Bunker Roy: Learning from a Barefoot Movement

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men, many of them illiterate to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It’s called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

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ABOUT Bunker Roy

“Development projects the world over run into one crucial point: For a project to live on, it needs to be organic, owned and sustained by those it serves.

In 1972, Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy founded the Barefoot College, in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, with just this mission: to provide basic services and solutions in rural communities with the objective of making them self-sufficient.

These “barefoot solutions” can be broadly categorised into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development. The Barefoot College education programme, for instance, teaches literacy and also skills, encouraging learning-by-doing. (Literacy is only part of it.)

Bunker’s organisation has also successfully trained grandmothers from Africa and the Himalayan region to be solar engineers so they can bring electricity to their remote villages. As he says, Barefoot College is “a place of learning and unlearning: where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.”

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