The world is battling a deadly virus that is refusing to go. War and brutality have returned to Europe thanks to an unshakable dictator in the Kremlin. And climate-related disasters are occurring with greater frequency and intensity than ever before. But the world is not entirely without sources of optimism. To appreciate it it is necessary to visit Barandanga, a village adjacent to the small town of Para in Purulia district of West Bengal. During my recent four-day visit to the region, I aimed to study new initiatives to provide education to the rural poor, and in particular constructive education. But I got a lot more. Largely cut off from the rest of the world, without newspapers or TV, and visiting village schools one after another, I felt a wonderful sense of hope.
This remote corner of West Bengal bordering the state of Jharkhand is largely tribal land. Tribes and clans such as the Santhals, Shabars and Murmus arrived here from Africa thousands of years before the so-called Aryan invasion, which began 3,500 years ago. These tribals are often illiterate and very poor. As I left for Para, I walked through vast stretches of largely uninhabited terrain, punctuated with clusters of houses. The scenery looked like a cross between the American prairie and rural Britain described by the Bronte sisters.
I had come to meet Nanaritam, a voluntary welfare organization which had nothing to do with education initially. Two women, who founded Nanaritam in 2002, Ranjana Sengupta, an IT professional and Bharti Bakshi, a doctor, were troubled by the widespread developments in the field of ophthalmology and blindness, which could be easily cured with modern medicine. Therefore, he established an eye hospital in this poverty-stricken area.
Through a combination of missionary zeal and entrepreneurial sense, the women soon had a modern hospital with a state-of-the-art operation theatre. Excellent doctors, many of them voluntarily for short periods, performed cataract and retinal surgeries and treated people for glaucoma. Many patients brought by vans from distant villages had never been to the hospital before.
There was a Maoist insurgency in the area at that time. But, as soon as the people received the gift of vision and Nanritam’s prestige spread, the revolutionaries left the organization alone. Some of them even quietly went to the hospital to get their eyes checked.
Nanaritam also wanted to provide a modern education to the children of the region, and later founded the school in Barandanga, which I had visited on my recent travels. Students learn their mother tongue, usually Santhal or Bengali, but the medium of instruction is English, the idea being that this will help them find jobs anywhere in the world. They learn math and poetry, physics and computing. The school believes that routine work is about to disappear and so children will need creative skills.
The interaction with the students mesmerized me. They were talkative and full of fun, and the creativity of some of their math and geometry exercises was compared to those in advanced economies.
The rapid adoption of new digital technology triggered by the COVID pandemic has enabled Nanaritam’s managers to seek creative education rather than old-fashioned rote rote. Hence, in 2021, amid the pandemic, Nanaritam launched the Education for All program to spread creative education to neighboring villages and districts. The organization regularly brings in teachers from other schools to conduct personal or virtual training, and provides books for children in 150 schools in the area. It is now able to reach 40,000 students, including the poorest. This is a large number, but still very small relative to India’s population.
Furthermore, as a remarkable 2005 paper by economist Michael Kramer and his co-authors shows, teacher apathy and absenteeism is a major problem in India. Given this, the quality of the schools I visited came as a pleasant surprise.
One of the most influential was the Marang Buru Chacho Martial School, which is nothing but a cluster of huts in Susunia Hill where Santhal children live and receive elementary education. The school is run by a Santhal tribal couple Lakshmi and Babunath Tudu. Babunath grew up in extreme poverty, sometimes eating only on alternate days. Her parents had to choose which child to send to school, while the others worked to ensure the family’s survival.
It was magical to see how much the right mix of inspiration, empathy and commitment can achieve. Economists generally advocate reducing teacher absenteeism through financial incentives, giving teachers an additional reward if they attend their classes (that is, if they do what they should) or if they do so. If not, then their salary is deducted.
But money doesn’t determine all of our goals in life, many of which are “built-in goals” that reflect the fact that we have a choice of goals. People who take pride in their work work hard. People who develop a tendency to be helpful reach out to others and give better education. We pay very little attention to these larger dimensions of the human mind and to human motivations.
All of this may be highly reflective of the hot flashes of my recent experience. But the shine can be long lasting, which leads me to believe it can be far-reaching. If we think creatively and provide innovative quality education to children including the poor and marginalized, we can make a cost-effective change for the better in the lives of the poorest among us. ©2022/Project Syndicate
Kaushik Basu is a professor of economics at Cornell University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.