@vdw  Hello Chris , your  suggestions worked very well. Thank you. When I enabled bidirectional learning, the model improved further.
Somehow when there was no dropout added during the initial training phase, the model was over-fitting. The test accuracy increased marginally.
When added a drop out of p=0.3 , the test accuracy improved & model seems to learn now. I got a test accuracy , train accuracy of 0.6,0.88 respectively for 10 epochs , with lr =0.005.