The Road That Sent Us Back
The day began early. By 7:45 in the morning Khairul had reached my home, and a light rain was already falling. We started sharp at eight.
Our first destination was Vivekananda Vidya Niketan at Andulberia. To get there you take the village road, and in this season the village road is not really a road at all.
“Due to the rainy season the road condition was not good. It’s full of mud, because tractors are loading raw jute from the farming fields.”
This is the part of fieldwork that never makes it into a report. It is jute season. The tractors come and go all day, loaded heavy, and they churn whatever surface the road had into something else entirely.
A rural village road churned into deep mud by tractor traffic, with motorcycles
pulled over at the edge.
We went carefully. After four or five kilometres we understood what we had driven into.
“Lots of mud — means almost seven to eight inches of mud was there on the road.”
Deep tractor ruts and standing puddles across the full width of a village road.
We kept going, slowly. Then a man walking the other way stopped us. He had come from further up and he knew what was ahead.
“He informed us: do not go by this road. If possible you should take the highway road, because it will be much safer.”
The rain was still falling. We stood there and made the call: we would not reach Vivekananda Vidya Niketan today. Not on this road, not in this condition. So we turned around and drove back the way we had come — another seven to ten kilometres added to the day before we even touched the main road.
It is a small thing to write in one line. On the ground it is a whole morning, and a school that will now have to wait for another visit.
Adarsha Missionary School, Joynagar
Once we were on the main road the weather turned with us. The rain stopped, the sky opened up, and we reached our second destination — Adarsha Missionary School in Joynagar, Murshidabad — on time.
We had come for World Environment Day. The children here had taken part in the Environment Day event, and we were carrying their certificates.
The whole school assembled in the ground. The morning’s rain had just stopped.
One Name at a Time
There is a particular way these distributions go. You read a name off the list, a child steps forward, and someone who loves that child steps forward with them.
The youngest of the group, waiting to be called.
Reading down the list. Parents had come and were standing along the verandah.
More than fifteen to twenty students had participated, and we handed the certificates over one by one. Not in a pile, not to a teacher to distribute later — one by one, to each child, with whoever had come for them standing alongside.
Fathers, mothers, elder sisters — most children had someone with them.
Each certificate handed over individually.
Explaining what the certificate is for. For many families this is the first one their
child has ever received.
The certificates themselves are simple. Green leaves down one side, a line of handwriting in the middle:
*”This certificate is proudly presented to ——— of Class ——— from Adarsha Missionary School, in appreciation of their enthusiastic participation in the World Environment Day Event, 2026 organized by Krishworks. Thank you for contributing towards a greener and more sustainable future.”*
Name, class and school, written in by hand for every single child.
Two families, two certificates.
One of the smallest participants of the day.
And then, as always, the group photograph — everyone holding their certificate up to the camera, in front of a doorway marked অফিসরুম.
The full group, outside the office room.
The Trophy We Almost Didn't Deliver
We had one more thing in the bag that morning: the Teacher of the Month trophy for May, for Sonia Parveen ma’am.
There was a problem with that plan. We had learned that she was no longer at the school.
“We came to know that she left that school, because suddenly she got married. But suddenly she came to the school today — so it was our fortune that we caught her.”
Of all the days for her to walk back into that school, she chose the one where we were standing in the ground with her trophy. We handed it over there and then, in front of the students.
Handing over the Teacher of the Month trophy for May.
The trophy reads: Krishworks — Adarsha Missionary School.
We recorded a short testimonial from her afterwards. She spoke very positively about the classes.
If we had come a day later, or if the mud on the Adalberia road had cost us another hour, we would have missed her entirely.
Sitting Down With the Teachers
With the ceremony finished, we sat down with the teachers to talk about what comes next — the upcoming diagnostic test and the written examination.
That conversation surfaced a problem we would not have found from the office: none of the teachers had our teacher app installed. Not one.
So we did it right there. We installed the app on their smartphones, and walked them through how to conduct the diagnostic test by scanning our QR code.
“They learned it very quickly and we took a demo from them. It was a smooth process.”
This is the kind of thing that quietly decides whether a program works. An app nobody has installed is a diagnostic test that never happens. Twenty minutes on a school verandah closed that gap for the entire teaching staff.
A Conversation With the School Owner
We also raised the pending examination fees, since the written exam question papers follow the payment of those fees.
While we were talking, the school owner himself came in. We explained the position on the dues, and he assured us he would clear everything related to the exam fees soon.
Then he went further than we expected. From the next session, he said, he intends to make joining our Hi-Tech class mandatory at his school. He wants the admission procedure completed by November or December — and asked whether we could finish the whole process within this year.
We told him that if the school agrees, we will complete the entire procedure within this year.
That is not a small commitment from a rural school. It came at the end of a morning that started with us being turned back by a flooded road.
The Way Home
From the missionary school, my home in Baharampur is almost 50 kilometres away — and roughly 30 kilometres from Khairul’s. That is the ordinary arithmetic of this work. Two schools planned, one reached, a hundred-odd kilometres of road, and a day that still delivered more than we went out for.
We lost Vivekananda Vidya Niketan to the mud. We will go back.
But we caught Sonia Parveen ma’am on the one day she returned. We put a certificate into the hands of every child who had earned one, with their parents watching. We got an app onto every teacher’s phone. And we came away with a school owner who wants his students in our classroom next session.
Some days the road decides your route. It does not always decide your day.