What Americans can learn from India's `Barefoot College'

It's the Harvard of rural India, minus wingtips or heels: a 50-year-old institution called Barefoot College that offers lessons for empowering people worldwide. Maybe even in America.

Barefoot College does empowerment as well as any institution I've ever seen: An illiterate woman named Chota Devi who never attended a day of school is hunched over a circuit board, carefully using color-coded instructions to solder resistors and diodes into place.

Chota is a Dalit, those at the bottom of the caste system once known as untouchables, and from a particularly low-ranking group called the Valmiki who often cleaned human waste.

But now Chota is learning how to be a solar power technician. Barefoot College trains illiterate, low-status villagers to make solar-powered lanterns and install solar lighting systems. After three to six months of training, they return to their communities and earn a decent living — and in the process, they upend the social hierarchy.

“I will have more knowledge than my husband,” Chota noted slyly. When she goes home, villagers now call her “Madam.”

Chota has five children, none of whom now attend school, but her trainers at Barefoot College have left an impression. “I'm working with women who know how to read and write, so now I want my children to learn as well,” she said.

Bunker Roy, 77, was an Indian national squash champion and an activist inspired by Mahatma Gandhi when in 1972 he moved to this remote village to see what he could do to tackle entrenched poverty. That year, he started Barefoot College.

Roy focused on putting technology skills in the hands of the least educated — because they were the ones who most needed the help and because he believed that nurturing dignity and self-confidence were crucial elements of overcoming poverty.

So Barefoot College takes illiterate villagers and trains them in technical skills. With funding from foundations, donations and the Indian government, the college also runs literacy classes, health campaigns, a water resources department, study centers and a sanitary pad factory.

“There are millions of people who are illiterate, and they have much to contribute,” Roy said.

The urban-rural divide exists worldwide, with opportunity lagging in rural America as well. Those left behind sometimes selfmedicate, creating cycles of despair; in India, all this is complicated by caste and gender. Barefoot College nurtures opportunity by offering skills training in the way that community colleges do in the United States, but there's a particular emphasis here on the most impoverished.

That benefits the entire society: Marginalized people are often a nation's most underutilized assets.

We in America could learn from this approach in rural India. The United States as well must do better providing training in technical skills to people who have been left behind so that they can earn a living — as electricians, wind turbine installers, carpenters and more.

Over the decades, Barefoot College has attracted international and local funding to expand. Here, “empowerment” is not a buzzword but a way of life.

“The illiterates of the 21st century,” Roy said, “are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn.”