BODHSHALA

BODHSHALA
the story of an experimental school in the Himalayas

Rajan Venkatesh

BODHSHALA

BODHSHALA

to Pawan and Anuradha,

whose efforts created Bodhshala
and opened the door to possibility

BODHSHALA

BODHSHALA

Contents
AUTHORS NOTE ................................................................. 7
FOREWORD :: SIDH JOURNEY ........................................ 10
FOREWORD :: BODHSHALA SCHOOL ........................... 16
I
EYE OF COMMONALITY.................................................. 23
II
FOOD AND HEALTH .......................................................... 65
III
PRODUCTION-INTEGRATED BASIC EDUCATION ...... 93
IV
PROJECTS .......................................................................... 157
V
ESSAYS............................................................................... 194
RESOURCES & REFERENCES ....................................... 217

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AUTHORS NOTE
December 2007 saw me bid goodbye to a salaried job.
My intention was to settle down in agricultural land and
pursue a study of farming, a study of sustainable living, and
also to address the question of the failure of modern systems.
In retrospect, that was the only action based upon a clear
decision. All other actions, subsequently, have been under the
umbrella of that primary action, and I cannot say that I
planned for them to happen. The school happened, the farming
happened, the production-integrated education experiment
happened, and now this narrative has happened.
In a way, this is also a reflection of the story of the
Bodhshala School Experiment. We had only one clear
statement which became the basis for all activities: The school
is a part of community; what is good for the community, what
strengthens it, what helps make prosperous families - these are
the things that make the curriculum of a school, meaning these
are the things to be studied, to be learned.
In such an approach, the direction is set, but the path has
to be ones own - it has to be explored locally and understood
on the strength of ones own capacity, because modern society,
and modern systems, and modern opinions, these may be
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completely contrary to the truth that one discovers.

In this book, I have used the phrase modern civilization,
and in other places, the word modernity. Both imply the
dominant western way of thinking which has prevailed after
the beginning of the industrial revolution - spanning the
colonial era and the post-colonial period till date. To me, it
denotes a warrior mentality; a way of thinking with insecurity
on the inside, and violence on the outside. By modernity, I am
referring specifically to the three colonial systems of
economics, governance and education, which remain unpurged even after so-called independence. And these three
systems, which were created to rule over us, continue to keep
us captive. Yes, captive. It is only the glitter of our comfort
acquisitions which has dazzled and blinded us.
The Bodhshala school experiment has confirmed to me
the path of possibility. I am grateful to the teachers,
volunteers, children and parents who together made up the
school. Bodhshala school is a part of SIDH, an NGO started
by Pawan and Anuradha in rural Tehri-Garhwal, a district of
Uttarakhand. It is my good fortune to have them as friends for
25 years, as supporters in this experiment, and to have their
family in Mussoorie accept me as one of their own. I am also
grateful to my friends Ashok and Sheila Gopala who were
constantly supportive of the school and its activities, and
whose home has been my home whenever I am at Dehradun.
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When the school project ended, it was Pawan who first

suggested to me that I write the story of these experiments
with education. At the same time, I also made plans to
commence an exploration of agricultural land to buy for
myself. Both projects have gone hand in hand for two years,
and so this book has been written in between travels at
various places in India - Mussoorie, Dehradun, Indore,
Thane, Narsinghpur, Satna and Sawantwadi.
It is indeed a fact that I received more support, more
help, and more guidance, than what I deserved - from people,
nature and the environment - and there are the numerous
nameless to whom I am very grateful. My thanks also to Nyla
Coelho who agreed to read and re-read this book, and who
pointed out to me parts within the text where, as she says, I
went beyond observations and was venting my frustration. I
hope those sections have been amended. But in an experiment
like this, where the modern system itself is under scrutiny,
some criticism of ourselves may be warranted, may indeed be
necessary. Your feedback is welcome.
Rajan Venkatesh
16th May 2014.

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FOREWORD :: SIDH JOURNEY

To talk about SIDHs journey has always been difficult.
The endeavour has been to engage with local communities
through education and share ones learnings. There are no
easy and straight forward answers.
SIDH began its journey in 1989 in the Jaunpur area of
Tehri-Garhwal, nestled in the Himalayan mountains. Starting
without any particular ideology or baggage, we learnt quickly
that through so-called education, we are creating a class of
people who get increasingly alienated from whatever is their
own. It could be language, local knowledge systems or
lifestyle. Education was infusing in people a feeling of
inferiority; benumbing them into insensitive human beings
and turning them into mindless imitators blindly following
what is served in the name of progress and development. This
learning happened in the first three years of our journey. Since
then, the effort has been to understand the cause of this
malaise and make every effort to address the issue through
education. For various reasons this has not been easy.
The influence of modernity is all pervasive, wide and
powerful. One realises, painfully, as to how we ourselves are
afflicted by the same disease though it may manifest
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differently. There are far too many well intentioned people even those who have stepped out of the mainstream - who do
not see the value of local culture, local knowledge systems
and the fallacies and illusions of the modern day democratic
system and all that goes with it. They do not recognise the
value of traditions; are far too enamoured by the advancement
in technology and the notion of individual rights. The fact that
education cannot be seen in isolation, that it is inter-connected
with other systems which support one another, seems to elude
most. Arguments criticizing the mainstream also come, by and
large, from the West and are not rooted in our own traditions.
In 2006 SIDH started a Gap Year programme. With it we
opened the doors to some well-meaning youngsters who were
urban educated, English speaking. Until then, our team largely
comprised youngsters from the neighbouring villages. There
was a reason for opening the doors to a different class of
people. We felt our team had come of age; had matured, and
would be able to handle influences that would come in with
the urban elite. Also, there was a feeling that perhaps to keep
a certain class of people away was discrimination of a kind
and was perhaps equally wrong (inverted snobbery).
In retrospect this decision was premature. This new team
was certainly more trained in supervising; they became the
leaders and started taking over many functions while

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patronizing our local team. The influence of English and

along with it angreziyat started spreading, almost insidiously,
in the rest of the team, something which had been resisted all
along. The local team members were getting attracted by
English medium schooling for their own children. All these
factors started impacting our own programmes, especially the
new primary wing at Bodhshala school. One could sense a
slow but subtle change creeping in. Sanjay Dev, a friend, was
requested to carry out an internal evaluation of the Bodhshala
programme, and I am grateful to him for telling us the bitter
truth. It shook us out of our slumber and we started taking
steps to resist this change.
The strength to follow our conviction was built upon
guidance from Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche who has been a
great influence and inspiration. Additional support came from
many friends across the country, who said we should stick to
our path. They felt that we had created a space, however
small, for an alternative education grounded in local cultural
moorings. Anyway, the end result of our intended path
correction was that SIDH lost many of its team members to
corporate institutions which lured them away with steep
remunerations, leaving a great void in the organization.
It was at this time that my friend Rajan Venkatesh arrived
in SIDH to explore natural farming and agriculture

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economics. He was pained by what he observed as he was

witness to SIDHs intellectual growth since the beginning. In
the initial years, he had been on the Governing Council of
SIDH. He was a fellow traveller, in a way, having studied
Vipassanaa and being an admirer of the work and life of
Mahatma Gandhi. He had helped us in many of our
publications. Venkatesh already had a deep interest in
education and appreciated our efforts to bring education
closer to home by teaching through the local geographical and
cultural environment. He observed our struggles to keep the
education process close to our ideology and ultimately the
exodus of the senior team. Like a true friend he stepped in at
this crucial juncture, offering to take charge of Bodhshala
his only wish being that he be allowed a free hand with his
experiments.
We were delighted as we felt that we were on the same
page with Venkatesh ideologically. We had great faith in his
commitment, even though he had no prior experience of
running a school. This was the beginning of an experience
that we are truly proud of. We have had our failures but we
are proud of some of our work: the Sanjeevani and Sanmati
programmes for young people; the published research studies
A Matter of Quality, Child and Family, Text and Context;
our efforts in teaching through the local contest subsequently
published as Jaunpur ke Ped Paudhe and Itihaas ki Samajh.
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We were running village schools from the beginning where

we tried to adopt the approach of teaching through the local
environment. However, we were not fully satisfied till
Venkatesh took charge of Bodhshala.
In three years Venkatesh achieved something that we had
dreamt of. Integrating subjects with production work, making
children and students realise the worth of local knowledge
systems and practices without sermonising, and constantly
learning while teaching. There was an overall structure in the
school and yet great flexibility. There were rules but not
rigidity. It took time, it did not happen overnight. But within
three years the experiment had matured. We realised that for
such a school to flourish, one needs a person at the helm of
the school who has clarity of vision and is not afraid to
experiment, who does not think within prescribed categories
and is ready to put in hard work, has true respect for the
community he works with, and has full support of the
management. Had the experiment continued for a few more
years it would have been a great learning place for those
interested in running such schools. However matters beyond
our control prevailed. Once it was decided that Venkatesh had
to leave this area we decided to shut down the school.
We feel that this journey, and the experiments within it,
would be a source of learning for others making attempts in a

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similar direction. I hope this book will provide some insights

for those interested in the finer details, nuances and subtleties
in running such a school; and encourage many of them to
take similar steps.
These small experiments may seem insignificant and
irrelevant to those interested only in addressing issues at the
macro level. However, initiatives such as these become
extremely significant in present times of mono-culturization.
They keep the hope alive.
Pawan Kumar Gupta
SIDH, Mussoorie
Ramnvami 2071
April 8, 2014

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FOREWORD :: BODHSHALA SCHOOL

I am glad Venkatesh decided to write this valuable
narrative of his experiences in Bodhshala, SIDHs
experimental school in Uttarakhand. In years to come, I am
certain that this little book will become an important
document for educationists, teachers and students of
education.
It was my privilege to be a witness to some of the
processes in Bodhshala. I was very impressed with his
courage, clarity and integrity. This comes across quite clearly
while reading the narrative. Although the book reflects only
three years of Venkateshs engagement with Bodhshala
school, there is a sense of continuity as far as SIDH is
concerned. It took forward SIDHs journey - of making
education relevant along Gandhian lines - to a more concrete
level.
Twenty five years ago, SIDH started as a simple response
to the community demand for village schools. In our dialogue
with the community, especially the women, our attention was
drawn to the negative impact of the modern system of
education upon their children. We learnt how the prevalent

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education system, styled around colonial lines, had alienated

the students from their language and culture and how it was
destroying sustainable lifestyles which still existed in villages.
We found a similarity between Gandhijis critique of modern
education and that of the village women, viz., that our
education ought to make a farmers child a better farmer and
that alienation from traditional occupations could be harmful
to communities that lived by the land.
It was at this time that Venkatesh began his experiments
in line with sustainable living - agriculture and hand skills
based production activities - in Bodhshala. His task was not
an easy one. Initially there was resistance from teachers and
parents. He was a hard taskmaster but he always set an
example by stretching his own reserves to the utmost. The fact
that he lived what he preached, coupled with his sincerity and
genuine affection for his associates as people, was a major
factor in breaking down the resistance and winning the
admiration of his team. Of course his unflagging enthusiasm,
energy and determination for what he considered to be the
right lifestyle helped to further overcome these hurdles. That
is why, within a span of three years he managed to implement
many of his innovative experiments in education. His
experiences are important as they elicit that if one has a
single-minded pursuit and courage of conviction it is possible
to accomplish what he did.
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He was critical of too much verbalisation in our method

of communication and identified it as the major gap in the
current system of education. He felt there was a
disproportionate amount of attention given to learning based
only on words rather than living the learning. He writes,
There is too much emphasis on verbal solutions. People
explain problems and also verbally explain the solutions
Life demands a real response. But when our education makes
us incapable, then we offer only verbal analysis and verbal
solutions. This insulates us from real living. And states,
modern schooling has induced a dangerous kind of stupor
where the walking unconscious are trampling all over their
fellow men.
In his own fashion, Venkatesh tried to undo what he calls
the modern schooling system which is creating a 15 year
distance between life and living. He says, It is up to the
school to take` responsibility; to take on the challenge of an
adverse, modern urban situation and rejuvenate the child and
through the child his/her family
That is what he tried to do. He insisted on a lot of hand
based production and agricultural activities as part of his
classes in senior school. He strongly believed that in order to
communicate any lesson it had to be lived by the teacher. He
demonstrated this himself through example. He motivated

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teachers and students to participate in all activities like

cleaning, washing, chopping and cooking in the kitchen as
well as in hand-based production activities. These activities
helped to integrate different subjects in the classroom. He
succeeded in inspiring the teachers and students because he
stayed and lived on the campus. I remember how his passion
towards land, farming, food and health (subjects which
remain largely outside the normal school curriculum) slowly
but surely spread to his team of teachers and the children
around him.
The significance of this book lies in the fact that it is an
inspiration for making the school a place of investigation. It
can also be a practitioners handbook. It tells us simply of
what was done and how it was done. For a teacher, the book is
full of many practical suggestions like collecting local seeds,
growing haldi, fruits and vegetables, as well as sourcing all
the surplus produce of dal/grain/rice for the school kitchen
from local villages and integrating all these everyday
activities in classrooms. Issues of food, agriculture, health and
sustainable lifestyles are usually not a part of classroom
discussion. But these activities also provide the opportunity to
discuss the exploitation by the market and how this has
affected the health and economy of the community. At one
level this book reads as a very honest, simple, first-hand
account of what was done in Bodhshala, the processes
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involved in the decisions, and learning from trial and error.

There are many valuable insights which flow very naturally
through the detailed narrative. It is as if the author is sharing
with us how he arrives at his learning. The complete absence
of theoretical postulations only enhances the impact of these
findings, simply because they are the outcome of practice and
not the other way around.
His narrative flows easily from food, farming, and
sustainable living to community, economics and tradition,
showing their links and inter-relatedness. Venkatesh writes,
School is discovering what is right living and relating
learning to daily living not as a strategy but because this is a
reality. Learning implies practicing to live correctly. School
learning should enable the child to live productively in his/her
community and ethically in society.
He was also constantly in touch with the local
community, often visiting farmers and collecting farming tips.
He writes, Such is the nature of tradition it is alive as long
as the community is alive. When a society decides to finish its
communities as we are doing then we are caught in a no mans
land If the school is a living unit, studying and practicing
sustainable living, then it also becomes a guiding light for the
community. It is integrated with goals and aspirations of the
community. Without this integration the school stands

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isolated.
This book is not only essential reading material for all
teachers and those concerned about the ill effects of the
current quality of education, but I recommend it to all who
dream of another world a sustainable world.
Anuradha Joshi
SIDH, Mussoorie
April 2014

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1
EYE OF COMMONALITY
From nothing to possible is the giant step. It is the unseen
effort, the untold story. From this sprouts possibility which is
in the realm of the visible; where stories usually begin. In this
case, that giant step is the exploration and effort of twenty
years that Pawan Gupta and Anuradha Joshi together invested
in rural education; passionately, with a seeking spirit. It is the
essential prologue to this book. Here flowered a community
called SIDH and a school called Bodhshala; nurtured on a diet
of questioning, curiosity, values and philosophy.
It was to this place full of possibility that I arrived in
2008, one could say by chance, having prepared myself over
three years to do everything I could to understand mans
relationship to land, to try and understand human insecurity.
From June 2008 to March 2012, I lived in Bodhshala. The
school was my home, and everything recorded in this book
happened during this period. It is the collective experience of
teachers, students and volunteers.
If the beginning was serendipitous, the culmination was
inevitable, and tinged with some sadness the Bodhshala
school programme came to an end in March 2012. The
learnings, however, remain, and we see that they are alive
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with more possibilities. Hence an attempt to write this book.

Land and livelihood related to it was uppermost in my
mind when I reached Dehradun in June 2008. So it was a
pleasant surprise when a friend gave me The Philosophy of
Natural Farming by Subhash Palekar. It absorbed me so much
that I completed reading it in one evening. At that time, I had
not read Masanobu Fukuoka and had only heard of Bhaskar
Save both legends of natural farming. Palekars book opened
my eyes. It pointed out some essential realities quite clearly,
and enthused me to further probe this subject. I reached
Bodhshala, therefore, fresh as a new leaf, absorbing every bit
of the richly endowed Himalayan environment. I also caused
a bit of a flutter in the school, thinking up farming lesson
plans and in the process bringing soil, cow dung and cow
urine into the classroom. Not all teachers were happy about
this then; so we talked about what we were doing, and why.
The essence of these dialogues with teachers continued
till the very end, and has been a useful learning experience. As
far as children are concerned, I found, it is not at all difficult
to integrate farming or any useful productive work. But once
you put a child through a mainstream school, out comes a
young adult fifteen or twenty years later, who will resist any
out-of-the-textbook, real-life learning. This is indeed an
amazing thing that modern schooling does to all, making us

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uniformly useless in a productive environment. Urban society

has accomplished this efficiently, and the same model is being
thrust upon rural schools.
There is also an important psychological element in this.
When a child from a farming family enters school, he comes
out feeling inferior. He considers his familys work to be
somehow backward. It is deeply ingrained in him that literate
or educated people should not do the type of work his family
does. The same holds true for children of parents involved in
other hand-skill occupations, like artisans. Livelihoods are
thus being methodically taken out and, as a result,
communities are being destroyed. It can be seen, and shown,
that modern schooling is an important cog in this movement
it is the place where the mind is conditioned to conform; to
not ask questions. So the dialogue among the teachers and
volunteers was, at the core, about all this. No one amongst us
was completely ready with a comprehensive understanding of
it all. We asked ourselves, are we prepared to be ready? All
hands were raised, and so we proceeded.
*

We started with a seed bank. Almost all teachers at SIDH

belong to the local rural community, and every child at
Bodhshala school comes from a farming family. Hence it was
not difficult to collect the seeds. The next step was to sort the

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seeds, and in doing so, we learned something significant

about how we see things around us. Given a group of items to
sort, how do we see them? Do we see differences, or do we
see commonality? If we want to find differences, we can see
that two trees are different, that two mango trees are different,
that two branches of a mango tree are different, that two
leaves on the same branch are different. If the leaves are of the
same size and shape, we can see differences in the shade of
their colour; we can feel the difference in their texture. We
can taste the difference in two mangoes, or even between two
parts of the same mango. We do this with our eyes, ears, nose,
tongue and skin, which are fine-tuned organs - instruments whose function is to spot differences in physical attributes.
When we gave a child two pumpkin seeds and asked what the
difference was between them, he promptly found some
attribute to separate the two; the child chose a reason to divide
the two pumpkin seeds.
So, with the Eye of Differentiation, if I can call it that, a
person negates commonness, and can even divide things
meaninglessly. If you give a child two tomatoes to taste and
ask what the difference is between them, he will find that one
is less sour than the other. He may then conclude that one is
tastier than the other. He may also declare that he likes one
tomato, and dislikes the other. So, with the Eye of
Differentiation, the activity of comparison becomes dominant.
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Comparison has negated commonness. Two simple tomatoes

are now opposing one another (in the childs mind). Since
commonness indicates usefulness, therefore even usefulness
(of the tomato) has been negated. When we say a person is
nit-picking, or splitting hairs, or finding faults, I wonder now
if he is looking at things with an Eye of Differentiation.
So is there any usefulness in this kind of differentiation,
this comparison, this separation, we asked ourselves, and, if
not, should we not drop this approach. After all, it is us, i.e.,
the teacher, who has guided the mind of the child in this
direction, by asking him to differentiate. The child is making
meaningless divisions of the world around him. Also, I was
keen that our pedagogical approach should be to stay with
facts all the while, and move from fact to fact, whereas with
this approach, the child was quickly moving from the fact of
tomatoes to the non-fact of opinion (tastier) and conclusion
(like/dislike). I resolved to be aware of this, to see if I myself
was not leading the childrens mind off course with wrong
questioning. A few other teachers also felt that this would be
useful.
Now let us call the other way of seeing as the Eye of
Commonality. When we say we see many trees, we have
already stated a commonality and kept them together, i.e., the
fact that these things called trees share the commonness of

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sprouting and growing roots, shoots, leaves, flowers and

fruits. So, we recognise them on the basis of this common
behaviour; but identify them with the help of the sense organs.
Even as we see them as trees, the Eye of Commonality
discerns that there are different types of trees. This is not the
same as seeing with the Eye of Differentiation. Here there is
no comparison. While keeping the trees together, one can see
the fact that some of them are mango trees. So by recognising
on the basis of another level of behaviour, the mango trees
have come together all of which grow in a particular manner,
and with which we relate in a particular way. Again, we use
our sense organs to physically identify the mango trees. And
even as we are seeing these mango trees, we can discern that
some are big, some are small, some have dense foliage, some
bear no fruit, etc., but the differences do not distract us.
Commonality implies togetherness. With an Eye of
Commonality, you see the thing that keeps things together.
So, with the seeds, we asked the children what could be
the basis for sorting them. It is assumed that it is we who do
the sorting, and that we can choose the basis all round seeds
together, or all brown seeds together, or if one really wants to
indulge in whim, all beautiful seeds together.
What we found was this:
- There is no commonality based on liking (beautiful,
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etc.). There is no such attribute, it is unreal.

- Commonality of merely one attribute of form, like
shape or colour, is not useful. Sorting black mustard seeds and
black tori seeds (ridge gourd) is quite meaningless.
- Commonality of form as a whole, which is seen as
similarity, is useful only in identification. The physical act of
sorting is done using similarity, involving the sense organs.
Now, there is a higher level of commonality while seeing
the quality of the substance quality being its relationship to
us; what happens when it comes in contact with us. For
instance, the effect of some substances like starch and sweet is
that it results in the body getting some energy. The sense
organs cannot detect this, it is a higher level of activity in the
mind which can sense the quality, viz. that this is an energygiving substance. Similarly, spices have the quality of
enhancing digestive fire, and there are substances like lentils
which help the body grow.
In this way, the students sorted the seeds based on the
commonality of quality - and we saw that nature has given us
grains, pulses, spices, vegetables and fruits. We did not give
the seeds their quality, we only saw and recognised it, so you
could say the seeds sorted themselves. So we could see that
recognition of a substance on the basis of its quality is useful.
Now, is there a level of commonality higher than this? Yes, all
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of these seeds - and the leaves, roots, fruits and vegetables

they represent - have the common essence of being human
food, or in other words, they all carry the essence of
nourishment for human bodies. Naturally, they were kept
together.
So, when we see the whole kingdom of vegetation,
nature has sorted out what is food for us, and what is not. This
is not seen by the sense organs, or by the higher activity
which senses quality. This seeing is an even higher function of
the mind, which can grasp, in one sweep, a whole system of
natural order. When this activity takes place, one is alive to
relationships, and one usually says, I see! or I understand!.
Commonality represents certainty, and provides
assurance. Recognition on a higher level of commonality
provides us a higher level of assurance. Of course, we can
look at other characteristics of seeds and sort them
accordingly (like which ones grow in summer, which in
winter). What this exercise did, for us, was to open our eyes to
the fact that there is an orderly sorting already done based on
natural behaviour, and that it is very useful to see, to
recognise this. This is true not just for seeds, but for
everything. And yet there are so many ways in which we sort,
or categorize, in our daily lives are we aware that these are
assumptions? Just to give you an example, let me take a

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school; it is also relevant to us. We have developed a system

of sorting children by age, and we assume that at a given age,
every child should absorb so much mathematics and so much
geography. We have developed curricular content which, we
contend, should be absorbed within one year by a child in that
class. Are these assumptions, on which we have categorized,
true?
Actually, commonality is, well, common. It is all around
us in our daily lives, and our behaviour reflects this
perception. When we say stationery, it reflects a
commonness of items; woollens are stored together; and it is
useful to keep tools in one place. Our teachers saw and used
the fact in math classes that commonality keeps things
together, so does counting. You count things which are
already together because they have something in common. If
one sees banana, that brings all the bananas together which
may be counted, and if one sees the commonness of fruit,
then one may count the bananas, apples and mangoes. So the
seeing of commonality comes first (why are they common?),
then the act of counting (how many?). This is simple, and can
be shown in a simple manner to smaller children.
However, with some of the bigger children it took more
doing, and we found out why. This was because they had been
drilled for years into seeing only the numerical signs of 0 to 9,

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without giving significance to what it represented. You show

them 8 and 7 and they gave you 15, without even asking what
the 8 and 7 are, thats the way they have been taught. And yet,
after years of just reacting to meaningless numerals and signs,
we still seem surprised as to why the kids make mistakes
while combining different measurement units (grams and
kilograms, or centimetres and metres). Our teachers tried to
restore the order of seeing commonality first, then doing the
math, and reported that the results were encouraging.
I tried with classes 6 and 7 a language exercise asking
how would we go about forming a new language. The first
step they said would be to give names to things. Yes, that is
correct. So, would we give a unique sound to each and every
thing? We explored this say we see a thing and name it
tree. Then we see another thing which is similar in
appearance. What would we do? We will call this too a tree,
the children said. We explored further we have three things;
the first and second look alike, i.e., they have a commonality
of shape and colour, but their behaviour is not common. The
first will lie on the ground without any change, while the
second will begin to sprout. Now, the second and third things
are not common in appearance, they are different in shape and
size and colour, but they have the commonality of behaviour,
i.e., both of them sprout. So, how will we name them? The
children promptly said that they would name the first thing as
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stone and the second and third things as seed.

So it is commonality of behaviour that has significance;
it is useful, so we base our recognition on this. And thus the
concept of common noun emerged. I told class 7 that class 6,
too, had worked out the same method how come they had
thought of the same way to name things? Because, it came out
slowly, but clearly, they are like us. We humans have a
common way of seeing, a common way of perceiving. Ergo,
every language will have common nouns; because that is the
way humans see the world; that is the way nature has built us.
I thought they were on to something.

