Session 4 (2): Solar-Engineer-Grandmothers & Barefoot College

4th and last speaker of the day: Sanjit Bunker Roy, from a village in India:

“I got one of these snobbish and expensive educations as you have them in India and in many other parts of the world. I was all set, as it is with Indian families sometimes: my future was all laid out for me. Had a degree and the jobs were ready for me just after I finished my studies.

At that time there was the Bihar famine sweeping through India and they were looking for student volunteers to help out. So I went there and helped for 14 days in a village. When I  came back I had made the decision that I wanted to work and live in a village.

I told my mother and she was shocked. The first question was: What do you want to work as in a village? And I replied: I want to work as an unskilled laborer, digging wells. My mother fell in a coma.

When I arrived in the village and told the elders I wanted to live there, they were disbelievingly asking: Is the police searching for you? Did you fail your exams?, as all educated people in India leave for the city its jobs. But I didn’t want this. Sometimes this expensive education can destroy you.

So I worked in that village for five years, digging wells.  And what I found was the extraordinary knowledge the poor there had and I wanted to bring this to the city and mainstream awareness. That is why I founded Barefoot College in 1972. And my first insight was: I don’t want any academic there with high degrees as teachers. No PhDs allowed. I wanted people who worked with their hands.

We kept it simple and were inspired by Ghandi’s ideas that the knowledge, skills and wisdom found in villages should be used for its development before getting skills from the outside. Today there is too much happening in a top-down manner, first you need to develop the skills in the village. The simplicity is kept throughout our organization, we live and eat on the floor and no one ever earns more than 100 dollars a month; you don’t come for the money, you come for the challenge.“

Barefoot college trains illiterate people from villages and proves the prejudice wrong that teachers, doctors or architects have to be literate or educated in expensive schools.  The college’s own solar engineer (Barefoot college is the only college in India completely running on solar energy) is a Hindu priest with altogether 8 years of education and has kept the system running from 1986 until today. He showed how the most sophisticated parabolic solar-cooker was installed by some illiterate women and went on to fascinating achievements in African countries with solar engineering.

Other projects included:

- The use of traditional local puppetry that was used to convey ideas of treating women better, using clean drinking water, embedded in the entertaining aspects and widely embraced by villages in India. Little side-comment that brought laughter from the audience: they made the puppets of old world bank reports (“So they finally found some real use“)

- Night schools through solar power, 7000 in 150 schools in villages across India

- Solarizing hundreds of villages (Comment from a women in the desert: “It’s the first time I see my husband’s face in winter”)

“As for educating solar engineers in other villages, he maintained that grandmothers are the best investments. They are committed to their village, enthusiastic to learn. Men are the worst. They always want some kind of diploma and then run of to the city.”

Taking their work with illiterate women from Afghanistan as an example, Bunker Roy explained that first of all the men were astounded when they asked to train two women in five villages as first solar engineers in their country (comment: “They don’t even want to leave the house, how do you want to get them to India?”). Yet they came and they were trained in six months, and came back empowered, confident and proud to bring solar lighting to their village and train others to spread the skills. That was in 2005, and by then there was no single village solarfied, despite about 700 UN-consultants sitting in Kabul. When they asked him how much the whole undertaking had cost Bunker Roy replied: “As much as one UN-consultant sitting in Kabul for one year.” Now there are more than 200 illiterate women, spreading the word, training more solar engineers and bringing light to villages.

“We now have 21 countries with more than 100 grandmothers in 75 villages and altogether 7000 houses with solar lighting for two million dollar. That’s what Jeffrey Sachs spends on ONE village!”

After showing this video exemplifying the solar-engineering grandmothers, he closed the speech with Ghandi’s wonderful words:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.

The following discussion also carried some interesting content, such as that it is crucial to enhance the quality of living in villages in order to halt migration to urban areas.

In a more general discussion of how to bring compassion into corporate culture it was emphasized again how important the executive level was in starting to bring about change. The John Lewis Partnership in the UK was an example, where about 76,000 employees were paid out benefits altogether amounting to 150 million pounds in 2009.  Thupten Jinpa added the priority of an Indian tea company which went out of the stock exchange to avoid the shareholder-value-driven pressure to fight intracompany competition and greed, making long-term employment the priority.

Before the session ended the attention came once more back onto Sanjit Bunker Roy, telling this shockingly amusing story in response to a question from the audience on whether Barefoot College was concerned also with water and not only with solar power:

“Rainwater collection is crucial. I remember the case of a village in Sikkim, India, where I approached the local governor if I could begin a rainwater project in the mountains in a remote part of his province. First thing he did was declare it impossible and far too expensive, saying: “Ahh you, one of these crazy people who think they can do anything”, but he said okay you can try, just leave me alone and don’t ask for money.

So I went and together with the people from the village we installed rainwater collection facilities and when we had 160,000 liters of collected rainwater I went back to the governor and told him what I did. “Oh”, he said, “already?” And I invited him to come and have a look. He said “Can I bring my chief engineer along?” Sure I said, bring him along. So we went and they had a look at it and it was fine and they impressed. And I went on to ask the chief engineer: Do you see the rainwater we collected, do you see it? And then the chief engineer said something stupid: “It wasn’t on my curriculum.” Now come on, a little common sense is really a good thing. It’s rain! But that’s often the problem, consultants come up with all kind of complicated solutions, pumping up river water through expensive and energy-intensive technology, and everyone gets money along the way, but it really is a waste of resource.

By the way, did you knwo that until recently, rainwater collection was illegal in California? So much for common sense.”

[Click here for another nice recount of Barefoot College]