WALKING BAREFOOT

With an 'anyone-can-learn' philosophy, Barefoot College is helping rural communities break the cycle of poverty through skill development and renewed self-worth

- Naorem Anuja

OF ALL OF HUMANITY’S assumptions about humanity, there is perhaps little that surpasses the prejudices the well-heeled have about the poor. Even when most admit to social inequities as the reason why the poor remain disadvantaged, there is often a litany of stereotypes that follow. But Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy is different, and so is the social experiment he has engineered in remote Tilona, Rajasthan—the Barefoot College.

Set up in 1972, Barefoot College has been working to provide the only known cure for the issues that plague the poor: empowerment, especially of women. With practice as pedagogy, the Barefoot college “is in the process of exploding many myths by setting an example,” as Roy puts it.

This is perhaps best illustrated by its Solar Mamas programme, where rural women are trained to build, install and maintain solar panels and batteries. After three to six months of training, they head back to their communities and implement the technology, bringing a reliable source of energy to remote villages and earning themselves a decent income. Many go on to train others in their own, and in neighbouring, villages.

One such trainer is 57-year-old Leela Devi, who bends over her workstation while carefully soldering a circuit board during our interview. Having studied only till class 3, she never believed she could do this job. “The beginning was difficult. I told them that I am not going to be able to do this,” she says. But starting from learning colour codes assigned to different circuit components, she learnt the names of the various tools and instruments.