On a Saturday afternoon in Kodaikanal’s Kombai-Perungadu tribal settlement, a 5-year-old girl appears on a video call, her hair neatly plaited, her blue frock crisp. She offers a shy smile. “Hi! Yen per Karnika (My name is Karnika),” she says in Tamil.
She is delighted to have someone asking her question after question, and even the poor network connection, which keeps cutting out her voice, doesn’t dampen her enthusiasm. She talks about her friends, her teacher, and her dream of becoming a police officer one day. “I like school a lot, and I like my miss,” she says.
Before the conversation can continue, Karnika is gone, pulled into a circle of 30 children who join hands and begin to chant — not the alphabet or times tables, but rhymes about cleanliness and friendship, led by a teacher, while parents watch proudly from the sidelines.
Not long ago, this scene would have been unthinkable. Karnika had drifted in and out of a local primary school where lessons felt distant and uninspiring, and where the pull of the fields was always stronger. Like her parents, and their parents before them, she was expected to grow into a life of farm labour rather than one shaped by a classroom.
Karnika, 5, dreams of becoming a police officer as she discovers the joy of going to school.
That changed when a ‘Saturday school’ arrived in her village, drawing in 25 children who, for the first time, found learning to be something to look forward to. One Saturday became many, and over two years, the group grew to include more than 52 first-generation learners like Karnika — children now able to step away from the fields and into an education their families had never had access to.
Making this possible took the decades of experience and determination of an 82-year-old educator, whose work teaching children in Delhi’s slums eventually led her, many years later, to bring that same mission to the remote corners of Tamil Nadu.
A promise made in Delhi’s slums.
Tucked into Attuvampatti, six kilometres from Kodaikanal town, My School Satya Surabhi has been educating underserved children for 27 years (since 1999), completely free of cost, save for transportation.
Founded by Padmini, who began teaching at the age of 19 in Calcutta and still walks into a classroom daily at 82, the school runs on a philosophy she calls integrated learning: no subject taught in isolation, every lesson threaded with geography, history, and science until it becomes, in her words, “an imprint on the child.”
**Padmini, 82, still walks into a classroom every day, carrying decades of experience in education into Kodaikanal’s underserved tribal settlements.**
It’s a philosophy she arrived at slowly, shaped by a career that moved from Calcutta to Delhi’s British School to Kodaikanal. But its real origin, she says, goes back further than any classroom. While teaching in Delhi, she accompanied students to a nearby slum twice a week and watched the gap between privileged and underprivileged children play out in real time.
“It became a part of my mindset that I must do something to elevate the status of these people,” she says. “The only way I could do it is not by feeding them, not by giving them clothes, but by giving them a good education.”
When she eventually settled in Kodaikanal and was offered the chance to start a well-resourced, exclusive school, she chose differently. 50 children, one paid teacher, and herself as the other, teaching those who came to learn for free.
Before that, in 1972, she spent four years teaching at a middle school in Benin City, Nigeria, where she saw children from different socioeconomic backgrounds treated as equals. The experience shaped her understanding that, at the core, people share the same basic needs and humanity.
That same instinct resurfaced decades later, this time pointing her towards Kombai.
“I had wanted to reach the tribal settlement there for years. The occasion that finally took me there was solemn — a visit to immerse a relative’s ashes in the river. But what stayed with me afterward was the children. Most of them, I discovered, weren’t in school at all,” she recalls.
More than 50 first-generation learners have joined the programme since it began in 2024.
Of the approximately 50-60 families across various settlements of the Kombai tribe, most children do not attend school. Families here work mainly as farmers, honey collectors, and cotton pickers and expect their children to work in the fields too.
“Children are often used for farm labour. They earn Rs 100-200 and for their families, that is very valuable. Even more than education,” explains Padmini.
But when she invited the children to attend Satya Surabhi’s main campus, the families couldn’t afford the ₹3,000 monthly transport fee.
So the school decided to bring itself to them instead. As a result, ‘School on Wheels’ was born.
What Makes ‘School on Wheels’ Different
The programme, which began in 2024, includes two teachers who set out to the village every Saturday on a rotating basis to interact with the children in the 30-family hamlet of Kombai-Perungadu. This particular hamlet was chosen as most of its children had never attended school.
