Teaching Against the Odds: Four Classrooms, One Shared Dream
Written by Manjiri Indulkar
The road to the small government school in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, is rough, its edges littered with red dust from the harvest trucks that pass through every morning. There is no signboard, only the sound of children reciting tables that guides you to the low building. Inside, teacher Babita Srivansh is already at work—long before the middle school students arrive to claim the room.
Babita’s primary class doesn’t have a classroom of its own. Each morning, she unlocks the shared hall, carries in charts, word cards and number games, and tapes them to the walls one by one. By the time the first child walks in, the dull cement room has transformed into a bright, print-rich corner of colour and possibility. When the bell rings for the middle school shift, she quietly takes it all down, packs the materials, and carries them away. Tomorrow, she will build it all over again. “It’s tiring,” she admits, “but children learn best when they can touch and see. They deserve this, even if it means extra hours for me.”
Babita’s determination is heroic, but it is not unique. Across Madhya Pradesh, teachers are performing small acts of brilliance every day to keep learning alive in a system stretched to its limits. The state operates over 94,000 government schools, yet the numbers are bleak: 6,798 schools have only one teacher, 1,275 have none at all, and more than 90 per cent lack a drinking water tap. Electricity is absent in 40 per cent of schools, and more than 1,500 function without any building at all. Against this backdrop, teachers are inventing new ways to teach—and to hope.
Four Walls, Four Classrooms
Several hours away, in another dusty corner of Indore, teacher Barkha Kuril has turned a single rectangular room into four. Her students range from Grade One to Grade Four, all of whom are crammed into a multigrade class. Most teachers would see chaos; Barkha saw an opportunity. She placed four blackboards on four walls, creating four mini-classrooms. While she instructs one group, the others work independently on their boards, then rotate when she claps her hands. Older children often slide over to help younger ones, strengthening their own understanding as they explain. The room hums with movement and quiet collaboration—proof that a little imagination can turn scarcity into a teaching strategy.
Following the Children
Further south, in the tribal belt of Burhanpur, the challenge is not just space but people. Here, seasonal migration pulls families to distant farms and factories. Even when parents leave children behind, youngsters, especially girls, are expected to cook, fetch water, and mind their siblings.
Teacher Yasmeen Ali refuses to watch them disappear. She walks from home to home, persuading parents to let their children return. If a child must work in the mornings, she shifts her own hours so they can attend class later in the day. Her flexible timetable is unofficial and unpaid, but it keeps children tethered to the dream of education.
A School Inside an Anganwadi
And then there is teacher Kamlesh Yaduvanshi, whose school does not exist at all. Her forty-odd students squeeze into a government anganwadi centre, a space meant for early-childhood care.
On immunisation days, health workers arrive with polio drops and weighing machines, claiming corners of the room. Instead of cancelling class, she quietly reshuffles the day’s plan, giving children drawing or writing tasks that require little movement. When the health team leaves, she gathers them back for lessons. In this borrowed space, she has created a timetable as flexible as the walls around her.
Threads of Ingenuity
What links these four teachers—Babita with her travelling classroom, Barkha with her four-sided lesson plan, Yasmeen with her doorstep advocacy, and Kamlesh with her movable schedule—is a stubborn belief that learning must go on, no matter the obstacles.
Their classrooms, however makeshift, are alive with print and colour. Children’s drawings spill across walls; hand-made charts flutter in the breeze. Even without electricity or running water, these teachers are creating environments where words and numbers invite children to dream.
Education researchers might call this “reflective practice” or “distributed leadership,” but the teachers simply call it their job. They arrive early, stay late, and spend their own money on chalk, paper, and paint. Their innovations are born not from policy directives but from love and necessity.
An Ally in the Journey
Alongside them stands CEQUE, an organisation committed to strengthening government school education. Through its Teacher Innovation Project (TIP), CEQUE coaches teachers like Priyanka, Barkha, Yasmeen and the anganwadi educator to widen their imagination and sharpen their practice.
TIP offers peer learning circles, low-cost teaching materials, and mentoring that helps teachers transform even the barest room into a learning space. With CEQUE as an ally, these educators are not isolated heroes; they are part of a growing community that shares ideas, celebrates small victories, and pushes the boundaries of what a government classroom can be.
Beyond Heroism
It is tempting to celebrate these stories only as acts of individual heroism—and they are—but they also expose a harder truth. Teachers should never have to fight this hard for the basics. Every child deserves a safe classroom, clean water, electricity, and enough trained teachers. Every teacher deserves support and dignity.
Yet education remains far too low on society’s priority list. Between the 2019–20 and 2023–24 academic years, Madhya Pradesh closed or merged 6,972 government schools, according to UDISE+ data.
For children, every closure means longer walks to the next nearest school, crowded classrooms, and higher dropout risks—especially for younger students and girls whose families may hesitate to send them farther from home. What looks like a line item in a report translates into lost learning, lost safety, and lost childhoods.
Until that changes, the future of millions of children rests on the quiet determination of teachers who refuse to give up. Babita will keep building her classroom every morning. Barkha will keep turning four walls into four classrooms. Yasmeen will keep knocking on doors. And somewhere in an anganwadi, a Kamlesh will keep rewriting her timetable around the next immunisation drive.
Their work is a reminder that education is sustained not by buildings or budgets alone, but by human will—a will that deserves not just admiration, but action: more resources, thoughtful policy, and a collective commitment to ensure that no teacher must choose between ingenuity and the basic tools of learning.
Sources: UDISE+ 2024 data; Hindustan Times report on school infrastructure; field interviews with teachers supported by CEQUE’s Teacher Innovation Project.
