An institution for women who can't read, write

Updated on: Monday, December 20, 2010

Imagine an educational institution where the eligible candidates have to be illiterate housewives!

The Barefoot College located in Tilonia village of Rajasthan's Ajmer district is perhaps the only institution in the world which transforms uneducated mothers and grandmothers into engineers with a mission to provide both light and livelihood in remote villages.

"The speciality of this college is that it gives admission only to those who are illiterate and don't have any desire to go to a city," says its founder-director Bunker Roy.

"Since its inception in 1972, the long-term mission of the college has been to work with the marginalised, exploited and impoverished rural poor living on less than USD 1 daily.

"The dream was to establish the first and only rural college in India built by the poor and exclusively for the poor," Roy told.

Roy, who was identified as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April, was also a guest speaker at the recently-concluded World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) held in Doha.

"At Barefoot, the students have shown that impossible is possible and confirmed what Mark Twain said, 'Never Let School interfere with your Education'," he says.

It is now a policy of the Barefoot College only to train illiterate and semi-literate middle-aged mothers and grandmothers from villages all over the world. Since 2004, the concentration has been on training women from Africa.

Asked why his colleges trains only women, he says, "Men are restless, ambitious, compulsively mobile and want only certificates. Once they get certificates, they leave their village within 24 hours to search for jobs."

Since 1984, the Barefoot College has provided gainful employment to more than 20,000 people apart from the Barefoot architects. Between 2001 and 2009, nearly 2,000 artisans --weavers blacksmiths, carpenters and rural women making handicrafts-- from nearly 50 villages in Rajasthan have earned nearly USD 100,000 in wages.

All these women have bank accounts and this, he adds, is one of the incentives for illiterate rural women to learn how to read and write and enable them to take their money out.

He claims that about 289 solar engineers from Barefoot College have so far solar electrified 600 villages, providing light to 12,000 families who are also being paid for looking after the repair and maintenance of the solar units.

More than 20 Barefoot Colleges have been started in over 13 states across the country. The Barefoot approach of training rural semi-literate middle-aged women to solar electrify their own villages has been replicated in nearly 25 of the least developed countries including Afghanistan, Timbuktu (Mali), Siberia (Russia), Bhutan and Namibia.

An institution for women who can't read, write

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