Covid Survey Leads To Education For 30k Illiterate People In Doon

Door-To-Door Education

- Ishita Mishra

Dehradun: In July last year, when the pandemic was yet to reach its peak in Uttarakhand, anganwadi workers fanned out across Dehradun district to identify people with co-morbidities who could be most at risk of Covid-19. As they went door-to-door, a standard question asked during the survey was whether the household residents were literate.

When data was collated, some startling figures emerged. At least 30,000 residents aged between 30 and 70, many of them women, had declared themselves illiterate. “We had all this information that we could put to good use. So we decided to launch a ‘Padho Doon Badho Doon’ initiative to encourage people to read and write,” said Nitika Khandelwal, chief development officer of Dehradun, who spearheaded the campaign. The effort had borne fruit. A year on, all of them can read and write. But when the authorities contacted the prospective “students”, they found most of them were shy about learning alongside kids in schools.