Four decades after commencing operations, BC has transformed into a model rural community college whose unique home-grown livelihood and rural employment generation programmes have spread to 14 states of the Indian Union and 72 countries worldwide: Dilip Thakore THE NEWLY CONSTRUCTED, STRAIGHT-AS-an-arrow four-lane National Highway No.8 which links Jaipur, the admin capital of the western India desert state of Rajasthan (pop.69 million), with New Delhi via Ajmer, is a marvel of engineering. It takes a mere 80 minutes to zip down the highway to Patan, a small town and point of departure into the scrub and gravel roads of rural India, one of which leads to the village of Tilonia (pop.4,000). Here, four decades ago the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) was modestly promoted by the then 25-year-old Sanjit (‘Bunker’) Roy in 1972. Over the past 44 years, SWRC has transformed into the globally acclaimed Barefoot College — perhaps the only village-based community college worldwide — whose organic rural education and development model offers the hope of breaking the grinding cycle of rural illiteracy, apathy and poverty which has sentenced over 600 million residents of village India — and several multiples of that number in other developing nations of the third world — to lives of perpetual want, hopelessness and despair. Today, forty years after its initial tentative operations, BC is not only a model rural community college engaged in transforming illiterate villagers of both sexes into solar power and rainwater harvesting engineers and educators, it’s also the hub of primary healthcare and vocational education whose unique, home-grown livelihood and rural employment generation imprint has spread to 14 states of the Indian Union and to 72 developing countries worldwide. “BC is the only college worldwide which consciously follows the teaching, life and work style of Mahatma Gandhi, who envisioned an India comprising thousands of self-sustaining village republics. Here, we don’t accept that village farmers, artisans and service providers are uneducated even if they are illiterate. On the contrary, we believe most village folk are well educated in inherited traditions of crafts, water management, weather forecasting and agriculture know-how and survival which are thousands of years old. In BC, our objective has been to revisit education by reviving the native skills of village India to tangibly improve people’s lives by enabling them to generate solar energy, manage water resources and build capacity for sustained development,” Roy informed EducationWorld which wrote the country’s first detailed feature (February 2012) on this sui generis learning institution which, although celebrated around the world, has been curiously neglected by the Indian media and establishment. Jesse Hartigan, an American academic, who visited BC in 2007, offers an explanation. Writing in Innovations — Technology, Governance and Globalisation, a journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he says: “Those most hostile to the Barefoot approach are people who have invested a great deal in acquiring an education through the official system and then applying their misguided ‘expertise’. The very idea of semi-literate women being able to manage and control initiatives…
