BGVS’ mandate toward Basic Education

The Mass Literacy Campaigns unleashed a major demand for children’s education all over the country, giving lie to the myth that there was little demand for education from poverty-ridden classes who saw the value of children more in labour than in education.

BGVS responded to such an upsurge by launching the Joy of Learning campaign in 1995, which attempted to expose people involved with children’s education, mostly teachers and educational administrators, to pedagogies and content that would make school education joyful for the children. The response of the teachers and the community was very encouraging. This led to a more sustained and long term initiative to link education to the lives of children through the jeevanshala program, that has been going on for more than five years now; involving very poor and the lowest caste children in Bihar, the BGVS district unit in charge of the literacy campaign set up 308 Vikalp Vidyalayas (Alternative Schools), with community support, to meet the demand for primary education.

In the last two years, there has been a consistent demand from nearly all the state units of BGVS to undertake a large-scale school programme to provide access and quality education to the children of underprivileged, marginilised, and poor communities. This has resulted in the conceptualization of the Gyan Vigyan Vidyalaya (knowledge and Science Schools) movement.