With the passing of Bunker Roy, rural India has lost a great presence of original thinking and beautiful creativity. He breathed his last on November 10. He was 81. Over six decades he made immense and durable contributions to rural development, institution building and protection of the environment. He leaves behind his wife Aruna Roy, an equally great development and social activist, and a very large family of members and well-wishers of the Barefoot College and numerous other institutions he helped create or inspired. Both Bunker Roy and the Barefoot College have been highly regarded nationally and internationally for their original thinking and beautiful creativity. He received the Padma Shri, the Jamnalal Bajaj Award, the Tytler Prize of Environment Protection, the Blue Planet Award and other honours.
After education at the Doon School and St Stephen's College (and becoming a squash champion), Bunker took the plunge into very different and at times very difficult challenges in development work in villages of Ajmer district in Rajasthan, sometimes climbing down steep wells to repair and improve them. He made his tasks doubly difficult by refusing to compromise on his 'basics'—including a firm faith in the equality of all humanity. When the first team for future work had been assembled with great difficulty, he was willing to accept the dismantling of the entire effort rather than accept the discrimination practised by some team members towards dalits, or their reluctance to eat food cooked by a dalit. He said he was even willing to work alone with his dalit colleague if the others did not accept that colleague on the basis of equality. That was about six decades back; today dalits and others work happily together on the basis of equality in this team.
Such a principled stand made it clear to all concerned that justice and equality are the basic precepts for intervening in rural areas. The result is that one finds women and men from dalit and other poor, neglected communities performing beautiful and skilled work today. Similarly, gender equality has been a very important part of these efforts, with Aruna Roy in particular making a very important contribution to the famous women's mobilization and movement started here.
Bunker also had a clear understanding that differently abled people must get all support and encouragement to take up various challenges so that they can realize their full potential. Here again the results have been great, and one finds differently abled persons doing so much important work here.
These firmly held views were part of Bunker's wider view, strengthened through his work and lived experience, that villagers—including those from poorer households—are highly capable of resolving their own problems in creative ways on the basis of their much better understanding of local conditions. Hence what is needed is to create facilitating conditions for them to realize their innate creativity and capabilities. This is what Bunker and his team tried to achieve with an increasing spirit of cooperation and community feeling based on equality and dignity of all.
These and other precepts like transparency and openness were very important for Bunker Roy. It was on the basis of these precepts that the famous Barefoot College (earlier known also as the Social Work and Research Centre, or SWRC) was founded in Tilonia village. Subsequently people who had learnt and gained valuable experience here started affiliated organizations in several other parts of the country, and the Barefoot College grew as a wider family.
One of the most important achievements has been in solar energy. Even before governments had started their solar energy programs in a big way, the Barefoot College had become a centre for highly creative learning and training on rural uses of solar energy. Not only did local village women come here to receive training, they also became skilled enough to impart training to women from dozens of African and Asian countries (as well as from several other parts of India) in one of the most beautiful programs of international cooperation. 'Sky is the limit' may at times be a loosely used expression, but these are the words that spontaneously came to my mind whenever I observed or interviewed the women at work in this program.
Then there is the great water conservation program of the Barefoot College, based on a firm belief that even in situations of less rainfall, as in many parts of Rajasthan, it is possible to be self-reliant in meeting essential water needs if the best possible efforts are made to conserve water, also learning from traditional skills most suitable for local conditions. As I travelled to several villages to report on this, what made an abiding impression on me were the intricate details of conservation works discussed between Barefoot College members and experienced villagers—details very important for achieving significant sustainable results with low budgets.
These are only a few examples of the many-sided contributions made by Bunker Roy and the Barefoot College team over recent decades. At a personal level, I consider myself fortunate to have widely reported on these efforts over the years.
