Vinod, Nahieeda Bathul and Mithun Kumar are all wearing dark blue T-shirts, with the word HOPE written on them. They had just been on stage at the Special Armed Police (SAP) camp in Thiruvananthapuram, telling their life stories to an audience, filled with students, parents and teachers. All three had once dropped out of studies or failed a class but came back to school again, to take up from where they left off. Vinod has cleared four of the five subjects in Class 12 that he had once dropped out of. Nahieeda, who had grown up in Tamil Nadu and had to once give up on her studies, moved to Kerala, picked up Malayalam within a month and finished her Class 10 exams. And Mithun, who was once denied a chance to play football because he couldn't clear his Class 10 exams, has both finished his schooling and found a place in a football club.
They came back to studies through a project by the Kerala Police called HOPE, aimed at educating students who had once dropped out of studies due to issues at home or because they were failing their exams. The police, after identifying students who drop out every year, urge them to come back to studies with the help of the various HOPE centres in the state. In the last five years, more than 2,000 students have cleared their Class 10 and 12 exams through the project.
“I was in Class 11 at a school in Wayanad when I had to drop out. My father had taken ill, and I had to take care of my mother and two younger sisters. I had worked odd jobs so my sisters could go to school. It was later that I came to know about HOPE and enrolled for a six-month course. I have now cleared four of the five subjects in Class 12, while working as a salesman in Kozhikode. All the support given by the police officers have made me want to become a policeman,” Vinod says.
He had never been on stage before in his life, he says, until an alumni meet was organised at the SAP campus on October 31 and November 1. “On the first day, I went on stage and made a speech. On the second day, I stood next to the Chief Minister of Kerala and spoke to him,” Vinod says gleefully.
The HOPE project had begun five years ago under the leadership of Inspector General of Police P Vijayan, who is also the brain behind the Student Police Cadet force.
During his time as the Commissioner of Police in Thrissur between 2010 and 2012, the city was reporting a large number of crimes, which led the police to intensify actions and look at the history of anti-social elements. “We saw that it was socio-economic circumstances that mostly led to this type of behavioural aberrations. So we had thought of initiating some programmes to prevent new generations from going astray. Later, when I became IG in Kochi range, I was given the power to extern antisocial elements under the Kerala Anti-Social Activities Prevention Act (KAAPA). During this time, we would hear out the criminals, who talked about their personal lives. In most cases, they either had academic failures or else faced early childhood abuse.”
P Vijayan, Inspector General of Police
In 2017, more than 4.37 lakh students had appeared for Class 10 exams, of whom nearly 96% had cleared it. The less than 20,000 students who had failed the exam would face a lot of stigma from within the family and the society, Vijayan says. “Those who lose self-respect are more vulnerable to crimes – both to commit them and to be a victim. One way to prevent that is to enhance their personal skills, help them clear their Class 10 or 12 exams, and help them acquire employability skills. That was the origin of the HOPE project,” he says.
In Mithun’s case, a call had come from the Mananthavady police to his house in Wayanad, urging him to join the project. The police had collected the list of the students who failed Class 10 exams and made calls to ask them to give it another chance. “I was so interested in football that I had not paid attention to my studies and failed in one subject in Class 10. When I went to the Gokulam Football Club which I had got selected for, they said that I should have finished Class 10 to join. So I lost on both counts and began to face a lot of shaming remarks. When the police call came, I initially thought it was a friend playing a prank, making fun of my situation. Even when I went to join the course, I had little faith that it would make any difference. But within one week of the classes, I felt I could get better results. The motivational classes were very good,” he says.
He passed with good marks, finished Class 12 through the National Institute of Open Schooling and took a Diploma in Medical Laboratory Technology. But the best part is that he could play football again, for several clubs. He wants to start a resort in Wayanad, so his family – parents, and two brothers – could live well, after having struggled with little money all their lives, he says.
The HOPE team has a process to identify dropouts and students who fail in exams, and understand their needs. They have put in place a bridge programme to bring the students up to the level of Class 10 or 12, if they are found to be at a disadvantage. “Society may have created some sort of inferiority complex in their mind, so we organise motivational therapies to help them get rid of it, overcome their fear of certain subjects and write exams. We have 90 centres in the state, with special focus on coastal and tribal areas. As many as 400 resource persons work passionately to help the students,” Vijayan adds.
The teachers get only a nominal fee, and most of them are arranged with the help of an NGO called Mission Better Tomorrow of the Nanma Foundation.
It was one such teacher who told Nahieeda about the project. She had left her father’s birthplace in Tamil Nadu during a flood, and instead came to Kozhikode in Kerala, her mother’s hometown. She had only been in Class 8 when she left Tamil Nadu, and had no hopes of ever going back to school. “Prinsha teacher, who taught my cousin, said that there is a way to go back to studies and clear Class 10. Both my brother and I enrolled for the HOPE project, and chose Tamil as a language subject. Unfortunately I got Malayalam, while my brother got Tamil. I didn’t know how to read or write in Malayalam. But with the encouragement of the teachers, I picked it up within a month and managed to clear my Class 10 exams,” Nahieeda says.
She is now a Class 11 student at the JDT School in Kozhikode.