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By Meena Menon 'Illiterate' traditional builders constructing spanking new campuses; semi-literate rural women handling computers, repairing handpumps and solar lighting; miners doubling as health workers; village women working as trained reproductive healthcare workers; barefoot educators with no formal degrees spreading literacy all over the country…..There's a Barefoot Revolution sweeping India, with ordinary, semi-literate people trained in different fields by development organisations leaving their footprints in the remotest parts of the country
In the spacious campus of the Barefoot College, earlier called Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), solar power rules the roost. The Tilonia campus, in Ajmer district, is self-sufficient. It has its own power, telephone exchange and post office, complete with EMS. Bhagwat Nandan, a barefoot solar engineer and teacher, shows us around. A local villager, Bhanwar, has designed the campus. Bhanwar believes that there is nothing like illiteracy. He is one of the many supposedly 'illiterate' members of Tilonia's Barefoot College. He has years of practical rural experience and traditional knowledge that were put to use in 1986 in designing and building the 30,000 sq ft new campus of the Barefoot College. Barefoot College has helped many people like Bhanwar to identify and respect their own skills and put them to the best possible use for the community in which they live. In just two decades, attitudes have changed and the people have come to rely on themselves. Tilonia is not the only example of the 'barefoot revolution' that is sweeping through India. In West Bengal, Sister Cyril's Barefoot Activity-Based Teacher Training Programme (BABTP) has transformed some 4,000 non-professionals into educators. In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank (http://www.grameen.org) has developed a system that can manage millions of tiny loans by training village women to administer and monitor loan repayment. In Mumbai, Jeroo Billimoria, a social entrepreneur, has created an emergency telephone service called Childline, manned by streetkids. The origins of the barefoot revolution in development work lie in two movements of the early-'60s. The term came into common parlance when the Mao Tse Tung administration sent groups of medicos to work in villages as 'barefoot doctors', in a bid to use professional skills in the rural health sector. Similarly, in the USA, President J F Kennedy launched the US Peace Corps programme, which re-shaped the voluntary social work ideology among US activists. Those early forays have now evolved into a new barefoot revolution, which is increasingly visible in the development sector. The barefoot concept takes skills normally concentrated in the hands of urban professionals to groups in the general population. 'Barefoot professionals' are recruited from traditional communities and trained to bring modern methodologies back to their communities through the use of local, inexpensive materials. These barefoot professionals are seen to be particularly effective as educators and healthcare providers because they have the advantage of understanding the local language and cultural mores of the community in question, and they are motivated to succeed.  At Tilonia, the Barefoot College provides basic services to 100 villages and more than 100,000 people spread over 500 square miles. Barefoot health workers, engineers, accountants and teachers have replaced the urban-based, paper-qualified professionals on whom communities elsewhere are still dependent.
The Barefoot College at Tilonia, under Bunker Roy's leadership, has broken traditional barriers and pereptions of roles. Semi-literate rural women have demonstrated their ability to handle computers, repair hand-pumps, install solar lights and construct rainwater harvesting tanks, perhaps more competently than men do. In Rajasthan the barefoot approach has grown out of the urgent felt needs of the community itself. The Barefoot College in Tilonia is the first to apply the concept in an integrated process on such a wide scale, according to Bunker Roy. More than 60 per cent of rural poor children do not attend regular school. This is because the curriculum is alien and redundant, teaching methods boring and the timings unsuitable to working children. At Tilonia, the Barefoot College introduced night schools in 1975. These schools cater to the needs of the children, giving them knowledge that is useful in their environment. They learn how to handle post-offices, banks, police stations, land records, office work, etc. Today, after 25 years, more than 3,000 children study at 150 night schools spread over an area of 500 sq miles. Seventy per cent of these schools use solar lanterns to provide light instead of the traditional kerosene lamps. Elsewhere in the country, women masons have built toilet blocks in quake-hit Osmanabad and learnt how to repair solar lighting systems. In Banda, Uttar Pradesh, they repair handpumps and double as masons to build low-cost houses. In other places they manage community banks and savings groups. In remote cold regions of the country, young men and women have learnt to assemble and repair solar lanterns and manage solar panels. Many of them are school dropouts or illiterate. There are many offshoots of Tilonia in the country which have become independent entities, grouped under an umbrella organisation called Sampada. The informal network was registered In July 1993. SARTHI (Social Action for Tribal and Rural Inhabitants of India), based in Panchmahals, Gujarat, was one such effort. It has trained women to become barefoot gynaecologists as