BERHAMPUR: Amid the decades-old
Kotia border row intensifying with
Andhra Pradesh holding panchayat elections in some of the disputed villages of Koraput and
Odisha moving the
Supreme Court against it, the reports of children from here crossing over to the other side for
classes seems to have added insult to injury for the home state.
With on-campus classes for children of the primary section yet to resume in Odisha, several Telugu-speaking kids from the Odisha-Andhra border villages in Ganjam district’s Patrapur block have been going to
schools situated in the neighbouring state.
In the wake of this development, the district education officer (DEO) of Ganjam, Amulya Kumar Pradhan, on Thursday rushed to the block and held a meeting with the headmasters of the bilingual schools to take stock of the situation. He said only 49 students, mostly from the primary section, have started going to schools in the nearby villages of
Andhra Pradesh.
Altogether 920 Telugu-speaking students study in the 20 bilingual schools of Patrapur block. “The lack of Telugu teachers, the non-availability of Telugu-medium textbooks and the closure of primary schools for a prolonged period owing to
Covid-19, among others, have forced several villagers to send their children to schools in Andhra,” S Mohan Rao, the sarpanch of Gudipadar panchayat in Patrapur block, said.
“Schools in Andhra Pradesh have already opened, while the primary schools in our state have been shut since March. As our wards were getting restless and were keen to go schools, we started sending them to the ones run by the Andhra government,” a resident of Balarampur, which lies on the Odisha-Andhra border, said.
But the DEO said no student had sought a transfer certificate from their respective schools for admission in schools run by the Andhra Pradesh government. “As on-campus schooling is yet to begin for students of all classes in Odisha, some are going to Andhra only to attend classes. They might be back to their respective schools in Odisha once normal classes resume,” he added.
He, however, admitted that there is a shortage of Telugu teachers and textbooks for Telugu-medium students. “We have placed a requisition for the textbooks in Telugu. They will arrive here shortly,” he assured. A delegation of the Andhra Pradesh legislative council, led by its chairman Shariff Mohammed Ahmed, had visited Berhampur recently and discussed the problems faced by the linguistic-minority communities (the Telugu-speaking people) in the district.