Teacher from Mewat with ‘magic wand’ picked for national award

Sumedha Sharma

Tribune News Service

Gurugram, September 3

The educationally backward Mewat — with an abysmal 56 per cent literacy rate, 35 per cent annual school dropout rate and a staff crunch of 45 per cent — has a reason to rejoice. Schoolteacher Basruddin Khan, 54, is to be felicitated by the President of India this Teacher’s Day.

Teaching science and math at Government Middle School, Tappan village, it’s said he wields a magic wand — he not only brings down the dropout rate whichever school he joins, but also trebles the student strength, effectively using education as a tool to bring about change. 

When he arrived at Tappan village, the school strength was a mere 78. It now stands at 600. Basruddin Khan managed to persuade an NGO and an agency to invest Rs 1.7 crore for upliftment. 

He also got land and an approach road sanctioned by the village panchayat. 

When Basruddin Khan started his career in December 1993 in Jharpuri village in Firozepur-Jhirka, the village school had 20 students in Classes VI to VIII. The number had trebled to 60 by the time he was transferred two years later. 

However, it was his 18-year stint at Siroli village in Punhana that earned him the admiration of locals and the authorities. Teaching for almost 12 hours at school and holding classes for weak students till late in the night, the school enrolment rose from 90 students in 1995 to 638 in 2013. 

Siroli village that till 1995 had only one girl who was a matriculate had over 50 of them during his stay in the village. 

“My father was a labourer and we struggled for subsistence. One day I heard someone say education alone had the power to change our fate and that of others. That stayed with me. I studied against all odds, became a government schoolteacher and decided to help others like me,” says Basruddin Khan.

A man of extraordinary grit and conviction, he got his two-year-old grandson vaccinated to quell rumours it was a plot by the state health authorities to “sterilise” the Muslims. 

In Rajasthan’s Mewat too, schoolteacher Imran Khan, a web developer who was praised by the PM during his speech at the Wembley Stadium in London in November 2015, has been chosen for the national award. He has designed more than 70 educational apps, all available to learners free of cost.