FARMING BEGINS
Just as the seeds sorted themselves, the farming
objectives, too, established themselves as we went along.
Bodhshala school is at the top of a hill. We prepared a few,
small, terraced strips of land adjoining the school, and these
we made ready for our farming experiments. SIDH also has a
residential campus about half a kilometer downhill with a few
larger fields for cultivation. These were also put to good use.
The school is surrounded by forest on three sides, and there
are many fruit trees in the school property itself. The place
therefore is a haven for birds, and regretfully, for a large
contingent of common monkeys as well as langurs (a white33

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furred, long-tailed Indian monkey). Our first three

experiments with potato, garlic and onion were uprooted,
literally, by monkeys. So we enclosed one small field with an
iron grill fence that had a grilled ceiling as well. This was not
a green house. There was free flow of sunshine, air and water
through the fencing and small birds could fly in and out.
We discovered an interesting fact about the monkeys. Till
as recently as seven years ago, there was little problem from
the monkeys. The few who came were forest dwellers who
were wary of humans and so kept their distance. Their
population, too, had been in check all these years through
natures own system of balance.
What disrupted the system was the decision of
neighbouring Mussoorie to get rid of their town monkeys. A
contractor was hired by the town council to export their
problem. The monkeys were captured, only to be set free at
Kempty the little town next to Bodhshala school. It has
shops and restaurants catering to tourist travellers. Now, these
creatures were different from the forest monkeys. Their
behaviour was deviant, they were aggressive and sometimes
violent towards humans.
Towns always have excess food, all year round.
Moreover, a town like Mussoorie catering to wanton tourism
is simply overflowing with food-related garbage. This has

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changed the eating habits of the monkeys as well as their

behaviour with humans. Their population is exploding. At
Kempty, the town monkeys began attacking nearby fields and
farms, and, over the years, have reached other villages a
kilometer away. Their population is visibly expanding, thanks
to food-garbage at Kempty and to their town habit of
proximity with human habitat. In a nutshell, this can describe
the bane of modernity and industrial progress. Create
problems. Dont solve them; just export some of them so it
becomes somebody elses problem. Meanwhile, the original
problem is still growing.
I have used the word interesting at the beginning of this
monkey episode. I wonder now if that is correct and if at all
the human predicament in this has come out in my narration.
Suppose you have a job at Delhi or Mumbai, and you are told
one day: You have just lost four months of salary in the last
one hour because of some monkeys sent from Mussoorie. You
are also notified that your father, mother, wife, brother and
sister have also been penalised. (It takes less than an hour for
monkeys to destroy a corn field nurtured over four months by
a family of farmers). Think about it.
*

So the fenced enclosure was built. It cost quite a bit of

money all that iron coming all the way from Dehradun, but

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Pawan at SIDH did not even hesitate. All through this three
and a half year period, he never once adversely questioned a
plan or move of mine. Self-sustenance was far away at that
stage, it was a concept, a goal otherwise we were voluntarily
frugal. This was good enough for Pawan, and he provided the
kind of support a researcher or experimenter can only dream
about.
In this protected field, which we called the jali ghar, we
replicated selected seeds and experimented with plant
varieties like garlic, onion, potato, radish, cucumber and
beans.
The hills are a treasure trove of beans. In the seed bank, I
saw a variety of local chemi (bean) in various shades of
yellow and red, and even black and white. Qualitatively, they
shared the commonality of being chemi or bean, i.e., they are
the Indian legume, they are grown in the summer monsoon,
they begin to pod within two months, some are small shrubs
about 12 to 18 inches in height, most are climbers and have to
be provided with props for their vines to twirl around. They
are legumes, dicotyledons, and have the place of dal (cooked
lentil) in our diet. Being natural nitrogen fixers, they nourish
the soil in which they grow. A few varieties we eat as
vegetables, but most others we let dry on the plant, store and
cook as dal, like rajma and lobia red kidney bean and black-

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eyed bean.
Since some of the bean varieties grow quickly, one can
even have two crops between the Indian calendar months
Jyeshta and Ashwin (mid-May to mid-September). We first
sowed the seeds by variety, and by proper selection and resowing over three seasons, we could get a collection of robust
seeds of each type. I was happy whenever our students or
neighbouring farming families would take some seeds for
themselves. When we grew the different varieties together in
the same field, we were surprised by the results. We saw that
many new cross-types appeared. We ended up with a
collection of eighteen different looking chemi seeds, colourful
as a rainbow, some monochrome and others with multicoloured designs on their skin, some smooth, some wrinkled.
I was struck by the abundance of natures creativity, though I
must admit that some of the beans turned out in such gaudy
blue and purple as not to look edible at all!
As vegetable, we grew the standard chemi, now known
everywhere as french bean. Another variety, which we called
peeli chemi, was also tender at the pod stage. A third variety
was the perennial flat bean which is aptly called barahmahsi. All these found their way to the kitchen. The barah
mahsi is an ambitious climber and one has to be watchful to
see what it is latching on to. We once planted two seeds next

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to a tall silver oak tree. The resulting vines clambered up the

willow to such an extent that we had to share its produce with
the langurs. They kept to the higher regions, while we
plucked the beans within our reach! Summer monsoon was
also the time we saw the beauty of the whole bel (vine)
community - different variety of pumpkin, gourd and
cucumber - spreading across the length of the field, racing up
the hill slopes, their lovely tendrils coiled at the ends,
twirling, gripping, moving, their bountiful fruits dangling
from the nodes; disguised to the non-gardener but quickly
spotted by those who have tended to it. They are a sight to
see, and can be a part of every school garden. They provide
food for the soul too.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY IN HALDI
The local Himalayan haldi (turmeric) is known for its
quality, for its medicinal properties. We grew this in excess of
our requirements, enough to distribute it amongst a large
number of friends. Our seeds originally came from a village
known to produce good haldi. Since then, we have been
largely self-sufficient in seed, falling short only when we had
to increase the field size. In our region, haldi is a two-year
(and in some cases three-year) crop. So we have two fields,
one in Bodhshala and the other at the LRC (Learning

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Resource Centre) campus, providing yields in alternate years.

In the first two-year crop, we got over 65 kg of sabut (whole
pieces) haldi. After storing 15 kg for seed, we boiled and
dried out the rest, which when powdered, yielded nearly 10 kg
of haldi churna (powder). Sometimes, the ratio is lesser, about
1:6. In heavy rainfall season, a yield of small-sized tubers
may result in as little as one-seventh the crop weight in
powder form. Fortunately, or should I say the wonder of
nature is that haldi is required in small quantities, so that
output and requirement are well balanced.
Pure and naturally grown haldi is worth its weight in
gold. This sounds clichd, but I am using it just to drive home
the point that good haldi is so valuable for our health. We
found that pure haldi is very scarce as the entire marketplace
sells adulterated haldi. Corn flour or wheat flour, available
for10-15 rupees a kilo, is added to haldi which can fetch a
price of 150-300 a kilo. Adding impurities is thus seen as
profitable business. Even cheaper and dangerous additives
like yellow-coloured chemical powders are also being used.
The marketplace has become an adulterators den.
How do we know that the haldi is adulterated, we asked
ourselves in class. By the colour, said some, but that varies
from yellow to brownish red depending on how long it is
boiled and the moisture in the air while drying. By tasting it in

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dal (cooked lentil), suggested some, but this was possible

only when the haldi was grossly adulterated and the person
tasting had the necessary sensitivity. One sure way is to find
out the price of dried sabut haldi (whole pieces of dried
turmeric) from the market the prices are also listed daily in
the commodities section of newspapers. Then one discovers
that, surprise, haldi powder is selling cheaper than sabut
haldi. But, wait a minute! One kilogram of sabut haldi on
grinding results in ten per cent less powder, so powdered haldi
should be more expensive. Now add the cost of grinding,
packaging, labelling and transportation, and one reckons that
powdered haldi should be way more expensive than sabut
haldi. But, the market shops are selling it cheaper!
The same can be studied for other powdered spices as
well, as well as for edible oil. The entire class can become
detectives. It can be easily established that lying, cheating,
betrayal and even manslaughter (many adulterated food items
are poisonous) is taking place regularly through commerce.
What about the perpetrator? Here, it is more difficult than in
detective fiction. For the perpetrator is us, all the links in this
chain of deception are human. Can human behaviour sort
itself out? Till it does, this is a continuing story. In the first
three years of my stay here, I found the farmers selling pure
haldi, usually sabut, and all the adulterating mischief was
done by the commerce chain middlemen, wholesalers and
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shopkeepers. But during the last six months of my stay, there

was a change. Many farmers were reluctant to sell sabut haldi,
and admitted: Why allow them to make all the money? We
have good corn flour; we can mix it ourselves and sell
powdered haldi. The producer himself as adulterator;
corruption at the very source! We have all the makings of
rural multi-national corporations.

GINGER WOES
We noticed that villages a few kilometres away to the
south-west were reaping a rich harvest of adhrak (ginger),
whereas there was none in our neighbourhood. Weather
conditions being similar, why was it not being grown here?
Was it the soil, which was more gravel on our land, or was it
the slight difference in altitude and lay of the land
sometimes, these subtle differences affected some plants.
About the soil, I had observed that turmeric, garlic,
potatoes, radish and arbi (colocasia) grew quite well. All
these develop under the soil; our loose gravel-type soil was
probably good for them, I thought. So why not adhrak?
Strangely, we could not get seed locally. No farmer kept them;
they all bought the seed, year after year, from the
neighbouring town of Vikasnagar. Fortunately for us, a newlyjoined colleague belonged to a farming family from just
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outside Vikasnagar, with over thirty years experience of

growing ginger. They always kept their own seed. So we
procured our first lot of hand-picked seed from his farm. We
sowed two kilograms on an experimental patch at Bodhshala
school, which yielded nearly 10 kg after eight months. Some
women farmers who visited the school commented that that
these were superbly formed, it was very good ginger. But we
had dug them out early, for the crop can be ruined by winter
frost, we were told, and therefore, they were not good enough
or mature enough to be able to sprout well. So we had no
seeds of our own that year. We bought more seed and selected
a bigger field at LRC campus this too gave a good yield; we
got some 26 kg from four-fifths of the field. As an
experiment, I let the remaining face the winter frost with some
dry mulching on top, but three months later, we found most of
them spoiled, they were soft and decomposing from within.
So again, in season two, no seeds.
Now we knew why our village did not retain ginger seed,
while down below Vikasnagar, with no threat of frost, was the
source of seeds. This also explained the reluctance of our
nearby farmers to take up ginger cultivation. It was moneydependant farming, buying seeds every year, whereas
virtually all their other crops were cultivated using their own
seeds. Subhash Palekars zero-budget farming came to mind
its virtues are still visible in these rural hill pockets where
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SIDH runs its schools; but only so to the alert interested

farmer.
While the farming activities were going on, on another
front, a group of teachers and students were studying and
producing a few ayurvedic medicines (Indian medical
science). Dried ginger, or sonth, is an important ingredient in
many medicines, and so we embarked on a project to make
sonth in the school from the second years harvest. We took
17 kg of fresh ginger and ended up with about 2.5 kg of sabut
sonth. Since sonth, too, like haldi, is needed in small
quantities, we had enough to meet our needs for the next two
years, and a little to spare, which we distributed to friends.
Sonth, too, is available in the market in powder form, though
if you have read the haldi experience mentioned earlier, you
would do better to pick up sabut sonth and grind it yourself to
ensure purity.

LEARNINGS FROM LENTIL

We tried growing local lentils. Masoor, urad, tor and
kulath are the ones grown and consumed here (pink lentil,
black gram, pigeon pea, horse gram). We started with 700 gm
of masoor as seed and got about 14 kg, a productivity of 2000
per cent. Naturally, we wanted to keep some aside as seed for
the next season, and here we got to learn something.
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Masoor and kulath are two seeds which quickly attract

micro-insects, and are eaten up within months if left
unprotected. We found that even though there are traditional
methods of protecting seeds, these are being given up in
favour of pesticides, which is pushed by the market. This is
the tragedy of the modern system evil is advertised with the
power of government and business, the good is left for
villagers to defend.
I wanted to test the village method and see its efficacy
myself. We split the seed amount in two halves and tried two
traditional techniques of the local region. In the first, we
added a little mustard oil to the seed and mixed it thoroughly
with shredded leaves of peach and walnut trees (which are
abundant here, also available in the school premises). In the
second, we again added a little mustard oil and then mixed the
seed with wood ash (from a kitchen chulla).
We left both out in the sun to dry for half an hour, and
then packed them in two martbans (clay jars). This was in
Chaitra (March-April). That year, we had a heavy monsoon,
the highest rains in forty years, and so there was high
humidity, conditions ideal for germs and insects. Yet, in
Ashwin (Sept-Oct), the masoor seeds were absolutely fresh
and fine, and were sowed successfully. What was left over
was washed and used in the kitchen for dal (cooked lentil).

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This was when I discovered that market seeds come with

a label Poison not edible. It amazed me that the first thing
our seeds and sprouts get to eat is the pesticide poison which
mixes with soil and water. All edible sabut dals are similarly
mixed with some pesticide or the other, and they carry the
warning label in the wholesale bags. But when it is
repackaged into smaller one-kg polythene bags for the supermarket, this warning message is not put on it.
Wheat, too, has rat poison mixed with it. The wholesale
50kg gunny bags bear the poison label and advice that the
contents be washed well before use. I have seen some village
folk sell their good, organic wheat and buy the low-grade
ration shop wheat because it is cheaper (subsidized by the
government). And without reading the label, or without being
able to read, they send it straight for grinding into atta (whole
wheat flour). I once mentioned to a village elder about this
dangerous preservation technique. He looked skeptical. I tried
to explain to him the whole market game. He still looked
skeptical. Finally, he said, Can a man knowingly mix poison
into another mans food? There are still pockets in India, and
Asia, where people appear so different from the modern man.
Maybe they are different, civilizationally.
*

In another dal experiment, we sowed some urad seeds on

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two terraced fields which were lying fallow, and also planted
mandua (finger millet, also known as ragi or nachni in other
parts of India) saplings along the boundary. The two are
known to thrive together. Five months later, the urad pods
were developing well and needed only a few more weeks to
mature when some grazing cows made a meal of the whole
field. The carpentry class in school then put a barbed-wire
fence around the field, and we bravely repeated the
experiment next season. This time, the cows were kept out,
but four months into its growth, some grazing goats crept
through and that was that. Since this field was out of view on
the northern slope, and surrounded by forest, it was difficult
to protect. So finally, we used it for haldi and adhrak, which
the animals do not have a liking for.
But we did discuss in class about grazing habits and why
this had happened twice to our crop. Village communities
have had a strong convention about grazing they are alert
and keep away from cultivated fields, they know the forest
areas for grazing and areas to be left for renewal. Even if
someones cattle ate up a field by mistake, he would give half
of one of his fields output to that family this would be
agreed to in the presence of the village panch (elders). But,
over the last decade, things are developing in a wrong
direction. Village joint families are fast breaking into nuclear
families and the pressure on the smaller families is immense.
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Earlier, two or three people from a joint family would go out

with a dozen cows and oxen and four dozen goats; now after
the breaking up, one person each from four or five smaller
families goes with lesser number of cattle. Also, that person,
usually the woman of the house, is in a rush to return for other
household and farming work, because now there is no support
at home. So the earlier relaxed grazing in distant forests over
an entire day is now a rushed affair; something to get over
with quickly nearby. Also, while the cattle are grazing the
woman is busy cutting grass, hence the accidental strayings
happen.
The force towards fragmentation is not only making the
individual families more hassled and insecure, but also
inconsiderate towards their fellow villagers. Few are now
willing to own up to their cattle straying into fields; indeed, of
late, we are witnessing more ill will between neighbours than
ever before. Bhaichara khatam ho raha hai, is the uniform
assessment of the village elders (there is no more a sense of
brotherhood).
So we saw in school that agriculture is dependent not
only on good seeds and soil, but also upon a healthy
community. In the classroom, the teachers guided students in
conducting surveys in their villages on the fragmentation of
families, sharing of work in joint and nuclear families, farm

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output and cash income, migration to Kempty or Mussoorie,

and the quality of life, including health. This was a learning
for all of us students, teachers and volunteers.

MILLETS OF THE HILLS

We do not have sufficiently large fields for growing
grains, makki (corn) being the only cereal which we grow, that
too only a little. We enjoy some of it as butta (corn on cob)in
the rainy season roasted on a coal fire, with lime and salt
rubbed onto it. We ground some into flour for our local grain
biscuit experiment. Sometimes, a little of it is mixed with
whole wheat flour for rotis. However it was not high on our
list of preferred cereal in the school. In the villages, corn, rice
and wheat are all grown and consumed; and one can see the
dried garlands of golden-yellow corn hanging outside every
home it is a wonderful sight.
We tried growing jau (barley) once, more to revive
interest in it, but our own colleagues were not motivated, they
had stopped eating it in their homes. So I dropped that, and
focused instead on the excellent millets of the region
Jhangora and Mandua, which were still grown and eaten, but
which were facing a threat from the glamour of wheat and its
easy availability through ration shops. What we observed was
this:
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1. Chotta anaj, which are small grains called millets in

English, have been grown here, like in all other parts of India,
for hundreds and hundreds of years, and recognised for their
nourishing value.
2. Seeds are stored in every house for the following
years sowing, farming methods are traditional using farm
manure, all knowledge needed is locally rooted, passing from
parents to children, yields are steadily good for hundreds of
years, the soil continues to be fertile this is a wonderful,
sustainable, no-cash-cost way of farming, the result being
wholesome grains, which many say is more nourishing than
rice or wheat.
3. Mandua, a dark-coloured finger millet (also known as
ragi or nachni), is grown along with urad dal in the summer
monsoon. It used to be the cereal of choice for rotis during
winters.
4. Jhangora is a light-coloured (fox-tail) millet. It is
planted and harvested at roughly the same time as broadcast
rice.
5. Mandua is still grown in many villages, but with fast
reducing acreage. Those who have migrated to Kempty town
or to Mussoorie or Dehradun cities have stopped consuming
it.
6. Jhangora is a delicate grain which is still hand49

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pounded for de-husking. Because it is delicate, the whole

grain gets crushed if de-husked in a regular electrical dehusking machine. Sixty-five years after independence, we still
have not used our science and technology to solve village
problems in the village itself. Instead, the answer has been to
neglect Jhangora. So with every passing year, lesser and lesser
acreage is devoted to this excellent millet.
7. The government has thrust wheat through the public
distribution system, offering it for rupees two a kilo. This has
discouraged the farmer from putting in effort on millets.
8. Even the farmer growing natural, organic wheat in this
region is discouraged. What he produces has been devalued as
a cheap commodity by the government. He is forced into
thinking about giving this up why work to grow ten quintals
of ones own wheat when one can earn two thousand rupees
through ten days of daily wage labour and buy ten quintals of
the government rations two-rupee wheat?
9. In actual fact, the wheat that the Garhwal farmer grows
is far superior to the low-grade stuff that is distributed through
government subsidy shops. Government wheat acquired
mostly from Punjab and Haryana is grown with a lot of toxic
chemicals and pesticides; different varieties and even substandard qualities are dumped together; they are stored for
years mixed with rat and insect poisons; they only resemble

50

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wheat, thats all. But the real mischief is that such wheat is
dumped in government ration shops for a subsidized rate of
two rupees a kilo. Because of this artificial price differential,
many farmers here are selling their own pure organic wheat
and instead buying and consuming the government junk.
10. The health of farming families thus compromised is
further weakened by the market propagation of excessively
ground wheat flour, or maida. In the absence of any sincere
effort by the government to provide correct information and
education, rural communities are taking to maida like a fad
(just like their urban cousins). The increasing attraction of
ready-packaged food items, all of which are made of maida
(bread, biscuits, noodles, chowmein etc.) is also contributing
to a worsening health situation in villages.
11. All this is having a telling effect on the state of the
farm. More and more farm land is now lying fallow because
of reducing acreage to millets and due to outward migration
of the younger generation. Hill lands are precariously
positioned with respect to soil erosion and with less and less
care of the land, more and more of fertile soil is being washed
away. The state of the community and the state of the farm are
a reflection one another.
*

So what do we do? Growing these millets in the school

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was not a priority for me. The lesson was. The lesson of
farming, food, health and sustainability, the commonality of
which was captured so beautifully by Wendell Berry, who
said, eating is an agricultural activity.
We decided to be alert about this and to draw the
childrens attention to it wherever possible. So teachers
initiated a discussion on millets as opportunities opened while
teaching history, geography, social science, languages, and of
course, health and agriculture. These were useful at some
level, no doubt. But I was uneasy that this should not end up
as millet versus wheat story. Wheat is a natural grain and, if
grown naturally, has its place in the food order. Events of the
last fifty years have trapped wheat and corn in a nefarious
business-political nexus. Having originated in the U.S., the
disturbance has been pushed out throughout the globe. We
know this. We also know that in our own country, the same
forces of commerce, helped by a weak self-serving
bureaucracy, unleashed a toxic revolution which has poisoned
our land and waters all in the name of producing wheat.
But here I am in rural Garhwal, among villages where
traditional farming practices still abound, where toxic
fertilizer and pesticides are still at the periphery, where hybrid
and gene tampering are not in the vocabulary, and where there
is still a multiple-grain diet of rice, wheat, corn, mandua and

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jhangora. Yes, this system is under severe threat, but what do I

communicate to them? I have no intention to dazzle them with
the latest information. Do I first tell them the story of modern
history; that it is based upon lies and loot and domination and
deceit and the genocide of continents? That a section of the
world has developed into an uncivilized ruling class
harbouring an insane wish to control what all humans eat?
That colonialism continues to operate through other means,
and we only carry the myth of being independent? That we
are weaker today, with less courage, less generosity and more
insecurity, than we were in 1947? That modern schooling has
induced a dangerous kind of stupor, where the walking
unconscious are trampling all over their own fellowmen? Do I
say all this to the Garhwali farmer and to his child in school?
If I dont, am I hiding something from them? Will this make
them understand, or make them insecure of humans and
human systems? From time to time one has pondered this
this tangled web of modern deceit, and if one pondered for too
long, one caught a bout of it, and needed to recover. I then
slept with a prayer that dawn should bring in some freshness.
It usually did.

ANTIDOTE TO A DISORDERLY SYSTEM

So, how does this questionable modern system affect the

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farmer of Garhwal? We found that:

1. It does not give him correct information. It does not
give him complete information.
2. It negates his traditional knowledge; it negates his
long-standing, native socio-economic systems. It removes
traditional occupations, while simultaneously placing
demands for cash income.
3. It disturbs him psychologically, makes him feel
inferior, and leaves him with little confidence in what he is
doing.
We asked ourselves what is our response to this, what is
the content of our communication to the student in school,
and through him, to his family?
In response to point number 1, we found a treasure of
valuable research in Dharampaljis work. Correct information
begins with knowing who we are, and I found his research
and findings on Indian society, economy, education and
science and technology very useful. So is his essay, Bharatiya
Chitta Manas, on how cultural India sees the world.
Masanobu Fukuoka, Bhaskar Save and Subhash Palekar, I
have already mentioned as having inspired me. I encouraged
the teachers to read them. (Bhaskar Save has written a historic
letter to M.S.Swaminathan concerning Indian agriculture
which can be shared with students).
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There are other sources of information, investigation and

inquiry books from Other India Press, Navdanya
publications, Annie Leonards films, writings of Arundhati
Roy, science references and Hindi translations of various
books from Arvind Guptas website all good people serving
an important purpose, because government, school and media
are all stultifying minds with a single story. USAs farmer,
thinker, poet-writer and practicing self-sustaining human
being Wendell Berry I recommended to many friends there
was no Hindi translation to give to my teachers but I dont
think any of them read him. Pity.
Of course, all of this was for us teachers, to open our
minds. After all, a real school is a place of learning for
teachers, and therefore, for children. At our discussions,
teachers suggested ways they could take their own learning or
inspirations to the classroom. There was a direct integration
with many lessons in the curriculum itself, so the
opportunities were always there. But we had to be careful; the
objective was not to counter assumptions with other
assumptions. We had to find ways to indicate, to draw
attention, so that the child saw facts, and the facts spoke for
themselves this was what J Krishnamurthy had said, and it
impressed me enough to become a conviction. But as the great
man had warned, the danger of teacher as authority kept
cropping up, one needed to be alert in spotting it, not to push
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opinions and conclusions in the classroom; to be, as he said,

constantly aware. For this, we found it was important to
encourage direct observation. So more and more of school
work, and homework, was observation-based, survey-based
and research-based. We also found that it is important to have
an integral approach, because that is the way things are in
reality.
With an Eye of Differentiation, we have divided the
world into mythical subjects like Science, Environment,
Geography, Mathematics, etc. So one teacher tells about the
science of electricity, another teacher talks about the
environmental degradation caused by large hydro-electric
power projects, while a third reads from the textbook about
big dams being the temples of modern India! all serving
individual dots that dont make a picture. Our challenge was,
can we see things now with an Eye of Commonality and
understand the common characteristics that define a
community, that sustain a village eco-system, and from there
examine individual attributes, whether in the science class or
the social science class. This put the onus squarely back on
the teachers, for we had to use and provide information as part
of a whole story, so that we could help one another see what
an orderly system is, and what a disorderly system is. This
had its repercussions.