part of its overall women's health programme. SARTHI, which started work in Panchmahals in 1980, has also trained village women to make stoves. Women were taught to build improved chulhas (stoves) out of locally available materials. Educationist Sister Cyril's BABTP programme in West Bengal and elsewhere has been making waves in the field of education. Twelve years ago, Sister Cyril Mooney started the Barefoot Activity-Based Teacher Training Programme (BABTP) to ensure that primary education teachers reached out to far-flung places in rural India. . When this Calcutta-based Irish nun, belonging to the Loreto Order, became the principal of Calcutta's Loreto Sealdah in 1979, she took it as an opportunity to introduce some changes in the girls' school. She started by admitting poor children who could not afford fees. In 1985, she initiated the Rainbow project for street children, whose lessons were taken by regular school-going children, as each class was allotted two periods per week for the assignment. Her aim has been to show that education is for all. Students from the school also visit villages and teach under a programme called Outreach. The Barefoot Training Programme began in 1988 when teachers from Midnapur came to her for help in educating the Santhal tribal community. Sister Cyril arranged sessions in teaching and developed a set of aids using local materials to teach the alphabet and other skills. It was decided to teach in the Santhal language but using the Bengali script. Dismissing the two-year teachers training course as a luxury, the barefoot training offers the bare minimum, focusing on learning, keeping in mind available materials, traditional arts and skills. The teachers training is designed for teachers who are not graduates but dropouts, who cannot access training because they lack the formal qualifications. Over 4,000 teachers spread across 15 Indian states, Bangladesh and Nepal have been trained under Sister Cyril's programme. An interesting development is that the trained educators have become good at training others and at innovating teaching methods and aids. BABTP has initiated the Trainers of Trainers (TOT) programme, which equips barefoot teachers to train others and become effective resource persons for their area In the area of health, many such initiatives vie for attention. The legacy of trade unionist Shankar Guha Niyogi continues to live in the red dust of Dalli Rajhara in Durg district. Miners from the Bhilai Steel Plant become health workers after their shift and work as lab and X-Ray technicians at the Shaheed Hospital, which was built and run entirely by the workers (see Stories of Change: Health). In rural Maharashtra, women, fed up with non-functioning primary health centres and general apathy towards women's health, have organised themselves under a unique programme aimed at understanding their health. Twenty-five kms from Pune, the Mahila Sarvangeen Utkarsh Mandal (MASUM) founded by health activist Manisha Gupte, focuses on self-examination by the women. Under the Sadaphuli programme, women have been trained as health workers, sensitive to the problems of their peers. The centre provides a range of services relating to sexual and maternal and reproductive health, apart from counselling. The women also make herbal medicines and sell it. Many of the women now actively engaged in such work had never stepped out of their homes earlier. Women are learning, many for the first time, to observe their bodies and distinguish between physical and psychological ailments. For the women it has, over the years, evolved into a movement aimed at gaining control over their bodies. Shodhini, formed by women from several NGOs across the country in 1987, has trained women to become barefoot gynaecologists. It has preserved and documented traditional medicine and healing practices from women in the community itself. The aim is to train women to use this traditional knowledge and re-establish themselves as healers of the community. (see Stories of Change: Health). SEWA has also been working with the traditional dais in rural areas and feels that organising dais into collectives is one way of ensuring healthcare to all. Dais are local village women who assist in childbirth, taking care of newborns and providing traditional medicines But they are among the poorest in the village and their services are for free. It is time these barefoot doctors got their due. Elsewhere in Banda, Uttar Pradesh, women have shrugged off caste repression to train as handpump repairers and as masons. They go from village to village, fixing the pumps and making sure they work, even if the water is not more than a trickle. Vanangana, a voluntary group working with women, focused on teaching women non-traditional skills. Dalit and Kol women were trained as part of a project to fix handpumps and in time, many of the pumps were repaired by illiterate women who had no previous experience of any mechanical task. Women had to suffer caste, gender and other forms of oppression but they tided over everything. They wanted to learn how to drive tractors and build houses. So they became masons building a low-cost housing colony for Kols. The women often battled with their families, who did not want them to go from place to place fixing handpumps. Madhavi Kuckreja, the woman who started all this, has also launched a catering service to raise funds for the organisation. As dozens of other organisations train barefoot professionals, they are leaving their footprints in the remotest parts of India, demonstrating the sustainability of community skills that have no formal endorsement by universities or institutions.
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