Click to play videoBirsinghapur (West Bengal): For over a decade, the adult literacy programme in West Bengal paid special attention to Midnapore district.
One of the reasons for this being that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the 19th century reformer and educator, was born there.
Birsinghapur in West Midnapore is the village where Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was born some 200 years ago. It has his name on every signboard from sweetshops to local clubs and even abandoned bus terminuses.
The title, Vidyasagar, means a sea of knowledge, but at this tribal ghetto, 24-year old Lajjabati Hembram is struggling to spell her name correctly.
"A sister from the literacy mission taught me how to write my name. But now I don't remember," Lajjabati says.
Lajjabati never went to school. But she was once brought under a government literacy mission, which has focused on tribal settlers like her for decades.
Today, many of those tribals can barely remember the alphabets they once recognised.
Literacy workers agree that sustaining literacy is more difficult than adding names to the list of literates.
"It's true that you can't remember without practice, and we also want them to cooperate. But not everything happens the way we want. That's the tragedy,” says Sanat Sinha Roy, a retired primary school teacher and now a literacy worker.
Pundit Vidyasagar's house in Birsinghapur is now a library. But the backward section in his home village can hardly read the books.
At the birth place of the father of modern Indian school education, masses have sunk into amnesia of alphabets they once learnt. Those who are literacy challenged say they have no practical use of them.
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