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The science teacher expressed sadness that the holistic

discussion on energy, electricity and environment had taken
the shine out of his class; the revolving electron had lost its
dazzle. Please remember that the Tehri dam is in Garhwal, in
our district. The trauma of drowned villages, of displaced
communities, the sacrilege of a river sacred is very real to us.
In the place of the beautiful, gently flowing river, there now
stands a large, lifeless lake which extends forty kilometres
backwards into neighbouring Uttarkashi. A few colleagues at
SIDH are from the displaced Tehri community, and they have
tears in their eyes when they see this lake. Other visitors who
do not know, who are simply insensitive tourists, gape at this
vast expanse of standing water, and take motorboat rides. The
grapevine had it that a famous cricketer (who is not god) was
being persuaded to buy land here and build his house and
helipad, and enjoy the motor boating. I wish someone will tell
him what lies beneath the graves of a hundred villages, their
land and forest, their memories, and a human heritage.
Since the children had so many questions, I encouraged
the science teacher to channel their energy into a play. It was a
simple, linear story: villagers of a proposed dam site raising
many questions, a meeting with the district magistrate who
cannot answer the fundamental ones, advice by the village
mukhiya (elder), and the District Magistrate agreeing to find
the correct way forward without harming the community.
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During the enactment, at the end of the play, a girl - the

sutradhar (narrator)- came forward and revealed that this was
not fiction at all; the play was based on fact. I come from
Bhediyan village. My whole village will soon be drowned by
a hydro electric power project on river Aglad. We are being
told to leave, but we dont want to. Why are they doing this to
us, she asked. The entire assembly felt her sadness.
Incidentally, Bhediyan is the village where SIDH started
its first school in 1989. It is a prosperous village, hardworking
farmers getting a good produce, good animal husbandry
supported by a healthy forest, the Aglad river flowing a few
hundred feet below. It is the birthplace of SIDH, from where
we raised those first questions about relevant and meaningful
education, about modernity and its mode of destructive
development. Now, they want to drown us out.
*

We are seeing how the modern system is affecting the

Garhwal farmer, and we said the second point was that it
negates his traditional knowledge and his way of living. It
removes his traditional occupations while simultaneously
putting demands of cash income. Mahatma Gandhis epochal
document Hind Swaraj bears clairvoyance now. An inimical,
globalised, consumption-based system is bearing down hard
on our localised, production-based rural communities, tearing

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them apart and tiring their spirit. Migration is built into this
system, and the school is designed to aid and abet this.
Our response to point number 2 was to strengthen the
learning from local environment, which SIDH had already
been implementing for ten years. Learning from the local
environment implies that the school activity relates the child
to his daily life. It does not cut him from his family and way
of living, it strengthens it. The child is bringing his own life
into the classroom and with it his knowledge, and the teacher
recognises and accepts this. By drawing attention to his own
information, knowledge and activities, and inviting him to
look at it closely, the teacher can point out other related things
to the child, thus expanding his vision. In this way, learning in
a local context is wholesome - both teacher and child are
encouraged to see things in a system of which they are a part.
The application of any new learning becomes automatically
clear to improve, enhance the system of which we are a part,
not to wreck it, but to strengthen it. This process also
awakened in us a need to understand Gandhijis Swadeshi in
its completeness it is not just about local and foreign goods,
it is about recognising the heritage of locally evolved systems,
of seeing our role and responsibility in perfecting them.
Meanwhile, we had started making many things using

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farm produce. Teachers and students learning and producing

together, useful things for the school; this had a ready
resonance with Swadeshi, and so this evolved as another
response to point number 2. Our reading of Gandhiji and his
vision of buniyadi shiksha- basic education - also provided
direction, and soon this activity grew into a full-fledged
Production-Integrated Basic Education programme. It ran for
three years, during which the learning activities at Bodhshala
school resulted in the production of recycled hand-made
paper, value-added food items, ayurvedic medicines, soaps
and creams, cloth bags, paper bags and envelopes, and
learning material like number rods and abacus.
Further elaboration on this experiment and its results is
presented in a later section. This was a response through
school to a crisis in community, and it was a source of great
learning. It has confirmed to us the path of possibility.
*

There was a third point mentioned; that the modern

system disturbs the Garhwal farmer severely, psychologically,
leaving him with little confidence in what he does.
In response to point number 3, it was clear that a
provision of holistic information, of an enabling environment,
of caring teachers, all this was helpful. It helped prepare the
child see things for himself. But what if these provisions were
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withdrawn? Outside the school, would the child have the

strength to be unmoved by the widespread social disturbance?
Would he not be pressured by the behaviour of the dominant
elite whose way of life is different? So, we asked ourselves, is
there something we could see, and show the child, something
unshakeable, which would be the basis for our understanding,
from which the teacher, child and parent could derive
confidence in our way of life, in our work and behaviour?
We found such a thing, an inspiration, in Shri Nagaraj
Sarmas philosophy of Madhyastha Darshan. At the core, it
shows that existence is co-existence, and from this unfolds an
order, a natural order which is self-sustaining in the sense that
it is enriching, it is harmonious. In this orderliness, one could
sense security, the order completes one. Many Bodhshala
teachers had attended week-long workshops to study this. I
myself felt that this was that thing which was wholesome,
unshakeable; on which one could plant ones feet surely.
Nagarj-ji says, vyavastha hai - there is order in existence; it
can be seen, it can be understood, it can be shown and we set
about doing so. We took the discussions to the classroom and
found children responding to it spontaneously. Anuradha saw
that the simple truths of orderliness and relationships could be
shown to and seen by even small children in Balwadi
(Nursery) classes. She also prepared modules and took this
lesson to government school children of classes 4 to 8.
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An attempt was made by a group of sincere students of

this Darshan at Amarkantak to bring out primary level
textbooks called mulya shiksha (value education). I received
one set in the last year at Bodhshala and found it useful in
content, though intriguing in its presentation format.
Somehow, our teachers did not bite into it, but this is no
reflection on these books, they are worth seeing by every
educator.
With vyavastha as the basis, one could see, and show in
the classroom, that many traditional livelihoods and work
practices, and socio-economic systems, were to a good extent
in alignment with the natural order wherever it was not, we
need to correct it. To destroy and discard it, as is being
suggested by modernity, does not make sense. I feel many
teachers and volunteers glimpsed the fact of this, the truth of
it. Many students, too, saw it, and behaved with complete
responsibility at home, school and society. I am enthused. We
have observed visiting teachers and students from urban
schools, and it appears that they are also seeing sense in this.
Maybe our politicians can see this as well after all, many of
them claim they still have a grass-root connection. What
about the bureaucrats and technocrats? What about the
business elite? These segments are strongly conditioned by
modern education, with a blind faith in the westernized
system. They are also up to their necks in profiteering from
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this modern system. Still, we find that many amongst this

class are uncomfortable with the contradictions; maybe their
attention can be drawn towards an orderly, value-based
system. To me, this makes sense at the level of community,
and appeals to the natural acceptance of every individual.
So these are the three key points, and to the extent of my
understanding, I have enumerated the response this formed
the basis of our activities in school. The school is a part of
community. The community is for the individual. What is
good for the community, what strengthens it, what helps make
prosperous families these are the things that make the
curriculum of a school, meaning these are the things to be
studied, to be learned.
Now, the community is a part of society, a larger sociopolitical system with institutions which are also acting
according to a curriculum. Now, if that curriculum is saying
something, showing something, doing things which are
fundamentally at odds with our school curriculum, for
instance, if they are weakening and breaking down rural
communities, then what do we, the teachers, do? I think this
has been the problem for alternate schools everywhere. The
larger, forceful curriculum of society has prevailed. So what is
the right approach, what is the right thing to do?
We find that contemporary evidence, worldwide, has no

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answer. So can this question itself become a quest, i.e., can all
school activity be based upon finding out what is right living?
I feel that with the weight of importance, the question itself
becomes the driving force. I would call such an investigation
of life and the study of right living as religion. Seen this
way, the school is a religious place, not merely studying
theoretical science and theoretical philosophy, but discovering
what is right living. I think this is the core function of a
school a school without such investigation is a school
without religion, it is a lifeless thing, it is a dead school.

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II
FOOD AND HEALTH

With the study and practice of farming at school and

community, I could see that we are related to land. This is not
a choice, it is a fact. So agriculture as a human cultural
inheritance started to make sense. This shows the way to right
livelihood, and resonates with the potential of sustainability.
The important thing about sustainable living is that we
produce with great care and affection, and then joyfully
consume it ourselves. So it was natural that our agricultural
experiments extended to a community kitchen at Bodhshala
school in a way, we actually ate our learnings. Teachers,
volunteers and guests had their lunch in this kitchen. Students
by and large brought their own lunch, but those who didnt or
brought rotis but no subzi (a cooked vegetable dish) were also
welcome in the kitchen.
Our own experimental production was not sufficient; we
had to buy a large quantity from outside. Our first priority was
to buy from the neighbouring villages; the condition being
that the teachers ensured that the family had produced in
excess of its requirement, and was not selling in distress. Not
many families had an excess of rice and wheat, so we sourced
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most of our staple grain from a friends organic farm in the

plains. We also asked for and got the local millets. Mandua
began to be regularly cooked in our kitchen, and jhangora too
as and when available. This had an unexpected effect on both
parents and children. Visitors from the community would
always comment, with pleasant surprise, oh, so you eat
mandua as well! This bridged the psychological distance
between home and school. Our teachers, too, re-discovered
the joys of traditional Garhwali cooking which they
remembered from their childhood. Some of them were still
eating this at home, but joylessly, because schooling and the
modern system made the millets appear incomplete and
inferior. I realised then how detrimental schooling is to health.
The Bodhshala kitchen, being open and inclusive,
contributed greatly to making the school environment what it
was a place where the children felt at home, where there was
no psychological distance between village and school.
Modern schooling has separated these two, making the home
and traditional living as something to be despised, to get away
from; while the school offers a dream, however vague, of
something different and superior. Even behaviour-wise, the
school shows a different way of doing things; the way we
dress, sit, cook, eat, talk, play. This has been studied at SIDH
by Pawan and Anuradha for a long time. I could see and feel
the truth of it here. I could also now see what happens when
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we do not behave this way, how fertile then a school

environment can be.
One thing I wished to do but could not, regretfully, was
the way we cooked in the kitchen, where students and even
teachers did not feel at home. Our kitchen was initially built
to cater to large groups of workshop participants, so it had a
stand-up marble platform with gas stoves. Bodhshala school
came later and we inherited this kitchen. We had to cook
standing. Also, the pukka cemented floor meant that people
walked in with their shoes, the cooking was also done
wearing shoes. This was not comfortable at all. A nofootwear rule was just not possible because the cemented
floor chilled the feet. In traditional village homes, the stone
and mud walls, the mud flooring and the wooden ceilings are
sensibly, and scientifically, designed. The interiors are cool in
summers and warm in winters. The floor, kept fresh with a
regular lipai(layering ) of cow-dung, is most comforting to
the feet; it in fact invites bare feet. A teacher pointed out how
one would not even think of entering a traditional structure
with shoes, but a change in home materials has brought with it
a change in behaviour. This is beginning to happen even in the
villages.
I wished for a home-like chulla (wood-fired stove) on a
mud floored kitchen. I had even selected a design for a chulla

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which consumed thirty per cent less wood and whose exhaust
went up a chimney and around a water tank on the roof, thus
providing warm water as well. But all this was not to be to
change the way of our cooking would have involved
architectural changes and too much breaking and rebuilding.
The kitchen was also the place for a food and health
class which we had for about a year. This was a 50-minute
morning class where different groups of children came for
two to three weeks each. The teachers, too, took turns to learn
and experience from this new type of class. I left it to them to
organize their own way of implementing it, but the syllabus
was clear understanding food qualitatively, seeing the
relationship between correct food and health, study of
regional crops and fruit, survey of traditional diets, a health
history of childrens families, discussion of common illnesses
and home remedies, and other hygiene issues. Much of this
syllabus was distributed across different subject textbooks, so
this class served as a place to bring it all together, to connect
all the dots. It linked good land use to prosperity and health,
and explored the new dependence on shops and the market.
Each student group also chose to cook a few local food
preparations, and also identified something new to them that
they wanted to learn. The children had fun. I hope the teachers
did too. Their involvement was certainly deeper. I wanted the

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teachers and volunteers to take responsibility for the kitchen

as a whole. In the beginning, only a few teachers showed
interest in fully running this, so I took it upon myself to drive
this initiative. It was a long learning curve. But with
perseverance, and with relationships blossoming, everyone in
the school saw the kitchen as their own. By the third year, it
was a common sight at school to see teachers and volunteers
cooking, cleaning the kitchen or washing utensils. The
organization had an employee mainly as a cook, but now he
was part of the faculty team, involved right from farming to
production to the kitchen classes. Cooking is not an isolated
activity; it is one link in a chain between growing and eating.
The cook, who used to be almost illiterate, learned during
this period to read and write adequately, and also to maintain
kitchen notes and accounts. We often had workshops in our
lower campus and the cook would be required there. At these
times, the teachers shared the kitchen duties, and quite
happily too. Planning the meal for the next day, procuring
anything necessary, cooking and then cleaning up the kitchen
and washing the utensils they planned and did it all without
much ado. A colleague and myself, who lived on the school
premises, would be left with a spic and span kitchen in the
evening, for us to cook our evening khichdi (a common Indian
preparation of rice and lentil).

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Towards the end, the Bodhshala community was

integrated enough that I would not notice the absence of the
cook. Each and every faculty member, including volunteers
and guest faculty, has participated in the kitchen activities.
This had its uses in many ways. I still recall those faculty
meetings around a fire during cold winter evenings,
accompanied by hot pakoras and chai. I was once asked by a
visitor if all this was not an interruption for the school. I had
never thought of it this way, and so re-looked from his
viewpoint. I must share my finding that community living and
community work are not an interruption for a school; they are
essential in completing education.

THE GHARAT
Our attention was firmly drawn to food and health. We
wanted as much local food as possible. All our farming
experiments were with traditional crops and varieties. We ate
as much as possible according to a traditional diet. We also
discovered the joy of junglee subziyan, a variety of wild
leaves, root and fruit which are a good nutritional supplement,
and which were eaten in a strict seasonal time-table, tried and
tested by our forefathers. This was documented well in class.
We ground our wheat, mandua and corn in a gharat.
Gharats are pani-chakkis or water-mills. They use the natural
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power of a flowing stream to turn a grinding stone which

grinds the cereal. The water stream moves on, and one can
have another gharat just twenty feet downstream... and so on
till the stream meets a river or reaches the plains. The
Uttarakhand and Himachal mountains are dotted with these
gharats which have served the hill village communities for
hundreds of years. Men and women from the villages operate
the water-mills and do its repair and maintenance. They know
the incline and head needed to run the turbine, they know the
tree whose wood can withstand being drenched in water, and
use it to build the turbine. The child, in the course of living,
learns all this. Life and education are not separate. The gharat
is a wonderful example of self-sustaining technology in
tradition it is beautiful in its simplicity.
With the gharat, one gets excellent atta - whole wheat
flour. This is a cold-grinding process, the mill doesnt get
heated and the atta comes out cool, at room temperature. The
gharat atta is also ground to the right extent, not too fine, and
it has the whole content of the wheat including bran, the
brown, outer covering which is necessary for us as food.
People who know say that this atta is wholesome and highest
in nutrition. The heated mill atta of an electricial chakki
(flour mill) is sub-standard. It has discarded most of the bran,
and therefore looks sickly white; its rotis are also pale. Good
atta, of course, is distinctly off-white; its rotis have a healthy
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tinge of colour. We enjoyed gharat atta at the Bodhshala

kitchen, its freshness and flavour made for great rotis. We also
used the gharat to make dalia and suji (porridge grade flour
and semolina). It so happened that the family running the
gharat was unaware of dalia. But once our teachers explained
it, they worked out the right adjustments to the grinding stone
and we got some excellent dalia from whole wheat. Similarly,
we also got good whole wheat suji which made for delicious
halwa and upma. The gharat family started to make dalia for
themselves, too. Our observation was that quite a few people
some of our own teachers, many visiting teachers and most
students from village and city did not know that dalia, suji,
atta and maida are all derived from wheat, and that the output
is in that sequence of further and further grinding. So we
brought this into the curriculum, and discussed the quality of
these products. As it turned out, this was timely. Even village
markets are now inundated with industrial goods called
processed food. Industrial bread, biscuits and noodles are fast
infesting rural India, leading to large-scale indigestion and
constipation. All these factory foods are made with maida, the
last in the wheat milling output chain which is not a daily
staple food at all. This is easy to see and can be shown in the
classroom. Bereft of its bran, the whitish maida dough is a
very sticky substance and is physically and qualitatively
different from whole wheat atta dough. Our students took a
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piece of discarded pipe and applied both types of dough to its

inside, and found how difficult it was to wash off the maida
dough. It is very likely that the same could be happening
inside our intestines leading to severe health problems. As a
reinforcing message, the students also saw the craft teacher
come to the kitchen to make laie (glue paste) from maida.
When they saw this homemade glue, it struck them that this
was hardly a thing to eat, it would, in all probability, stick to
their insides making digestion difficult.
As we went through all this learning, our kitchen became
clean of refined items, which is another name for
unwholesome food. Just like refined wheat flour in the form
of maida, there is also polished rice which is rice without its
external coating of bran. This polishing process has nothing to
do with food and health, it is for commercial gain the bran so
removed is sold to oil companies. The resultant, polished rice
is whitish, while whole rice is off-white to light brown in
colour. Ironically, the white rice is sought after, just like some
people prefer the whitish rotis of refined atta; they actually
believe that this is good. In the absence of knowledge about
quality, colour is becoming the basis of choice. The market is
also merrily guiding consumers in the wrong direction.
We also found another refined product which is causing
major health problems edible oil. Apart from the rice bran oil

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which we have mentioned, other oils extracted from

cottonseed, corn and palm are also used as adulterants. In the
case of factory marketed brands, the mixed oil also undergoes
a bleaching and deodorizing treatment at very high
temperatures which changes its physical and chemical
properties this transformed substance is sold as refined oil.
A fourth refined item which we could only partly remove
from the kitchen was white sugar. From sugarcane juice, we
first get gur (jaggery), and then khand and burra the further
stages in crystallization. These have been the traditional
sweeteners in our homes. Refined white sugar is a new
industrial product of the last hundred years where the
traditional sugarcane products are bleached using detergents
and then crystallized. In terms of its effect on health, this is
the maida of sugarcane. An authoritative research study on
refined substances has been done by Dr T.L.Cleare, a
medical doctor of the British navy who has documented the
ill-effects of refined food and also criticized the business
strategy of the market in promoting its use. It is worth
reading. At Bodhshala kitchen, we kept organic jaggery and
jaggery powder (sakhar) which we used for our sweets like
halwa, kheer, etc. But for tea, sugar prevailed. I couldnt fully
shake the habit myself am working on it.
One thing that became clear from this study was that
factory food is now three times more unsafe the atta, oil and
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sugar are all refined. Both teachers and students could see
this. But yet, after school, when the children walked back
home, the market was out there, displaying its unhealthy
products, ready to tempt the young. So there is a fundamental
contradiction in the two messages reaching the student, one
from school and the other from society (the world outside).
This is not just a matter of opinion, it concerns the health of
citizens. This is also not about strength of opinions, and which
is more powerfully advertised. We put it forth to the school, to
both teachers and students; that these are two proposals (ours
and the markets), we have to find out which is correct. That
will point us towards right living. From our side, the proposal
linked all that I have written about so far: agriculture-foodhealth-relationship-community-sustainability - its one
interconnected whole, we said.

BISCUIT ECONOMICS
Why is it that a rural community which produces its own
food, good quality organic food, wish to eat industrial food
like bread, biscuits and noodles? One reason, of course, is that
it is fashionable. If it can be shown that the elite are behaving
in a certain way, the others are apt to follow - so goes the
principle of fashion. So a want is created through false
advertising (is that an oxymoron?). A second reason could be

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that this form of food is not made locally this is partially

true, but even where there is a local bakery, the branded
industrial food travels from half way across the country. And
this brings us to the third reason. It sells cheap, very cheap.
How is it that a factory in Mumbai is able to send its
biscuits all the way to a village in interior Himalayas and still
sell a 125 gm packet at 5 rupees? This five rupees is the gross
income, mind you, out of which the shop-keeper takes his
share, the distributor his share, and the transporter his share.
Then there is the advertising cost; the pay-off to the dishonest
celebrity. In the factory, there are all kinds of manufacturing
costs, including salaries to hundreds of employees, interest
cost and depreciation. Removing all of these, we can isolate
what is of prime interest to us, the cost of just the raw
material. This would be less than 1.50 rupees per 125 gm of
biscuit, or just about ten rupees a kilogram.
Just ten rupees of raw material to produce one kilogram
of industrial biscuit? How is this possible? One may say
because of volumes, but even considering that, this bears
investigation.
Now, such a costing is possible only if: a) the raw
material is some cheap, third rate alternative, which means
that the product looks like a biscuit, but is not a biscuit; or b)
the raw material, or some of it at least, is stolen, because

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stolen goods are sold cheap.

Now, the reality may be a combination of both the above
factors. With regards to point b wheat released by the
government through the Public Distribution System
(government run stores selling provisions at subsidized rates)
is meant for the really needy, but is diverted for private use.
This wheat is subsidized, i.e., paid for by society for the poor,
but it may end up at quarter rate at the gates of the biscuit
manufacturer. This may partly explain the unbelievably low
cost of raw material. Now let us explore point a, we are
interested in knowing what actually goes into an industrial
biscuit.
We made biscuits in Bodhshala school, the formula being
2:1:1 for the three main ingredients: atta, ghee (clarified
butter) and sugar. So for one kilogram of our biscuit, we used:
Whole wheat atta :

500 gm : Rs 10

Cow ghee :

250 gm : Rs 125

Organic burra :

250 gm : Rs 20
Total : Rs 155

I have put indicative prices for the atta and ghee. The atta
is from our own organic wheat and ground in a gharat. The
ghee is pure, made-in-the-village, from the milk of grazing
hill cows its priceless, but I have just given an indicative
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figure. The sweetener is burra from organic sugarcane.

If you replace cow ghee with bazaar ghee or butter, its
cost will be Rs 70-80 for 250gm. Similarly, using the cheapest
mill atta and market sugar in place of our pure ingredients, we
get:
Mill atta :

500 gm : Rs 7

Bazaar ghee/butter :

250 gm : Rs 70

Ordinary sugar :

250 gm : Rs 8
Total : Rs 85

So the raw material cost for the cheapest butter biscuit

is Rs 85/kg. This is still food; even though the ingredients are
not purely home-grown. Its like a sweet dish like laddoo
(Indian sweet), made at home with ghee and sugar from the
market. We have stepped down from desi ghee to bazaar
butter and from organic burra to white sugar, but that has been
a personal choice for self-consumption. But what if one
wished to make biscuits not for eating, but merely for selling,
and that too, to unknown people whose health was of no
concern? Well, industry did have such a desire and began to
look for a vastly cheaper substitute to ghee; never mind its
health repercussions. And so they came up with things known
as hydrogenated vegetable oils. This contains trans-fat which
has been banned after decades of ruinous effect on human

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health. The hydrogenation process uses all kinds of

questionable oils as raw material and results in a greasy
substance which is used to hide the absence of ghee or butter.
We brought a sample once, only to look at it. The
shopkeeper called it bakery ghee. It is a greasy oddly
plastic-smelling thing; I doubt if it is food. But it is cheap, and
industry can produce it at less than 40 rupees a kilogram. That
would change the equation we were working upon: with this
imitation grease in place of ghee, the cost of raw material for
one kilogram of product goes down to Rs 25. They manage to
reduce this further, we are told, by decreasing the ratio of the
bakery grease in the formula to 12.5 per cent, and increasing
the ratio of the cheapest ingredient, maida, to 67 per cent.
Also, some percentage of weight is accounted for by various
baking and colouring and preserving agents which are dirt
cheap, for the simple reason that they are derived from
inorganic dirt. Eventually, with all such industrial gimmickry,
somehow less than ten rupees of raw material is used to make
one kilogram of product (we cant call it biscuit
anymore).This is packed in eight packets, to be sold at five
rupees each! To come back to point a, we can now see how
such costing is possible: the raw material is some cheap, third
rate alternative, which means that the product looks like a
biscuit, but is not a biscuit. It may not be food at all.

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We learnt something important from this study. The best

food, biscuit or laddoos or anything else, is the one that is
made at home. It is best because we care about our health, our
ingredients are pure, and it will also be the cheapest. If a
shop-keeper in our own neighbourhood were to make the
same laddoos or biscuits we made, with the same care and
affection, and if he wanted to earn his livelihood out of it,
then certainly it would be more expensive. This is obvious
because at home we make it ourselves, there is no cost of
labour; whereas the shop-keeper is adding his labour
expenses, which is his livelihood. Similarly, if the Mumbai
businessman were to make the same quality biscuits that we
make with care for our health and with pure ingredients, and
then spend on packaging and advertising and transportation
all over India, then surely his produce would be the most
expensive one packet of 125gm would cost not five, but
fifty rupees.
If at the level of society we understand food and health
together, then food produced and consumed locally will be the
best in quality and price. You will know your food as well as
who produced it. This model encourages strong local
communities and kindles social responsibility. But when
society separates food and health, as is being done in the
modern world, people do not know what it is they are eating
and where it is coming from. And when they fall ill, they eat
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some pills without knowing who produced that and where that
is coming from. That model promotes industrial food and
social irresponsibility.
*

Understanding all this is a part of education. I feel that

seeing the togetherness of food and health also helps see the
togetherness of work and responsibility. In the absence of
such education, we have people doing types of work in their
offices which are completely irresponsible in society. During
the day they work for companies which produce and sell toxic
food, or pollute the environment, or cheat customers in
myriad ways; and after work they are at home as so-called
good folks who take care of their families. This disconnect
between work and social responsibility is actually welcomed
in the modern economy, where most of the highest educated
people are mere salesmen, and dont mind if the product they
are selling is ruining the health of the individual, community
and environment. I remember meeting a bright, young,
successful man working in Chennai for a multi-national
company which makes toffees (candy) and sells them all over
the world. After being educated at IIT and IIM, his daily
concern was how to extract fifty paisa from the pockets of
children, never mind the ill effects on their health. What a
pity.

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HOME REMEDY
At Bodhshala school, we studied and practiced the use of
home remedies. The kitchen was the place for treatment,
where we had the familiar ingredients haldi, jeera, methi,
ajwain, kalimirch, lavang, dalchini and saunf (all common
Indian spices), along with less common but medicinal spices
like pipli and sonth. My friends Ashok and Sheila from
Dehradun sent us their own home remedies kit which
contained bael churna, muleti, phitkari (alum) and home-made
amrit-dhara. We also had plants and trees within the school
premises providing live medicines, like tulsi, mora, kalighas,
timroo, amrud, akhrot, etc. Pure cow ghee and forest honey
were crucial ingredients. Additionally, we had a regular
supply of fresh cow urine (gau-mutra), whose quality and uses
I began to study.
All of these ingredients (except of course fitkari and gaumutra) were in use in daily cooking; now, we studied their
properties as medicines, both preventive and curative, and for
three years, we treated all common illnesses in the school
using these items.
When I first came to the school, the place for immediate
treatment was the office, which had a first-aid box with
some bandages and skin ointment, along with assorted pills
which even the teachers did not know about, which can be

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dangerous with allopathic chemicals. I dont now remember

their names, except for one which was worrisome, Brufen,
which should not have been there. A boy I know who was
then studying in a government sports school in Dehradun
reported that his classmate died of an overdose of Brufen. The
newspapers made a brief mention but did not pursue it. Maybe
if the boy was from an elite school, or if there was some sex
angle, then the media would have taken notice (Molested boy
takes Brufen, dies). I wonder how many schools, and rural
schools, are stocking such dangerous pills and administering
it to their children. Brufen is called a pain killer, that is a
misnomer. It hides or suppresses the pain for a while, but what
it actually kills, or attacks severely, are the stomach and
intestines. Once, one of our own girls was severely affected
by Brufen prescribed by a local doctor, and was hospitalised,
which traumatized her further.
The old medicine kit was not at all of any use to me, so I
kept it aside. The place for treatment gravitated to the kitchen
- almost all ingredients we needed as medicine were available
there. The food and health class was also held there; so it
was a natural move.
I found that most illnesses were of the digestive and
respiratory systems. Cases of indigestion and constipation
kept showing up at any time of the year, the symptoms being

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stomachache, dizziness and headache. Respiratory problems

were seasonal. Boils on the feet and legs, and insect bites,
were common during monsoon. And then there were cuts and
minor injuries. Among teachers and volunteers, there would
be a few cases of acidity, and for some guests, diarrhea or
dysentery during the initial days of their visit here.. We found
that we could treat all of these quite well in the school itself.
The problem of excretion, or not clearing the bowels
regularly, was a major cause of many ailments. Every student
who complained of stomachache, headache or dizziness was
first asked about it. The school environment was such that the
students were not embarrassed or shy in admitting that they
were suffering from constipation. They were properly advised
about the importance of excretion every morning, and were
encouraged to do so in the school whenever they felt like it,
and not to suppress it. Irregular or insufficient clearance of the
bowels, if properly dealt with in schools, can lead to longterm good health. If we, the teachers and students, can see the
digestive system at a personal level, not just as a science
chapter, then we can see and feel the connection between food
and health. Without education, merely taking pills for
stomachache and headache is making things worse.
The connection between headache and indigestion is
difficult to see, but I can vouch that in the three years at

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Bodhshala school, most cases of headache were due to

indigestion, and they were treated successfully as such.
Friends of ours who have been researching this have found,
and cured, cases of migraine after finding the source to be
severe indigestion which was ignored at the stomach level and
had reached the intestines.
I noted two cases of interest in the school. One was a
teachers child who had fainting spells and was diagnosed by
Mussoorie and Dehradun doctors as having epilepsy. The little
child was put on daily medication which was to last for at
least three years. The medicine was making the child dull and
irritable. Now this teacher mentioned one day that her childs
constipation had completely cleared after a visit out of town
maybe it was the water or the fresh cows milk he had there.
That is when I found out that the child had been suffering
from severe constipation since birth, not excreting for days at
a stretch, sometimes even a week. It so happened that soon
after this improvement, the childs overall health condition
got better and the parents took him off the medication. There
were no more fainting spells, and as I write this, the child has
been healthy for two and half years now without any
indication at all of epilepsy. The family is now alert for any
signs of constipation, and the child takes ayurvedic triphala
(herbal medicine) as and when required.

