Sanjit ( Bunker) Roy

 

Bunker Roy has been a leading figure in the Indian NGO community for the past thirty years. He is a source of inspiration for many younger social entrepreneurs. The code of conduct debate he launched 10 years ago was then a groundbreaking, controversial, but visionary initiative. It sought to promote the standardization of social auditing to render the Indian voluntary social sector more transparent, effective, reliable and accountable.

 

The Barefoot College is the only community-based organization in India which has publicized and opened its auditing books for the past ten years. Roy's initiative was cut short as the social sector divided around the lines of pro and anti transparency advocates. But the campaign was successful in influencing government policy. A Credibility Alliance is being developed today to readdress the transparency issue raised by Bunker ten years ago.

 

Inspired by Gandhi and moved to respond to India’s 1967 famine, Bunker Roy moved from the affluent suburb where he grew up to Rajasthan, India, to help rural villagers improve their lives. The organization he founded in 1972, Social Work and Research Centre, came to be known as “Barefoot College” because its clients are poor, rural, often semiliterate villagers. Communities from all over India have sent representatives to work and study to become “barefoot” health workers, teachers and engineers. Once they return to their villages, they use their knowledge of water engineering, solar power, income generation, medicine and other topics to improve their own communities. Some launch their own Barefoot Colleges.

 

The organization has trained 750 technicians—women, dropouts and unemployable youths—in remote villages in 13 Indian states over the past 30 years through a self-help model that respects local knowledge and capability and promotes local organizations to make community decisions. Skoll’s grant will help Barefoot College bring the “Barefoot Approach” to 30 communities in five countries.

 

"Never Let School interfere with your Education" Mark Twain

 

There is a mistaken belief that illiteracy is a barrier to the rural poor developing themselves with skills of their own. In other words a rural poor farmer, weaver, potter, leather worker, blacksmith and other artisans,because they have never been through a formal education system are not capable of producing high quality products with a marvelous eye for aesthetics and form. In the rural areas of India today for instance there are endless examples of rainwater harvesting structures for drinking water and sanitation still being used today that are hundreds of years old constructed when there were no architects and engineers.

 

But their lives are under great threat. Mahatma Gandhi said the economy of India did not lie in mass production but production by the masses.

Mass produced goods like plastic shoes, buckets, ropes and power mills producing cheap inexpensive cloth are threatening the lives of thousands of leather workers, potters, traditional rope makers and weavers. Their traditional markets have been taken away from them. Their skills are dying. And they are being forced to migrate to the slums in cities looking for any job.

 

The Barefoot College is acutely aware of these dangers and traditional artisans are being given choices to use their skills to produce other products so that they can remain in their own communities.