It is estimated that today more than 1.5 billion of the world’s 7 billion people still live without electricity and are basically denied access to the 21st century with all its new and evolving technology. Electricity is not vital to people’s health and well-being. Obviously people can live without electricity, but not without potable water or food or quality health care. But those of us who do have access to electricity know how integral it is to education nowadays, which can in turn lift people out of poverty and prove to be the means through which a better all round quality of life is obtained.
It is because he has grasped this that Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy has been using the Barefoot College, which he founded in 1972, to train women in solar engineering. The women then take this skill back to their communities where they train others and/or provide the technological know-how to power the communities. Interestingly, Roy trains only women. He found men to be untrainable, he said in an interview with CNN, and those that could be trained were “restless and compulsively mobile.” All they wanted were the certificates and when they obtained them, they would leave their villages and go to the big cities to work. Roy decided that in order for his concept to work he would be better off investing in training “older women, mature women, gutsy women who have roots in the village.” It has paid off.
Barefoot College, registered as the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), is basically a non-governmental organisation in Rajasthan, India. The term originally comes from the Chinese health workers who were villagers trained to assist their own rural communities in the 1960s. The name emphasises the organisation’s commitment to poor, neglected and marginalized sections of society. It occupies 45 acres of government land and an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium (consisting of 21 buildings) which is leased from the government for Re 1 a month.
The college’s main focus was not always its current solar engineering project. Its goal has always been the provision of basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable. The college therefore sought to graduate ‘barefoot professionals’—persons drawn from rural communities, some of whom were barely literate but who were willing to be trained so that their acquisition of knowledge could serve to uplift their communities. Over the years, the Barefoot College has churned out hundreds of teachers, doctors, midwives, dentists, health workers, solar engineers, water drillers, mechanics, architects, artisans, designers, masons, communicators, water testers, phone operators, blacksmiths, carpenters, computer instructors and accountants of both sexes from communities across India.
Its current female-intensive solar engineering project draws its ‘students’ from developing countries around the world. The women spend six months at the Barefoot College ‘campus’ where they are taught to build and maintain a variety of solar-powered lamps and chargers. To date, Roy told CNN, 150 grandmothers from 28 countries have ‘graduated’ taking their newfound skills back to their villages where, in total, 10,000 houses are now solar powered and saving thousands of litres of diesel and kerosene from polluting the atmosphere.
The concept of training villagers, who would take their knowledge and skills back to their communities, is not a new one. It has been done before and with some amount of success. It has even been done here in Guyana, though increasingly the trend has been to send professionals into rural and hinterland communities, where they do not necessarily have roots, to live and work for specified periods. This has sometimes proved to be problematic.
The Barefoot College concept works because it tailors its training to the human material with which it is presented. Its student base is drawn from people who want to learn; people who are interested in giving back to their communities. It would fail if it were to set basic academic standards that had to be met for entry, as most of its students would obviously not qualify.
Roy told CNN that he wanted the concept of the Barefoot College to be taken up by people the world over; he would be truly gratified if there could be Barefoot College campuses springing up around the globe. If that were to happen, ‘Barefoot’ professionals could truly succeed in lighting up the world.
