Rajasthan’s hero of the illiterate

For 50 years, Bunker Roy, born into India’s elite, has trained the poor to become builders, engineers and doctors.

By Heather Malcolm

On the bookshelf behind me is a statuette of the Hindu god Ganesha, remover of obstacles.

When I was sitting chewing my pencil, attempting something for The Oldie’s Jeremy Lewis Prize for new writers, I promised Ganesha that if he helped me win, I’d give the money away.

It’s going to Barefoot College Tilonia, in Rajasthan. But the college is just one of thousands of organisations working to improve the lives of the poor all over the world. Why is it special? For me, this is why.

Fifty-five years ago, a well-born, very highly educated young man rejected a glittering future to labour alongside the poorest of his country, India, digging wells out of the stony desert.

Bunker Roy, born in 1945, chose the road less travelled. Born into a distinguished family, with India’s first Air Chief Marshal a paternal uncle and a mother who became India’s State Trading Company’s ambassador to Moscow, he attended Doon School in Dehradun – an Eton equivalent, which prepares young people for the Indian Civil Service or high government office. Rajiv Gandhi was a classmate and friend.

An exceptional squash player, for three years Bunker was India’s national champion, playing in two world championships. Life’s glittering prizes beckoned.

Everything changed in 1966 when he helped in the famine that hit Bihar, seeing for the first time, up close and personal, the horrors of extreme poverty: death by starvation on a fearful scale, men fighting dogs for bones in the street while society’s wealthy gorged on, uncaring.

The injustice seared his soul. To his family’s great disappointment, he turned away from that brilliant career, going instead into the desert as an unskilled labourer, digging open wells for five years.

Learning more from this about Mahatma Gandhi’s rural India and realising the value of its ancient knowledge, skills and wisdom, he was determined to improve the quality of life of the rural poor.

Working with the poor for five years, he listened to what they said, shared their lives and tried to understand what they wanted. Then he founded a college just for them, teaching what they had told him they wanted to learn.

At first it was called SWRC – Social Work and Research Centre – but soon everyone around knew it as Barefoot College. Now it’s Barefoot College Tilonia, after the village where the building is.

It’s been thriving since 1972, offering a cornucopia of good things from clean water (collected and filtered from rain, not pumped from environmentallydamaging wells) to basic education.

Traditional skills and knowledge are blended with modern solutions – as long as those solutions are simple and kind to the environment, and work.

That young man, Bunker Roy, is no longer young, but he still adheres to the principles that inspired him, those of Mahatma Gandhi. Equality for all, regardless of caste, gender or religion; the dignity of labour. Simplicity. Austerity.

Nobody working there, including Bunker, the director, draws more than the smallest of salaries: it doesn’t cost much to live simply, doing without ‘things’. Some of what he and his team of volunteers have achieved is breathtaking.

I met Bunker 40 years ago, when he was a speaker at a conference I’d helped to organise. His belief that dispensing charity in the form of cash or subsidies wasn’t the answer to ending poverty because ‘people don’t value what comes for free’ was a fresh thought for me.

But showing belief in people, giving encouragement and drawing out their best so that they could earn a living wage – that was his way.

Bunker believes illiteracy is no barrier to achievement. Illiterate people may not be able to read or write, but they aren’t stupid.

Under his guidance (I know he’d argue with that term and remind me that he’s only one in a brilliant team), for 50 years illiterate and near-literate people from the poorest of India’s rural poor have achieved marvels: built houses (some using recycled plastic), repaired machinery, given rein to their artistry and trained to become barefoot doctors, along similar lines to the model used in China. Importantly, they now know their worth.

Perhaps most astonishingly, they’ve become solar engineers. In this case, it’s actually women – and not young women either. Illiterate and semi-literate grandmothers – Bunker insists on that – come to the college to learn how to make and maintain solar panels and associated equipment such as lamps and cookers.

Think of it: illiterate grandmothers from rural villages, with hardly any standing in society at all, becoming solar engineers!

And why must it be women? Because with training such as the grandmothers receive, men tend to see themselves as ‘qualified’. They rush to cities, looking for well-paid work. They aren’t interested in staying in a village, even though the sad truth is that most end up in city slums, unable to go home because of the shame in failure.

Grandmothers, on the other hand, are rooted in their communities, with children and grandchildren nearby, and want to make life better for them there.

From 2000 on, with help from the Government of India, rural grandmothers from India, Africa and South America started coming to Tilonia for training. Colour-coded charts show them what to do, making illiteracy unimportant; Barefoot College Tilonia staff demonstrate, and they learn.

For six months, these women who’ve often never before left their remote villages, let alone their countries, and speak no language but their own, live at the college, learn and return as heroines to their homes, taking safe light and heat with them. Their guts and determination awe me.

By now, over 1,700 women from 96 countries in the developing world have been trained, and over 1,500 villages can use stored sunlight to extend and gladden their days.

Re-reading a letter Bunker wrote to me in 1983, saying how pleased he was, just having taken delivery of photovoltaic cells to start this great experiment, I feel some astonishment.

Somewhere along the way, the world sat up and noticed something unusual happening in this corner of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.

In 1992, Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited. In 2008, the Guardian named Bunker as one of the 50 environmentalists in the world who could save the planet. In 2010, Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The college has won countless national and international awards. In its 50th-anniversary year last year, it received congratulatory letters from HRH Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and the Dalai Lama, among others.

But that’s not why I support Barefoot College Tilonia. The personal connection is important, naturally. But what I like is knowing that every penny I contribute will be spent well, with nothing hived off.

I like it that the college empowers downtrodden women in desperate need.

I like it that its programmes are inclusive and work with the environment. Quietly and steadily, Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College Tilonia is changing the world, and I want to help with that.

I hope Jeremy Lewis, The Oldie’s late deputy editor, would approve.