In the densely wooded hills of Uttarakhand, a quiet revolution is underway. Van Gujjar children, who have spent generations learning from the forest, are now shaping their first alphabets in the soil. Their lessons begin with the rustle of leaves, the movement of buffalo herds, and the changing mood of the sky.

What is unfolding here is not a reinvention of education, but a return to its roots.

According to national and regional data:

• India’s national literacy rate stands at 80.9 percent (UDISE+, 2023–24)
• Scheduled Tribe communities continue to lag significantly behind (Education for All in India)
• In Uttarakhand, overall literacy is recorded at 78.8 percent (Census 2011)
• Among Van Gujjars, more than 74 percent of adults remain illiterate (IJRTI, 2022)
• Only 23 percent of Van Gujjar children complete primary education (IJRTI, 2022)

These numbers are not just statistics. They reflect a long history of invisibility.
Refusing to wait for interventions from outside, two young members of the community, Taukeer Alam and Saddam Hussain Lodha, chose to act. What they built was not a conventional school, but MAEE, a learning space shaped by the forest, spoken in the children’s own tongue, and rooted in the knowledge they already hold.
Here, literacy grows like saplings. Children count using seeds. They study the life of rivers. They find patterns in leaves before pages. This is education that listens before it teaches.
This model of learning does not ask children to abandon their identity. It invites them to learn from it.
The story of MAEE is not a story of access alone. It is a rethinking of what we call education in a country as vast, multilingual, and ecologically rich as India. Where state policy has often failed to reach the forest, these young educators have carried chalk and courage into clearings and commons.

In a nation that often forgets its margins, the Van Gujjar children are proving that learning does not begin with a building. It begins with belief.