Unlike hundreds of primary schools that are run without a roof or in cracked buildings, some even under trees, this one in Bihar is unique.
An Urdu primary
maktab (school) is located inside a 200-year-old graveyard in a village in Kaimur district, where over 200 children learn their first lessons on reading and writing. Mostly, classes are held in the open in the graveyard.
The children not only learn but play and eat amidst the dead.
"It is really an unusual school, as children spend hours surrounded by graves," said Majeed Ansari, an elderly person of Kohari village who is one of the founders of the school.
The school has an interesting story.
"We started this maktab in the 60s in a thatched hut in the graveyard, as there was no other place to set up it. The villagers did not object since nobody was ready to donate a small piece of land for it," Ansari told
rediff.com.
Though most students in the school are Muslims, it does have dozens of Hindu children on its rolls.
A few years ago the local
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