The students of Alur Extension High school are jubilant. 80% of them have passed the recent school leaving examination. The average pass percentage in their area is 60%. In all, 23 out of 29 students have passed the exam, 10 boys and 13 girls. A fitting result for a school that was born out of the efforts of children themselves and where every small success has been accompanied by enormous struggle.

Before the High school opened its doors in 2003, many children who had gone through elementary education would drop out of school after 7^th grade since there was no high school readily accessible to them. The nearest High school was in another Panchayat, 13 kms away. Lack of transportation facilities to reach school, having to walk long hours to return home, reaching home late, traversing dangerous terrains – all these factors associated with distance contributed to children leaving school at the high school level.  On leaving school, the children would then join the workforce and add to the population of child labourers in the area. Some would even migrate and start labouring in exploitative and hazardous conditions in towns and cities alien to them.

The Makkala Panchayat raised this issue in the Task Force where the adults and children took a collective decision to start their own high school with all the resources they could muster. Since then, children who had dropped out of school some years back have returned to resume their education. Child labour in the Panchayat has come down to nil and migration has reduced significantly. The commencement of the school has contributed towards making Alur a Child Labour Free Panchayat.

The school is being run in the Panchayat community hall, and the teachers are being paid partly by CWC and partly through local contributions. Even the chairs the students sit on are their own! Every step towards taking the public school leaving exam has been a struggle for the children. They had to fight to get an examiner to come to their school so that they could take the exam in their Panchayat instead of incurring the time and expense of traveling to another center far away. Before that, just laying their hands on their hall tickets was a ferocious battle. Despite all these odds, the students managed to excel at their exams, demonstrating how steely willed their determination is to acquire a meaningful education.

The community hall, in which the school is run, is also used by the children and the community to hold their meetings and events. The students of the High School frequently organise and participate in these community meetings to ensure that the development of their Panchayat is participatory and democratic. They actively participate in the Makkala Panchayat meetings and work with the Bhima Sangha to solve school and community related problems. The academic results of the school proves how skillfully they are able to balance both, their scholastic responsibilities and their role as active agents of social change.

The basic question, however, begs to be asked: Where are the high schools for all the children who are ready for them? Whilst the government has focused all its energies on expanding the reach of primary education, the need of the hour now is facilities for middle and high school. Does the government mean to say that just primary education is sufficient for the people who depend on government facilities, often the poorest and most marginalized sections of the population? Amidst the current debate raging in the country concerning reservations in institutions of higher studies, more urgent and basic problems that are having much wider implications remain woefully ignored.