The new year has started well. That’s because in early January, I fulfilled a long overdue visit to the Social Welfare and Research Centre, Tilonia (Rajasthan), more famously known as Barefoot College.
I had heard about Barefoot College and its founder-director Bunker Roy several decades ago when I was in business journalism. But at the time I was too busy sawing away at the Gordian net of licence-permit-quota raj cast over Indian industry by the feral neta-babu kleptocracy, and covering the consequential problems of India Inc, to spare time to investigate the college. In retrospect, that was a grave error of judgement. Because given sufficient exposure and encouragement, by now Barefoot College could have transformed rural India and perhaps raised annual GDP growth rates to Chinese levels.
Since 1972, Bunker Roy and his competent core committee have single-mindedly focused upon the education and development of rural India, which hosts 65 percent of the country’s population, cruelly neglected by post-independence India’s Soviet-inspired centrally planned development effort. Curiously, the self-evident truth that prosperity of the rural majority is the pre-condition of national development, has escaped the attention of the globally renowned economists who have adorned the Planning Commission for the past six decades.
Nevertheless, despite official apathy and indifference, the faculty of Barefoot College has carried on regardless and devised an education-cum-development model which has been tried, tested and proved suitable to meet the needs and priorities of village India. According to this model, rural citizens don’t need 16-18 years of education — especially urban-centric syllabuses and curriculums which alienate youth from their village habitats. Therefore, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a free India comprising thousands of self-sustaining village republics, the college has designed a rural syllabus which combines primary education for attaining functional literacy and numeracy, supplemented with hands-on vocational education which draws upon the traditional skills and technologies — developed over thousands of years — of rural communities. By teaching, implementing and demonstrating the efficacy of its curriculum — driven by ancient India’s peer-to-peer and learning-by-doing pedagogies for over 40 years — Roy and his team have not only transformed the college into a showcase institution, but also 200 neighbouring villages in Rajasthan into relatively prosperous communities reporting high human development indices.
The growth and development of Barefoot College, which offers hope of a brighter future for rural citizens scratching out miserable lives behind the façade of shining India, is the subject of our cover story.
And as if to prove the point that the urban-centric, inorganic school education system devised by post-independence India’s myopic planners and educators is unsuitable, our special report feature written by managing editor Summiya Yasmeen, investigates a recently released authoritative study which highlights the less-than-globally-comparable education being dispensed by metropolitan India’s top private schools. Plainly, K-12 education urgently needs new ideas and radical reform.