New beginning in Bastar: Children once taught in Maoist schools now step into government classrooms. Teachers assess their age & learning levels

As you cross the knee-deep waters of a stream that locals call Kute Mangi, you arrive at a small campus with a few pucca buildings. This was once a kanya ashram, a residential school for girls. Today, it has over 100 students, including about five dozen boys and girls who, until 2024, studied in a school run by the banned CPI (Maoist).

The campus is situated at Dunga, a nondescript village in the Orchha block of Narayanpur district in Chhattisgarh.

Across the school stands an imposing red column erected by the ultras. “This memorial was built last year. But now the Maoists have deserted the area and most of them have surrendered,” says Madharam Netam, the village’s deputy sarpanch, as he collects mahua flowers that are used to brew a local liquor.


The Maoists, says Netam, had hired Dilip, an educated man from nearby Takilod, to teach children at their school at Ambapara, about 7 km west of Dunga. “The party paid him ₹4,000 a month,” he says. “All those students were shifted here last month. You should go in.”

In the school, Class V students have just finished their Hindi exam. As the midday meal is served, students—aged between 6 and 18 years—line up with steel plates for rice, dal and vegetables. They chant a prayer and settle down for lunch.

“Sixty-three students from the Ambapara school have joined this campus. We are assessing their abilities and enrolling them in different classes accordingly,” says Anju Dhrew, a teacher, who has placed an 18-yearold boy in Class V.

The teachers don’t prod their past. “We never ask the students what they were taught when the party ran the school,” says Dhrew. “Let them forget the past, and forget it quickly.”

Until recently, many children in Bastar went to Maoist-run schools managed by the underground Jantana Sarkar. Now, as the state government takes over their education after the crackdown on Maoists, sarkari teachers are assessing the children’s age and learning levels to place them in appropriate grades — carefully steering them away from the old curriculum and helping them move on from that difficult chapter. Some of the children from Ambapara who find it difficult to travel to the school daily live on the campus.

Dhrew and Arti Kujur were recruited as teachers for the Ambapara school by the Chhattisgarh government in 2023. However, as insurgency escalated in the area, they were temporarily attached to a girls’ school in Orchha, the block headquarters.

Now, the government is constructing a new school at Rekawaya, which falls between Dunga and Ambapara, with separate buildings for boys and girls. The plan is to eventually shift all the students from Ambapara to Rekawaya.

“As examinations are under way, we are spending our nights on the campus at Dunga,” says Kujur. They have to ride 100 km on a motorbike from Orchha—where they live in rented accommodation— to reach Dunga, because of the long detour they have to take around a hill, although the distance between the two places, as the crow flies, is just 20 km.

THE RED SCHOOLS
Vivekanand, additional director general of police (ADGP) for anti-Naxal operations in Chhattisgarh, estimates that until a few years ago, Maoists ran 12-15 schools in the remote pockets of the Abujhmad region as well as in the SukmaBijapur belt in the south.

“The schools were meant to be the breeding grounds for Maoist recruitment. At times, the students were also deployed for spying activities,” he says.
“For very young children, the syllabus was largely the same as in government schools. The Maoists somehow managed to procure textbooks from government supplies, so the books were the same. But alongside, they subtly indoctrinated the children from a very young age,” he adds, noting that many of the teachers were recruited from among Maoist sympathisers.

According to Vivekanand, since late last year, no Maoist school is in operation, and the government has shifted those students to regular state schools.
Gaurav Rai, superintendent of police, Dantewada, says security forces often recovered educational material during encounters with Maoists. “During encounters, we found reading material meant both for young students and cadres,” he says. “In the Maoist-run primary schools, the focus was largely on children’s basic literacy—learning the alphabet, constructing sentences and developing reading and writing skills. Most of the teaching was done in the Gondi language.”

Political or ideological lessons for cadres, he says, were given in the organisation’s mobile schools.

This ties in with what T Vasudeva Rao—a former central committee member of the Maoist party, better known by his nom de guerre Rupesh—told ET in December. He said the party was running six-seven schools in Abujhmad, with a syllabus that was quite identical to that followed in government schools. Maoist ideology, he claimed, was taught only to cadres in their mobile schools.

Rupesh joined the mainstream in October 2025, leaving the party and laying down his arms.

Rupesh’s wife, Sri Vidya—known by her alias Rupi—had headed the party’s education wing until her arrest in July last year. Rupi, an engineer by qualification, is cur- rently in a jail in Telangana.

For decades, Maoists burnt down hundreds of schools to prevent security forces from using the buildings as shelters during counterinsurgency operations. Now, as insurgency recedes, the government is rebuilding many of them.