The Barefoot College, which has emerged at the world level as a symbol of the often hidden but great abilities of ordinary people—particularly women and weaker sections—completed 50 years of its eventful journey in 2022. Several inspiring stories of women and men from very modest backgrounds overcoming many constraints to acquire important skills and then using them to help their community have been a very important component of this journey. Take Sita Devi of Tyod village in Ajmer district, who grew up without any formal education. As a young woman she got an opportunity to learn the repair and maintenance of hand pumps, and she mastered the skills so well that villagers who had doubted women's ability to take up this work had to reconsider their opinion. As a 'barefoot' hand-pump mechanic, Sita covered about 6 villages with around 100 hand pumps. Later she trained in installation and repair of solar energy systems and teamed up with colleagues like Shahnaz, Shyama and Kamla to form the 'Women Barefoot Solar Cooker Engineers' Society', a registered association of rural women who complete the full fabrication and production of parabolic solar cookers. When I met this group in Tilonia, they explained the working of the parabolic cooker installed there, including the precise measurements needed to ensure the cooker can track the sun.
When Leela first came to Tilonia campus following her marriage, she did not know even the ABC of solar energy, but she was keen to learn, while more traditional work such as sewing did not interest her. Her initial progress was good, but when it came to calculating values she faced a lot of problems. "But where there is a will there is a way," she said. With the help of trainers she evolved her own methods of learning as the training proceeded. To consolidate her training she continued a little more than the normal six months. After this she was able not only to do assembling work in the campus workshop but also to go to the field to carry out essential repairs. The next big challenge came in the form of a training programme for rural women from several other countries, mainly from Africa. A major difficulty was the language gap. With sign language and a few key Hindi and English words, this difficulty too was overcome. This training proved highly successful as women from various countries could install solar systems in their villages after returning from Tilonia. The team of Leela, Magan Kanwar, Nazma and Gulab and other trainers deserve a lot of credit. All these women are living symbols of Bunker Roy's insistence that there is no word like failure in the dictionary of the Barefoot College.
Fatuma Ababker Ibrahim came from Beyahile village in Afar, Ethiopia, for training in Tilonia as a barefoot solar engineer. Despite language and other problems, she made remarkable progress and returned to her village with essential equipment from Tilonia to install 90 fixed solar units, and also helped start a rural electronic workshop in her village. Gul Zaman, a 26-year-old woman from Afghanistan, came to Tilonia with her husband Mohammed Jan for training in installation and maintenance of solar energy systems. They returned to their community to provide solar electricity to their village of around 50 houses in 2005.
Bunker Roy, who came to these villages around 1967 and founded the Barefoot College, wrote that even though established approaches have failed to achieve sustainable improvements, there is reluctance to turn the top-down process on its head and start from the bottom up. "Few operational models provide a contrast that demonstrates the alternatives. But outside the usual box are other more cost-effective approaches that draw more on the grassroots. There are ways to build on local knowledge and skills. And these approaches can be replicated on a large scale by taking the poor into confidence and reducing their dependence on inappropriate knowledge, skills and expertise from 'outside'."
It is this approach which BC has followed steadfastly. "By giving the responsibility to choose and apply and adapt technology to rural communities," Bunker adds, "by handing over total control to barefoot educators, health workers, water and solar engineers with roots in the community, and by showing respect in the faith and competence of ordinary people to provide tangible benefits to their own people, we've shown there is a better way."
"Underlying the Barefoot approach is a firm belief in the knowledge, creativity, practical wisdom and survival skills of the rural poor—possibly the only answer to making communities self-reliant and sustainable." This is why people in BC are not judged by paper degrees or diplomas but by their attributes of "honesty, integrity, compassion, practical skills, creativity, adaptability, willingness to listen and learn and ability to work with all sorts of people without discriminating."
Bunker Roy, educated at some of the most sophisticated institutions in India, said that in the course of the work at BC "what we have 'unlearned' is our gross underestimation of the people's infinite capacity to identify and solve their own problems with their own creativity and skills, and to depend on each other in tackling problems." "On the other hand, the learning has been that empowerment is about developing their capacity to solve problems, to make choices, and have the confidence to act on them."
The firm faith in ordinary villagers also gave BC the confidence to hand over very challenging tasks to them—for example, the planning and building of the new campus, or solar electrifying it. The campus spreads over 2,800 square metres of buildings that must meet various specifications and needs electricity for 500 lights, many fans, a photocopying machine, more than 40 computers and printers, a pump set, a small telephone exchange and a milk booth with freezers. But barefoot architects and solar engineers given these challenging tasks lived up to their responsibilities. Visitors have often expressed surprise at the low costs of campus buildings (while maintaining good quality of construction) and the wide range of applications of solar electricity.
