Place · highland school & hill station · India
Netarhat Plateau
Netarhat on a 1,100-metre sal plateau in Latehar district, called the Queen of Chotanagpur, is best known for Netarhat Residential School — opened on 15 November 1954 by Bihar chief minister Sri Krishna Sinha as a Jawahar-era meritocratic residential school for rural Bihari boys modelled on the English public school, and alumni of which came to dominate the Indian administrative services from the 1970s. The plateau has also been in continuous occupation by Oraon and Asur Adivasis who are among the few iron-smelting peoples of eastern India still practising their craft, and in 1964 was selected as a central Indian field-firing range for the Indian Army — a decision Adivasi activists have resisted every year for sixty years in the Netarhat Field Firing Range struggle.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.472, 84.255
Connections (1)
- Life routeBirsa Munda
Birsa Munda, the Munda ulgulan leader of 1899-1900 who declared himself Birsa Bhagwan at Chalkad, studied as a boy at the German Lutheran mission school at Burju near Netarhat and worked across the Netarhat plateau and the Palamu-Lohardaga belt in his years of underground political organising. The plateau's Oraon and Munda villages were the recruitment ground for the ulgulan — the Great Tumult — in which he was captured near Jaikaran at Dombari Buru in March 1900 and taken to Ranchi jail, where he died of what the colonial record calls cholera on 9 June 1900.
Sources
Standard reference.
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