Karnataka - Bangalore   

Driving home the point on people’s power

BANGALORE: There were no grand statements about Mahatma Gandhi or about following his philosophy.

But the point on people’s power was driven home through narration of instances, marked by simplicity from an individual who has helped to redefine the concept of education and literacy.

Bunker Roy, founder and director of Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, had this to say in his Gandhi Memorial Lecture on “Demystifying Professionalism: The Gandhian Approach” on Wednesday: “Our campus was built by an illiterate man for only Rs. 58 per sq. ft. in 1986.”

“When urban designers said we could not grow anything in the desert, we went to an old, illiterate man who told us what species we could grow,” he said.

The slides he shows present a campus filled with greenery.

“When we were doing the roofing for the buildings, the women asked the men to leave. For, it was the secret of women that was not to be shared with men. They made some mixture and applied it all over. The roofs have not leaked once since 1986,” he said.

Startling his audience with these instances of success achieved by illiterate and semi-literate women, Mr. Roy said that Tilona, 350 km from Delhi in the middle of the desert, was the most well-connected village in the country with “optic fibre cables, wi-fi and solar-powered computers.”

It was incredible how quickly the women picked up the most sophisticated and complicated technology and how easily they applied them to raise the quality of life of their community, he said. “You just need to spark something in their minds and they fly beyond what you can imagine,” he added.

Mr. Roy narrated a story about training unlettered women from a remote village in Ethiopia to become solar engineers. The first thing the women did when they went back was to provide birth attendants solar lanterns so that women could now have safe childbirths. The status of birth attendants had also gone up in the village. “The women do earn money, but more important than that is the status, self esteem and dignity that come with their newly acquired skills,” Mr. Roy said.

At the close of his lecture, a man from the audience asked Mr. Roy how he could claim to follow the Gandhian philosophy when he used technology in his barefoot college. He said, “As long as we control technology, as long as people are not deprived of jobs because of technology, then we are in essence following the Gandhian principles, aren’t we?”

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