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Man with a mission

Meet Bunker Roy, founder and inspirational leader of the Barefoot College.

From civil servant to a pioneer in rural education, Bunker Roy has covered a lot of ground in his life.

Thirty years ago he moved from New Delhi to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he opened a work center for the victims of a devastating famine.

Since then, the center has grown and flourished, earning the appellation of the Barefoot College and training two generations of villagers to become health-care workers, solar engineers, hand-pump mechanics and teachers.

Thanks largely to Barefoot College graduates, more than 100,000 people in 110 villages now have access to safe drinking water, education, health and employment. Rural villagers once regarded as “unemployable” install and maintain solar electricity systems, cookers, hand pumps and tanks for drinking water.

Rising to the rural education challenge

At the heart of the Barefoot College philosophy is a belief in age-old wisdom and practices for achieving self-sufficiency that are sometimes overlooked by conventional government policies.

For example, Roy stresses the importance of local efforts to achieve universal primary education in India: “Encourage private initiative without commercializing education. Give private initiative more responsibility, more space, more freedom,” he says. “It (formal education) destroys initiative and creativity. It expects you to do everything the way they say, the way they do.”

Wisdom in action

Roy recounted a classic example of this philosophy in action at the recent Pop!Tech event in Camden, Maine, USA.

When an expert claimed that nothing would grow in the arid soil of the college campus, Roy consulted a village elder. Drawing on his local knowledge and experience, the elder advised exactly what to plant and where. The result? A lush, green campus.

Roy has shown that this philosophy helps improve living conditions for rural populations in ways that well-meaning government policies fail to achieve. Twenty Barefoot College field centers are now running in 13 of India’s 26 states, and the expansion is set to continue.

Solar engineers lighting up India and beyond 

The solar engineering program at Barefoot specializes in training people to become “barefoot solar engineers”. Since 1986, barefoot solar engineers have installed nearly 11,000 solar panels for cooking and lighting in rural India. So far, these systems are estimated to have generated more than 200 KWh of solar energy across the country.

Barefoot solar engineers have installed solar systems in 10 states of India. They have:

• Solar electrified 300 adult education centers

• Solar electrified 870 schools

• Solar powered 28 remote and inaccessible villages in Ladakh district alone

• Solar powered more than 50 villages overall

And their work transcends national boundaries: one recent graduate of the Barefoot College Solar Engineering program led a project to bring solar power to her village in Afghanistan, making it the first solar powered community ever in that country.

Thanks to the remarkable instructors, students and former students of the Barefoot College, determination and technical expertise are bringing renewable power sources to remote regions of the world.

Applying the Barefoot philosophy

Is there a lesson here for operators? Business models and marketing strategies that have proven successful in urban markets will not necessarily be effective in rural, emerging regions. Rural communities have needs and challenges of their own. In order to address these, operators may have to follow Roy’s lead; ignore best practice, scrap the blueprint and start listening to the local population.

Photo: Kris Krug, http://staticphotography.com/