Enhancing the Educational Opportunities for Slum Dwellers: Experiences of IGNOU Regional Centre Bhopal

Abstract

Growing urbanisation and large scale migration of people from the rural areas to urban centres has resulted in the large scale development of urban slum population. The Madhya Pradesh has approximately 24.31% of the urban population living in such slums which is expected to further grow in the years to come. The poorly paid unskilled job opportunities coupled with little or no educational avenues has perpetuated the poverty in the slums. Though educationcould be a viable tool to break this vicious poverty trap, it has not been explored to the extent it is required. Traditional educational systems due to its rigid structure cannot do much to bring the huge slum dwellers in to the fold of education. People are too vulnerable and cannot comprehend their problems. Their livelihoods commitments come first as a result of which most of them can not pursue full time education. It is in this context that Open and Distance Learning systems due to their Flexible and Innovative nature have an important role to play in slum areas. Indira Gandhi National Open University has started an innovative scheme of giving the “School Drop Outs” direct access to Higher Education. University does not put any precondition for the formal schooling and has created a channel of Higher Education under which “School Drop Outs” can directly take admission in graduation and other University level programmes, subject to clearing “Bachelor's Preparatory Programme”, a specially designed 6 monthly bridge course. The 6 monthly programme was popularised among the slum dwellers with the support of World Vision a non profit humanitarian organisation working in slum areas of Bhopal. The response of the slum dwellers for this course led to overwhelming response with more than 50 students taking admission with in less than 15 days. Authors of this paper have been engaged in the publicity and promotion of IGNOU's programmes with special focus on disadvantaged groups in Madhya Pradesh. In this paper, we have described our experiences while dealing with this special group and the further possibilities have been highlighted in this paper. The paper has been organised in following four parts. In the first part the conditions prevailing in slum areas have been described and the conditions which make ODL system relevant for these areas have been highlighted through a SWOT analysis. In the second part the proposed model of interventions has been described. In the third part the lessons learnt out of this experiment have been summarised and the recommendations for future interventions have been given.