For such achievements to be possible, other important values had to be added to the basic faith in ordinary people's ability to solve their problems. Evolving a highly participative system was basic to operationalizing BC's key values. Work in various villages is taken up only when the need is felt by villagers and a request comes from them. Village communities take the initial decision and then implementation is handed over to various village committees—generally water committees, education committees and energy/environment committees. These committees handle project funds and the bank account. People share responsibilities with each other. Work is never considered complete without approval by the village community and signature by committee members. Transparency and accountability are key aspects of this entire process, as well as of the overall functioning of BC.
Another key value is to prioritize as much as possible the weaker, poorer sections. As Bunker Roy says, it is the illiterate, semi-literate or barely literate who have been most frequently trained in BC to become 'barefoot' educators, doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, communicators, hand-pump mechanics and accountants. They have demonstrated that 'experts' from urban areas with paper qualifications are not required to make villages self-sufficient and sustainable, because these trained 'barefoot' experts can do this work themselves. Along with this prioritization come very strict requirements of equality and absolutely no discrimination on caste, religion, gender or other grounds within the BC community.
BC's educational effort concentrated on the needs of the poorest children—several of them shepherds or cattle-grazers—who could not attend regular daytime school for various reasons. BC's night-schools provided innovative education to thousands of these children and helped many integrate with mainstream education through bridge courses, with the help of 'barefoot teachers' selected from within the community. Many artisans and craftspersons associated with BC created products in their villages that were appreciated and found a market even in the most prestigious urban markets and exhibitions. Women's groups associated with BC won widespread acclaim for their dedication to fighting gender injustice and wider social problems. Violence against women came down drastically and educational opportunities for girls increased significantly in BC's work area. Aruna Roy made a particularly significant contribution to the formation and progress of women's groups during her full-time work with the Barefoot College (1975–1983), and continued to help even later.
The overall thrust of these activities is to increase the potential and self-reliance of villagers, particularly weaker sections, to meet their basic needs and improve their quality of life in sustainable, ecologically protective ways—all pursued in a transparent, participative and decentralized manner. Various sections and centres have a lot of freedom and autonomy within the framework of BC's core values, and their representatives meet regularly for sorting out problems, evaluation and planning.
Over and above project and programme-based work, BC and its affiliates are committed to the wider issues of justice, equality, democracy and communal harmony, and regularly link up with several campaigns. The judgement of the Supreme Court of India in the case fought by BC activists and its director Bunker Roy has made a lasting contribution to protecting the minimum wage rights of workers all over the country.
The value of this work has increased further due to BC's concern for the weakest of the weak—people with multiple vulnerabilities. Thus within a typical rural community BC is more concerned with the dalits, within dalits it works more with women, and within dalit women it takes special care to find out if there are any disabled women who need support and new opportunities.
A particularly heart-warming aspect of Barefoot College's encouragement of hidden talents is the tremendous faith reposed in the abilities of physically challenged persons. Most visitors to the Tilonia campus take back memories of physically challenged persons moving around with confidence and fulfilling important responsibilities like managing the telephone exchange, screen printing unit, water mapping, photocopying and lab tests. BC's health program has also made important contributions, and a separate unit for making educational toys out of waste materials has trained many villagers in this creative work.
The spread of the idea of BC has been helped by the encouragement and help BC gives its members and friends to start their own efforts and organizations incorporating its essential precepts and values. Thus around 20 colleges "in the barefoot mould," to recall Bunker Roy's words, have been established in 13 states of India, giving the idea of the barefoot college a fair degree of nationwide reach.
Hence the work, ideas and concept of the Barefoot College have travelled much beyond Tilonia and its nearby villages where they began their eventful journey in 1972. All those who have been part of this journey, or feel inspired by it, will greatly miss the inspirational presence and guidance of Bunker Roy.
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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Man Over Machine, Planet in Peril, When the Two Streams Met and India's Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food. His website is bharatdogra.in and his YouTube channel is Bharat Dogra | Save Earth Campaign
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