When the teachers reached the village for the first time, they found parents unwilling to let their children join the sessions they had planned. So before all else, the teachers sought to counsel the community members.
“We would go to each and every house to talk to the parents and bring the children for the programme. It took up to 2-3 months for them to get familiarised with us and only then could we begin.”
But another challenge presented itself: children appearing for the sessions without bathing, grooming themselves, or wearing clothes that were not torn. The general sense was that community members did not see the value of self-care and presentation.
For several children, Saturday lessons have become a pathway to full-time schooling, with 20–25 now enrolled.
“We decided not to start with A B C D or Tamil or maths,” explains Jegatheeshwari Markam, who joined the school initially as a parent and turned English teacher there in 2021.
In a community where children had never been taught the basics of dignity, cleanliness, or self-care, the first lessons had nothing to do with textbooks. “During the first few weeks, we literally just took nail cutters with us and trimmed their nails. We talked about cleanliness, about washing hands and eating well,” she says.
Only after hygiene and care came reading, writing, and arithmetic, alongside a snack consisting of a boiled egg, a glass of milk, and cereal for each child.
Nail cutters before ABCs
But Padmini’s core educational philosophy is what sets ‘School on Wheels’ apart from conventional schooling.
While working at Delhi’s British School for 14 years as Head of Department and Coordinator for French and foreign languages, Padmini encountered a teaching method called “thematic teaching.” “What I learned there was something amazing because it gave me a new insight into learning and teaching,” she says.
The idea, as she explains it, is that no subject exists in isolation. A lesson in English, for instance, covers more than grammar: it also touches the geographical, historical, and scientific angle of that particular lesson. “Teaching a text without unpacking where it’s set or how its culture took shape the way it did,” she believes, “makes the learning incomplete.”
“It’s a lot of hard work and planning by teachers. But this is the core of holistic learning,” she says.
She termed this ‘integrated learning’, and it remains the core teaching methodology at both the school and the outreach programme, including in Kombai, where the same principle shapes something more basic than a textbook lesson: daily living itself.
The Saturday programme began with nail cutters, handwashing and lessons on personal hygiene—not textbooks.
Cleanliness connects to dignity, nutrition connects to focus during class, and literacy connects to self-worth. Nail-trimming and handwashing are not separate from education; they are the first thread in the same fabric. Only once that foundation is in place does subject-based learning follow.
“Because of this philosophy, I now see my child taking his presentation seriously and aiming for perfection in everything. Because he was taught to take care of himself and go to school well groomed, he takes extra care with whatever he does,” says Maheshwari, mother of 11-year-old Sudharshan from Kombai.
What lessons really look like
In line with this philosophy, Science teacher Shanti is busy on a Friday, curating a lesson plan that integrates her subject of biology with mathematics, geography and agriculture for the Kombai children’s class the next day.
“I have taken a wild flower seed which the children are familiar with given their families’ agriculture background. With the help of the social science teacher, we tell them about the region in which the plant grows and the area’s history,” explains Shanti.
Next, having spoken to the mathematics teacher, Shanti teaches them how to measure the seed with a ruler to understand how many seeds they would require for a given portion of land.
The lesson then moves on to climate and rain patterns, added to the plan by another teacher.
Mahalakshmi now attends classes alongside her children, learning alphabets and multiplication tables herself.
“We then assess the plan and conduct the session on Saturdays. The response is always resounding. Children feel immersed because getting to know about one small seed from different perspectives is fascinating to them, especially at that age. More importantly, it inculcates critical thinking in them,” says School Headmistress Mary Johnson.
To all teachers, including Jegatheeshwari, this aspect remains one of the most fulfilling parts of working at the school. “It is truly rewarding when we see children respond with curiosity and ask us more questions to learn further,” she says.
‘Every job is dignified and important’
Padmini’s approach to education is shaped by a conviction that intelligence takes many forms, and that a school’s job is to help every child find theirs. Mushroom farming is one example of this at work. “Nobody does that, actually. It’s very unique,” she says of the practice, offered alongside more conventional subjects.