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A second case happened in school when a child in

Balwadi cried and complained of acute pain in the upper
abdomen-chest region. His parents happened to be nearby and
took him to a doctor in Mussoorie who prescribed many
medicines but there was no definite diagnosis. A similar pain
occurred again three days later in my presence and I called for
his father and asked, as is my wont, about the childs
ablutions. It turned out the child was constipated for two days.
We suggested that the child be given triphala in the nights
with lukewarm water for some time, but importantly, that the
parents see to it that their son had a proper bowel clearance
every morning. Since then, for the rest of the academic year,
the child was fine.
In both the cases which I have listed above, I observed
that the parents had not mentioned to the doctor their childs
history of constipation/ bowel movement habits. Surprisingly,
the doctors, too, had not thought it important to ascertain this
fact. I would maintain that in emergencies, one must consult a
good doctor; most schools are not capable of taking over that
responsibility. But schools should certainly be a place where
healthy living and healing methods are also practised, not just
explained.

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PRACTICAL HEALING METHODS

Our approach to treatment involved a study of traditional
Indian home remedies, study of remedial recipes and herbs
used in village homes and also a study of standard ayurvedic
formulations. Here is a list of treatments we tried and found
useful:
1. Digestive Ailments:
Indigestion: 3 - 4 drops of amrit-dhara mixed with a little
water is a potent remedy. The patient may feel like throwing
up, or may feel like clearing the bowels, and should be
encouraged to do so.
Amrit-dhara can also be made in the science class in
school. It is a fascinating 1000-year-old chemistry - three
solid herbal crystals (of ajwain, pudina and kapur-carom
seed, mint and herbal camphor) when mixed together,
spontaneously form a transparent liquid.
Acidity: A tea-spoonful of ajwain to be chewed and
(when it starts to feel hot) to gulp it down with some
lukewarm water. Useful in heartburn and temporary bouts of
acidity.
For long-term acidity problems, which may also show
itself as headache, a table-spoonful mixture of roasted and
ground jeera and dhania, to be taken after meals regularly for

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a month.
Diarrhea/Dysentery: A table-spoonful of bael churna
(dried and powdered Bengal Quince, or Wood Apple) to be
mixed with a little water into a paste and taken every two or
three hours initially, as required. Very effective.
Constipation: A tea-spoonful of triphala churna with
lukewarm water, to be taken at bed time. Can also be taken
again first thing in the morning.
Prevention of Indigestion: The use of a range of spices in
daily cooking will help a lot in keeping the digestive system
healthy. Hing, haldi, jeera, dhania, methi, ajwain, kali mirch,
lavang and dalcheeni, if used regularly will enhance digestive
fire. Peepli and sonth can also be kept and used from time to
time, they add a nice flavour, too.
A good, simple and healthy meal is khichdi of rice and
moong chilka (split whole moong dal), with a chaunk or tadka
(tempering) of hing, jeera, dhania, haldi, kalimirch and
dalcheeni. Hari mirch, onion and garlic are additional options.
The result is a tasty and wholesome meal to be had with a
spoonful of cow ghee. May also be accompanied by seasonal
salad. I do not intend this to be a recipe book, but speaking of
health invariably leads us towards right food. A regular meal
of a simple khichdi like this makes for a good digestive
system, which indicates a healthy body. If one has interest and
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cooks this meal by himself, then the fulfillment is for more

than just the body. This can be tried in the school kitchen, by
teachers and students.
Since cooking is being outsourced more and more to the
market, especially in cities, indigestion has become endemic.
There are two ayurvedic formulations which use many of the
above mentioned spices (and some more) and which are
effective as digestive churnas, to be taken just after meals. We
learnt and made these in the school itself. One is called
lavanbhaskar churna and the other is hingashtak.
2. Respiratory Ailments: It is important that the nasal
tract be clear, and for this, one needs to blow out if the nasal
contents are pulled in, it can cause sinus and a head cold. In
addition to what is mentioned below, a common and
important treatment for all respiratory conditions is hot-water
gargles with salt; if there is pain or infection in the throat, one
can also add a pinch of haldi. A second and most critical
requirement in all these cases is rest, which will assist healing.
Common cold, flu: A kada (decoction) of 10 tulsi leaves
and 5 black peppers is made by putting them in a kettle with a
glassful of water, and allowing it to boil till the content
volume reduces by half. To be sipped slowly, mixed with a
spoonful of honey, can be taken twice a day. If children find
the kada (decoction) spicy, they may be given a small piece of

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jaggery along with it. Also, a teaspoonful of sitopaladi churna,

with honey and ghee, twice a day.
Chronic cough, bronchitis: A teaspoonful of Sitopaladi
churna with honey and ghee is an excellent long-term cure.
Dry winter cough: Mungretta is a local hill remedy. It is
roasted kernel of corn, powdered, to be taken with honey.
Also effective is powdered muleti (liquorice) with honey.
Tonsilitis: Suck on muleti sticks, there will be no need
for an operation.
3. Cuts, boils, bites, etc.:
Cuts, including deep cuts: Juice squeezed out of kalighas
leaves (a local plant), mixed with haldi, to be applied to the
cut after cleansing it well with water. We have seen the most
efficient repairing of wounds using this traditional method.
Even deep and wide cuts have healed quickly using kalighas,
leaving virtually no scar. No need for stitches at all.
Boils: Wash well with gaumutra (cow urine); may also
apply some haldi over the boils after the wash. Our children
had a regular outbreak of boils in the monsoon this was an
amazing treatment from the villages which we adopted at
school. I feel we may also have contributed in reviving it in
some homes where they had recently started to go to the town
doctor.

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Insect bites: Wash and apply fitkari (alum). It contains

the effect of the bite immediately. Also apply gau-mutra.
4. Other learnings:
Toothache: Rinsing the mouth with fitkari water contains
the infection, if any. Chewing on amrud (guava) leaves is
another simple and effective remedy. Both rinsing and
clewing can be done several times a day, but should be
definitely done at bedtime so it has effect all through the
night.
Worms: Thanks to a visiting doctor, our attention was
drawn to the fact that a lot of our children had worms. The
symptoms were there, and the reason, too, could be seen
regular work on the farm soil and handling of manure, and not
maintaining complete cleanliness. Our health education
involved pointing out all this and also giving the whole school
a three-day dose of the ayurvedic krimikutar ras vati (pill)
along with diluted kumari asav. A repeat drill was done after
three months and the results, as far as we could make out
through visible symptoms and questioning of students, was
good.
Preventing water-borne infections: The local mora
plant which looks somewhat like tulsi, is an excellent
preventive antidote to water-borne infections, especially
during the pre-monsoon and early monsoon periods. We used
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this in various ways putting a few leaves in the drinking

water container, adding a few seeds or leaves to our chutney,
or even munching on a leaf. After our discussion about its
medicinal merit (of which I first heard on a Baba Ramdev
show on TV), I could see many students pluck a leaf from the
mora plants in our courtyard to chew on. For two years in the
pre-monsoon and monsoon periods, I regularly put mora seeds
and leaves in the overhead tank which held drinking water for
students. I assume that all this must have helped, for we did
not have any case of a serious water-borne illness (like
hepatitis) in school.
*

In Japanese Buddhism, the inter-relatedness of self and

the environment is shown as efo shuni, which means two,
but not two. In the kitchen class, I felt such a relationship
between food and health. Correct food implies good health in
the sense of physical well-being. Understanding and
producing ones own food, being part of a self-sustaining
community this contributes to mental well-being. In the last
hundred years or so, we have gone backward and
disconnected food and health. We have forgotten that they are
two, but not two.

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III
PRODUCTION-INTEGRATED BASIC EDUCATION
Production in the school began to happen as soon as we
introduced farming into the curriculum. Mahatma Gandhis
vision of school education, which he called Buniyadi Shiksha
or Nai Taleem, was the main inspiration, the moving force,
behind this. Two key objectives in this were: that the school
should help to build livelihood skills inherent in the local
community; and that the school itself become a place of
production so that it could be self-sufficient.
The main livelihood activity in our region has been
farming. Every village home has cows, oxen, goats and sheep,
so there is animal husbandry as well. Compared to villages of
the plains which, on an average, have upward of 500 families,
in the hilly regions of Garhwal, the villages are very smallsized a village with 50 families is considered biggish; and
we still have some villages with around ten families. So there
is no specialized crafts community, like of potters or weavers
or goldsmiths. There was just one lohar, or blacksmith, in our
cluster of about a dozen villages. Other artisan skills existed,
but were not livelihood activities, they were for self-use.
Sheep-rearing for its wool, the art of spinning and knitting;
wood-work skills in making utensils and implements; cane93

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weaving for making baskets; rope-making from the bark of

the local bheemal tree; all of these had been part of village life
for centuries, learnt and used in every home, but were now
fast fading away because of the fundamental shift in the
nations economic model from self-sufficiency to market
dependency.
In our research projects, teachers and students would
survey their villages and list the people who were still
proficient in traditional crafts. That the list was a small one,
and made up of only the elderly, tells its own story. So it was
farming, and farm products, that became the starting point for
the school production programme. At SIDH, there had earlier
been an income generation programme named Himalaya
Haat, so we used the same name.
Bodhshala schools Himalaya Haat activities began with
the twin responsibility of sourcing naturally grown, organic
wheat, rice and other ingredients for our kitchen, and of
producing farm-based products for our use as well as for sale.
The first responsibility was the primary one, i.e., it was clear
to me that our production activity was to meet our own
requirement. This meant that we had to pay attention to our
need, to identify accurately the quality and quantity of what
we needed. In doing so, we also went beyond the quality of
the substance and asked why we needed it, and that opened up

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a whole new aspect. For example, with respect to the kitchen,

we could list our requirement of cereals, pulses, spices and
vegetables; we could work out how much we needed; we also
decided that since the purpose of food was our good health, it
had to be naturally grown and free of toxins; but there still
remained the last question: why do we need a healthy body?
Of course, it is useful in our daily activities, but what are
these activities in aid of? Is a healthy body necessary only so
that it can produce or earn money for food, and that food in
turn will keep the body fit? Is this the only relationship? Or is
the body to be used for living rightly, responsibly, humanely,
and therefore for a fulfillment of the mind - which is a higher,
deeper satisfaction than of satiating hunger? In this way, our
production programme offered us some food for thought as
well.
At a fundamental level, it also nurtured our belief that the
activity of production is for ourselves, to meet our needs, and
any produce in excess of our requirement may be given or
sold. This belief subsequently got strengthened at Bodhshala
school, and was the basis of all that we produced be it
pickles or potato chips, hand-made soap or hand-made paper.
Its significance is simple, but because it is so simple, I am
afraid it may be missed by many. When people in a village
produce what they themselves need, and only sell the surplus,
there is no adulteration. There is little profiteering because
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buyer and seller are both producers and part of the same
community. In this manner, when most basic needs are met
within the community, there is also the assurance of
livelihood and prosperity for every family, and therefore no
exploitation for the sake of commerce. Such would be the
Gram Swarajya that Gandhiji spoke about, I suppose.

CHACHI-KA-NAMAK
We produced a wonderful thing called chachi ka
namak. This is a seasoning salt made with eight spices and
condiments, ususally available in every Indian kitchen.
Chachi ka namak was already being produced at SIDH as
part of an income generation programme, and it was an item
much in demand when we started to make it in school. It has
an interesting history.
The formula for this salt comes from Anuradhas family.
Her grandmothers chachi (aunt) devised the recipe and they
were using it for three generations, calling it quite aptly,
chachi ka namak. Many, many years ago, Anuradhas
mother had been part of a social movement in Almora and had
organized a womens group which would produce home-made
food products to be marketed collectively. She told me that
chachi ka namak was then introduced to the group and was a
great hit among Almoras residents. That programme had
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lasted several years. A generation later, it was Anuradhas turn

to introduce chachi ka namak at SIDH, again for a social
cause, involving members of the Mahila Dal (womens
group). They learned the recipe under Anuradhas mothers
guidance, and it became popular with friends and visitors to
SIDH. And finally, at Bodhshala school, chachi ka namak
found a place directly in school education, and was studied
and produced as part of a curriculum. Several teachers and
students started to make it in their homes, and when we had a
large quantity to deliver, some teachers even produced it in
their homes for SIDH.
Bodhshala school also conducted production-based
education workshops for students and teachers of other
schools and colleges, so chachi ka namak found its way into
homes in Delhi as well. So that is the story of this seasoning
salt it is the story of the natural flow of traditional
knowledge without the stench of modern commerce or the
arrogance of intellectual property.
*

The activities at Himalaya Haat expanded in a needbased way. We grew our own haldi which we packed for our
kitchen as well as for sale. We had some dhania and mirchi of
our own (coriander seeds and chilli), and also collected from
the village homes their surplus produce, and all these were

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dried, cleaned and packed. After beginning with pure masalas

(spice powders) and chachi ka namak, we saw that many
visitors appreciated the whole wheat atta we used for making
our rotis at the school. This atta was from organic wheat
supplied by a friend and was ground in a traditional gharat.
We started to regularly use the gharat for atta, dhalia and suji,
mainly for our own use and for a few friends in neighbouring
Mussoorie and Dehradun, who would ask for it. Other visitors
from distant places also appreciated the dalia and would take
away a packet or two, but there was no way of maintaining a
steady supply to them. This also indicated to me that if
producers and consumers were close by, they could share a
mutually beneficial and long-term relationship; this was a
pointer once again towards a small sustainable communitybased model as an alternative to modern globalised chaos.

OF LEMON AND PICKLES

A good yield of garlic and chili in our farm as well as in
the villages prompted us to make a chili-garlic pickle. After
a while, we had a good supply of forest lemon and we made
pickles out of that, too. We enjoyed the whole process.
A pickle was something all the teachers loved, so it was
our own need which had fuelled this production programme.
We learned a few recipes, we experimented and perfected
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some others, and our school kitchen was never without

pickles. We enjoyed making them, we enjoyed serving them,
we enjoyed eating them. Several teachers groups from other
schools would visit Bodhshala for workshops and these
pickles, if available for sale at that time, were always in good
demand.
We produced three types of pickles - spicy garlic, stuffed
chili, and lemon. The main ingredients in all of them were of
local produce, even the spices that went into them were of
local produce. The hills are not conducive for mustard oil
production, and so we had to select good quality oil from
Dehradun or Roorkee.
It was during this period that I saw the wonderful forest
lemon of Uttarakhand, they are about fist size, yellow, and
very juicy. This one is called nimbu. The small-sized lime is
called kagzi nimbu. There are two other citrus varieties I came
across. One is gal-gal, which is green and has a sweet skin,
but with very little juice; it is eaten more for the skin. Another
is called chakotara which is greenish yellow when ripe, with
a pinkish tinge on the inside this one is very tasty. Diverse
citrus varieties abound all over this country and yet we have
allowed ourselves to be limited to just two standardized
varieties, orange and mosambi (sweet lime) that, too, plucked
when unripe, warmed with chemicals, stored in cold boxes,

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transported over long distances and eaten well past its age. Its
a shame, really, that we are educated thus.
The three fruits I have mentioned still grow in the forests
of Garhwal; the village families get the fruits of the trees they
take care of (there is no ownership). During my last year in
school, I started to work on a plan for a nursery to propagate
selected trees of the region, but that turned out to be the last
year for Bodhshala school as well, so sadly, that remained a
plan. But those trees are still there. If anyone is interested in
multiplying those citrus species, they are still there, on the
slopes of the hills of Garhwal.

MANDUA COOKIES
While sourcing food grains for our kitchen, our attention
was drawn towards an excellent millet of the region mandua.
We spoke to the children about how and why it was part of
our traditional diet, about its quality and usefulness. This was
necessary because modern society was taking them backward,
telling them to give up a good thing acquired over centuries
and to eat maida instead. A lot of village houses were
therefore eating less and less of mandua, even though the
elder generation knew it was good. It also made for tasty rotis,
I can vouch for that. I also knew that this was happening all
over the country. Good, healthy , traditional diets based on
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natural farming were being given up because of the message

given out by the government and elite that chemically grown
wheat was better. So we tried explaining this through the
school curriculum, but I always had a feeling that this was not
enough.
Once, three of our teachers went to Hesco, an NGO in
Dehradun, to learn baking using a wood-fired oven. I was not
keen at all on bread or cakes, but our teachers also learnt to
make biscuits, or cookies, and this caught my interest because
of the possibility of using local grain. With encouragement
from Anuradha, we got a wood-fired oven built for us at
school. We started to make atta biscuits and mandua biscuits
and makka biscuits, and gradually gained expertise in using
and regulating the heat in the wood-oven. I had some friends
from Mussoorie taste these biscuits and they said it was very
good, and kept asking for more. But in the school, all
production activities were done as part of a time-table, the
main objective was to relate the biscuit-making to subjects of
daily living, like food, health, knowledge of local grains, and
self-sufficiency. A side objective was to make available
biscuits to everyone at school, and there were a hundred of us
to feed. So there was not enough for distribution or sale. We
made these biscuits about a dozen times in the whole
academic session as a skill, I think our teachers, and many
students, progressed to a level of good consistent quality.
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There are two observations and lessons:

1. I had stopped eating biscuits from the market years
ago, and had a strong opinion against them. I still say, with
even more insight now, that the market biscuits are truly
non-food and risky for health. No one who really loves his
child would give him these biscuits. But home-made cookies,
per se, as a supplementary snack food, is okay. Whether the
baking procedure and temperature removes some nutritional
value as is claimed, I cannot say. In our wood-oven, the
temperature range was lower than in the electrical oven, and
the cookies retained the flavour and quality of atta and
mandua. Of course, our ingredients were pure and homegrown, and we consumed the cookies fresh. Once, I had a
friend who had volunteered to teach at the school. He, too,
was sensitive to quality of food, and was particularly reactive
to maida biscuits of the market. During that time, we both ate
our atta-mandua cookies, about 8 to 10 each, every evening
with tea for about five days. We were alert towards its effect
on our digestion, and I can report that both of us felt no signs
of unease; in fact, they functioned well as food. So my older
observation stands amended. Market biscuits are still trash,
but home-made ones, with pure ingredients, can be good.
2. Did our experiment succeed in reviving the use of
mandua? Not as a biscuit, no. Our lessons did draw the

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attention of teachers, parents and students towards this high

quality millet and certainly they were eating mandua rotis
now in school in a more relaxed way, without feeling that it
was in any way inferior to wheat rotis. What succeeded was
the use of makki atta in laddoo; many parents told us that their
children were now making it in their homes. But biscuitmaking needed an oven and it was difficult for that idea to
spread to the villages. I did think of an innovation to the home
chulla which could accommodate a small tray to hold the
cookies so that they would be cooked while the food was
being prepared atop the chulla. I may still do that some day. In
the meantime, the revival of mandua as cookies at the village
level remains only as a possibility. For urban homes with an
oven and with someone keen on making healthy biscuits, our
experiment can be an inspiration. Try it, you will love your
home-made cookies.

POTATO CHIPS
We also made potato chips. The SIDH campus would
grow about a quintal and a half of potatoes every year; these
were organically grown, very tasty potatoes. We had much
more than we needed, and gave away a lot to our staff
families and other friends. Two teachers from Pune who came
to teach us some production work showed us a good way to

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utilise these potatoes to slice, soak and dry them as chips.

Making the chips also served another purpose. Children
are constantly being told not to eat the heavily advertised
potato wafers from the market (that parents still buy them is
also a fact). Even rural markets are flooded with processed
wafers, and at Bodhshala school, we too spoke about the
dangers of this. This danger is two-fold. One is that processed
food is unhealthy; it is the cause of serious long-term
diseases. The second danger is to the independence of our
social and economic system. As a society, do we want an
economic system based on self-sufficiency, i.e., a maximum
of food needs to be met locally, or do we want a system based
on dependency? It is amazing that when every village home in
India grows potatoes, they are tempted by potato wafer made
very, very far away, many, many months ago, by unknown
people, who work for a company in North America, which in
turn is owned by who knows, some say a few banking
families in Europe. Such a complicated system! For what?
For slicing a potato and frying it! This is a clear and present
danger, this subversion of a simple and fair socio-economic
system into a complicated and exploitative one.
One simple way of instant potato wafers at home is to
simply wash, slice and fry them. When using natural grown
home potatoes, one slices them with the skin, they taste

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delicious. The chips we made in the school, however, were for

store-and-use. Hence, we washed and sliced the potatoes,
soaked them briefly in hot water and spread them out in the
sun to dry. They could then be stored for years without any
preservative. To eat them, all you have to do is heat some
good, edible oil which is available at home and quick-deepfry the chips. Fresh, nutritionally good wafers can thus be
made easily at home itself. I feel that children and, indeed all
of us, need a ready, healthy alternative before we can say no
to processed food.
We saw a good effect of the chips exercise on visiting
groups from urban schools and colleges. Urban homes have,
unfortunately, outsourced all kitchen activity, partly to maids,
partly to restaurants, and partly to processed food companies.
They are powerless. When these students and teachers saw a
simple, self-production exercise here, many were enthused
enough to share their desire of doing this in their homes. This,
I feel, is a good, effective and harmonious way of taking back
the power we have surrendered to the market.
If you are part of a school and if your school has a
canteen or kitchen, you may encourage students to participate
in the kitchen, and make chips, cookies and laddoos for
themselves as well as for the school. As a teacher, you can
spot and devise many lessons on agriculture, biology,

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chemistry, physics and economics which are possible through

this activity. Language and mathematics can easily be
integrated into almost any project. In this way, one can
gradually, but surely approach the larger and fundamental
question of sustainability and human fulfillment, which is the
mother of all lessons.

AYURVEDIC MEDICINES
All these food products constituted one category of the
Himalaya Haat activities. A second category of items began to
emerge, again on the recognition of need, and that was
Ayurvedic medicines. At SIDH, lavan bhaskar churna, a
digestive salt, and triphala, a famed restorative and digestive,
were earlier produced as part of an income generation
programme. We re-started these activities at school. Triphala
is a combination of fruits of three trees - Harad, Baheda and
Amla. One option is to buy the dried fruits from the market
and to grind them together. For us at Bodhshala school, there
was a second and better option these three trees grow in the
forests of our region. So we integrated the triphala production
into a class 7 project. For three consecutive years, in the
beginning of winter, a batch of students with two teachers
would go on a field trip to study and collect these fruits. Our
children were already familiar with one or two or all three

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trees, depending on which ones grew in their village area. In

the study trip, they familiarised themselves with all three
trees, they estimated the tree population in the zones they
visited, and they collected the fruit.
An important element in this was the tree-climbing skill.
Not all are adept at it, especially on a tree like Baheda which
is huge, with a thick trunk, long, stout branches, and a wide
spread with the fruits hanging at the very end of those long
branches. I have gone on a study trip myself it is wonderful
to see nature offer its treasure in a pattern, a kilometer long
stretch over a hundred metres downhill holding many, many
baheda trees. They are not as thickly spread as the patterns of
oaks and devdhar trees in the higher Himalayas, but one can
see they are grouped together. Similar clusters of amla
(gooseberry) trees could be spotted in the lower, warmer part
of the forest.
Once the fruit was brought to school, the project work
continued through the activities of separating the kernel and
seed, and drying of the kernels because these constitute the
main ingredient of the medicine. In the case of Amla, it is not
easy to separate the kernel and seed, so it is first soaked in
boiling water for ten minutes and the seed squeezed out while
the fruit is still soft and hot. The fully dried fruit kernels are
ground, sieved, and mixed in even proportion to make

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Triphala. The grinding was done by hand, by pulverising it in

an imam-dasta (a deeper version of mortar and pestle). This is
a wonderful, age-old ayurvedic restorative formulation which
is beneficial when taken for long periods - months or even
years. It is a tridosha-nashak, since it balances all three
doshas (malfunctions) as recognised in the Indian medicine
system of Ayurveda. It purifies the blood of toxins, it is good
for the eyes and can even be used externally as a solution to
wash the eyes, and lastly, it improves post-digestion bowel
movement. This last benefit is the one most publicized, and
therefore recommended for those suffering from constipation.
Our research, however, showed that it is good for everyone
because most conditions of illnesses are caused by toxins aanva in ayurveda - and triphala helps greatly in removing
body toxins and balancing the system.
We used triphala in school. We gave it to children as and
when needed, and many teachers and volunteers, too, used it
regularly. We were satisfactorily self-sufficient and we took
the decision to produce about ten times as much so we could
distribute it to others in need. This second category of
Himalaya Haat - the activity of producing ayurvedic
medicines - demanded a commitment, that we would study,
learn and produce herbal medicines not just for ourselves, but
to help others and also thus to strengthen the movement
towards herbal remedies and natural healing.
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On a visit to Almora, I was introduced to a kindly lady

whose family used to make ayurvedic medicines and bhasms
at home. She gave me the formula for Sitopaladi Churna, a
treatment of great repute in Ayurveda for bronchial ailments.
The immediate reason then for my interest in this churna was
my sons health, whose respiratory system was prone since
childhood to bouts of breathlessness and who periodically
suffered from asthmatic attacks. On my return to Dehradun, I
procured the necessary ingredients and we made our first
batch of sitopaladi churna in school. The lady at Almora had
told me the right way to take this churna, with the correct
ratio of honey and ghee, so we put this instruction on the label
and also verbally advised those who used it. The churna was
effective; it brought back health in those affected by persistent
cough, throat infection, and breathlessness.
I sent a sample to the wholesale ayurveda shop at
Dehradun from where I had purchased the ingredients, and on
my next visit, the owner, who is also a vaid (physician of
Indian medicine), said the churna was good. He appreciated
the fact that we had produced this in our school, and that it
was hand-pounded (and not ground in an electrical grinder).
He then revealed to me that one of the ingredients which he
had given me, banslochan, was not the pure one, and did I

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want the pure, original stuff? I said, of course, why did you
not give it to me at first? It is rare and very expensive, he
replied, and also added that he did not know at first how
serious I was about making the medicine. So what was that
you gave me, I asked. He said the molecular formula of
banslochan had been approximated in a chemical factory and
so it was replicated and available cheap (like artificial
camphor which is made from petrochemicals). The so-called
big brands of ayurvedic medicines were all using this
chemical substitute in their sitopaladi churna, he said. Since
then, I have asked for and always used the original, which is
found inside a particular type of bamboo which is over a
hundred years old. It looks like ash. The amended sitopaladi
churna we made was excellent. It is very effective, especially
when taken with pure honey and pure ghee. In my own sons
case, I saw that it was useful and effective both at the
beginning of a bout, to prevent a bronchial attack, and also
during an attack, in which case I combined with this a kada of
tulsi and black pepper. Our ayurvedic shop owner keeps
asking for it for his personal use.
We bought ingredients from the same ayurvedic shop to
make Lavan Bhaskar Churna, a digestive salt which is
effective when taken at the end of a meal, to remedy acidity
and sluggish digestion. Since indigestion, gas, acidity, etc. are
among the most common illnesses today; our attention was
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drawn towards another ancient and proven ayurvedic

formulation, Hingashtak, a churna with eight ingredients led
by hing (asafoetida). Of course the use of all this is
meaningless if we keep eating recklessly and do not
understand the co-relation between food and health. This was
an important part of the production classes, the discussions on
what and why. With it we could explore and establish the
relation that correct food equals health. As teachers, we saw
that the curriculum in the prescribed textbooks did have many
of the topics we were talking about, so even as we discussed
and did our production activity, we were also covering some
part of the syllabus, like, for instance, the digestive system
and the respiratory system. Similarly, nutrition and quality of
food substances - carbohydrate, protein, vitamin - is in the
textbook. It is just that we studied these in our own way. In
the Balwadi, Anuradha and her team had a wonderful method
to introduce children to different types of food. They
identified food that give us energy to walk or work as chalo,
those that give us growth as badho and food that gives us a
healthy glow as chamko. Instead of the English names
which are phonetically meaningless - carbohydrate, protein,
vitamin - this terminology at once showed by its word-root
what the quality of the food is, i.e., what it does to the body. I
wondered why they had left out oil (ghee), which is a fourth
and significant quality of food; perhaps this is the danger
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when we start with a foreign system and try to translate, then

we inherit its faults and limitations. However, the chalo,
badho, chamko idea was so neat that I suggested that we use it
in the higher classes as well, and with success; most students
were otherwise just memorising the protein word without a
clue as to what it is, what is its relationship to us. The
textbooks also had topics on local grains and the diversity of
food in Uttarakhand, so this part of the syllabus was covered
when our teachers related health to regional agriculture. This
was a detailed and useful study for us because our children
came from farming families and had quite a bit of knowledge
and practical skill in growing the local grains and lentils. The
class worked out what a healthy diet would be in various
seasons and saw the usefulness of traditional recipes and
festival food.

