It was 80-year-old Chedichi, a member of the Paniya tribe, who first learned the ditty that inspires tribal elders to learn to read and write. She is now determined to be the first in her class to learn to write. She dreams of emulating Karthiyani Amma, who at 98 scored 98% in the Literacy Mission’s Aksharalaksham project, and won an award from the President.
Chedichi is among 25,000 tribal people who are part of the literacy programme of the Kerala State Literacy Mission Authority (KSLMA) that is expected to make Wayanad fully literate. Wayanad, the only district in the State that does not qualify as 100% literate, may shed that tag by April.
Wayanad is home to 31.2% of the State’s tribal people, whose literacy rate is a low 71% compared to the rest of Kerala, which is why KSLMA launched this tribal literacy programme. In the first two phases, 7,302 people in 500 colonies were made literate in this dominantly tribal region.
Attappady, another tribal belt, is also changing. Although in the news for all the wrong reasons ranging from infant mortality and malnutrition to poverty and under-development, by June this settlement in the foothills of the Nilgiris will become the first completely literate tribal block of the entire country. Here, 3,670 of 5,031 people have so far become neo-literates.
The programme is in compliance with UNESCO literacy criteria that mandate that more than 90% of the population should be literate to declare a place 100% literate.
In Attappady as well, the third phase is now under way. This final phase aims to reach the remaining 25,000 unlettered people with the help of 1,300 qualified instructors drawn from the community itself.
(Images and text by Thulasi Kakkat)
