On a hot April afternoon,Ramlal Durua,a 13-year-old tribal boy from Maoist-infested Malkangiri district,beats the heat by fanning himself with his notebooks. Sitting inside the decrepit,corrugated,iron-roofed hostel rooms of the Gurukul Sanskrit Vidyapitha,started by Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in Chakapad block of Kandhamal in 1971,Durua,like 220-odd other boys in the hostel,can only yearn for a ceiling fan. Forget the ceiling fan,the tribal boys dont even have a cot to sleep on. The inmates curl up on the uneven floor every night after having their dinner of watery rice and sautéed vegetable. Over seven months after the killing of Saraswati,the Sanskrit Vidyapitha seems to have been forgotten by everyone,including the BJP which is busy encashing the killing of Saraswati in the LS polls. While the BJP candidate for Kandhamal Lok Sabha constituency,Ashok Sahu,repeatedly salutes the sacrifice of Saraswati during election meetings,Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi keeps predicting that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik would be wiped out in the Assembly polls if he fails to catch the Swamis killers. However,no one in the past seven months has cared to visit Chakapada and the school. When Saraswati came to Kandhamal in 1969,he started his ashram in Chakapada block. Two years later,he started the Sanskrit school with contributions from local people. The school has now been turned into a college and churns out toppers in the Madhyma certificate exam,the Sanskrit equivalent of the annual high school certificate exam conducted by the Orissa Board of Secondary Education. Since Saraswatis death in August last year,the hostels condition has only deteriorated. Look at the hostel walls. We dont have enough money to put plaster on them. Last year,rainwater seeped through these walls,making it difficult for the children to sleep on the floor, said Jagabandhu Das,the Pradhan Acharya of the school that enrolls students from Std VI to X. The school does not even have mid-day meal facility though BJP ministers were part of the alliance Government for the past nine years. The students have watery rice for breakfast and steamed rice for lunch,along with mashed potatoes. We dont have money to give them anything else, Das said. The students also face water shortage. The school authorities allow the students to take bath in the nearby Brutang river. Das says he knows the danger involved,but he has no other option.