SENSE STUDY
It was during this time that Pawan showed me an essay
on education by Sri Aurobindo, written way back in 1921.
Apart from an insightful observation on the state of so-called
modern education, Sri Aurobindo goes on to show how
children can be methodically introduced to sensory
observations. A heightened awareness of the senses can help
sharpen the mind and prepare it for further development, he

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says. I was inspired enough to suggest to my teachers a few

experiments at Himalaya Haat involving herbs and seeds. The
ingredients were not only identified by the eye, but the class
tested their ability to identify them through taste, smell, and
by touch, with their eyes closed. This can open the door to
minute sensitivity and familiarise the self with the full
capacity of the sense organs. One then realised how dull the
mind, or the receiver of senses, had been in the normal course
of the day. Even the eye, which we are excessively dependent
upon, is underutilised and we receive its input in a dull, semiconscious sort of way.
I practised this sensitivity test myself, and experienced in
the process three stages. The first is alertness about each sense
organ and its sense object. In the sense of touch, for example,
one could sense, distinctly, variations in texture, gradations of
roughness and smoothness, in otherwise identical looking
things. One could make a clear distinction between two very
finely woven pieces of cloth. Through the sense of taste, one
was alive to different types of sweetness, even minute
differences in sweetness. Through the eyes, one could look
out and see that, yes, leaves are green, but then there are so
many greens. So in stage one, there was a heightened sensory
experience of the particular sense that one concentrated upon.
One could then compare, differentiate, distinguish one from
the other. Since the concentration is on a particular object,
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there is little awareness of things around.

I tried to see if there could be a wider, but still intense,
sensory awareness of one sense system. Rather than
concentrate on the cloth at hand, I tried to see the entire gamut
of the sense of touch the fineness of the cloth in the palm of
one hand, the other hand rested on the cool, smooth table top,
the feel of the cement floor under the feet, the rub of the kurta
sleeve on the wrist, the slight chill of the westerly breeze...
this can be done for sight, sound, smell and taste as well.
When initially I attempted this while eating, it was interesting
to see a whole range of taste in a mouthful of roti, sabzi and
dal. A range of individual tastes could be seen, felt. But I
barely listened to the conversation at the table. So in this
second stage of sense-experiment, there was a wider
awareness without the pull of a particular object and without
the activity of comparison, but the exercise, done consciously,
was limited to one sensory area.
At the level of the school, we did not make much
headway in these experiments, only a few teachers tried it,
randomly, a few times, but I personally am touched by it. I
feel something happens to the way one sees, and this can be
done so easily, in every school, by both teacher and child.
I do not know if it is because the senses were getting
finely tuned and trained, but there has been another level of

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sensory observation which I may call the third stage. Here,

not just one, but all the senses are alert, together, and it is not
with any conscious intent. So one is struck by the moving
rainclouds, rich in their shades of gray and white; the air filled
with the smell of the earth; the tall bamboo trees moving,
bending in the wind; a group of lively children scampering
quickly across the terrace into the prayer hall. One can see,
feel, hear, smell all this at once; it happens. Did the practise of
the first two stages have anything to do with the happening of
third? Maybe, or maybe not! Perhaps this is just the beauty of
nature, the beauty of Uttarakhand, the beauty of Bodhshala
school.

APRICOT OIL AND CREAM

There is a third category of products that the Himalaya
Haat group studied and made, which was mainly inspired by
the locally available apricot oil. At SIDH, the oil, extracted
from the seed of the apricot fruit, used to be procured for
distribution to our friends. It is a good winter oil, and also
useful in massage. Once oil is extracted, the left-over kernel,
called khali in Hindi, can be used to make a body scrub,
which is also a useful product. We made the apricot scrub in
school. The apricot khali was dried and ground into a granular
form, not too fine, with a slight roughness to it. To this was

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added a powdered mixture of dried orange peel and dried rose

petals, along with a pinch of haldi. The apricot scrub can be
used as a paste with a little apricot oil or with water. Many
friends of SIDH are long-term users of this body scrub.
While this activity was going on, a friend from
Dehradun, Sheila Gopala, learnt to make a cream from apricot
oil and bee wax. It was excellent, and to me, it was right along
my line of thinking. It was made using locally available
natural oil. It used natural bee wax, and it could be made in a
village home. Cream is a thickened form of oil, and this
natural face and body cream was a good and much needed
alternative to the market stuff made from petroleum oil and
petroleum wax (vaseline). So we had a workshop in school.
Sheila, who was even otherwise a regular visitor and
supporter of the school, taught our teachers and we learnt the
skill of cream production cleaning the wax, the oil to wax
ratio, heating it to the right temperature, the required quality
of container to withstand the hot oil, and safety measures
during production.
When the teachers had learnt it well enough to introduce
it in the production class, they made a lesson plan which also
incorporated an inquiry into what is oil, the sources of oil, the
types and qualities of oils used traditionally in our homes, the
modern advent of petroleum oil, and the wisdom or otherwise

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of bringing petroleum products in contact with the body, both

externally and internally.
The melting point and freezing point of wax, which we
call science, could be observed in this production
environment. It was interesting and noteworthy that the liquid
wax and liquid oil mixed together so completely that when the
mixture cooled down, the small percentage of solidifying wax
held the oil with it, thus forming a smooth- soft cream. We
called our product, quite simply, the natural apricot oil cream
with bee wax, and it was, and is, really good. All of us used it
regularly, many of our friends still use it, and most visitors to
the school have appreciated it and asked for more. Some of
our teachers are making it in their homes. Our children have
been taught and trained, so they can make it in the villages.
You can too, either at home or in school. There is no secret
ingredient.

SOAP, SCIENCE AND ETHICS

We also made bathing soap. Soap, like almost every other
domestic need, used to be made in every village. It was a
locally produced item and was promoted as a cottage industry
in the Sarvodaya movement. I came across a small handbook
of things which could be made at home, written by a
Sarvodaya activist Sachidanand-ji. Bathing soap caught my
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interest and so I bought the ingredients from Dehradun and

requested my friend Sheila to come and help. The science
laboratory was suited for this activity.
Initially, it was just the two of us who made the first
couple of batches of soap. We then taught it to two teachers
who made a further two batches. The students were brought in
groups only to observe it as a demonstration. It took time and
several trials for us to study all aspects of the chemistry, the
ratios and proportions, the accuracy of dilution, the ambient
temperature, effect of humidity, etc. The quality of the soap
we produced was good; it contained natural, unrefined
coconut oil and also had the natural glycerine that is released
as a by-product during the chemical reaction. It felt
comfortable on the skin, there was no dryness, in fact, the
glycerol acted as a subtle moisturiser, and since we put a little
besan (bengal gram flour) and haldi in the soap, it was
cleansing and curative as well. So much about the quality. The
appearance, the physical property, though, was not consistent.
Sometimes, it was hard, sometimes soft. Once, the soap would
not harden and there was an oily layer on top which we
poured out into a container and, much later, this turned into a
wonderful, golden, translucent glycerine soap by accident!
This is the secret of many a discovery and invention.
We learned, by and by, the chemistry of saponification,

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the SAP values of various oils, the usage of caustic soda and
potash, and the use of natural fragrances. For the school, the
achievement was that we did not have to buy any soap for two
years. There was more than enough, so that all the teachers
families used it as well. The little extra we had we distributed
to friends. I dont remember that we sold this soap, it wasnt
ready then (I say then because later, I fixed the SAP
(saponification) values and dilution ratios of the alkali for
three different oils and now it comes out consistently okay).
Soap-making can be an excellent, practical science lab
activity for schools. If further, your school makes selfsufficiency a priority, you can decide never to buy soap and to
make both toilet soaps as well as washing soap in the school
itself. I have also seen a simple and doable formula for a
home-made sanitising phenyl solution. If all this can be done,
with education for sustainability as a priority, then this
production activity can truly achieve its full educational
value.
While we did our research along with this production
activity, we also faced the question: why does the market soap
leave the skin so dry and irritable? The answer is this the
generic soap formula to know is that:
oil + alkali = soap + glycerol. This naturally produced
glycerol is excellent for the skin and is also necessary because

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the soap is otherwise very dry and abrasive. The soap

available in the market is devoid of its glycerol because it is
removed through a complicated chemical process to be sold
separately. Therefore, the market soap is very rough and dry
on the skin. Now, who does the soap company sell this
glycerol to? The moisturiser company! So these two work in
tandem to sell you, first, a bad soap, and second, a so-called
moisturiser which has the same glycerol which was removed
from the soap to make it bad. Such is the distorted business
ethic of multinational corporations; to work for which our
children are made to go to school. Also, the market soap has a
third rate oil-like substance instead of oil this may be derived
from animal fat or from petroleum, both bad for human
health. Your school soap, if you decide to make it, can be
made from pure oil selected by you. It will thus retain all the
natural glycerine, it will be soft and gentle and healthy for the
skin. By discussing all these issues relating to market soaps,
the important issue of ethics can also be directly addressed,
which unfortunately has been removed from school syllabus.

SELF MAINTENANCE
We were fortunate at SIDH to have a teacher from the
village who was a self-taught, competent, technical man. He
was actually developing as a good teacher-administrator as

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well and was given charge of one of the SIDH village primary
schools. But, seeing his technical ability and his interest, he
was given the responsibility of all electrical, plumbing and
carpentry maintenance work of the entire SIDH campus.
When the Production-Integrated Basic Education programme
started at Bodhshala school, it was this teacher who caught
my eye for starting a carpentry class. He was made available
part-time to the school and he conducted the carpentry lessons
for both boys and girls of classes 6 to 8.What did we need in
school which this production department could fulfil? Well,
the children made a cricket bat to begin with. That was all
right, but when I asked the other teachers what their needs
were, a nice co-operation began to flower. The paper-making
department needed wooden frames of various sizes with a
wire mesh, this the carpentry team designed and built. The
wire netting also had to be periodically tightened or re-fitted,
so this was being done as well. The Himalaya Haat store
needed a full-size cupboard and this was built to their
specification. The Balwadi listed its needs, which included
learning material like number rods and solids of various
shapes. So the carpentry class made many sets of number
rods, which is a useful tool to help introduce the concept of
the unit, and of numbers and counting. Seeing this, I
wondered about the use of the abacus to help the primary
children understand the decimal system, and in response, the
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carpentry class used our local bamboo to make the abacus. We

had a meeting of teachers to study the abacus and to
understand its use in communicating the decimal system. I
constantly encouraged the primary teachers to take this to the
class; I even prompted the math teachers of the senior classes
to try it with their students but in the end, like with Vedic
mathematics, while everyone agreed it was good, few used it.
We had initially named this department as carpentry,
but it evolved to become the maintenance facility of the
school. The teacher heading it was anyway our technical
maintenance person and so he, along with his students, took
care of all electrical, plumbing and repair work and they did
it very well!
There are many opportunities to learn in a live
environment, and this department flourished with every new
opportunity. Our prayer hall roof had developed multiple
leaks at the joints where the roofing sheets were bolted
together. This was just before the rains and the maintenance
team sealed all of them perfectly. Another roofing had its
fibre-glass sheets broken by langurs who would jump on them
from tree-tops to race across the roof. These were also fixed in
the maintenance class. These may seem like minor things, but
where we are situated in the distant hills, getting such help is
both difficult as well as expensive. And the more important

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thing is the self-sufficiency, which enabled us to fix things

right here, at the right time. This has so much merit, because
immediately after, we had heavy rains the entire season, the
most in forty years, and not a drop leaked into the prayer hall.
The subsequent year too saw a record rainfall, and still the
roofs held beautifully. A stitch in time saves nine.
Once, the schools outer gate - a heavy grilled iron gate collapsed and had to be re-fixed. This gate opened onto a
sloping driveway which was in a state of disrepair. We
decided to re-build this as well with a new brick-and-cement
flooring. This was a biggish task because the heavy gate
needed new steel-girded concrete pillars on either side. Our
teacher suggested we hire a professional masonry foreman,
with the rest of the team coming from the school. The work
took three full days. From our side, we had all the boys of
classes 6, 7 and 8, and all male teachers participating
according to a revised time-table. Other SIDH staff from the
lower campus also participated. A few teachers felt squeamish
about this outdoor work which was witnessed by many nearby
residents and visiting parents. They asked: what will the
parents think when they see all of us working like this
(meaning manual work; working at a desk is considered
okay). My own feeling was that, yes, they will see their
children working. What they may or may not see is that
teachers and students are working together, that the school is
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determined to be self-sufficient as far as possible, and that this

is a learning activity for mind and body we must try and
communicate this to the parents, I said. I also added that we
would invite and welcome parents to also volunteer in
constructing the gate. This last part was a sincere effort at
reviving the waning spirit of parents co-operation, a factor
which had energised the SIDH programme in its first ten
years. All our village schools were built by the village
residents, with their own hands; they then felt good about
constructing their own school. Those able-bodied men and
women are now the village elders, and their next generation
parents increasingly have a shifted mindset which is not in
favour of self-sufficiency, of doing things on ones own, of a
feeling of ownership about the school this is one of the many
critical distortions on the road to modernity.
The new gate was built. The brick-and-cement driveway
was completed. Soon after this, torrential rains led to our jalighar (a fenced field for farming) to collapse along one side.
This, too, was rectified in the school, by the school. When two
other fields needed protection from grazing goats, the
maintenance class developed a lesson plan some ageing
bamboos were selected, cut, split linearly into four sections,
and then each one cut into three-feet long fence staffs. A dried
cyprus tree was chopped and used for the heavier, loadbearing posts. Real-life fields are not perfect squares or
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rectangles, and this activity helped the children learn the

usefulness of calculating perimeters of non-regular shapes.
How much bamboo would be needed? This, too, was done
using simple, conventional mathematics, but it tested and
strengthened the visualising and logical thinking functions of
the mind. One may conclude that as a by-product of this
learning, we got a nice fence.
Around Diwali time comes the comprehensive cleansing
season, and once in three years, we undertake a complete
putai (whitewash) of the school. Our school, being situated on
half an acre of mountain terrain, has buildings spread over
four levels along the slope. Whitewashing the entire school
premises was a big programme, which was planned and
executed by the maintenance department. The whole school
participated. Every child helped in cleaning the school. Girls
and boys of classes 7 and 8, along with some teachers and
volunteers, took on the main job, preparing the paint and
employing the brush. The girls in particular revelled in this
for they had come forward to demand their participation and
were getting the opportunity for the first time to do some wall
painting. I recall that we hired one man from the village for
two days to help us in this activity, especially where some deft
painting skills were required, like the library. In all, over three
years, we had used just six or seven man-days of outside help,
a proof, I feel, of the kind of self-sufficiency education we
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were practising.

TAILORING
We also started a tailoring department. A balwadi teacher
agreed to take charge of it. Basic sewing, knitting and
embroidery was introduced to all children of classes 6 to 8.
Most boys, and some girls too, were seeing all this for the first
time. The teachers tried to make everyone adept at basic tasks
mending of personal uniforms, and mending of school
curtains, sheets and cushion covers, was done in this class.
They also kept up a supply of dusters in all classrooms for
cleaning the blackboard. After the basic session, the girls of
classes 7 and 8 had an extended exposure to tailoring,
especially the method of designing, cutting and stitching a
salwar-kameez. It was my desire then to develop, over time, a
regular batch of girls of class 7 and 8 who could, with a little
supervision, stitch not only their own uniforms but also those
of the smaller children. Maybe, I thought, we could procure
khadi cotton in bulk and use it for uniforms, to be cut and
stitched by us in the school. All this was a long-term dream,
and could not be realised; but what we did see in three years
was ten girls become adept - skilled and self-confident - in
tailoring their own salwar-kameeze. So this experiment gives
me hope.

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The tailoring department teacher was also keen on

making bags, the kind which is slung on the shoulder and
which can hold a few books. A professional tailor from
Mussoorie came and gave her and another teacher a few
lessons and helped them make the first few bags. Later, they
could do this by themselves, with the students watching,
assisting and learning. We had some good quality jute fabric
in the campus which, too, was put to good use by making
purses and pouches for mobiles.
While doing all this, the tailoring department also created
some lesson plans on what is cloth, where it comes from, how
it is made and what is its relationship to our health. These
covered the topics of production of cloth, natural and
petroleum-based fibres and on the usage of the sewing
machine. I had at that time begun learning to use the charkha,
so we had an opportunity to demonstrate to children the
production of thread from cotton. A few years ago, Pawan had
installed a handloom at SIDH for a youth education
programme. I wished it had still been there, so we could have
had a fully integrated cloth production department in school. I
still feel this is a real possibility for schools, especially in
cotton-producing regions, but since our region was not
growing cotton, and since handloom was not a traditional
craft, I did not pursue it.

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The fact was that my learning the charkha was the result
of the great inspiration of Gandhiji. I wanted to live through, a
sort of re-enactment, of what had been a historical movement
in this country. I did not need any convincing about selfsufficiency and cottage industry. The charkha, however, had
moved from being real to being a symbol, and my hunger was
not satiated by the symbol. The few months of spinning on the
charkha has contributed to me immensely, personally, but as I
deepened my study of Gandhijis swadeshi, I realised that the
response to todays social, economic, and ecological crisis has
to be real, not merely symbolic; and the real crisis of today
relates to destruction of village communities, growing food
insecurity, manipulation of land, water and food resources,
and domination on a global scale. If the power and
independence of the person spinning and weaving was taken
away then; it is the person producing food, the small village
land-owner, who is the target today. A decentralised system of
spinning and weaving in every village was destroyed at that
time; now, the more vital decentralised food production
system is being brought down. The villain then was
Manchester, today we can call it Monsanto. These are real
names but to us, they are not individual entities, they are
behaviour-symbols. The Manchester behaviour signified the
beginning of an industrially-powered colonial exploitation of
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slave nations, for private benefit. It was the harbinger of the

cruelty of political-business nexus. The Monsanto behaviour
signifies the barbaric end-result of that misadventure. The
cruelty is now global; governance and science are both
subservient to business, there is no ethics.
The minimum and adequate response is to take back
farming into our own hands; every family must grow some of
its food, not only the village family which must be
encouraged and supported to continue doing so, but the urban
family as well, who must be educated about the significance
of regaining this lost independence. In that sense, todays
charkha, I feel, is self-production of food in a sustainable way,
which we may call natural farming or rishi kheti - if Gandhiji
were here today, I feel he would approve of this. I once
mentioned this to Rev. Prof. Samdhong Rimpoche, the former
Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile, who has
great admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, and he agreed with this
assessment - that the present day charkha is rishi kheti.

RECYCLED HAND-MADE PAPER

While making a documentary film for the Department of
Science and Technology, I had visited a village in Andhra
Pradesh where a cottage industry making recycled, handmade paper was being run by the women of the village
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community. At Bodhshala school, I was keen to start such an

activity so that we could make notebooks for ourselves. I
contacted the professor at Vijaywada who was guiding the
Andhra Pradesh project, who kindly sent me the list of
machinery needed. This would cost at least about Rs 50,000,
and so I hesitated and, for the moment, shelved the plan. But
the desire was still there. By providence, a few months later, I
got a phone call from a gentleman enquiring if we were
interested in a workshop on making hand-made paper. I
thanked nature for finding this way to fulfil my wish. The
caller was from Vikasnagar, a town only 50 kilometres from
our school, and so we promptly invited him to come and teach
us the art. More importantly, when I mentioned to him my
reluctance to invest in any machinery, he supported my view
and said his method needed no machinery, and no electricity!
This is how we started making recycled, hand-made paper
from old newspapers at the school itself.
The teachers and volunteers learnt the process in the first
batch along with twenty class 8 students. At the end of the
three-day workshop, we had produced some 250 sheets of
roughly A4 size; our guest teacher took some of these sheets
and bound them into a beautiful diary and gave it to me to
use. The students began learning binding as well, and started
to make rough notebooks for themselves.

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It was good to see that we were producing something

useful. It also felt nice that we were now able to do so on our
own, that we had a skill. There was also the satisfaction that
the recycling method had helped the environment. And behind
it all, I felt a deeper fulfilment, born out of a sense of selfsufficiency, of the possibility of resolving things in the place
where we lived.
The process of making paper is not complex, it can be
done in every school, and even at home. All it needs is a tub/
container, a wooden frame with a net mesh, and a cotton cloth
cut into paper-size pieces. The process involves the following
steps:
1. Tear the old newspapers into tiny strips and put in the
tub.
2. Mix with water and knead the contents into a pulp.
This kneading by hand we did for an hour each for three days.
3. The pulp may need further breaking down. For this,
some use an electrical grinder. At home, for a small, quantity,
one can even use the kitchen mixer-grinder. What we did was
to use the stone okhal where we pound the rice with a wooden
staff for de-husking. This turned out to be a good innovation,
and the resultant pulp was satisfactory.
4. Boil the pulp-water with a handful of starch powder
(to enhance binding).
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5. Take a handful of the pulp in a tub or tray and mix

well with water. Immerse the net-mesh frame into it, remove,
and press it against a clean cotton cloth (like stamping). A thin
paper layer will be formed on the cloth.
6. Repeat this with more cloth pieces. Dry in the sun. The
paper sheets will separate from the cloth easily.
7. Shine the paper sheets on a smooth stone or marble
slab by rolling a glass bottle over it. The sheets are now ready.
You may trim or cut the edges for uniformity.
8. Bind into diaries or notebooks.
We experimented with a variety of paper. Newspapers are
the easiest to pulp. Glossy supplements and magazine paper
have a lot of chemical glue coating - this makes for better
binding strength, but takes a lot more effort to grind them into
a fine, fibrous pulp. Colour supplements also have the
problem of ink, and one has to use some sodium hydroxide to
wash away the ink; this can be very abrasive on the skin if
one is working with bare hands. One learnt a lot with every
class and with every batch of paper-making.
Students of classes 5 to 8 participated in this activity. The
classes ran for about three months a year. The class reports
sent by the teacher show that over 3,500 sheets of recycled
paper were produced in the school for self-use. About 15 per
cent of this was classified as imperfect, with torn edges, and
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was put to good use as drawing paper for smaller children.

Using 20 A4-size sheets folded at the centre and stitch-bound,
the students produced an 80-page notebook. For the cover,
they used the covers of older, discarded notebooks. For the
covering cloth, we used either jute fabric or printed cotton
cloth. The jute fabric covers turned out to be quite good. The
entire stitch-binding process was the same as used by
professionals, but our skill was still patchy. There was no
continuous presence of a binding teacher and so we practised
and learned slowly by ourselves. In all, the school produced
about a hundred notebooks. Many of these were given away
to visitors and guests who insisted on paying for it - which
brought forth the question: what should be the price of a
recycled, hand-made notebook?
Surely, we were not going to go into the clerical
accounting of cost of raw material, which was almost nothing,
and the cost of salaries, which again was nothing. If I was
hungry and plucked some fruits off a tree, would I be entitled
to a salary? Similarly, we saw the need of paper to write on,
and went ahead and produced it. Just like I may pluck a few
more fruits than my actual need, we may also produce a few
additional notebooks. I would say they were useful byproducts of school education. But the question of price
remains, which we pursued, and found something significant.
The temptation to look at the market so as to get a fix on the
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price is where the problem is created. You could get a 90page notebook for just ten rupees in the market. It is centrestapled with a soft cover not fancy, still utility-wise, it
provided 90 pages for ten rupees. Our books were of only 40
sheets, or 80 pages; yes, they were better bound with a cloth
cover, still, would the price of our notebook be under ten
rupees? Our students, and our teachers, were disappointed
with the result of this market mathematics; they all felt they
were holding something of higher worth than what the Rs 10
suggested. They felt almost cheated.
Earlier in this book, we mentioned how the government
action of subsidising and selling wheat at two rupees a
kilogram was discouraging the farmer, making his work and
produce seem unworthy and inferior. We had also explored
how a factory-made biscuit, with some trickery, is priced so
low that local biscuits, like the ones we made at school, just
cannot sell at that price. Something similar is happening with
paper and books. The notebook which I have mentioned as
available for just ten rupees is manufactured and marketed by
a large company which makes cigarettes, possibly getting the
children used to seeing its brand name and hoping they will
become smokers tomorrow. It runs a very large factory which
gets its wood from cutting trees from thousands of hectares of
land, and then pulping and processing it in a factory with
large machines and hundreds of employees. The product is
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transported over long distances and the retailer paid for

stocking and selling. But it is still profitable for the company
to sell it at ten rupees a notebook.
Obviously, the real costs are not being paid. When
fifteen-rupee wheat is subsidised and sold for Rs 2, the
remaining Rs 13 is paid by society, by the people, by us.
Similarly, the biscuit and paper manufacturers, too, are not
paying all their costs honestly. If they paid the real cost for the
forests they destroy, for the pollution they cause to land and
rivers, for the ill-health caused to their employees and to
community, and for the amount of natural resources they
guzzle as fuel, their products would be ten times higher, at
least.
If price has to be based only on the cost of inputs, like
any thoughtless accountant will tell you, then our notebook
with 80 pages ought to be priced at almost nothing because
we did not buy any input material. But if the price, which is
the reward to the producer, be based upon how good it is to
society as a whole, then it may be noted that for our books, we
cut no trees, used no electricity or diesel, and created no
pollution, whereas the factory notebook is guilty on all three
counts. Also, our production encourages self-sufficiency and
responsible use, while the factory system keeps humans as
labour and encourages irresponsible consumption. It is up to

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us to decide our economic system whether to encourage

local, small-scale production by a large number of families
who will do no damage to the environment, or to favour a few
industrial families with large-scale production and large-scale
damage to the environment. This decision will also indicate
the level of civilization of society.

