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Indian migrant children at an Aide et Action learning centre in Hyderabad Picture:

Over the last two years, G. Prakash Raj, a charity worker from India�鶹APP�s Tamil Nadu state, has received hundreds of yellow postcards. Each reads the same.

Sent by a migrant child, the postcard informs Raj that the child is safely back home and, more importantly, back in school.

The postcard programme was launched in Tamil Nadu in 2014 as a way of tracking the education of some of the more than 10 million children who are estimated to migrate with their families to different parts of India every year.

�鶹APP�When they are at work sites with their parents, we try and ensure they get basic access to education,�鶹APP� said Raj, who works for , a non-governmental group which is collaborating with the education department to keep migrant children in school.

�鶹APP�When they head back to their villages six months later, they need to go back to school. Tracking that has been a big challenge,�鶹APP� he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.   

Under the Indian Right to Education Act, every child between the age of four and 16 should be enrolled in school �鶹APP� but government data shows up to six million children aged between six and 13 are out of school in India.

Under the postcard programme, the first to track the education of migrant children across state borders, migrant families working in Tamil Nadu are given a postcard when they head home.

They are required to get it signed and stamped by the principal of the village school and send it back to Aide et Action.

�鶹APP�In the postcard, the principal writes back to us saying that the child has been enrolled back in school. It�鶹APP�s just a note but we are able to track a child�鶹APP�s academics through it,�鶹APP� said an official at education department, requesting anonymity.

Last year, 547 postcards were sent back with migrant families from areas around Chennai and 495 came back saying that the children had been successfully enrolled in school.

To ensure the children are back in school, volunteers working with the education department travel to the home states and cross check enrollment.

Families who do not send back a postcard are traced back to their villages and counselled to enroll their children in school.

In Tamil Nadu, most migrants tracked are from the eastern Indian state of Orissa.

The success of the postcard programme has prompted similar initiatives in other migration hubs across India, including in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh.

Although India�鶹APP�s law allows children to go to any school in the country, an education department official said that a language barrier kept many migrant children out of school.

India, a country of 1.2 billion people, has 22 official languages and dozens more that are spoken across its 29 states.

�鶹APP�We are fixing that slowly,�鶹APP� said the official, who declined to be named. �鶹APP�We are bringing people and books from home states to help the children in a language they are familiar with.�鶹APP�

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