Jamshedpur, Dec. 14: The year is 1980. Two young nuns (Sisters of Charity), from two different parts of India, travel five kilometres everyday ignoring all dangers through dense forests to reach Birsanagar, where a handful of students wait for them in a makeshift classroom.
That was Gyan Deep Vidyalaya then. A lot has changed since. What was a dense forest area, is today an upcoming suburb and the one-room school occupies a proud place at its very centre.
Thanks to the struggle and dedication of the two nuns belonging to the Sisters of Charity, Nazerath, who travelled all the way to the steel city from far-off places such as Kerala and Maharashtra, the school stands proudly today.
From the tiny one-room school, today, Gyan Deep boasts off two state-of-the-art blocks, 32 rooms, 30 full-time teachers, a auditorium, a basketball court and a badminton court, four laboratories, an audio-visual room and a huge library. And from the meagre 60 students in one classroom, today the strength is a whopping 1,200.
“This school was located in the dense jungles of Birsanagar and was filled with dangerous criminals. Everyday, Sister Sarala and I, then barely in our 20s travelled from Golmuri Cathedral on our bicycles to reach this place which was not only completely alien to us but was out of reach from the main city,” reminisces Sister Blanche Corriea, principal of Gyan Deep Vidyalaya.
Monitoring the last-minute preparations of the grand silver jubilee celebrations that were celebrated with great enthusiasm and festivity on Wednesday evening on the school premises.
Nostalgia was written largely on every one’s faces as the school completed 25 long years of relentless struggle and dedication to enlightening the underprivileged in that area.
“At the beginning, we and two other teachers, went from door-to-door asking each family to send their children to the school. But mostly, parents turned us down. They were not willing to send their children and it was twice as tough to convince parents of a girl-child,” says the principal looking back upon the struggling days. And if some refused to send their children to a school, others refused to pay up the school fees
“In those days people were neither capable nor willing to pay the school fees, so we accepted anything that we got. That meant that some paid around Rs 20 a month, others managed to get something like Rs 10 and that, too, not every month,” remembers the principal.
“It was horrifying travelling such a long distance those days and moreover meeting every family in the nearby localities and convince them to send their children to the school was another harrowing job,” remembers Corriea.
