A degree can take you places, but Barefoot College in Rajasthan’s Tilonia village is not one of them. In fact here that is ground enough to disqualify you.
Founded by Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, this college works in poor and inaccessible traditional rural societies of the world where people are judged by their ability to work with their hands with dignity and self-respect, and not by the paper degrees they hold.
With the ceiling earnings for each member of this college set at around Rs 9000 per month, money is hardly the motivation. Roy believes that each person joining the college comes for the challenge, the desire to bring fundamental and lasting change, the need to try new ideas, and learning from mistakes instead of giving up and not trying at all.
“The barefoot approach will work where communities have been neglected or destroyed by the formal system devaluing the old and traditional that have stood the test of time. It will only work where urban professionals will never go because they consider it too backward or primitive, whatever that means,” says Roy
An alumnus of Doon School and St Stephen’s College, Roy believes that the elitist, snobbish and expensive education in India almost destroyed him.
It was a 1965 summer spent volunteering at the famine-affected Palamu District in Bihar that changed his life. He traded his wellcut suit for the simple kurta pyjama and started working as an unskilled labourer, deepening and blasting open wells for water.
“I lived with very poor and ordinary people under the stars and heard the simple stories they had to tell, of their skills and knowledge and wisdom that books and lectures and university education can never teach you. My real education started then when I saw these amazing people–water diviners, traditional bonesetters, midwives–at work. That was the humble beginnings of the Barefoot College,” says the social activist and educator.
The boys and girls who come out of the night schools are given priority to join the college and eventually become “barefoot” doctors, teachers, solar and water engineers, architects, designers and health workers.
Just over four decades later, there are now 24 inspired Barefoot Colleges in 13 states of the country, each having its own legal identity, governing body, sources of funds and priorities. In addition, the model has also inspired 64 of the least developed countries around the world.
A smooth marriage of old world and new age, the college uses sign language, sight and sound and no formal education to train pupils. “The oral tradition in rural communities all over the world continues to be very strong,” says Roy, who uses a technique mixing traditional ways of learning through sign language and sight and sound with current technology, like in the case of solar engineering.
Roy is a strong believer that there are many more powerful ways of learning other than the written word.
Debunking the myth that you need an expensive outside consultant with fancy degrees conducting a feasibility study costing lakhs of rupees to look into pitfalls such as lack of safe drinking water and power, basic education and health, Roy believes that paper qualified experts with no practical experience on rural realities will hardly be able to appreciate the rich expertise already available in communities to identify their own problems and come up with their own solutions.
“What the Barefoot College has done is bring this process into the mainstream and give it the respectability and credibility it deserves,” he says.
An integral part of their organisation are women who they believe are powerful agents of change. In fact, the Barefoot College believes men are untrainable, restless, compulsively mobile, ambitious and all they want is a certificate after their training, after which they leave their villages looking for jobs in the cities.
Under the India Technical Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme of the Ministry of External Affairs, the Barefoot College has also trained nearly 500 rural grandmothers to be solar engineers and has solar electrified over 20,000 houses in Africa.
The five countries selected–Liberia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Sudan– have the largest number of women solar engineers. The idea is that these women solar engineers will become trainers in the Barefoot Vocational Training Centres demonstrating that more women can be trained “in-house”.
The Ministry of External Affairs intends to establish five Barefoot Training Centres in Africa in addition to solar electrifying 11,000 houses in 22 countries across the continent.
“The Barefoot Model has demonstrated it is possible to empower rural women in all areas addressing basic minimum needs (electricity, drinking water, health, night school education) because that is the only way of achieving human, technical and financial sustainability. A top down model depending on outside experts providing a technical service can never be sustainable,” says Roy.
According to him, the best woman solar engineer the Barefoot College has trained is a 55-year-old semi-literate grandmother from Afghanistan who is looking after 200 houses she solar electrified in September 2005 which are still functioning without any problem. She is now training other women.
But how difficult has it been to get funds for a model that overthrows the baggage of formal education?
Roy believes it important to first prove the simple idea on the ground and show its immediate impact. The funds follow. Barefoot College has entered into global agreements with UNESCO, UNWOMEN, GEF Small Grants Programme of UNDP and the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.
In Roy’s world there are no ‘students’ and everyone is a learner and also a teacher. Barefoot intends to become self-sufficient by next year. “We believe the future of this country does not rest on the literate but uneducated. It depends on the educated but illiterate,” he says.
