Barefoot colleges
and barefoot method

Bunker Roy

Inspired by Gandhi and moved to respond to India’s 1967 famine, Bunker Roy moved from the affluent suburb where he grew up to Rajasthan, India, to help rural villagers improve their lives. The organization he founded in 1972, Social Work and Research Centre, came to be known as “Barefoot College”, because its clients are poor, rural, often semiliterate villagers. Communities from all over India have sent representatives to work and study to become “barefoot” health workers, teachers and engineers. Once they return to their villages, they use their knowledge of water engineering, solar power, income generation, medicine and other topics to improve their own communities. Some launch their own Barefoot Colleges. The organization has trained 750 technicians—women, dropouts and unemployable youths—in remote villages in 13 Indian states over the past 30 years through a self-help model that respects local knowledge and capability and promotes local organizations to make community decisions. Skoll’s grant will help Barefoot College bring the “Barefoot Approach” to 30 communities in five countries.

Background

The Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) was created in 1972 by a group of students from top Indian universities under the leadership of Bunker Roy. Inspired by Gandhian principles, the social drive of this group first materialized in the creation of Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan. Barefoot College was built around the concept of the village as a self-reliant unit. By applying informal educational processes to build and repair technologies needed to provide basic needs, the illiterate or semiliterate rural poor can gain control of and manage these technologies without “help” from outside experts. All members of the Barefoot College take a living wage, not a market wage. They earn a maximum living wage of US $100 a month.

Barefoot College identifies poor rural jobless and unemployable youth who have not been able to finish their formal education. They have returned to their village as dropouts. These very people are trained to be "barefoot" doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, metal workers, IT specialists and communicators. The innovation lies in the simple and informal method to confidence building.

Barefoot College does not believe that educational degrees are either relevant or important when it comes to developing people. Only a hands-on approach has achieved results. The Barefoot method challenges the notion that formal education is required to become a solar engineer, for instance.

To date, Barefoot technologists have solar electrified several thousand houses in 8 Indian states and installed hand pumps in the Himalayas, a task which urban engineers had declared technically impossible. Barefoot water engineers have planned and implemented piped drinking water. Barefoot educators have been trained as pre-primary and night schools teachers. Nearly 3,000 boys and girls that have to perform household chores during the day attend over 150 Barefoot-run night schools. A Children's Parliament supervises the schools, and all three elected Prime Ministers have been girls. Barefoot communicators using puppets have changed the attitudes of many communities on issues such as child marriage, rights of women, equal wages for women, and child literacy. Barefoot architects and masons constructed the 30,000 square foot College out of low cost materials. The campus is the only fully solar electrified College in India. Barefoot College is testimony to the infinite capacity of people to identify and solve their own problems with their own skills, encouraging self-reliance and private initiative.

Strategy

Barefoot College operates in a decentralized and non-hierarchical manner where the inhabitants from the surrounding villages who are part of the College follow the same model: the village has a council where community issues are taken up and decided. On the first week of each month, the democratically elected village council reviews and evaluates the work carried out the previous month and organizes the agenda for the weeks ahead. Collective, transparent and accountable decisions are at the core of governance. When starting a night school or constructing a rainwater harvesting structure, for example, costs are publicized for all to review, allowing villagers to assess the value of their work.

Personal Snapshot

Bunker Roy has been a leading figure in the Indian NGO community for the past thirty years. He is a source of inspiration for many younger social entrepreneurs. The code of conduct debate he launched 10 years ago was then a groundbreaking, controversial, but visionary initiative. It sought to promote the standardization of social auditing to render the Indian voluntary social sector more transparent, effective, reliable and accountable. The Barefoot College is the only community-based organization in India which has publicized and opened its auditing books for the past ten years. Roy's initiative was cut short as the social sector divided around the lines of pro and anti transparency advocates. But the campaign was successful in influencing government policy. A Credibility Alliance is being developed today to readdress the transparency issue raised by Bunker ten years ago.

Bunker Roy bagged the Ashden Award for Community Welfare. After receiving the prize money and trophy, Roy told PTI he would utilize the cash prize for starting a Barefoot College for women in Ladakh.

As part of Roy's commitment to demystifying the technology of solar energy and demonstrating that poor communities can manage their own solar electrified villages without any technical help from outside, 90 men and 19 women -- many of them illiterate -- were trained as barefoot engineers to maintain the fixed units and solar lanterns provided. The change that has taken place in the lives of over 15,000 people, now benefiting from solar energy, has been immense. "No longer do they have to walk for two days to get a 20-litre jerry can of kerosene that had to last one month," Roy said.

The work of Roy and the Barefoot College has created significant employment opportunities, facilitated night schooling in winter, enabled women to produce handicrafts at home, regenerated wasteland through the use of solar water pumps, and most importantly, ensured a growing collective confidence among the communities involved to look after their own solar electrified villages.

See more: www.barefootcollege.org