PRICE AND VALUE

So we see that different systems can result in different
prices. Also, different situations can result in different prices
for example, the farmers in our village get the lowest price for
ginger after harvest, but when they go to buy ginger for
sowing, it is at its highest price. Different regions can quote
different prices for the same commodity; two shops on the
same street can put different price tags on the same product.
The reason is that when we mention a price, it is not the
product speaking for itself, it is the human being who says the
price. So price is an output of the human mind, it is a
concept, and since the human mind is whimsical, prone to
change, open to greed, and generally most inconsistent, price
therefore is always uncertain. All of us, teachers and students,
could see this. We then asked if there is something the product
can say for itself which would be consistent, and we found
that there is.
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This thing is its value, the usefulness of the product,

how it behaves with us. We could see then that the value of a
notebook is that we can write and store information in it.
Every notebook has the same value. Everyone can see this.
Similarly, a hundred grams of ginger has the same value,
whether in the sowing or harvest season. A handful of rice
would give the same nourishment to the body, yesterday and
today, here as well as there. When a thing is seen for its value,
then there is certainty. So value is something intrinsic in the
product every thing has its essence, its relationship to us,
which we can understand. It is the thing that makes things
meaningful to us.
There are also values intrinsic in a human being that
could be felt while we were studying and doing this activity:
acceptance of responsibility, co-operation, fulfilling our
relationship to the environment, self-sufficiency, enhancing
our ability and capacity, and the joy of producing with our
hands to fulfil our need. All these are human values which
were fulfilled in school while producing the product.
Price is only a concept, it has no value. Value is priceless.
The discussion in class then veered towards how we look
at things, when and where do we see value and when and
where the price? This was a useful exercise; to observe in
daily living, how we look at the things around us, our food,

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clothing, physical facilities, and also the trees and the birds
and the river. Are we aware of the value or do we see the price
of these items? The childrens replies revealed that at home, in
their village, they saw many things as per its value. They
evaluated their homes as structures providing shelter, their
food was seen for its nourishment, the utensils in the kitchen
and the agricultural tools were seen for their usefulness, the
river was seen for its usefulness, its value. Price is paid,
whereas value is realised.
We had an exercise to figure out the value of different
things, to see whether the value of a substance differed for
every human or was it the same. The entire class would arrive
at the same value for things, but when asked for its price, the
answer would vary. We also checked if the price had any
effect on value, i.e., does a higher price indicate a different
value; should a watch which is more expensive show more
than the accurate time?
*

The hand-made paper-making class involved a study of

the history of producing paper, the evolution of process, the
use of technology, the growth of paper use after the printing
press, the depleting forests and the pollution of rivers due to
paper factories. Some of this study and activity was connected
to lessons in the childrens science, social science and math

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books. Other lessons were prepared by the teachers

themselves.
The production process itself involved the study of the
property of materials, and the post-production activity of
inspection, classification and storage involved many types of
practical measurement and analysis.
I remember two key learning points emerge from this
exercise:
1. While studying the history of paper-making, we
discovered that the process we were using was almost exactly
the same as that used by the Chinese 2000 years ago. There is
a 700-year-old illustration of the process learnt from the
Chinese by the Italians, which depicts the wire-mesh frame, a
tub with pulp-water and cotton cloth to stamp it on just the
way we were doing it. The principle of paper-making is the
same even in factories. We asked in class if there were other
inventions, implements or processes which were in use after a
thousand years, and we could identify the plough (hal), the
mill (chakki), the handloom (khaddi) and the furnace (bhatti).
In the last hundred years, electricity has been used to
mechanise the movement (which was earlier moved by hand
or by animal power) but the science is the same. Observation
and understanding of natural materials and their properties,
understanding and identification of processes necessary in

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farming, food, clothing, etc., this is the science which has to

be the same; natures behaviour is definite. Based on this
knowledge, skills were developed to build the machines the
plough, the mill, the handloom, and the furnace, which have
served man for a thousand years and more.
2. We learnt that the paper-making industry is the third
highest polluting sector and is the cause of concern worldwide. Dozens of toxic chemicals are used in processing the
pulp, large quantities of which are drained into the river or
dumped underground into the water table. This industry is
also a huge water waster; very large amounts of good water
are used by the paper factories, while human communities go
thirsty.
In our region, Saharanpur is the place of numerous paper
factories which dump their wastes into the Yamuna river. For
years now, I have been reading news reports about how
polluted the Ganga and Yamuna rivers are, and how thousands
of crores of rupees are being spent to clean them; yet they
remain unclean. In all this time, I have hardly seen one news
item questioning industrys gross irresponsibility, and
demanding zero pollution from them. The paper industry, in
particular, is a double villain because apart from creating
pollution at the output end, it is also destroying forest at the
input end. Our children were shocked to learn all this, and

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said that these polluting industries ought to be shut down.

What will we do for paper, asked a teacher. We will find a
way, they replied, with the new-found confidence of having
made their own notebook. It would be tempting to dismiss
this as innocent bravado, but the important point is that these
children were willing to face a truth which adult society has
been hiding from.

MADE IN, MADE BY, BODHSHALA

At Bodhshala school, these were the four main
departments in the Production Integrated Basic Education
programme Himalaya Haat, Carpentry and Maintenance,
Tailoring, and Paper-making. We tried to instil the essence of
this, the essence of self-production, in all that we did. When
the sale of our products demanded carry-bags, the craft
teacher incorporated this into her activity, and the school
regularly made bags from old newspapers. We also made
envelopes from used A4 paper which was printed on one side.
As vacation homework assignments, students made brooms of
traditional design from local plant material, the kind they used
in their houses, and these were the brooms used in school.
The essence of this also implied that for things we cannot
produce ourselves, we procure our needs locally. This meant a
good relationship with the village community. We exchanged
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seeds with them regularly; on a few occasions, we paid for

and bought local rope made in the village from the bark of the
bheemal tree; and we mended our farming tools at the local
blacksmith.
I think another meaningful test, or rather, the evidence of
this, was in how I discovered things without my prior
planning, things which had the fragrance of this essence. The
sports teacher started to string badminton rackets in school
(which used to be given out), the carpentry teacher many
times found old wood which could be recycled, he also made
wood polish in the school itself (which used to be bought), the
craft teacher made her own gum (maida laie) in the kitchen
(our stationery purchase was minimal during this period), and
we made our own laddoos during Independence Day and
Gandhi Jayanti (otherwise, it had to be outsourced). The value
of all this is like the value of breathing, no accountant can
grasp it. But there was one instance which had a gross,
monetary manifestation as well. When I had just joined
school, I saw that the Annual Day celebrations involved hiring
the services of a tent house maker for twenty thousand
rupees from Mussoorie. I remember Pawan expressing shock
at the mercenary Mussoorie shop-keeper. The following year,
I shared my concern with the teachers and we looked for an
alternative. The teacher-in-charge brought to me an
alternative, a shop-keeper from the village who could do it for
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eight thousand and five hundred rupees a saving of eleven

thousand and five hundred rupees! And in the third year, for
our annual utpadan mela, the saving was a full twenty
thousand rupees, for we did not spend a paisa! The schools
tailoring department stitched together sheets and repaired old,
discarded tent material, and the maintenance department
planned and erected the tent-house. This happened as a
matter of course, without any accounting objective in mind.
Self-sufficiency is indeed a good means to a good end.
What did we produce, cumulatively, over the three years
of experimentation in school? The first year was mostly
preparation and planning for our own kitchen, the second and
third years gave us some actual produce, which we consumed,
gifted and sold. All this has been recorded. Another good
thing that came out of this production programme in school
was that the teachers and volunteers got an exposure to
record-keeping. They maintained stock registers and cost of
input raw material. They recorded all production figures and
details of finished products and packaging. Then they also
noted details of movement of all finished products. At SIDHBodhshala there were three ways a product could move: selfconsumption, as gifts, and sale.
All this was documented, and I supervised and checked
this activity myself, for I was keen that there be a correct

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system for school production. This was important work; yes,

it was fun, but it was not aimless or reckless, many of our
needs were actually being fulfilled, and I also wished that this
activity would eventually earn some money for the school.
Whenever there were visitors to the school, or when we had
our annual utpadan mela, the sale of products happened in the
school itself, and so the teachers maintained a cash book,
receipts were issued, the cash was recorded and then
deposited with me. All this was new to the teachers. The same
teachers were also collecting fees of their respective classes
and maintaining those records too, for we had no separate
accounting clerk. I feel that this entire practice has surely
helped us in seeing the importance of adhering to a system, of
record-keeping and documentation, and in handling money
and keeping track of money matters. A volunteer who was
adept at machine computing also helped in feeding all records
in an excel programme sheet, with proper formulas; and our
carpentry teacher learnt to use the computer quite well to feed
and update records.
The following table shows the cumulative production
statistics in rupee terms for the years 2010-11 and 2011-12:
Total Produced Self-consumption
2010-11 :

( table to be added)

2011-12 :

( table to be added)
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Sale Rs

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Right from the beginning, we organised the production

activity into the time-table itself. I tried a 50-minute first
period for the first three or four months, but later we settled
down to a 90-minute session towards the end of school time,
i.e., the last two periods from 1.30 to 3pm. In the mountains
the weather was hot only for a month in May (we were closed
in June) and comfortable at other times. Between December
and March, it was so cold everyone wanted some outdoor
work, in the sun. Being the last two periods, it also meant that
any activity which needed more time and which could not be
interrupted could be completed by staying beyond school
hours. All in all, this schedule worked well for us for nearly
three years.
We had no special faculty for production. It was our
regular faculty of teachers and volunteers who led the
production classes. Our carpentry and maintenance teacher
was part-time because he was needed at other sites on the
campus, but he, too, was an experienced primary teacher and
would take some substitute classes. Since this was new to all
of us, we learnt even as we guided the students in production
work. Generally, there were two teachers for each production
class; the tailoring section had an extra teacher for
embroidery. Any visitor during the afternoon hours could

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witness different groups of students and faculty spread across

the school premises, busy in an assortment of activity.
Teachers and students from visiting schools would also group
themselves and team up with our various departments and get
a feel of the production-in-school process. They would also
ask questions, and this helped our teachers and students to test
their own clarity of thought and expression of what they were
doing, and why. I myself am enriched by the entire
programme.
The important challenge for us was how to integrate the
production activity into our curriculum. This is relevant
because our school was running within a system, it was
affiliated to the Uttarakhand state board; we adhered to the
state-prescribed curriculum and textbooks. So we had to find
a way to navigate through the prescribed books while also
doing our production activities, being all the while guided by
what we had accepted as our fundamental syllabus
wholesome education which will strengthen the child and
strengthen the village community.
We went through the topics in the curriculum. In the case
of a few that were found to be inappropriate we exercised our
freedom to skip; but overall, the topics by themselves were
quite alright, the words at least were okay. It was up to us to
relate these words to real things, to facts in the students living

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environment which is the village community, livelihoods,

the land and animals, the rivers and forest, the home, the
school.
At first, when the production work began, one could see
different subject topics as part of our activity. For instance,
in the Triphala project, the study of important fruit trees of the
region came under social science, the effect of those fruits
on our health came under biology, the possibility of using
the fruit as a source of income came under a local
entrepreneurship topic in social science, the measurement
of yield, the weighing of the individual fruits according to
fixed ratios and proportions, came under mathematics all
this can be seen quite easily. The problem was that presently,
the study was of parts which were broken, separated; there
was no integration of these parts to signify the whole. Such a
study is insufficient, incomplete, it may not be useful at all,
and the mental state of students and teachers in todays
schools reflects this meaninglessness. Children are bored, and
ask, quite rightly, why they ought to be learning all that is in
the textbooks, and they get no sensible answer.
So teaching in parts, that remain apart, has been a
fundamental problem. As a direct result, we are getting
disconnected from activities of daily life. The whole that
these individual subject parts must together signify are

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actually facts of daily living facts of right livelihood, facts of

agriculture, animal husbandry, architecture, of local
technology. In doing this, one can discover the subject parts,
i.e., science, mathematics, history, biology and economics,
etc., in everyday life through the plough, the handloom, the
water-mill, the dairy and the production of herbal medicines.
And if, in our schools, we study the subject parts without
seeing the whole, then schooling will obviously cut the child
from his daily life. Living then assumes a new definition: it
is what one will do after finishing school or college. So in the
name of education, the modern schooling system has created a
distance, a fifteen-year distance between life and living. This
is particularly telling in rural schools where the children
actually participate in home activities, in production activities,
and in village activities; they are already significant living
units of society they dont have to wait till they are twenty
one to start living. In this way, a severe damage is inflicted
on the rural child. With every passing year, his mind is further
and further confused with fragments of subject information
which are unrelated to his daily living and therefore
meaningless. But then, the school, society, the entire system,
tells him that he can get respect and happiness with this wordknowledge, and also that he will get nowhere if he gives
importance to the activities of his daily life. Thus is migration
engineered.
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For the urban child, the situation is different, for it is

difficult to say what the school is cutting him from. Urban
society structure is such that the family is not a cohesive
social unit, it is an individual unit taking care of its own
interests through employment; the children are not connected
at all to the economic livelihood programme of the family.
Home activities, too, are done by machines and servants,
while the child does Facebook.
While this situation is difficult, the answer, to my mind,
is still the school. It is upto the school to take responsibility,
to take on this challenge of an adverse modern, urban
situation, and to rejuvenate the child, and through him, his
family. The task, though tough, is cut out for the urban school.
First: a readiness to prepare oneself mentally and a
willingness to put sustainable living and self-sufficiency as
fundamental objectives of education. Second: to make
production activities an integral part of the curriculum. These
must actually meet some needs of the school, and help both
teacher and child to connect the academic components to
wholesome aspect of living. Production activities may be
selected and designed to suit each school, but Agriculture is
an essential some farming, processing of farm output, and
cooking (and eating); Maintenance is also an essential. I feel
it helps so much in understanding science and technology. It
equips children with handy skills to take back; to help
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maintain the home. It is sad to see todays so-called science

and engineering graduates shake and quiver when asked to
change a switch. They stare at everyday tools as if they are
seeing a foreign object.
While this approach may appear difficult for an urban
school, and we are not saying that it is not so, the real
difficulty is the first part that of preparing oneself mentally
to pursue the path of education for sustainability. The
second part - of production facilities - may not be so difficult
because many well-to-do urban schools have enough
monetary reserves. I think that this approach is possible for
every school where the core faculty is serious about its
philosophy. Please remember that ours was a small, rural
school getting an average of 80 rupees per month per student
as fees, and dependent on donations to make ends meet. So
money is not the key problem; getting teachers and parents
together to support such an education is the primary
challenge.

INTEGRATING CURRICULUM
I have digressed. This is the problem when a non-bookwriter sits down to write a book. So to continue about the
integration of curriculum into our production work, I have
mentioned that at first, we could see different subject topics as
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parts of our production activity. This was a good starting point

for us, the observation that from one whole production
activity, small parts are taken out and put in different
textbooks. The next step was to get different teachers together,
during and after the production class, so they could watch,
discuss and use the activity as the basis to introduce or
strengthen different subject learnings, especially
mathematics, about which the students complained many a
time that its relationship to daily life was obscure. The
identification of topics was done quickly, but the way it
unfolded in the production class was unique, interactive and
was quite an experience.
The production environment demands a different kind of
order. It is not the static obedience of the classroom, it is not
also the type of orderliness in chemistry laboratories where
every student stands in front of a Bunsen burner, with beaker
in one hand, flask in another, pouring from one to the other in
unison at a command from the teacher. Production work is
about doing a thing together. It is a practise in co-operation,
participating to produce a common end result. This activity is
not meaningless, like kicking a ball into a net; it leads to a
result which is useful, needed by the school, a product which
will be used by us. In a classroom, the teacher can allow the
student to make as many mistakes, and then correct at leisure.
In the production class, a mistake in measurement can lead to
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a defective product. So it is a fine balance giving the

children full opportunity, explaining and correcting errors at
the appropriate time, and keeping an eye on the time taken
and quality of the finished product. To do this, the teacher
himself needs to have a balance of discipline, alertness and
patience. By discipline, I mean what J. Krishnamurthy has
said, a readiness to learn (discipline comes from the root
disciple). With the teacher leading the way, a sense of
discipline can pervade the entire class.
Children are not machines, and neither do we expect
them to be. They will ask questions, they will not agree to all
suggestions, they will try their own methods, and they may
misunderstand instructions. The alert teacher will take in all
this, welcoming questions, being flexible and open to some
experimentation, and evaluating the level of understanding of
each child. Also required is patience, for many a teacher tends
to interfere in a hurry, being either too protective or too
impatient, and no learning happens when the teacher grabs the
childs task and does it himself. To know how much room to
allow the student both time-wise and creativity-wise; to
know precisely when to intervene; this takes a combination of
patience, alertness and discipline.
All of us teachers and volunteers went through this
learning process, and were strengthened empirically.

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It was in such an environment that we tried to bring in

subject learnings like measurement in metric units, fractions,
ratios and proportions, perimeter and area, and volume and
density. Also introduced during the production activity were
the microscope, study of monocots and dicots, the digestive
and respiratory systems, and solar and hydel energy. The
maintenance class helped introduce concepts of properties of
light, magnetism, electricity, and conduction and insulation of
materials.
There were also many topics and issues which were not
there in the textbooks, so the teachers tried and created their
own lesson plans. For example, the tailoring department made
one on understanding fabric, the Himalaya Haat class on
what is oil, the hand-made paper department on paper and
pollution, and the carpentry department made one on wood
for carpentry.
In implementing such an integrated production
programme, we had our share of shortcomings. Firstly, the
teachers had a cautious learning curve because this was
something new and I was experimenting as we went along.
We were not copying any model, though my inspiration was
Mahatma Gandhis Buniyadi Shiksha. Secondly, in
implementing this, we faced the hurdle of the deeply
entrenched subject-based system. Teachers are so subjected to

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specialization that even in class 3, 4 or 5, the English or Hindi

teacher cannot teach Mathematics, or the Mathematics and
Science teacher cannot teach his mother-tongue, Hindi. By
cannot teach, I mean the teacher does not know the basics of
a class 4 subject, does not have the confidence to take a
primary class even though he may be a graduate or postgraduate. While this proved to be a challenge, it also helped
us see the inadequacy of the present system, and all teachers
agreed that each one must be completely proficient till at least
the class 5 level. This led to after-school classes for the
teachers where they helped one another revise the basics of
language and mathematics.
There was a third challenge, and that was the complexity
of logistics. We were all together about a dozen teachers and
volunteers, and each one was attached to some production
class. So it was difficult for a science teacher to be present in,
say, the Himalaya Haat class if he was busy with his own
activity. At such times, the subject (say ratios) was taught in
the classroom, but the teacher would talk about the production
work and link it to the subject learning. In any case, the nature
of live, production work is such that a subject topic is
discussed and demonstrated, but its study is complete only
when reiterated in the classroom. Our production integrated
approach, therefore, went about in a spontaneous manner with
a lot of flexibility. It was far from perfect, but it had a
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wholesome flavour, it was empirical, it was useful.

*

Relate learning to daily living, was a mantra I chanted

for three years, not as a strategy, but because this is the
reality; learning implies practising to live correctly. School
learning should enable the child to live productively in his
own community; it should ennoble him to live ethically in
society. Some of our visitors, I feel, saw my conviction as an
obsession, and I dont fault them; our miserable modern
schooling has produced a verbal education which does not
touch real relationships, real livelihood, real science, and real
wisdom. This verbal education is superficial, hollow. It is like
a defective instrument which produces noise. The more of
such schooling is only resulting in more noise, the evidence of
which is seen in seminars, on television, in parliament. And
also in classrooms! So many teachers work so hard in trying
to explain the quality and behaviour of things; much of this
explanation is from memory, it is a replay of conclusions with
a veneer of logic. Such a verbal approach fails to touch the
learning pulse of the child. When it is raining, the teacher can
show and make a rain-gauge in class and go out measure the
rainfall. There is real learning in this. Instead, the teacher
introduces the rain-gauge verbally, explains the concept of
the measuring cylinder, writes out a formula on the black

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board, and thats that it may not even be rainfall season. If

we start to observe, we will find that most of us, educated
people, are like this; we explain problems, and we explain
solutions. Life demands a real response, but when our
education makes us incapable, then we offer only verbal
analysis and verbal solutions, and this insulates us from real
living.
*

There is a door. As it swings shut, it makes a screeching

noise.
Many people have sat outside this door; teachers,
scholars, philosophers, scientists. Their knowledge is vast and
varied; they know about existence, about society, about
human beings, about science and material things. They are
highly educated and concerned people, and so they sit outside
this door and discuss ways to solve the problems of the world.
The door, as its swings shut, makes a screeching noise.

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IV
PROJECTS
At SIDH, Pawan and Anuradha had for a long time been
challenging the rationale of a centrally-devised curriculum.
Such an urban pill, taken a long distance away in rural India,
was causing much damage, they felt. They had, therefore,
begun a programme of learning from the local environment.
Teachers at SIDH were already being attuned to this; they
were being encouraged to observe the local environment
carefully, and to guide the students to do the same. This was
in perfect resonance with my education for sustainability
approach; in fact, the production experiment was a natural
extension of learning from the local environment, one may
call it, living in the local environment. The way this
unfolded, one may term it projects.
I use the word project with some hesitation, because we
have seen, during workshops with teachers, that there are
many meanings and interpretations of project work. For me,
project was something projected by the light of our
philosophy of education for sustainability. This philosophy
projected the village eco-system of which we were a part, and
the school activity acted like a screen to capture this
projection, to study, to see, to understand the village, and to
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understand the world through the village.

In our contemporary, centralised syllabus, we give
fragments of information about the world, and the assumption
is that one can then also understand the village. That this is
not happening, and that it cannot happen, is clear now to
many educators. This is a fundamental axiom, and I attest to
its truthfulness; that by understanding ourselves, our
surroundings, our livelihood, our society, one can understand
the world; indeed, this may be the only way, the way that
modern schooling has missed altogether.
In todays schooling, we are trying to cover a vast area, a
bit about many civilizations, a bit about different histories and
different geographies, a bit about agriculture, a bit about
economics, and a bit about technology. By casting the net
wide, we are trying to catch a lot of knowledge. Is that
happening? Is knowledge like fish in the ocean? Or is
knowledge the ocean itself, which is both inside as well as
outside the fish, which is within the net, but which cannot be
caught in it? This is not an idle metaphor, this is mentioned in
our religious texts, we have to understand that of which we
are a part. By understanding the ocean, by seeing the way it
functions, we may understand all the fish in it. The problem
with the other approach, that of netting all the fish is not that
it is a slow or incomplete approach, it is quite simply the

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wrong approach the sum of all the fish does not equal the
ocean.
Here are some project experiences of Bodhshala school:

RAINFALL MEASUREMENT
For two monsoon seasons, 2010 and 2011, the school
collected rainfall data for the months July, August, and
September. The class 8 students, guided by their mathematics
and science teacher, undertook this project.
In my practise and research of agriculture, I would meet
expert and industrious farmers every village has a few of
them. I saw that their knowledge was not static knowledge,
they continuously observed, they continuously practised, their
knowledge was continuously tested. This gave them an inner
strength and confidence, which externally is seen as expertise.
They observed nature closely; they observed the soil and
humus, the sky and the movement of the moon, the wind and
the clouds, and, of course, the rainfall and snowfall. They
discerned patterns from these observations patterns over a
season, longer-range patterns which they saw over their
lifetime, and these they tested with the very-long-range
patterns of centuries available as village tradition. This is
what made them good farmers, expert farmers. Their numbers
are dwindling, but I was fortunate to have met and learnt from
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some of them. I therefore wanted the school to continue rather

than discontinue this practise of excellence, the kind of
continuous observation which was related to their daily
economic activity of farming. Hence, the rainfall
measurement project.
There was a discussion in class about all this, and the
students considered this to be a useful thing to do, to find out
how much rain fell in our region, and they were excited to
learn how to go about doing this. And so it began, with the
very first observation being that amount of rainfall seems to
denote volume, so how come we are measuring it in units of
distance, like millimetres or inch? The teachers, too, bravely
faced all the questions, or should I say humbly, because they
were not used to this kind of learning, and would often have
to face the fact, in front of the students, that they did not
know. However gentle and friendly my interventions, the
teacher would have to face being a student again, in front of
the class. That this could happen to the extent it did was, I
think, because of the completely experimental profile of the
school, and the fact that we lived together as a small
community or family, sharing and fulfilling a larger, human
relationship.
We made our own rain-gauges using old plastic bottles,
but only as practise. I wanted our recordings to be accurate,

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and for that, we used two proper metal body rain receivers
with a funnelled top, which had been lying in the science lab
for some years. At about the same time, the US embassy in
Delhi had a workshop for science teachers of rural schools on
the subject of rainfall measurement and soil analysis. Our
science teacher attended and returned with a gift of a raingauge, and so we had three rain-gauges which were used by
three groups of students of class 8 to record rainfall data.
The students recorded the information daily at 9.00 am,
soon after the morning assembly. Since I lived in a room on
the school premises, I volunteered to record the rainfall on
Sundays and holidays. The two school rain-gauges were good
collecting devises, and we measured the height of the water
level by the simple method of immersing a stick along its
inside edge till it touched the bottom, and then pulling it out
and measuring the length till the (wet) watermark. This was
reasonably accurate (the error margin increased only when it
rained very little). The third rain-gauge which was gifted to us
came with a measuring cylinder, and initially, I found that
even our teachers could not understand its calibration. With
some guidance, they figured out the ratio of height to
diameter for a fixed volume in cylinders, so some of the
mathematics they had learnt actually came handy. In doing
this exercise, they also discovered that the measuring cylinder
was itself wrongly calibrated! This came to light because the
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three groups of students would keep their own readings, and

while the first two sets of readings using the dip-stick method
were similar, the U.S. embassy-gifted rain-gauge readings,
which used the measuring cylinder, were always different.
Now our teacher had learned the mathematics and method of
calibration, and so the records were corrected. But in this
entire process, we made another important discovery about
our own assumptions. Both teacher and students had assumed
at first that our two rain-gauges using the dip-stick method
were wrong, and that the calibrated cylinder was right such
is the blind faith about instruments in this modern, scientific
age.
I felt then how important it was for school education to
break this superstition about instruments, and to develop a
confidence in the child to observe and arrive at his own
evaluation. After all, instruments, however complex, have
been created by the human mind, and will always be
subservient to it. The human mind can use the instrument, but
should always be aware not to be trapped by it. Like with
thermometers, for instance, it would always be better to have
ones own evaluation of the fever as a reference, and then to
use the instrument reading in comparison with that reference.
A skilled human observation is qualitative and obviously far
superior to a one-dimensional mechanical instrument. Just
popping a pill based on a reading would not be advisable at
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all. This is even truer for electronic, digital instruments where

human perception is completely sidelined. Take digital blood
pressure meters, for instance, they are erroneous so many
times that they can actually give high blood pressure to a
person with their wrong readings! In the name of
convenience, this increased dependence and blind faith in
instruments is actually an undoing of human ability, it stifles
human potential. Simple mechanical devises which demand
our awareness and even skill during measurement are, in my
view, well suited and appropriate for society than electronic
instruments which only display a reading and which do not
offer us a clue whether it is right or wrong. For weighing, for
example, I would always recommend that we use a
mechanical weights based system rather than an electronic
one, which leaves the person un-alert, uninvolved and even
helpless if the reading should start flickering or shut down.
This dependence on just reading a measurement is an
example of dumbing down, as those in the west would call it
they should know, for I am told that all activities in northern
America have been reduced to clicking like or dislike
repeatedly, and that this ultimate in dumbing down is now
being exported all over the world. Is education related to all of
this? The rot is everywhere, the west and the urbanizing east,
but is education, or the absence of right education, at the core
of the issue? It may be useful to think about this.
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We had heavy rainfall in 2010, and our feeling was that it

was much more than in the previous two years, August in
particular had very heavy rains, and the newspapers said it
was a record, the largest monthly precipitation in 40 years.
The following year, 2011, too had very good rains, with more
than expected rains in September. Again, the newspapers said
this was some kind of record, they also mentioned individual
days in August and September which saw the most rains. I
mention this because I remember having checked the figures
reported in papers with our own, and they would not match,
sometimes they were close, and sometimes not, sometimes
higher, sometimes lower, so clearly there was a discrepancy.
So I went on the internet and looked for specific readings for
Kempty in Jaunpur block in Garhwal district of Uttarakhand. I
found none. The Indian meteorological department provides
averages for a district, but this does not make sense. A district
is too large an area, with a lot of variation in precipitation.
Even within a tehsil or taluka - the administrative blocks
within a district - there can be considerable variations in
temperature and rainfall. This is especially so for hill districts
where changing topography, variations in altitude, forest
cover and presence of water streams, results in discernible
differences in weather even over a distance of 10 kilometres.
Our Tehri-Garwal district is spread over 3,640 square
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kilometres, so one can see how having just one district

average rainfall record is quite meaningless. I am not
faulting the meteorological department; it is this centralised
approach which is disorderly. A self-sufficient community,
aware of its own needs, will have its own observations, its
own data, and its own intelligence to use that data. Every
community can then offer its data to a central body which can
merely collect and display it. That could have some small use.
But to depend on an office in Delhi to take responsibility for
the entire nations weather data, usually recorded by clerical
staff who do it as a job for a salary, who have no interest in
local community concerns nor adequate knowledge of local
agriculture, this is disorder. The English set up a centralised
system to rob this country. We need to dismantle that and
encourage a de-centralised community-based system, so as to
move from dependency to self-sufficiency.
Tehri-Garhwal district has about 950 gram panchayats,
and my view is that each gram panchayat should have its own
rainfall record. And what better way to perform this very
useful community activity than by integrating it with school
education? If the secondary schools in each gram panchayat
can be encouraged and motivated to take the responsibility of
keeping weather records, that will serve the dual purpose of
observational education, as well as present an accurate local
reading which can actually be useful.
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As the rainfall readings came to a close in September, the

mathematics teacher scheduled the organization of data
topic, and so the children learned to organise data, to analyse
it, to study and plot different types of charts and graphs all
this using our live data. The science teacher had started
practical lessons on the computer, a part of his curriculum,
and he used that class to introduce the students to
spreadsheets. The kids loved to enter the rainfall data and to
use the computer software to plot various types of graphs, the
theory of which they had learned in the mathematics class.
For the social science class, we usually planned for
weather and monsoon related topics to be done during this
period, and so the children studied climate and weather, to
which the teacher added a particular study of climate in
Jaunpur, the part of Garhwal where we are located. As part of
this, the students re-visited the summer monsoon crops of the
region, of which they were already aware, but this time with a
focus on the sowing pattern of various crops vis-a-vis the
pattern of rainfall. We already had a ready reference in the
form of tradition, and the children, coming from farming
families, had a natural access to this information in their
homes.
Traditionally, crop-sowing time periods are according to
the Hindu calender months, and most farmers know this and