The philosophy traces back to her own self-assessment. “I’m terrible at math. I’m quite bad at logic. But there are many kinds of intelligence,” she says. “Now neurologists and neuroscientists have proved that. There is EQ, IQ, and SQ also. Spiritual quotient.” It’s a belief she has carried into decades of teaching. “I think I knew intuitively that they must be good at something. They will make a mark in something in life.”
That conviction shapes what she wants for her students: not uniform achievement, but excellence wherever their passion happens to lie. “You must have a passion for what you’re doing,” she says. “Not every child can become an IAS. So the person who becomes a sweeper should be the best sweeper. The best farmer should be the best. In the field that they choose, they should shine the best.”
Teachers first built trust with families before introducing lessons to children in the tribal hamlet.
For Padmini, this begins with the fundamentals. “What you need is basic good quality education. That’s the keyword,” she says. “Not just entering the class and the teacher says something and the child forgets. It should become an imprint on the child. Then automatically the child will seek perfection.”
It’s a principle she practices, not just preaches. “I go and sweep my school. I set the example,” she says. “Now I can’t do it in all the classrooms, but at least they know that they must also do it.”
This matters especially for the Kombai community, generations of whom have worked in agriculture and hard labour, a reminder that this work, too, deserves respect and recognition.
The 80-year-old who wanted to write his name
But for Padmini, learning has no age limit — it doesn’t stop at graduation, or retirement, or any point along the way. “I’m a constant learner. Learning should only stop at death. It sounds so final, but that’s the way it is. What you do every day is what you are in life,” she says.
And Kombai’s outreach programme is a testament to that.
The programme started with 30 children, and consistently draws 25-30 children to each session. The children span ages 4 to roughly 13.
But there is something surprising that stands out in these sessions. It has also pulled in adults of various ages who have never once stepped into school, but now feel a sense of comfort and non-judgement at the sessions. Adults like an elderly man feel safe enough to approach the teacher and ask them to teach him to write his name.
“He must be in his 70s or 80s. It was so admirable to watch him be so eager to learn. We taught him to write his name in Tamil, letter by letter, on a blackboard: Pandy,” Jegatheeshwari said.
An elderly man from the community learned to write his name in Tamil, letter by letter, on a blackboard.
Although two years in, the work isn’t always easy. “It is still a struggle to reach out to the parents because they still don’t find the value of education there,” she admits. But for a settlement where most children had never seen a classroom, a man learning to write his own name is its own kind of beginning.
Several parents, mostly in their 30s and 40s now, once hesitated to participate in the programme and send their children. But with repeated counselling from the teachers and a sense of camaraderie and familiarity that built over time with them, they came around. They soon began accompanying their children to the classes.
But from being silent spectators, a lot of them have turned students themselves — among them Mahalakshmi, who works in the fields and is the mother of Prathiksha (9) and Adhirathan (7). She now sits in on lessons alongside her children, learning her own alphabet and tables as they learn theirs.
As one session wraps up, a child chimes in over video call, prompting laughter, “Mari miss is my favourite teacher!”
From Saturdays to every day
Several of the children who attend the Saturday programme are also enrolled at the school itself, travelling 10-15 km each way to attend classes from 7:30 am to 5 pm on weekdays, then still showing up on Saturdays. “I enjoy going to school as all my teachers are good, and every day I learn something new. I have also made lots of friends,” says Krishika (8).
Of the children who first found their way into learning through the weekend programme, 20-25 have since become full-time students at the school, also free of cost, with the school covering half their transport expenses.
Mahalakshmi, who works in the fields and once thought her own chance at an education was gone for good, is now among the parents who show up alongside their children.
“Now, I can recite the alphabets and even know two tables. I feel happy. My children have learnt the importance of cleanliness and they are studying very well. Now, they come home eagerly and teach me all that they learnt in school that day,” she says. “The teachers are very good, and now we feel that as a family that comes from nothing, we can finally dream again.”
For children like Krishika, her best friend Karnika, and the 20 others who still gather every Saturday, ‘School on Wheels’ has meant exactly that — the chance to dream, and the room to grow into whatever that dream turns out to be.
