It is the Harvard of rural India, minus wingtips or heels: a
50-year-old institution called Barefoot College that offers lessons for
empowering people worldwide. Maybe even in America.
اضافة اعلان
Barefoot College does empowerment as well as any institution I
have ever seen, and here is what that looks like in the rural state of
Rajasthan: An illiterate woman named Chota Devi who never attended a day of
school is hunched over a circuit board, carefully using color-coded
instructions to solder resistors and diodes into place.
Chota, who has no idea how old she is, is a Dalit, those at the
bottom of the caste system once known as untouchables, and from a particularly
low-ranking group called the Valmiki who often cleaned human waste.
But now Chota is learning how to be a solar power technician.
Barefoot College trains illiterate, low-status villagers like her to make
solar-powered lanterns and install solar lighting systems. After three to six
months of training, they return to their communities and earn a decent living
as they bring solar power to communities without reliable electricity — and in
the process, they upend the social hierarchy.
“I will have more knowledge than my husband,” Chota noted slyly.
When she goes home, villagers now call her “Madam.” It is partly a joke, partly
a show of respect.
With a new income of perhaps $80 a month, Chota plans to pay off
debts, buy a simple cellphone and build an outhouse.
Chota has five children, none of whom now attend school, but her
trainers at Barefoot College have left an impression. “I’m working with women
who know how to read and write, so now I want my children to learn as well,”
she said.
“We wanted to start a college with a difference, where people were not penalized because they were illiterate.”
Bunker Roy, 77, was a three-time Indian national squash champion
and an activist inspired by Mahatma Gandhi when in 1972 he moved to this remote
village to see what he could do to tackle entrenched poverty. That year, he
started Barefoot College here.
Roy focused on putting technology skills in the hands of the
least educated and most scorned people in the community — because they were the
ones who most needed the help and because he believed that nurturing dignity
and self-confidence were crucial elements of overcoming poverty.
“We wanted to start a college with a difference, where people
were not penalized because they were illiterate,” Roy said.
So Barefoot College takes illiterate villagers — most of them
Dalits or women — and trains them in technical skills such as solar panel
installation. With funding from foundations, donations and the Indian
government, the college also runs literacy classes, health campaigns, a water
resources department, study centers and a sanitary pad factory.
“There are millions of people who are illiterate, and they have
much to contribute,” Roy said.
The urban-rural divide exists worldwide, with opportunity
lagging in rural America as well as in rural India. Those left behind sometimes
self-medicate, creating cycles of despair; in India, all this is complicated by
caste and gender. Barefoot College nurtures opportunity by offering skills training
in the way that community colleges do in the US, but there is a particular
emphasis here on the absolutely most impoverished.
That benefits the entire society: Marginalized people are often
a nation’s most underutilized assets. And there’s something delicious about the
way the success of low-status people messes with people’s heads.
One of Barefoot College’s first initiatives was to train Dalits
to install water pumps. Initially, this was in their own communities, because
they were not allowed to use the same wells as those from higher castes.
The upshot was that the most reliable water source in a village
became one in the most scorned neighborhood. When high-caste villagers found
their wells running dry, they would awkwardly get water from the Dalit pump.
“It’s just for the livestock,” they might say at first.
"The illiterates of the 21st century are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn."
When their own pumps broke, they also found themselves having to
summon a Dalit pump technician. Since Dalits traditionally were not supposed to
touch food or water containers used by higher caste people, the head-spinning
only increased.
We in America could learn from this approach in rural India. The
US as well must do better providing training in technical skills to people who
have been left behind so that they can earn a living — as electricians, wind
turbine installers, carpenters and more. And there’s a belated recognition that
we worry too much about formal educational qualifications; bravo to
Pennsylvania for opening up state jobs this year to those without four-year
college degrees.
Over the decades, Barefoot College has attracted international
and local funding to expand. The college now has water programs around India,
and the Indian government brings in women from Africa and elsewhere to study
solar engineering at Barefoot College for six-month courses, and they then
return home to bring electricity to their villages. Here, “empowerment” is not
a buzzword but a way of life.
“The illiterates of the 21st century,” Roy said, “are not those
who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn.”
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