Teaching on wheels

"Of all the hard jobs around, one of the hardest is being a good teacher."

-Maggie Gallagher

"There have been cases when parents have complained to school authorities about what we’re teaching but, more often than not, when we explain to them the importance, they go satisfied"

Aditya Kumar’s unique mobile cycle school is a landmark of sorts in Lucknow-visible in the slums and streets every day for the last 18 years! Aditya has been tutoring slum children who have never seen the inside of a school or classroom, without charging them even a paisa. He carries all his teaching tools on a bicycle that he pedals some 50 to 60 km a day, teaching at five to six locations from 10 am to 7 pm. While the slum children are taught in Hindi, he takes English lessons for youngsters looking for jobs. He is a travelling teacher who does not need a classroom. As he cycles around the city, he is constantly on the lookout for children on the streets who show an interest in learning English. Extremely poor himself, his passion to help the poorest with education is what has sustained him.

Kumar launched ‘Aditya ki Shiksha Kranti’ almost two decades ago, in a bid to teach English to youngsters who could not afford conversational English classes. Interestingly, he now has many keen students from the shanties, who are working on improving their English.

A Science graduate of DAV College, Kanpur, Kumar comes from a poverty-stricken family in Salempur village of Kayamganj area in Farrukhabad. While in school, he worked as a labourer and simultaneously finished his education. Kumar left his village of 400 residents in 1992 and came to Kanpur. His motive was to “get the fear of English” out of the minds of students. Kumar said that while he was doing his B.Sc, he feared angrezi (English) in which he was expected to be conversant. The fear always haunted him, so much so that he decided to take the language “head-on”. He decided not only to overcome the fear of English himself but also to teach English to the children of slum-dwellers. By 1995, he was the owner of a second-hand bicycle. He had learnt to “read and write good English”. Soon, he started an “English-speaking school”, which would run mostly on his bicycle, of course.

Life was not easy when he first came to Lucknow to earn a living. For a month he lived at the Charbagh railway station that became his second home. Right there, students collected around him and he tutored them. In due course, those students who could not afford to pay a fee but wanted to learn English also came. Initially, he refused to teach without being paid. “But each time I refused a student I felt bad. One day I just decided to teach everyone who wanted to learn English,” Kumar adds with a smile.

“No one will teach anyone for free, but he is doing it. Today if you don’t know English you won’t get a good job. Sir is helping us to realise our dream,” said Rishi Chaudhary, who is preparing for an examination for the post of a probationary officer in a bank.

“I would teach students wherever I got any-by the roadside, in parks, near slums, wherever. I had a board on my bicycle, and students would just read it and stop me. I was one of them, I understood what it meant to be poor and without support,” Aditya says, with a grim expression. When aspiring to be a bureaucrat and to join the Indian Administrative Service or the Provincial Civil Services, he decided to make a living from giving tuitions, all he made in Kanpur per month was a measly Rs.300.

Having pedalled in Kanpur and then in Lucknow for over one lakh kilometres by now, he says he has faced rough times. He has been the target of violence, and people have been suspicious of his motives and beaten him up for sitting with a bunch of boys and girls along the roadside.” Then I put up a small board on the cycle, announcing-Aditya Master Saheb. Things have improved, and on and off there are even people who tip me with Rs.100 for food and tea.”

Living in a room admeasuring just five square feet at Nishatganj that was offered to him by a compassionate man, Aditya remarks on life’s ironies: when he first began, he had no students. These days, he has no dearth of students, as girls especially flock around him to learn English in the hope of finding work at call centres and as receptionists. It is ironic that the state government spends crores of rupees on education, but cannot offer him support. Kumar’s classes are presently being conducted at Balu Adda, Kudiya Ghat and Samta Mulak Chauraha in Lucknow. Aditya teaches over 2,000 students in a given month. Over the last twenty years, he has taught at least one lakh students, he says.