According to data from the Chhattisgarh government, 35 schools—28 in Bijapur, 5 in Sukma and 2 in Narayanpur—which had remained shut for years, some even decades— were reopened in 2024-25.

Although the Ambapara-RekawayaDunga area—where several students and teachers who were earlier associated with the Maoist-run schools live—is in the Orchha block of Narayanpur district, it comes under the police jurisdiction of Bijapur. Significantly, personnel from the Dantewada police are regularly deployed in the area for domination patrols.

There is no security camp in the immediate vicinity. The nearest one—run by the Central Reserve Police Force at Pallewaya—is about 20 km from Ambapara. That perhaps explains why we spotted at least three red memorials in a stretch of 6-7 km. However, more than a hundred such columns have been demolished in the past two years in the larger Bastar division, which includes the seven districts of Bastar, Bijapur, Dantewada, Kanker, Kondagaon, Narayanpur and Sukma.

With no easy road link from Orchha due to the region’s mountainous terrain, anyone travelling to the Ambapara-Rekawaya-Dunga belt must approach it from Bhairamgarh in Bijapur, nearly 400 km south of Raipur. Fourwheelers can now cross the Indravati river at Fundri, thanks to a recently built temporary ramp to an under-construction bridge. But about 10 km ahead, the road narrows sharply, prompting most travellers — including security personnel — to switch to motorcycles. The 30 km stretch between Fundri and Ambapara involves crossing three streams, none of which has bridges.
The ruins of old schools and demolished red pillars talk about the changing power structures in the region.

A short distance from Dunga, we come across a school at Takilod. It is a makeshift wooden structure with green plastic sheets for walls. Young children in navy-blue uniforms attend lessons under the shade of two large trees.

Not far from them are the ruins of a school building that was blown up by the Maoists with IEDs in 2003, say local people. Beside it stands a broken red memorial pillar that has been demolished by the security forces.

One of the teachers, Hitesh Kapoor, who was posted there last year, says he is unaware of any school that was run by Maoists in the vicinity. “I can say for sure that none of my students ever went to a Maoist school,” he insists.

THE MAOIST CLASSROOM
Yet, further ahead, beyond another stream, a large building emerges from the jungle. At first glance, it resembles an abandoned insurgent camp—clusters of makeshift structures without walls and roofs draped in blue plastic sheets.

A weathered sign board identifies it as Bhumkal School, named after the great Bhumkal Rebellion, an armed tribal uprising against Britain in 1910.
This is the Ambapara school of Maoists. The campus is deserted—most Maoists have surrendered and the students have moved to the government school at Dunga.

Although there are no students, one teacher lingers. He was appointed by the local panchayat to teach the kids in 2024, after the Maoists had left the region. He says representatives of Chandrashekhar Azad’s Bhim Army had held discussions with village elders about running the school some time ago. Perhaps that explains the blue flags of the Bhim Army—rather than the Maoists’ trademark red ones—hanging at the entrance of the campus.

“Maoists ran this school for years,” says Samila Kawasi. She studied at the Ambapara school between 2008 and 2010, before she got recruited by the party. “However, at that time, the Ambapara school was located 2-3 km further west, closer to the hills,” she recalls. “That’s where I learnt to read and write the Gondi alphabet.”

Kawasi says she and most of her batchmates would be taken to a nearby training camp where they were introduced to the Maoist doctrine, including lessons about Mao Zedong and his Long March. Last year, Kawasi returned to the mainstream and has since joined the police force.

With the surrender of the last significant Maoist leader, Papa Rao — alias Mongu — earlier this week, Bastar appears nearly free of Maoist influence, at least for now. With just a couple of days to go for the government’s March 31 deadline to eliminate Maoism in India, only a handful of senior leaders remain at large. Among them are Muppala Lakshmana Rao alias Ganapathy and Mihir Besra. “We tracked Ganapathy till November,” says ADGP Vivekanand. “But he slipped out of Chhattisgarh.”

THE STUDENTS
“What is Maoism?” I ask the children in the school at Dunga. The responses are telling. While the younger children have not grasped the difference between the two schools of teaching, the older ones, more aware of the shifting political and security landscape and the government’s deadline to eliminate Maoism, choose their words carefully.

Who were the teachers at the Maoist-run schools? One name comes up repeatedly: Dilip. But locals also speak of three other teachers — Pawan, Vasu and Mangesh—who taught young children and who, the police believe, shaped their thinking. “Pawan was a full-time Maoist cadre. He recently surrendered in Rajnandgaon,” says Kawasi.

If a former armed cadre like Kawasi can lay down her weapons and join the police force, could the Maoist teacher Dilip surrender and return one day to the classroom—this time as a government schoolteacher? In the shifting sands of Bastar, anything is possible.