Linking education with Health: Lessons from children of migrant construction labourers in India

Abstract

Children accompanied by migrant families in India are less often allowed to exercise their rights due to social, economic and political factors in an urban locale. There is a law preventing child labour and many interventions were being implemented to protect these vulnerable children. One of the recent campaigns is the ‘schooling of migrant children’ initiated by many government schools and non-governmental organizations across the country. With this concept, this paper was performed a media content review of various interventions implemented to address schooling of migrant children of construction labourers and the review revealed a very grim picture of the complexity of the issue. The interventions were taken three different approaches; (i) children were directly mainstreamed into the government school driven by local government (ii) bridge schools were driven by non-governmental organizations for the children of first-generation learners and those discontinued their learning due to family migration. Bridge schools are found in various forms such as tent school, worksite school, moving school, study centres and community schools, finally (iii) seasonal hostel model for migrant children mainly at the source of migration. The content review arises the following discussion points: (i) what is the objective of the schooling of migrant children? (ii) what is the impact of the schooling of migrant children on the under-five children or mainly their younger siblings below under-five years age? (iii) is there any curriculum for bridging the learning gap? (iv) besides education, are health and nutrition being considered essential for the improvement in learning outcome? and (v) is the tracking mechanism effective enough to continue schooling of the migrant children? This paper recommends the following policy implications: a compulsory bridging programme for migrant children, compulsory health-checkup and supplementary nutrition along with education and inter-state partnership in addressing schooling of migrant children. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2020.00007.2