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are guided by this; for instance, mirch in baisakh. chemi

(beans) and rajma in jyestha, dhania, rai, methi during the
shrardh period of pitra paksha, etc. There are even specific
tithis, or dates, like kaddu is sown on Shivrathri, garlic is
sown on the 20th day of bhadrapad, etc. The expert farmers
did not, however, go blindly by this; they respected and used
this reference, but observed carefully the prevailing weather
and soil condition, and acted accordingly. I encouraged the
teachers to themselves be aware of this qualitative
observation, and to ask the students to get information from
their homes as to when exactly each family sowed a particular
crop, whether there was any variation this year compared to
the last, and if so, why.
Along the way, we also studied and tried our hand at
making a simple barometer, which could indicate shifts in
atmospheric pressure. The children also recorded daily
variations in temperature at a fixed time; our maximumminimum thermometer did not work properly, so we could not
get those readings.
While on this learning path, the language classes of
Hindi and English encouraged the students to speak and write
clearly about what they were doing in this project, why they
were doing it, and what their learnings were. We did this for
all projects, the language classes were meant to integrate what

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the children were actually seeing, doing and learning at the

time, so the teacher was free to drop a few topics from the
official curriculum and add these live topics, about which the
students would practise to express themselves clearly, first
through articulation and then written.
I feel that such an observation-based learning from the
local environment strengthens community tradition, and keeps
the movement of knowledge alive. I would have liked a longterm experiment or project of this kind in the school, so that
we could observe and verify our traditional references; for
example, I would have liked a ten-year weather data during
Shivrathri. Present government data is not local at all, and is
useless to me. My traditional knowledge is a very local
reference, villages even twenty kilometres away could have a
different reference, and their own local story to go with that
reference, so they will have to have their own observations for
their own learning.
Such is the nature of tradition; it is alive as long as
community is alive. And when a society decides to finish its
own communities, like we are doing for the last 65 years, then
we are caught in a situation which is a kind of no-mans
land, a state of cultural isolation with the roots exposed and
dying. Then we all become individuals and outsiders, even
those amongst us who may talk about community, we are all

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outsiders craving for an inclusive community, but for which

we are not prepared. This is the tragedy of modern education it is uprooting us.

DANT MANJAN (Tooth Powder)

Once, a discussion on health with children of class 6
developed into a useful project. In the absence of the social
science teacher, I initiated a discussion on health, in
particular, oral health.
The children began to share the ways and means of
ensuring oral hygiene which they practised. They named the
plants and trees whose branches were chewed upon daily. I
found, to my surprise, that students, and even some teachers,
of villages on the western side were not aware of one tree
whose branches were used by villages on the eastern side.
Diversity is not a matter of choice, it is a fact of nature. But
the main tree used in oral health, as revealed by all students,
was timroo, which is available all over. This is a thorny tree
which grows wild in the entire region, between 2,500 and
4,500 feet altitude. The thinner branches towards the ends are
carefully selected, de-thorned and then chewed upon. The
green outer covering of the twig starts to tear and a juice rich
in astringent taste fills the mouth. A cooling and tingling
sensation follows, which is the peculiar characteristic of
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astringent; an excess of saliva is produced, and so one keeps

chewing as well as spitting out. Now astringent is an excellent
cleanser for it keeps the germs away; it is also good for
bleeding gums because of its natural micro blood-clotting
property. The after effect of a timroo datun is indeed cooling
and refreshing.
There are many other trees that the children used for their
oral health. One was gandela (sweet neem or kadi patta),
which is mildly bitter and so good for the cavities. Another
was gontai, with a distinct oily fragrance which somehow
reminded me of some anti-inflammatory oil. I would have
liked to probe this further if, in fact, this plant could be used
to extract some useful oil, but that task was left undone. A
third tree used in oral health is akhrot (walnut), its tender
leaves may be chewed for cleaning the teeth, but it is the bark
of the tree which is a popular ingredient in most traditional
tooth powders. A fourth tree is the fruit tree amrud (guava),
whose leaves are most potent in preventing tooth decay, as
well as being a very effective curative for infected and painful
cavities. The leaves can be chewed, and one may also prepare
a decoction by boiling these leaves in water and then rinse the
mouth with this decoction.
All this was not book information. This was something
the students and their families practised every day. The

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branded toothpaste was also becoming known in the village,

thanks to shopkeepers in town and advertisements on
television. It had its glamour, its attraction, but the students
till then were still largely using the natural herbal remedies
available in the local environment.
As this discussion progressed, I started to observe closely
the teeth of the students in that class. They all appeared to be
quite well set, even the gums seemed to be strong; there was
no bleeding of gums except in one child, and that too, mildly.
My attention then went towards children of other classes, and
I observed their teeth closely. Most had even, healthy teeth. I
also included my teachers into this scrutiny, most of who
belonged to the local region. I observed their teeth, which
looked clean and strong, and asked them about their oral
health habits. During that period, I was watching teeth
everywhere; in the villages, in neighbourhood town Kempty,
in visitors to the school, and also in visiting groups of
teachers and students from urban centres.
By and by, it dawned upon me that my school was full of
healthy teeth (except probably mine). The Garhwali children
and teachers all had a beautiful set of teeth and these were
usually well-kept with traditional herbal remedies. There were
very few toothache and infected cavity problems which I
encountered during those three years. I also found our village

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elders, in their seventies, eighties and even nineties, with

reasonable sound teeth these were people who had all their
lives used only the herbal datun and other home remedies. It
was only among the younger children of Kempty town that
one could discern signs of poor oral health; a common reason
accepted by all was the in-between-meal snacking, especially
on things like toffees, chocolates and biscuits, with their sugar
and starch content. This, in turn, was because of the role of
money and market; village children did not carry money, the
town kids were beginning to do so. The town is also infested
with shops, a disease which has the sanction of modern
development.
It was then that the idea first came to me about making
our own local dant manjan. I felt a ready tooth cleaning
powder would be useful and convenient. It could also benefit
those from the region who had moved away to the towns and
who had no access to trees like timroo. So we began the
process of collecting all ingredients barks, leaves, small
branches and in the case of timroo, even its seeds. These were
collected week after week, cleaned and sorted and kept out in
the sun to be dried. In the case of timroo, we had to wait a few
months for the right season so that its seeds could be
collected. After sun-drying, we powdered and stored them
separately. This was a continuous activity and it took on its
own momentum. The children formed their own sub-groups to
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procure and take care of the collected material; they would

clean, trim, peel and do all necessary procedures twice a
week, and lay the material out in the sun every morning, and
then put it back inside before they left school. This was a slow
and lengthy programme, and while all this activity was going
on, the class 6 children moved on to class 7. The once-a-week
discussion continued with the same group.
We knew that our dant manjan would be a combination
of the five types of flora we had collected timroo, gonthai,
gandela, akhrot and amrud. But I wanted to expand this to
include other known ingredients, as proven and practised all
across the country. I know as a general, traditional knowledge,
that salt is a good teeth cleanser, one can simply take some sea
salt, or salt with a drop of mustard oil, and rub ones teeth
with it it is effective. I also know that lavang (clove) is used
for cavity treatment. It has been in use in India, after a meal,
as a preventive and as a mouth freshener for probably a
millennia. I had also been told about the usefulness of fitkari
(alum) whose astringent property was potent in preventing
and curing infected cavities.
Another source of such information was the known
brands of traditional dant manjan, and so we bought a sample
unit each of Divya Dant Manjan, which I had used and know
to be effective, as well as Viccos Vajradanti Manjan. We

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studied the labels for a list of ingredients. From these, we

found that harad is used in small quantities, some manjans use
trifala itself, of which harad is a part. Kali mirch is another
useful ingredient, again in a small quantity, being a spice, it
keeps germs away.
Every manjan has one primary ingredient. It is neem or
babool in the plains, but for us in the hills, it was our local
tree timroo. So our formula contained the following:
Timroo, Gandela, Gonthai, Akhrot, Amrud, Samudri
Namak, Kala Namak, Lavang, Kali Mirch, Harad, Fitkari and
pudina leaves (mint, for its mouth freshening property).
We named our manjan timroo. I worked out the
proportions on a trial basis, which was version one. We
sampled this, and after making a few adjustments in
proportions, we arrived at version two. I gave it out to a few
friends to sample; of course, our own teachers and students
also tested and tasted it repeatedly. I got a feedback to grind it
more thoroughly. Since our manjan was only hand-pounded at
school, the grinding level was insufficient, so I sent the
manjan to a friend to grind it in an electrical grinder in her
home. After that was done, she said it was okay to use. She
also used it herself over many days and said the product was
good and felt refreshing after use. I myself have used it for a
year and a half and found it to be satisfactory. It is cooling and

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refreshing after use, and was especially effective in limiting

my slight proneness to bleeding gums. The timroo powder
when used at night helped to eliminate the incidents of
bleeding gums in the morning.
That the manjan turned out to be good and effective was
not so much our achievement, this is a tried and tested thing,
and it is natures doing. But the childrens attention being
drawn towards their need of oral health, their study of nature
to understand which part of it fulfilled that need, their
working with nature to produce a manjan useful for them and
others all this was indeed in tune with education for
sustainable living, and that was a source of satisfaction.
The timroo tooth powder was made just that once, and
the entire experiment took shape as a project which spanned
six months. This was the last year for Bodhshala school and
so was not made there again. But the learnings are available.
There is also an awakened possibility now of producing it in a
larger quantity and to be able to earn something in exchange,
should any teacher or any of those class 7 students desire to
take it up the formula has been tested, it is simple, it is
traditional, it is no secret.
I remember two interesting learnings from this project:
1. The astringent taste is one of the six tastes in nature
and identified by human senses. The traditional Indian science
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of ayurveda has studied this as part of its holistic research into

health, illness, food, herbs and treatment. It describes specific
qualities of astringent substances on the human body and it
provides detailed guidance on its use, and the condition in
which it is effective. Our students, however, are told in their
science textbooks that there are only four or five tastes, so the
question to me is how does a teacher handle the missing
sixth? Most teachers themselves may not be aware of this
since they too have been brought up on these same modern
text books. But what if this is pointed out, then how does a
teacher handle it? Does he simply ignore it, because he is lazy
to investigate; does he merely give the students an option,
saying, okay, here it says five and in this book it says six
tastes, and leave it at that; or does he invite the children to
actually look and see what is it in reality? In a truly alternate
school which seeks to learn from the local environment, such
opportunities for discovery will be many, and that, according
to me, is the charm for a teacher in an alternate school.
2. While studying the various herbal ingredients for use
in oral health, we observed the predominance of bitter and
astringent tastes and the presence of salt. Obviously, these had
a positive effect on keeping teeth and gums healthy. In one
instance, we also found the use of black pepper in a miniscule
amount. All ingredients of a good manjan were largely a
combination of bitter and astringent tastes, with salt being a
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required and useful additive. One noticed therefore, the

absence of sour and sweet tastes, and one can see why. Our
teeth are sensitive to things sour, and our cavities attract
germs with things sweet (sugar, cereals and their various
forms like rice, roti, candy, biscuits, chocolates, sweet items,
etc.). This logic could be seen by the children, that sweet
substances attract germs; they also experimented by keeping
small amounts of items of all six tastes out in the open and
found that sweet substances like sugar, starch, carbohydrates,
attract germs quickly. A question arose, therefore, as to why
toothpaste has a sweet taste. I asked our visiting volunteers to
research this and what they found was: sugar is used in
toothpastes to hide the dirty taste of detergent - yes,
toothpastes contain detergent - and also because a sweet taste
will attract customers, especially children. So the main
objective is to sell, to make money. For this, they have two
necessary side objectives which are: to have a superficial
effect of whiteness and to have a product that is tasty. The
superficial whiteness is achieved through the use of detergent
which actually weakens the teeth and which can cause cancer
with its abrasive alkalinity. Notice how your hands are rough
and wounded after rubbing with detergent, the same is
happening to the insides of your mouth, but the effect is
disguised with other chemicals. As for making it tasty, any
sweet deposit is actually harmful for oral health.
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This is the fundamental problem with the modern style

living which we are imitating it has no ethics.

JAUNPURI BHOJAN
We had a local-centric education. The Himalaya Haat
production classes included the study of local agriculture. The
social science class involved the study of local geography,
history, customs. We had a school kitchen where we procured
local grains whenever possible, and ate simple, local food. On
festive occasions, our teachers volunteered to prepare special
dishes as per the local custom; on such days, many students
and teachers would also bring festive food items from their
homes. In such an environment, it was natural that local
cuisine would be a subject of discussion, but what I did not
expect was that it would turn out to be a successful project
worthy of publishing.
It started with the students of class 8 making a list of
things they cooked in their homes; what was predominant in
which season, and the special items prepared on important
dates and festivals. To this, they added a further note about the
significance of many of these items, the folklore behind it,
and the health benefits of the dish, etc. all researched from
interviews with their parents and grandparents. The Himalaya
Haat teacher reported that the children had worked
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enthusiastically and produced a good study. It was about this

time that my attention was drawn to a small book called
Kumaoni Bhojan, written by Anuradhas mother at Almora.
I wondered, why not a Jaunpuri Bhojan compilation about
our local cuisine? The teachers agreed and the students started
to note down the recipes as told to them in their homes. The
Hindi language teacher, who also taught social science, joined
the project and guided the students in collating and writing
the recipes correctly. After several re-writes, they categorised
the recipes as pakwan, dal-bhaath, sabzi, chutney, mithai and
an unusual category called jungalee subziyaan. We have
cooked and tasted many of these jungalee sabziyaan derived
from wild leaves, shoots and roots. These arent sown, grown
or cultivated, and the real skill is not the cooking, but the
recognition of the flora, knowing where it may be found, and
when. No book can point out these plants, it is the parent who
points it out to the child, and I feel this is an important point
which modern education has missed; that real education is
inseparable from the movement of tradition.
Our project developed over four months, and during this
time, we were tempted to try out many of the recipes which
were being written, and we enjoyed doing so. The interest and
enthusiasm spilled over to other classes too, who insisted on
preparing and then feeding us some delicacy of their
selection. They planned it with minimal guidance, they used
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whatever ingredients were available in our kitchen, bringing

the rest from their homes, and along with their teacher they
fixed a slot in the time-table during which to do the cooking.
When the recipes were fully written, I felt it may be
useful to publish it. Pawan, as always, was supportive. One of
our teachers typed out the Hindi manuscript. I asked my
friend Ashok for help in designing the book, and he readily
agreed. And so our little book Jaunpuri Bhojan got
published, an unlikely result of a study project by students of
class 8.
Compiling the recipes was not an objective in itself. Our
study of agriculture, of food, nutrition and health, the
properties of grains and lentils and ghee and gud, of the
techniques perfected in preparing wholesome food, and
practise in making the same these were our learnings. The
book is not really authored by us. Claiming that would be
ridiculous. We have only recorded with gratitude what we
have received from the movement of human tradition. Our
collection of recipes is actually a testimony to the beauty of
this movement, and to the inherent strength of traditional
knowledge systems. This is naturally a part of community; in
a way, it defines community itself. This movement of tradition
is alive as long as community is alive, as long as there is a
vibrant gram vyavastha (village eco-system). When we break

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down our communities, as we are doing now in the name of

development, we are putting a live thing to death. It is
violence, of which we, especially the urban educated elite, are
a part whether willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or
unknowingly, directly or circumstantially, brazenly or
hypocritically; our actions have brought us at the crossroads
of an immensely significant civilizational question.

ANIMAL CENSUS
By giving it the name project, one hopes that the reader
will not think of them as something special, a special
methodology or technique. Quite simply, project work
implies direct learning through observation and participation;
it is a study of activities and relationships in daily living. A
child in Garhwal cannot do project work on polar bears or the
giant panda. Downloading pictures and sticking them on chart
paper is a different type of work. We are using the word
project to imply a direct learning of environment, it is not a
reading about environment.
One can observe that in most pre-primary and early
primary classes, the learning movement is naturally
observation-based. Even at Bodhshala, our Balwadi was the
most project-based, it was quite effortlessly done, and it was
most effective as well. We wanted to continue this onward,
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and the teachers would plan and implement many projects in

their daily living environment through which the students
attention was drawn towards geography, history, agriculture,
tradition, culture, science, economics, prosperity, happiness
and fulfilment.
Observation-based activities included surveys and
interviews which would give a perspective and sharpen the
skill of recognising patterns and trends, and causes and
effects. There was also the opportunity of organising and
analysing data, and to practise the mathematics and reasoning
skills needed.
If at all learning has a speed, then that speed is leisurely,
and this fact is best appreciated in project work. We had a
project on animal husbandry for which the children conducted
a census. Twelve villages were studied, and data collected on
number of cows, bulls, oxen, calves, buffaloes, he-buffaloes,
goats, sheep, mules and poultry of each family. The villages
also provided information on the number of animals they had
ten years ago. Milk output for cows and buffaloes was
recorded. Figures of sale of milk - how many families sold
milk, how much and for what price - was recorded.
Information on sale of goats and income from it was taken.
Detail of animal health, common illnesses and traditional
cures, was also noted. Animal feed and grazing habit was

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surveyed. A lot of this recording was quantitative data, but

there was an important component of qualitative questioning
with the village elders providing a view developed over long
years of watching and participating in their socio-economic
environment.
The project process took nearly three months. Data was
collected week after week. There was a weekly discussion
meeting where the emerging findings were looked at. Because
these discussions were what we may call open or nonconclusive, the children and teachers both shared what they
saw with equal vigour. In between these meetings, during the
course of the week, the math class examined the figures as
they came in and worked out a modality to organise the data;
the social science class focussed on the relationship with
animals and their role in a village ecosystem; the language
classes of Hindi and English took the empirical findings and
learnt and practised ways and means of expressing the core
content in this way, many subject faces enveloped the
project.
The trends unfolded gradually, patterns were slowly
recognised and interpreted; this was the human mind in action
at a leisurely pace. The inferences did not overshadow the
observations, there was no single answer at the end of it
which had to be memorised by all, and so there was no hasty

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end result as delivered by an excel formula. Yes, we did

organise and tabulate the data, and also created graphical
representations of the findings. But our learnings were already
in place, they were not the result of statistics.
In a similar fashion, the school learnt from other projects,
which could originate from either the regular subject class or
the production class projects like gaon ka itihaas, a study
of village history, hamare bhawan, a study of village homes
and architecture, krishi auzhar, a study of agricultural tools
and implements were all done regularly every year with a
different batch of students. I found that this kind of project
work was useful only if it was a fresh attempt every time, with
no prior record to copy from or compare with.
A significant factor in all this was that our students and
teachers lived in the very environment which the project
addressed and I felt that because of this fact, there was much
enrichment from this study which would not be so if they
were to merely take an anthropological survey as outsiders.
The children were continuously sharing the findings with
their families, bringing the gist of home talks to class, and
then taking something from the project discussion back home.
They were the surveyors as well as the surveyed.
It is one thing to find the findings. It is another to read
about these findings. One can always read an essay on

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animal husbandry. It can contain some statistics, it can state

the trends in cow, buffalo and goat population growths, and it
can give ready reasons for the same. The essay may even
become part of the social science textbook, but somehow, I
dont think that that process can bring about this learning.
I feel that the greater the distance between the analyst
and the real environment, the more meagre or the more
superficial the understanding. This is true for todays state of
economics, governance and education where the highly
educated have no contact with the real environment; they
merely analyse statistics from a distant office and then take
sweeping decisions, often with catastrophic consequences for
the nation. And if we introspect, we find this is also true for
the educated intellectuals so few of us are in touch with a
village ecosystem, or with any real producing environment,
though we may champion their cause. I feel that a truly
alternate education would first and foremost correct this basic
aberration.
*

Almoras NGO Uttarakhand Seva Nidhi has done very

good work in producing poject-based books in association
with Mirtola Ashram. These are also prescribed for study by
the state government. It is another matter that the government
schools, in our region at least, did not even touch these

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project-based books. Some schools did not know of their

existence.
I discovered these books only in my last year at
Bodhshala, and I found them well researched, focussed on the
local environment, and suitably presented to help the teacher
bring out geography, science and mathematics through
observation, action and documentation. These are the first
education books that I have seen on the Indian rural
environment which give the feeling that the authors know the
place, that they know the subject not academically, but really,
and that they care for the well-being of the local community. I
have met Lalit and Anuradha Pande of Uttarakhand Seva
Nidhi at Almora, and I commend their sincerity and
dedication in working with the state government to bring their
books to a curriculum level and in training a sizeable section
of teachers at Kumaon in implementing the project books.
I encouraged our teachers to go through these books, and
they did try and implement a few projects. I remember that
our students studied soil erosion by doing their observation
and exercises according to this project book. A study of trees,
collecting their seeds and growing them into saplings was
abandoned midway. The class 6 students studied and made
their own village map, as guided by the book, but this activity,
too, petered out. Somehow, our teachers were not biting into

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this. I asked myself why. We were after all an experimental

school doing a lot of project-based exploration ourselves. Our
teachers were encouraged to look in this direction, and they
were involved in hands-on production work, too. Of course,
our project work had no textbook; it had no pre-conceived
lesson plan. If we felt a certain need, then to fulfil that need
we did what we had to do, research, inquire, and even produce
content. This for us is project work. So can it be that starting
with a textbook or project book was the problem, can it be
that teachers today are so sick of books that another one
simply meant a further headache? I dont know, but this may
be worth exploring.

THE NO-LANGUAGE PROJECT

We use language to describe the world around us, and to
learn about it. This world outside of us is introduced to
students in school as Science, Social Science and
Mathematics. We also use language to describe the world
inside of us, our thoughts, feelings, desires, beauty, and joy.
Sadly, todays schools touch this inside world only in
passing, hence leaving it undeveloped.
I hold a critique of the way the language class happens in
schools. Whether Hindi or English, this class is an island unto
itself, with little connection to what the student is seeing,
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learning, experiencing, and understanding in his daily

environment. The language class also holds itself separate
from what the student is doing or learning in his other
subject classes.
At SIDH, there had been a consistent effort at sensitising
teachers towards seeing language and mathematics in relation
to their local environment, culture and customs. So there was
a move to revolve some of the childrens language class
activities and homework around their village life, history,
stories, songs, melas and festivals. When the production work
began in school, this was integrated with the language class both Hindi and English - so that the children learnt to speak
and write about their daily production activities.
But there was still a gap between the language class and
what the children did in other subjects. I saw that the
science, mathematics and social science teachers would not
correct spellings and grammatical mistakes in their subject
notebooks. They felt that this was the work of the language
class this was not any conscious reasoning, it was just a
deeply entrenched mindset about subjects. I have mentioned
elsewhere that we were challenging this kind of
fragmentation, and were trying to present the whole of
reality, to point out the significance of a complete system, of
which small parts were taken out and taught in science, social

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science, etc.
Another observation was that even the middle school
students were not expected to read their textbooks by
themselves; i.e., a class 8 student was not told to read a
science or social science chapter by himself. In fact, there was
no expectation that he should be able to read and understand
at least part of what the chapter was saying, even though the
student was being taught language for ten years, and despite
the fact that the student was carrying out all his daily
activities in that language. This is true for all schools. I asked
visiting teachers and students from Delhi, and they too said
that no student was expected to understand a chapter, or even
a part of it, by reading it himself. Whereas, I would suppose
that this is a key purpose of learning a language, to be able to
read science, social science or any other book and be able to
understand for oneself.
Seeing all this, the question that struck me at the time
was: why is it that, when every subject is being taught in
Hindi, when our daily lives are being lived in Hindi, why then
should we have a separate Hindi class, that too, every day?
The exploration of this question unfolded as our no language
class project.
I discussed it with our faculty before the new session
began. I said, let us do away with the daily language class, no

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more Hindi periods. Each of us, while teaching our

subject, will also be responsible for correct enunciation of
our subject content, and correct expression in both speech as
well as writing. There is both self-evaluation as well as
student evaluation in this process, I added, and that we must
raise our own language competence, and we must be clear
about words and the reality that they represent.
At first the teachers were sceptical, and they expressed
their scepticism unreservedly, using various arguments. No
other school does this, we may not be equipped for this, what
about the Hindi curriculum, etc., etc. But I kept reminding
them of the purpose which was to raise the students
capability, to make them use their language skills to be selfreliant, to be creative, to help open up their minds. And in the
process, we would enhance our competence, too. The faculty
eventually agreed, more out of regard for me, I think, than any
complete conviction. But they began to feel at ease as the year
progressed.
As a result, for classes 6 to 8, we did away with the daily
Hindi period. Rather I should say we took language out from
its prison and set if free. The subject teachers began
observing and guiding students on how they expressed what
they had understood. Students were writing small notes on
atoms and molecules, on lenses and microscope, on simple

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and compound interest, on weather and soil erosion, and any

other topic which was being discussed in class. They also
wrote about their learning experiences, what they saw and felt
while doing a lab activity, what they saw and felt while doing
a production activity their interest, excitement, boredom,
achievements, happiness and disappointments. I encouraged
teachers to also ask them to express, in speech and writing,
what they had not understood. None of these notes and
presentations was for marks or any comparative evaluation,
so the students spoke and wrote freely. The teachers also got a
useful feedback on how much the students had understood,
and the gaps in their own teaching methodology.
We had a two-hour weekly project meet on Saturdays for
each class, where language was also being attended to. To this
we added a one hour specialised language session for
grammar or any other language-related topic which the
teachers felt was needed for that group.
We added another dimension to the language project, a
continuous creative writing activity for the whole school. A
group of senior students took charge of this project under the
guidance of one teacher. They would choose a particular
writing form, say poetry, and would give a suggestion of
subjects on which to write poems. The concerned teacher
would introduce the concept of poetry briefly in the assembly

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and encourage everyone to participate and contribute their

poems to this group over the next two weeks.
The students wrote in their own time (there was no Hindi
period), and they could approach any teacher for guidance. At
the end of the first and second weeks, the output was
reviewed in each class, individually, and comments and
suggestions given for improvement. After three weeks, all of
the poems were re-written nicely in the art class and were put
up on a new school notice board set up for that purpose. The
next month, a new writing form, say, short story, was taken
up, the month after, travel experience, followed by a social
issue of their village, etc., etc. In this way, over a period of
eight months, we had a lovely display of creativity, and each
student also got his or her own collection of a literature folder.
From the beginning, participation in these activities was
voluntary, there was no compulsion. But most students
participated, and with great energy. Of course, the teachers
were also informally encouraging all of them. I remember that
students who were weak or dull in the traditional language
classes were also most enthusiastic, and were seen to be
enjoying this activity hugely.
Though the no language project was only for classes 6
to 8, the creativity section was open to all and everyone from
class 1 to 5, too, joined in, guided by their language teachers.

