It’s highly unlikely that you’ll encounter an individual as enthused by the surprisingly unsung exploits and initiatives of Barefoot College, Tilonia (Rajasthan) as your correspondent. During the past decade, I have written three cover features on this pioneer community college which has greened the desert landscape of Tilonia (pop.4,500) and a cluster of villages in its neighbourhood, and restored the dignity and self-respect of thousands of rural folk of Ajmer district.
The promotion and development of BC into a model education institution based on Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and development model by Sanjit (Bunker) Roy, an alum of the The Doon School, Dehradun and Delhi’s blue-chip St. Stephens’s College, is a story of extraordinary grit and determination to deliver some benefits of the successful freedom movement led by Gandhiji to the neglected majority of rural Bharat, the other India.
The decision of newly independent India to take the socialist road and prioritise development of heavy industry through promotion of monopoly public sector enterprises (PSEs) has proved a disastrous failure. Managed by venal politicians and business-illiterate bureaucrats, PSEs have egregiously failed to generate the promised surpluses (‘profit’ is a dirty word in the leftist lexicon) for investment in public education, healthcare and infrastructure in rural India which has evolved into poor, backward and illiterate Bharat, almost another country. Although 65 percent of India’s population toils in hinterland Bharat, it contributes a mere 16 percent of annual GDP and the average per capita income of Bharat is half of urban India.
This is the iniquity that the Barefoot College management led by Roy has successfully addressed since this community college was established fifty years ago in the water-stressed boondocks of Rajasthan. Early this year, BC modestly celebrated its Golden Jubilee, a landmark which inspired the third detailed cover feature on this grassroots development model which on merit should have been replicated in all 742 districts of India, but has not been. Why and how this extraordinary skills development institution which provides a blueprint to lift the rural majority out of poverty, has been ignored and at best damned with faint praise — and has recently suffered institutional schism — is explained in our Independence Day cover feature. It’s also a sad story of betrayal and compassion deficit.
There’s a lot else in this content rich issue of the country’s premier education newsmagazine. Read about the collateral damage caused by the hasty imposition of CUET as also Sanjaya Baru’s essay and our editorials which recommend reflection and introspection on India’s 75th Independence Day.
