On The spot
Tavleen Singh
‘Our founder would like to meet you before the panel discussion’, said the man who picked me up from Bhubaneshwar airport last week. We were in the lobby of the Mayfair Hotel and so we sat and waited and while we waited he told me about the man we waited for. ‘His father died when he was five and then he went through a long period of poverty and hardship so he was determined to do something to help people escape poverty. So he has dedicated himself to this and has never married for this reason. He lives in a small rented house and does not even have his own office. He works 17 hours a day.’
Then he stopped and smiled as the man he was telling me about had just walked in. Dr Achyuta Samanta is a diminutive man with a pleasant face and a nice smile but this is not the first thing I noticed about him. The first thing I noticed was that I hardly noticed him when he walked in. His manner is so simple and self-effacing that it took me a minute to work out that this was the founder of what is probably the largest charitable school for Adivasi children in the world. It is called the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS). I have been to Bhubaneshwar many times but I had not heard of it till late last year when a lady with the unusual name of Mona Lisa Bal wrote to ask me if I would be part of a Women’s Day panel discussion in KIIT University. I said no and explained that this was because every time I made a commitment of this kind some big journalistic reason usually caused me to ditch at the last minute. But, she was persistent and so it was that I was in Bhubaneshwar on March 8 despite a chance to be moderator of Narendra Modi’s Chai pey Charcha in Delhi. The chance to meet Modi at this point in such an exciting election tempted me to ditch at the last minute but I felt bad doing this and so I went. And, am I glad I did because if I had not seen KISS with my own eyes I would not have believed it could exist.
Even as I write this I can hardly believe it does or that one man could have created a vast infrastructure of educational institutions that charge full fees to enable KISS to provide its Adivasi students not just with free school education but with everything else they need. Food, clothes and hostel accommodation and for those who want to go for higher education there are seats reserved in the colleges of KIIT University. KIIT (Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology) was started on a humble scale twenty years ago and today is a university that includes medical and dental colleges, an institute of fashion technology and an international school. But, in my view it is KISS that is Dr. Samanta’s real achievement.
After driving around the sprawling campus of KIIT University I was taken to a collection of yellow buildings on the edge of a wasteland on which children played. ‘These are all KISS children,’ said Chitta Panda who had been my guide since he picked me up at the airport. The children played on the edge of an unsightly garbage dump and I, cynical still, pointed out that even if these were Adivasi children from poor families they should not be playing so close to a garbage dump. He said they could do nothing about the garbage because the land that the children had made their playing field belonged to the government.
This did not seem to me like a good enough excuse and I continued being cynical until I talked to children studying in KISS and heard them tell me how much their lives had changed since they had come to school. They came from very poor Adivasi villages, they said, and saw their parents only once a year in the summer holidays but did not miss home because they were so fulfilled with what they were learning in school. What about very small children, I asked one of the teachers, were they not homesick? He admitted that they often were but the youngest children in the school were over seven years old so it was easier to explain to them what they were doing here. I was taken on a tour of the KISS campus and shown the school gym and conference room and the cupboards filled with trophies won by KISS students, some in international competitions. And, I was taken to see a vast dining room in which it was possible for 7000 children to eat their meals at the same time and by the end of the tour my cynicism had vanished and I began to see Dr. Samanta in a new light.
He has built an institution that is replicable and if replicated on a smaller scale in Adivasi areas across India could provide the most powerful weapon to win the war against poverty. The key to winning this war is not by throwing cheap food grain and dole at those living in extreme poverty but by helping them escape the horrors of it by giving them an education. What is commendable about KISS is that it has been built without any help from the government. Not even the land on which the school stands has been given free. This is more than likely to be the main reason why KISS is such a success story because had it been controlled by officials of our many ministries of poverty and rural development I have no doubt at all that they would have interfered in the most unhelpful way.
Proof lies in the appalling standards that exist in state institutions for children’s welfare across India. From my own work with street children in Mumbai I can tell you that children prefer life in the streets than in the prison-like conditions of Government controlled children’s homes in this city. When they are locked up for begging or vagrancy I spend days getting them released. So perhaps what we need to win the war against poverty is for more private citizens to do what Dr. Samanta has done in Bhubaneshwar. I have told you his story today because on the flight back to Mumbai I felt ashamed that as a journalist, deeply interested in the war against poverty, I had never even heard of kiss.
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