Dilip Thakore interviewed Sanjit (‘Bunker’) Roy, promoter-director of the Social Work and Research Centre, popularly known as Barefoot College (BC), in his Gandhian floor-level seating office on the college’s new campus. Excerpts.
SWRC was established in 1972. what were the factors which prompted you to forswear urban life and promote a Barefoot College in this remote area?
I had a very privileged Doon School and St. Stephen’s education and was set to enter the civil service when I visited Bihar during a great drought and famine in the mid-1960s. What I witnessed there prompted me to believe I could make a greater contribution to national development by working in rural India. Therefore much to the dismay of my parents, I signed up with Catholic Relief Services — a US-based NGO — which sent me to Ajmer to dig 500 irrigation wells in five years. During this period I met Meghraj, a Jat well-driller, who came from Tilonia and taught me everything about well drilling. He encouraged me to start a rural community college in Tilonia.
Fortunately, the St. Stephen’s College connection helped me get the first grant of Rs.20,000 — a lot of money in 1971 — from the Dorabji Tata Trust. Again through the college connection, we managed to persuade the government of Rajasthan to give on lease an old TB sanatorium of the State Warehousing Corporation where we started a gram sevak training centre.
In 1979 because of political pressure from the then BJP government of Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the lease agreement was terminated and we were served an expulsion order. But a fortuitous visit by World Bank president Robert McNamara and President Kennedy’s national security adviser saved the day. In the following year when Mrs. Gandhi was returned to power at the Centre — her son and later prime minister Rajiv was a Doon School classmate — the lease agreement was renewed. In 1986 with funds from CAPART, the new Barefoot College was built by 12 barefoot architects at a cost of Rs.58 lakh.
What are the prime objectives of SWRC/Barefoot College?
To tangibly improve the quality of life of people in village India, particularly people living on less than $1 per day by empowering them to access light and water for their homes, and to build capacity and capability within their own communities to improve productivity and incomes.
To what extent have the objectives of Barefoot College been attained?
The Barefoot College has trained solar and rainwater harvesting master trainers and teachers who have spread out to 673 villages in eight states across the country. In all of them, the Millennium Development Goals — full productive employment and decent work for all; universal primary education; women’s empowerment and gender equality; reduction of child mortality and improved maternal health; environ-mental sustainability and halving the proportion of people with access to safe drinking water and sanitation and developing global partnerships for development — have been substantially attained.
The Barefoot College dispenses its own type of education. what are the major infirmities of mainstream education?
The major infirmity of mainstream primary and secondary education is that it is urban rather than village-centric, and alienates students from rural India, aka Bharat. Therefore the BC curriculum which combines primary and vocational education designed for village schools, is informal, connected with village life and situations, and is deliberately uncertified to retain our graduates in their native communities. We believe rural weavers, midwives, cobblers, tailors and architects and appropriately trained engineers can also be teachers even as they earn livelihoods and enhance their skill-sets. Unfortunately this model is only paid lip service and not accepted by the establishment, which has a vested interest in its rigid teacher-centric model.
How do you gauge or measure the impact of the BC model of education?
If you study the profiles of the 22 members of our core committee, almost all were at best semi-literate men and women. But they have transformed into brilliant solar and rainwater harvesting engineers, teachers, master-trainers, responsible heads of field centres and respected leaders of their village communities. This will give you a good idea of the impact of the Barefoot College education model.
How optimistic are you about village india being able to enjoy a reasonable standard of living?
I am extremely optimistic. I believe we have devised an informal, decent-ralised, appropriate education model to help village India to help itself. Over the past thousands of years, rural artisans, engineers, architects and other professionals have inherited and developed valuable skills and competencies which need to be revived and encouraged, and brought into mainstream thinking. Barefoot College is essentially a laboratory which looks deep into the history and cultures of traditional societies to develop appropriate solutions to improve the quality of life in India’s villages. In BC our major achievement is that we have demystified and decentralised rural development. We have given rural citizens the confi-dence to rely on their traditional technologies and wisdom to rise out of poverty.