RSS penetrates education some more

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RSS hopes to woo youth with 1 lakh teaching jobs

Piyush Srivastava

Lucknow, January 27, 2010

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is pushing its weight behind the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to attract the youth to its fold.

The RSS has discovered a new way to deal with the problem of the youth's lack of interest in its activities - woo them with employment opportunities.

The RSS will open more than one lakh schools, called the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams, in the hinterlands of the country where only young people will be employed as teachers.

The Sangh has failed in all its recent endeavours to widen its mass base and couldn't provide any support to the BJP, ostensibly a political wing of the parivar. So now, youth who have a leaning towards right wing ideology will be employed in these schools.

The Sangh will also help them look for other career prospects.

Ram Madhav, a senior RSS functionary who was in Ayodhya to attend a programme of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad - the youth wing of the BJP - confirmed they had been focusing on the youth.

"The RSS is running 70,000 single-teacher schools in the tribal areas of the country. Now there is a plan to open one lakh more schools for which we need energetic young teachers. These youth will also be given an opportunity to shape their careers elsewhere," he said.

Madhav said the youngsters had to decide whether they wanted to work for money or also contribute in nation-building.

For all these grand plans, the members of the Bharatiya Adhyapak Parishad (BAP), a bank of teachers affiliated to the RSS, are mostly overage.

The Sangh employs them in its Saraswati Shishu Mandir schools. But they have mostly remained ineffective in giving any political boost to the BJP. It is believed that the Sangh Parivar expects to 'catch' maximum politically vibrant youngsters in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa where the tribal population is fairly high