To Break The Poverty Cycle

GoI should allow companies to offer earn-while-you-learn education to poor young Indians

- Devi Shetty

Visuals of migrant labourers as they were homeward bound during the national lockdown moved many of us. Sadly, they are the children or grandchildren of migrant labourers who ran away from home looking for greener pastures. I feel a certain emotional bond with these migrants because I am myself, the son of a migrant labourer.

My father “ran away from home” as a teenager before Independence and reached Bombay from Udupi. He was fortunate to create wealth and educate his nine children. What my father did cannot be reproduced today because the labourer without a college degree cannot get rich, his children cannot afford a college degree.

Post-Independence educational policies, including reservations, helped children from lower-income families of all castes to secure themselves an education. Education was a guaranteed ticket to rise from poverty.

However, 100 million households of labourers were left out of this big story.

Now is the time to right this wrong.

An alternate college education system must be created for the children of labourers without disturbing the successful mainstream education.

Fifty-year-old labourers are dependent on their 16-year-old children. The picture will be clear if we visualise ourselves as the 16-year-old child of migrant labourers. The ground reality today is rampant child malnutrition in rural India – because school midday meals stopped after Covid. Labourers send their children to school for food, not for education.