[cr-india] SECMOL- Ladakh

[TsewangR at iijnm.org]

Hello!
Here is a remarkable voluntary organisation called SECMOL in Ladakh, the
land of passes and mountains, which was once an independent Kingdom of in
the Himalayas.  
The organisation has been working in the region for the past 15 years or so,
and the achievement has been rather astonishing. SECMOL works to reform the
government run village schools through teacher training, community
mobilisation and by lobbying with bureaucrats and leaders. As a result 10th
class result has gone up to 49% in 2003 from 5% in early 1990's. 
Though SECMOL is not having a website as yet, but you can get a lot more if
google for it. Some of you might remember that one of Indian weekly
magazines called 'The Week' had feature the organisation in 2002 as its
cover story. The reason why I'm letting you know is that SECMOL especially
in summer months receives lots of volunteers from the world over. SECMOL's
staff produces a magazine called Mirror of Ladakh that is the only
independent media in the region. Besides, the org organises lots of youth
camps to broaden their outlook and to strengthen their self-confidence that
many of them may have lost in their schooling due to the irrelevant
education they had got.  
If you want more info you can email the organisation on the ID that is at
the end of this article, or you can reach me at rigzinhimalaya at yahoo.co.in
because I worked as a volunteer for a few years. 

Regards,
Tsewang Rigzin, Bangalore India


Here is an article about the organisation that appeared in the Outlook in
2001.  
http://www.outlookindia.com/mad.asp?fname=Making&sid=&subsubsec=Ladahk&fodna
me=20010625
 Courtesy: Outlook
 Ladakh's schools are now more culturally rooted, thanks to SECMOL
 In 1979, when Pink Floyd sang, "We don't need no education", I thought they
were speaking for me. Twenty-two years later, standing on a dusty campus in
faraway Ladakh I realised that here were kids more unfortunate than me-who
had probably not even heard the song-for whom the reality was starker. 

Welcome to Ladakh-the largest district of the country (India), where the
average pass percentage in the all-important matriculation exam in the
300-odd schools has oscillated between 0 and 5 per cent for the past 54
years. 
The winds of change have, however, begun sweeping this remote land forgotten
by the triumphant forces of progress, thanks to the tireless efforts made by
the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (secmol), an NGO
trying to improve the lot of Ladakhi students.

Formed in 1988 by a small group of enthusiastic youth-who had themselves
experienced the harrowing education system and had emerged from it-secmol
was determined to change the fate of thousands of students being crushed by
the burden of a dark future in the schools of Ladakh. Having had the good
fortune to pursue their higher studies outside Ladakh, they'd attained the
mental distance needed to figure out that when 95 per cent of the students
were dubbed "failures", the fault probably lay not with the students but
with the system.

It all began with free-of-cost coaching classes for the students,
supplemented by vocational training for dropouts. But Mr. Sonam Wangchuk,
secmol's driving force, soon realised that the malaise was deeper as only
some were doing well. The need was to revamp the entire educational
structure. Informal discussions, where youngsters exorcised their own bitter
experiences in these schools, soon hit upon the most glaring anomaly: the
abrupt change in the medium of instruction from one non-Ladakhi language
(Urdu), till class eight, to another (English), in class ninth. 

Native Ladakhi wasn't part of the curriculum at all. The "enviro-culturally"
irrelevant curriculum was the next stumbling block. How was a child-with a
life spent entirely in 11,000-foot high arid mountains, among apricots and
yaks-to conceive of rain-drenched forests and coconut groves? The alienation
was made worse by improperly trained teachers, mostly non-Ladakhis, who only
added to the children's woes by castigating them for their inability-being a
part of a "primitive tribe"-to comprehend the teachings of an "advanced
society". The teachers also didn't receive much support from the parents,
resulting in little community participation.

It was here that secmol stepped in. In 1991, it started a training programme
for teachers at the Government High School in Saspol, a tiny village on the
Leh-Srinagar highway. The programme was kept under wraps and it was only
when the results started coming in that the authorities took notice. By then
secmol volunteers had succeeded in organising a sizeable number of villages
to take over their respective schools through Village Education Committees
(vec). A silent pedagogic revolution had begun. Of course, as Wangchuk
asserts: "We never wanted to set up a parallel educational system. We
preferred to work within the existing structure and reform it from within."
Today, after working with 300 schools, his efforts are paying off. At Saspol
High School, a record 48 per cent cleared matriculation last year.

At their centrally solar-heated "alternative campus" in Phey, situated at
the end of a nondescript bylane that branches off from the highway leading
onto a spectacular bend in the Indus-secmol has already trained nearly 1,000
government school teachers and organised summer camps for more than 1,500
students from all over Ladakh. Here volunteers from all over the world help
the students unlearn their sense of loss and pick up the much needed
self-confidence and cultural awareness essential for surviving in adverse
circumstances. If you want to be one of them, get in touch with secmol near
Hill Council Complex, PO Box 4, Leh 194 101. Tel: 01982-52 421. e-mail:
secmol at rediffmail.com 
- Avishek Ganguly, Outlook

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