Bunker Roy's college where the lesson has to travel home
How Sanjit "Bunker" Roy built Barefoot College around a simple test: can a practical lesson return home as local power, education, and authority?
When darkness came to Hamna Silima Nyange's home in Zanzibar, so did the smoke. Her house had no electricity connection, and the oil lamps she used for her eight children gave too little light for studying and hurt her eyes. Then her neighbor, Tatu Omary Hamad, installed solar panels and bulbs. "Today we have enough light," Nyange told the Associated Press in 2025. 1
Hamad was one of the women trained through Barefoot College International. The program brings women from villages without electricity to a six-month course, then sends them home with technical skills, equipment, and at least 50 household solar kits. The technicians install and maintain the systems in their own communities. In Zanzibar, the program had lit 1,845 homes by the time of the AP report. 1
The return journey is the point. The lesson becomes useful when the person who learned it can repair the equipment beside the people who depend on it.
The question Roy brought to Tilonia
Sanjit "Bunker" Roy arrived at this idea through a sharp contrast in his own life. He had been a three-time Indian national squash champion, a credential that placed him far from the rural workers his experiment would later center. In 1972, he established the Social Work and Research Centre in Tilonia, Rajasthan, to respond to rural poverty, illiteracy, disempowerment, and gender inequality. The center later became known as Barefoot College. 2
Roy's challenge was simple to state and difficult to prove: literacy and certificates do not contain all useful knowledge. A person who has never studied at a university may still know how to read a landscape, organize a household, repair a tool, or solve a local problem. Roy argued that an institution should begin with that knowledge and build from it. TED describes Barefoot College as a place where rural women and men with little formal education learn to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists, and doctors in their own villages. 3
That argument became a place with buildings, workshops, trainers, health workers, teachers, and village relationships. Roy supplied the provocation and the institutional design. Other people made the design work.
A school built around use
Barefoot College teaches through practice. The independent account of the college describes villagers learning entrepreneurship, health work, engineering, and other skills by doing the work itself. Brijesh Gupta, a school dropout who joined the college in 1982, moved through jobs as a water tester, office assistant, handicrafts seller, and visitor coordinator. His experience shows what the institution changed: a person excluded by the formal job market could accumulate useful abilities through repeated work. 2
The solar course turns a complicated task into a sequence that a learner can see, repeat, and correct. Women from unelectrified villages spend six months learning to install and maintain solar lighting systems. Trainers color-code tools and circuit components, and trainers learn from students as much as students learn from trainers. The method lowers the language and schooling barriers without pretending that the work is effortless. 2
The same logic shaped the college's night schools. Children who herded animals or helped with household work during the day could attend lessons at night. Barefoot teachers and solar lights made in-house supported the experiment. Three schools around Tilonia later informed the Rajasthan government's Shiksha Karmi project, formally adopted in 1987. The independent report says that project eventually facilitated education for more than 200,000 children; it also reports 250 Barefoot night schools in ten Indian states and more than 100,000 out-of-school children served. Those figures describe reported program reach at different stages, rather than one current total. 2
The adjustment mattered because it answered a practical question: when can a child attend? A school that ignores the answer may have classrooms and still lose the students. The night-school example also shows why the Barefoot model was more than a slogan about empowerment. It changed schedules, materials, staffing, and lighting around the life people already had.
From one village to a network
The choice of trainees matters as much as the lesson. Barefoot College has often selected older rural women because young graduates frequently seek work in cities, while women remain closely connected to their villages. The Zanzibar program uses a similar logic: it selects middle-aged women, most with little or no formal education, because their community ties help them reach households and sustain the work after training. 12
The women become more than recipients of a service. Khazija Gharib Issa arrived in Zanzibar as an unemployed widow and later became a master trainer. Her authority came from work that people could see: wiring a system, keeping it running, and teaching someone else to do the same. The AP report records that some residents initially laughed at women doing technical work, then changed their view when the installations proved useful. 1
Alumni also carried the method beyond Tilonia. In the early 1990s, 22 grassroots organizations joined SAMPDA, the Society for Activating, Motivating, and Promoting Development Alternatives, and committed to work in remote areas across 14 Indian states. The network included groups focused on rural livelihoods, renewable energy, solar power, and rainwater harvesting. 2
The pattern is clear in the available record: a trainer teaches a skill, a village technician takes responsibility home, an alumnus trains another person, and a partner institution adapts the method to a wider program. Roy's contribution lies in making that chain the center of the institution. The chain itself belongs to trainers, students, village leaders, government partners, grassroots organizations, and communities.
Where the model meets power
A model built around local return carries conditions. Trainees are expected to serve their villages, and the college's lack of formal certification can restrict what graduates do in systems that recognize paper qualifications. The independent study of Barefoot College also raises a succession concern: an institution associated so strongly with a charismatic founder needs a second line of leadership that can carry its purpose without depending on his presence. 2
Funding creates another pressure. The AP report says Barefoot College International relies on public and private donations and income from social enterprises while competing for a smaller pool of aid. Gender norms create a more immediate barrier. Village leaders help nominate trainees, yet some husbands have prevented their wives from attending. A solar technician may have to overcome opposition at home before she can prove the value of her work in public. 1
These pressures reveal what makes the model travel and what makes it fragile. The course can be repeated in another country. The social permission to attend, the money for equipment, the village's willingness to accept a woman technician, and the institution's ability to renew its leadership all have to be rebuilt in each setting.
A compact timeline
- 1972: Roy establishes the Social Work and Research Centre in Tilonia, the institution later known as Barefoot College. 2
- 1987: Rajasthan formally adopts the Shiksha Karmi project after the experimental schools around Tilonia. 2
- Early 1990s: Barefoot alumni help form SAMPDA, linking 22 grassroots organizations across 14 Indian states. 2
- 1997: The solar program begins the period in which the independent report says it trained more than 1,700 women. 2
- July 2025: AP reports on Solar Mamas training and installing systems in Zanzibar. 1
Three leadership takeaways
- Design for return. Roy's training model begins with the question of what happens after the lesson. The solar technician goes home with tools, equipment, and responsibility. A useful institution measures success in the place where the learner must use the skill.
- Make expertise visible through practice. Color-coded circuits, repeated repairs, night classes, and peer teaching turn an abstract claim about human ability into work that people can inspect. The method gives learners a route into technical authority through action.
- Build ownership beyond the founder. Trainers, women technicians, alumni, village leaders, government partners, and local organizations carry the model across settings. Roy's story also carries a warning: a movement that depends on one visionary still has work to do when the next generation must lead it.
References
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- 2The 'Barefoot College' Reinventing Rural Education
reasonstobecheerful.world
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