From numerous interviews gathered over two months spent in Rajasthan, at the School of Tilonia where she also adapted to the inevitable local austerity (such as using the same basin for washing your hair, clothes and floor), Ottieri is animated when she tells us about the concrete results that the idea of Roy Bunker, the Barefoot College’s founder, brought to the residents of nearby villages. Giving life to the school in the seventies, Roy dreamed of creating conditions in which the Indian farmers could produce a better quality of life for themselves. So it is that since then, thousands of people who no one would have ever considered have arrived in Tilonia to be taught a profession. The criteria to enrol are basic – you just need to be illiterate or semi-illiterate, because as the project owner says, “there is no need to have a solar engineer to install 32 panels and connect them up with batteries”. Today the Barefoot College owes its name to the hundreds of “barefoot” doctors, teachers, architects and engineers who have come out to offer their services to more than 100 Indian villages.

Even though Bunker Roy claims that his job is independent from every kind of ideological consideration, a lot of Gandhian thought influences Tilonia. And it’s no coincidence that Ottieri’s title is taken from Mahatma’s invitation to ‘reach the last man’ and it’s not just in the village that meat is banned and the traditional Indian robes are welcome. But above all the School aims to help people to stay in their villages without being dependent on the outside world, exactly as Gandhian swadeshi (the economic self-sufficiency of villages) preaches. To make villages independent from the government’s inefficiency in managing the water system, naturally one of the main concerns of the Barefoot College was also water. In drought-prone Rajasthan it is the farmer’s main worry, and knowing how to conserve it when it comes is vital. Consequently, the school teaches how to build underground tanks, as well as solar panels to power water pumps. More than “500 thousand people living on less than a dollar a day now have access to drinking water, through 1,500 hand pumps and rainwater collection from roofs”. And given that there is no lack of sunshine in these parts, the barefoot experts have made the entire food centre using solar power, even the telephone lines!

In Tilonia and the surrounding areas schools are not empty shells, buildings symbolising a presumed development. Teachers do not arrive from far away cities but from nearby villages, so the tendency for absences is held in check. Then, by moving lessons to the evening, children have time to help their parents with their morning tasks, without having to give up on their education. Last but not least the 150 ‘night schools’ opened by the Barefoot College are managed by the Bal Sansad, the children’s parliament. This is no game; it’s a strong body with powers such as being able to fire teachers who do not show up. “Reaching the last man” is an exhortation with deep social significance in India where, as broadly explained by Ottieri, the caste system still causes cruel discriminations. Nevertheless, in Tilonia such an invitation has become imperative. The mark of belonging to a caste has been left behind for those joining the school and since the beginning Bunker Roy has been one of the first to make an example of this by becoming a cook – a dilat, an untouchable.

Besides rejecting the stigma attached to the castes, the stress towards a more egalitarian and democratic society at the Barefoot College was mainly achieved through never-ending faith in people’s capabilities. Whoever arrives with an idea which could improve the life of the villages was encouraged to put it into practise. “Professionals from the city do not help”, Roy told a journalist, “the capacities exist but they are not worth anything simply because the local experts are poor and illiterate”. Tilonia is the epitome of the ‘learning by doing’ model, a paradigm of alternative development compared to that offered by thousands of institutions which “offer projects off the back of another” and have produced “an uninterrupted succession of failures”.

Translation by Helen Waghorn