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I think it is wonderful to read poems written by 6 and 7 yearoldsthey are simple, and therefore so beautiful.
Approximately once every three or four weeks, the notice
board would be refreshed with the latest writings, and one
could see that for many days, the students would be crowding
around it to read what the others had written. At the end of
that year, each student could also boast of a personal literary
collection!
I feel that if we connect language strongly with
subjects, this helps the student see the subject content better,
with more clarity. They can even go past the technical content
and see the beauty of things, for eg., the fact of precipitation
is presented technically in the science book, while the
language book may have a poem about the beauty of monsoon
and the flowing river. Why have we separated the two? Are
fact and beauty separate things, to be seen at separate times?
Cannot the science teacher feel the wonder of reality, of
existential laws, of relationships in nature? Cannot the
language teacher feel the certainty of behaviour and
usefulness of things? I feel something nice flowers when we
see beauty in facts, and facts as beauty; they are two, but not
two.

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V
ESSAYS

1. Education and the movement of Tradition:

How does education happen in a village?
A village is a community of producing families who have
lived together for many generations. Everyone knows
everyone else; all children in the village grow up as brothers
and sisters.
Since every family is a producing family, the child
naturally, and effortlessly, becomes a part of household
activity and outdoor economic activity. A study of relationship
with nature - with land, soil, water, rain - is not a special
course, it is woven into this home and economic work.
As he grows up, the child learns the principles and
techniques of farming, he learns to use, and even build and
repair, a variety of farm implements, he takes care of cows,
sheep, goats, and learns about their diet, illnesses and
remedies. He sees and learns the local flora and fauna, he
learns something of the medicinal quality of plants, he learns
something about which wood is used for which work (plough,
furniture, etc.). All this is seen, learnt, as part of growing up.
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I have used the pronoun he but this is all true for both boys
as well as girls.
Then there are other learnings, too. Most girls become
adept at cooking, not as a fad, but as a practical home
responsibility. They can take care of siblings. Many boys, too,
get to learn the basics of cooking. They also get to experiment
with minor plumbing and electrical work. Both men and
women know how to run and maintain the gharat (water mill).
All this while, the child is also socially well integrated,
he participates in all festivals, melas, marriages, and, as he
grows up, in other village activities, too.
Not all children learn all the things, not all children learn
things perfectly, it is reasonable to suppose this. But the
minimum that each child has exposure to, and opportunity to
learn, is quite enough for him or her to be able to lead a life in
that community. This has been seen for a long time, that
generation after generation, by the age of 16 or 18, the child is
capable of participating fully in a home economy, even
running a home and being responsible for a family.
All this learning is without a lesson plan, or any
consciously built structure of teaching. If the end result is
that education happens, then its cause is the movement of
tradition. It is this movement that has created the village
structure and its economic sub-system, the various crafts and
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skills, the technology tools, the plough, the handloom, the

mill, the furnace. The community, or the gram vyavastha,
symbolises this movement of tradition, all merit is due to the
whole. The question, who invented the gharat does not exist
in this civilization.
Since tradition is in movement, challenges have to be
met, change will happen. And this has been so for centuries
upon centuries; new ideas have come, new people have come,
new technologies have come, and they have been seen,
studied and also absorbed to various degrees, without
violation to society. Similarly, our people have travelled, they
have given or shared goods, knowledge, technology and even
philosophy with others, without disrupting the host
community. In this way, we explored, discovered, and learnt among other things - gold mining, coal mining, iron smelting,
bronze casting, stone, metal and wood sculpting, architecture,
masonry, carpentry, spinning and weaving, pottery, tanning
and leather work, and, of course, various techniques of
agriculture, and food production like edible oil extraction and
gur-making (making jaggery from sugarcane). All this did not
happen as one event, it happened in the movement of
tradition, while maintaining a robust community. All the
techniques and technologies mentioned above did not
overpower or overwhelm the community, rather, they were
given a de-centralised shape each of these skills existed in
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every village, creating millions of self-employed families.

There are, I feel, three important principles which explain
this movement of tradition:
1. Change is accepted, initiated and happens from within.
2. Change is for a purpose, and its successful completion
is indicated by a stable situation.
3. Change is always in favour of the good of the
community, of the gram vyavastha.
When change is the result of community movement, then
the people think: how can every person in my village be
gainfully employed? How best can we meet our needs, what
production techniques may be improved upon? What new
tools can we make? Here is a new technology, a new proposal
from outside, how can it help meet our objectives? How can
we maintain the forest even as we use it to meet our food,
fuel, fodder, timbre, health, and other needs? Who can guide
us to deepen our study of herbal medicines? What about our
childrens education how can we ensure that they grow up
with a livelihood skill and learn to be good human beings?
Such is the wheel of tradition, and this wheel has turned
for thousands of years. Till the nineteenth century, Indias
non-centralised production system was doing enough to enjoy
a leading share in global trade without trying to be

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competitive. It was also known the world over for the skill and
technology which produced all these goods while still
maintaining healthy village communities.
But in the last one hundred and fifty years, with the force
of colonial economics and the force of centralised
governance, this wheel is being taken apart. In the modern
system, the primary actions of economics and governance are
going contrary to the principles mentioned above: 1) Change
is being forced from outside, it is not initiated by community;
2) Change is not aimed at a stable state, there is a continuous
state of chaos: and 3) Change is not in favour of good of the
community, it is driven by profit and benefit for a few.
When change is forced from the outside, with a
colonising mentality, then it is violence. It divides the
community with the use of money as well as threat. The
outside force tempts a few from the village with jobs and
positions, it tempts some contracts to mine and destroy the
local hills, it tempts a few more with contracts to cut local
forests, it allows a few locals to run liquor shops and
gambling dens, it brings in real estate speculators who divide
and destroy families in every village, and it heckles and even
arrests the few who dare to protest.
This leads to a state of surrender, with complete
dependence on outside forces. Employment is created from

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outside, so if there is unemployment, somebody outside will

solve it (state government, central government, World Bank).
Law and order is maintained from outside, so if there is social
disturbance, somebody outside will solve it (state police,
CBI). Pollution is created by technology and machines which
came from outside, so we wait till somebody outside will
solve that. Since health care has also been abducted by outside
forces, the village is helpless even in the face of common
illnesses, looking for an outside pill.
All this has created a psychological state of helplessness
and uncertainty. We have faced this reality in rural Garhwal,
and in particular, the smallish town of Kempty and the three
dozen villages around it. The approach of modern education is
to justify and perpetuate the force of colonising economics
and governance. The value of the village community is not
understood by modern schools, so it is being put to death;
community tradition is not understood, so it is being ignored
and trashed. The process of study and investigation has itself
been corrupted; ethics has been removed, so there is no
questioning about truth and false, of right and wrong.
So a most important question now for educators is: how
does education happen in this society, where the force of
change is coming from outside? I dont have a ready answer
to that, but from our experiments at Bodhshala school, I can

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suggest how it may begin. Firstly, the educator needs to see

and study the movement of tradition, how knowledge happens
in that movement. Secondly, the educator needs to see and
study the gram vyavastha, the characteristics of a selfsustaining community. And thirdly, the educator needs to see
and study the socio-economic basis of modern society, see
why it is false. An alternative may emerge from these three
insights.

2. On Tradition and Community:

I see the community, or the gram vyavastha, as a
functional structure which strengthens the possibility for
families to be prosperous in a self-reliant way. In that sense,
the community is for the family. The family is a functional
structure which strengthens the possibility for each person to
discover what is right living, in the warmth of relationship. In
that sense, the family is for the person.
In this way, the functional order is in favour of each
person being free and finding fulfilment. This is the purpose
of society; the combined expression of a people is to serve the
person so he can understand life and be complete. With this
functional purpose, a community unfolds a structure which
strengthens the possibility for each person to grow and flower
in a fertile social soil.
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Whether such a dispensation, in its completeness, has

been achieved, I do not know. But it is certainly true that in
India, traditionally, we have had largely self-sufficient village
communities which together constituted society. They had
come up through the movement of tradition and had been
maintained with some diligence. And now, for the last two
hundred years or so, the force of modern society has been
breaking them apart, first slowly, but now with great speed.
Living in rural Garhwal for the last four years, I see that
the village community being dismantled today are only the
structural remains; it appears that the functional purpose has
been long lost. I dont know if the functional purpose was
ever fully realised in the past. The structure now continues as
a momentum of habit so what we see crumbling today may
not be the movement of tradition per se, but the inertia of
tradition. Even so, I am of the view that a good thing is being
pulled down, and I would say we ought to question why we
are doing this.
The reason is that:
- this structure is in harmony with its environment, it
does not dominate;
- it is not aggressive with nature; plant and animal life
can thrive alongside it;
- it is self-reliant, many essential things are fulfilled
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within the community;

- it is not dirtied by market; exchange and distribution of
goods is regulated by distance; and
- it is not destructive with its science and technology.
So I would say that such a structure should be useful to
us always. Not as a thing of the past, to be preserved like an
exhibit in a museum. I am saying that if we have the intent to
understand the wheel of traditional community, then we need
not re-invent the structure, it is there. We can take it, build
upon it, and re-discover its functional purpose.
I feel this - the re-discovery of the functional purpose - to
be a key component of education: to understand the function
of a human community, and to understand the functioning of
the larger existential order. The modern method is focussed on
structure; it invents newer and newer structures, and keeps
piling on information as education. We are saying here that
whether you have one plough or one hundred models of it,
what is important is to understand the function of the plough,
and in relation, the function of agriculture. We constantly
change our structure and create new types of jobs, and
modern schools are trying to catch up with all this I submit
here that right education involves the understanding of the
function of livelihood, and that this is one for every human
being. From this understanding may emerge a correct
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structure, a local structure, to fulfil such a function.

This discovery has to be made by every human being of
every generation, that is the purpose of education, and that is
also the joy of education. This important part about function
has been totally removed from modern schooling. If we
decide to explore this again, I feel it will take us through the
path of why, the path of truth and false, and so we can also
rediscover ethics in living.
Merely changing outward structure at a maddening pace
will only make society insane. Since we do not want this to
happen, I suggest we re-look at structures in rural India by
understanding its real function, we could maintain, and
strengthen, and improve the community structure, and enjoy
the harmony that it makes possible. We can live in it, enrich it,
live from it, and be enriched.
*

The Indian village community cannot be invented in a

library, or a laboratory, or a factory. It cannot be understood
from these places. This structure holds the breath of a
civilization, it is borne by tradition it has evolved through
human communities which have accepted the need of the
soul, peace and happiness, as the basis for a design of society.
We may call this a human-centric society; the objective at
its core is human development, for which plant and material
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resources may be used.

That is now being dismantled systematically, globally,
after the coming of modern industry; here, the person is a
servant of society, to be fit in slots as needed by it, to be
uprooted and migrated as needed, to be paid wages for labour,
and to be schooled to be obedient and follow rules, no
questions asked. This is so in all the modern, materialistic
models: capitalism, socialism, communism, and exemplified
in democracy.
Today, a set of man-made rules and regulations is at the
core - which is society - and the purpose of the human being
is to fit into and exist for this core. We may call this a profitcentric society; the objective here is material growth and
development, for which humans will be used.
One has to question why.
*

The wheel of tradition implies knowledge inherent in

community. When, for some reason, there is a break in
tradition, it means the wheel has been discarded. Now two
things can happen. One may re- invent the wheel with no
remembrance of community. Or, a discarded wheel may be rediscovered. There is an important distinction between the two.
Re-inventing the wheel as the modern system is doing

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means there is no link to tradition; it is not a community

wheel anymore, it is the wheel of commerce. Its beneficiary is
not man, but businessman. It traps us in an abyss of
destruction.
To re-discover the wheel, one must be grounded in the
local because by its very design, the wheel is a creation by, of
and for the community environment. Every community has its
wheel. A successful civilization will have a harmonious
functioning of a thousand self-sustaining wheels. Such is
swarajya, I imagine.
If a re-discovered wheel should come alive in
community, then as a natural corollary, it would be alive in
education. I see such a re-discovery as a real possibility; it is,
in fact, integral to sustainability and human development.

3. An NGO for the Elite:

The economic dice is loaded against local production. We
learned in our school experiments that cottage-level
production work is heavily discouraged in our society. The
modern economic system is devised in such a way that locally
produced goods using local raw material appears more
expensive than goods coming from thousands of kilometres
away. This means that self-sufficiency and sustainability,
which to us are desirable objectives, are not at all the goals of
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our government.
A hundred years ago, cloth production in lakhs of Indian
villages was destroyed by the English, so that a few
Manchester businessmen could make large profits. Later the
English left, but we retained their exploitative economic
system. Cloth production never came back to the villages;
instead of Manchester, it was done in Manchester-type
factories at Mumbai and Ahmadabad for many decades, and
today, after sixty five years of independence, it is going out of
the country itself, into the hands of Chinese manufacturers. It
seems to me that nation-states are only a charade in the
modern world, for it appears that in reality, it is the business
and political elite, whether from London, New York, Mumbai
or Shanghai, who are together as brothers-in-arms, aiming for
a unified, global policy to continue with economic control.
A much larger danger stares at us now in the form of
losing our rights to producing the most basic of all things
food. This basic need and right of villagers is also being
attacked, and policies are being written by the Indian
government to support and promote large-scale industrial
control of even food production. More than 200,000 Indian
farmers have committed suicide in the last ten years, even as
the number of Indian millionaires has increased hundred-fold.
So the English may have left, but their colonising

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thinking still continues. Our educated elite which runs the

nation has become a mad slave to the modern system and does
not seem to have a mind of its own, it appears to have lost its
Indian roots. The actions of todays governing elite is patently
colonial, it is directly and indirectly looting its own country
and resources. In biology, there is a name for this, when one
or more cells of an organism goes haywire and attacks its own
neighbouring cells it is called cancer. When the cancer cells
were the English, we used the surgery method to separate
them from the country. Now the cancer cells are spreading
among our own elite - in bureaucracy, politics, business and
academia - it is inside their heads in the form of thought, so
what do we do? I feel what is needed is compassionate
education. Compassion as the basis so that there is friendship
and dialogue, and education in the sense of a complete
understanding of a humane social system, a humane economic
system. Only this can cure the disease of a colonising
mentality, of man preying upon man first for survival, then
as habit.
But who will educate the elite? The whole history of
NGOs is that of the urban, English-schooled elite, living on
salaries and donations, feeling sorry for the rural, Indianlanguage speaking self-employed people. Now, with a clear
perception of colonising economics, which in other places I
have also called modern civilization, we can see the need for
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NGOs to educate the urban elite. We are using the word

education here in its truest sense ethics, understanding
truth and false, right and wrong. Such guidance would earlier
be given by religious leaders, but in modern society, that
entire segment appears reluctant to intervene. A few so-called
Sadhus are in the news for all the wrong reasons, while the
serious religious people are silent. No Shankaracharya, or any
respected religious guru, has yet publicly declared that the
present economic and political system itself is false, and that
we need to re-look at a fundamental level.
Maybe we can actually have some NGOs to educate the
elite. Maybe someone can start a profiteering anonymous,
along the lines of alcoholics anonymous, which will address
the addiction to profiteering, to money-making. All our
leading businessmen, and many bureaucrats and politicians,
are ripe candidates for attending such a programme. So are a
large majority of qualified professional employees who are
mechanically following the system, who are on the
profiteering and consumption conveyer belt, but perhaps
without ever asking why. If these sections of society can see
the truth of what is being pointed out, we could change things
around in one day, because it is the elite which the rest of the
nation is following, trusting that they are doing the right thing
- in that sense, they have the role of parents and grandparents
at home, or the elders and panch of the village. So it is the
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elite of modern society who now have the responsibility of

understanding the issue of the modern, colonising mentality,
of understanding the need for Indian-ness in Indian solutions,
and ensuring humane behaviour and humane systems in
society.

4. Education, Economics and Freedom:

I think it is important for all of us, not only teachers and
educators, to see fully the relationship between education and
economics. Let me clarify that we are not speaking now of the
business of education, of making money through education.
But that travesty, too, shall be addressed, I hope, while we are
exploring this issue of education, economics and freedom.
If I may summarise the points to explore, we are stating
that:
1. Education is related to the economic system.
2. Therefore, we need to understand: a) what is a right
economic system, and b) what is right livelihood?
3. The action to transform education goes together with
action to transform the economic system.
4. There is then a real possibility that schools become
one with community; they guide the community to grow as
islands of sustainable living.
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Let us further explore these points.

1. The purpose and content of education is decided by the
economic system. We may wish this is not so, we may even
fancy that our alternate school is beyond this economic
connection. But we see that in reality, this is indeed so. Even
the children of alternate schools go into the same economic
system; they are concerned about getting jobs, about earning
money, and also getting some status through their position in
the economic hierarchy.
Even as we adopt more and more of western economic
system and method, our education system, too, is getting
moulded on western lines. Our curriculum itself is getting
fragmented; the way modern education is going about it, we
are seeing a smaller and smaller part of it, getting absurdly
specialized and losing a sense of reality. The modern
economic system wants isolated employees, who are seen as
units of production, and the schooling system is adopting
this each student is made an isolated unit, even siblings
grow up isolated.
The modern economic system has positioned money as
both means as well as ends, and this is bringing its own subtle
content of making a quick buck into the education system.
Our students, especially management students, are told that
the marketplace is a battlefield, that you have to use every

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trick, every deceit, to sell and survive; todays education has

in effect put one skill above all else, and that is cleverness. In
doing this, our economic system is also building itself on
overconsumption, which is pushed through the activity of
selling. Our education system has responded to this by
promoting careers in sales. Whether a 10th standard pass or
an IIM pass, they are doing the same job of salesmen, be it of
soap, candy or insurance.
The modern economic system worships comfort and
luxury, using it as incentive as well as reward, and many
urban schools are shadowing this as well, with air-conditioned
classrooms and buses, and canteens serving fast-food.
The new economic disorder has dispensed with real
work. Therefore, in our schools, too, there is no creative
working with ones hands; there is no act of nurturing,
building, developing something which is useful for oneself
and the school.
The economic system wants portable employees, people
without geographic or cultural roots, who can be deployed
anywhere, easily, like machines. Our schools are doing
precisely that, uprooting children from their traditional
communities, individualising them to be fed to the global
economic engine. Some philosophy-based schools and life
education programmes are inadvertently aiding and abetting

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this uprooting of the child from his community by rejecting

any and every reference to tradition. I would implore them to
re-address their syllabus as understanding tradition rather
than to start with a rejection of it.
By breaking up the community, modern economics has
announced a rejection of self-sufficiency as a desired
objective. Our schools have adopted this completely, our
curriculum has nothing on self-sufficiency, our schools
themselves are gross consumers of the market, even schools
with abundant fertile land produce nothing; they further the
economic system. Even while studying and trying to
understand freedom, we are in a state of economic surrender.
Every twist in the economic field is accompanied by a
turn in the education space, and the worst effect of this is the
deterioration of values, the abandoning of ethics, and the
promotion of tendencies of making quick money, no matter
what. If tomorrow, we legalise betting and gambling as is
being lobbied by some, the education system will soon follow
with a casino management course, how to make a career out
of gambling.
Our efforts so far, especially in the alternate schools,
have been to try for spiritual growth in the individual while
not doing anything about the disintegrating economic
environment, willy-nilly participating in its exploitation. I

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submit here that the school is not separate from this, that
participation in an alternate economic system is an
inseparable part of alternate education.
2. To do so, the teacher would have to see what right
economic living is and understand modern economic forces.
The present emphasis is on monetised economy, centralised
production, intensive energy use and transportation, and jobbased employment. This is leading to large-scale migration,
unethical money-making business practices, environmental
degradation and pollution, and a citizen who is dependent and
helpless, with no control over the availability or quality of
basic necessities.
The alternate economic emphasis would have its key
principle in the citizen, and his community, having control
over local resources and means of production. This would
imply a vastly de-monetised economy, de-centralised
production, minimal transportation, and a self-employment
based economy. While the modern system is destroying local
communities, the alternate economic system would promote
and support self-sufficient communities. In this way, one may
explore what is right livelihood at an individual and family
level, and its relationship with justice, social harmony,
ecological harmony and psychological fulfilment.
3. I propose here that the action to transform education

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within the school goes together with action to transform the

economic system outside in the community, in society. A
school is a unit of community, its goal and aspirations are not
separate from that of community learning, freedom,
happiness, peace, prosperity, harmony Action in schools
aimed at psychological liberation can and should go hand in
hand with action in society aimed at a humane socioeconomic system. The sensitive teacher and educator is
concerned about right livelihood, about the need for a
sustainable community, and so he also acts in society, and for
society. In that action, there will be contact with local
governance and political systems, and the educator, the school
itself, has to take a stand on the economic system, and even
demand a correction where it is needed. The in-school and insociety actions go together.
4. If the above three points have been considered, then
there is a real possibility that our schools, especially alternate
schools, become one with community, that they guide the
community to grow as islands of sustainable living. Real
creative work will then re-enter our schools, and production
work will be done to fulfil the needs of the school. Teacher
and student will together explore right livelihood, practise and
learn useful skills, and discover in the process, what aspect of
freedom is it which is touched by responsible livelihood,
without which freedom may not be complete.
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Sustainable living is not just about campaigns for save

the tree or save the tiger it is about sustainable
relationships. If the school can be a living unit studying and
practising sustainable living, then it also becomes a guiding
light for the community, it is integrated with the goals and
aspirations of the community. Without this integration, the
school stands isolated, it is influenced by the economic
environment, but stands in denial. The absence of a
wholesome response to what is happening means students
leave the school with no learning, no experience, of right
livelihood, and hence economic freedom is unattainable.
But if such integration is made possible, the alternate will
be complete in its alternateness, there can be a combined
movement of spirituality and right livelihood, of peace and
prosperity. It is then possible that schools can be meaningful
components of community.

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RESOURCES AND REFERNCES

Three visionaries who have been a continued source of
inspiration for me are Mahatma Gandhi, J. Krishnamurthy and
Nagaraj Sarma. I have gained much from their philosophy and
written works. There are names of other people,
organizations, manuscripts or other media which I have
referred to in this book. These have been sources of
information, practical knowledge and wisdom. They have
provoked thought and insight. I list them here for ready
reference.
1.

Shri Bhaskar Save: Inspirational natural farming

practitioner rooted in Indian tradition. His 14-acre home and

farm in Valsad, Gujarat attracts thousands of visitors.
2.

Bhaskar Saves Letter: He wrote a brilliant open

letter to M.S. Swaminathan of the Indian Agricultural

Commission explaining and extolling the real attributes of
Indian philosophy and agriculture. Available at: http://
www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_2416.cfm .
3.

Masanobu Fukuoka: Inspirational Japanese farmer,

scientist and practitioner of natural farming. Author of OneStraw Revolution and other books.
4.

Subhash Palekar: Agriculture scientist, practitioner

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of natural farming, and a guide to lakhs of farmers on

replacing chemical farming with natural methods. Author of
The Philosophy of Natural Farming and other books.
5.

Shri Dharampal: Researcher, historian, thinker and

an astute observer of Indian society. His research into the state

of India in the 17th and 18th centuries as observed and
documented by the British has been brought out as a set of
five books. Jointly published by Other India Press and SIDH.
Priceless.
6.

Dharampals essay Bharatiya Chitta Manas which

I have referred to is available in the English version as book

and as downloadable pdf at the Centre for Policy Studies:
http://www.cpsindia.org/index.php/pub/102-bharatiya-chittamanas-and-kala/ .
7.

Other India Press: A publishing house which, as its

name suggests, has worked towards bringing the other story,

the Indian viewpoint, which has been subdued by modern
thought and education. They have excellent books at: http://
www.otherindiabookstore.com/ .
8.

Navdanya: Known for its resistance to genetic

tampering of seeds, which they have termed bio-piracy.

Navdanya has published many books on agriculture,
environment and global farm-politics. For me, they provided
enjoyment with their little book on millets of Uttarakhand.
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9.

Annie Leonards Films: Environmental activist

Annie Leonard produced a brilliant film The Story of Stuff

which showed the connection between economics,
environment and politics in a simple and most effective way.
There are more meaningful films as well, at: http://
storyofstuff.org/ .
10.

Arundhati Roys essays and books questioning

modern development are informative and thought provoking.

The one I recall is The algebra of infinite justice, but there are
others as well.
11.

Shri Arvind Gupta, scientist, educator and keen

student of the philosophy of education, has two treasure

troves in his website. One is the practical science experiments
which are a must for any science teacher, and secondly, a list
of books and film references carefully selected by him. He has
also done significant work in translating English, Hindi and
Marathi works from one to the other: http://
www.arvindguptatoys.com/ .
12.

Sri Aurobindos essay: This long essay comprises

the first part of the book Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on
Education, Published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Publication Department, Pondicherry, ISBN: 978-81-7058028-7. It is an insightful piece on the state of education in
India in the 1920s, and a beautiful description of elementary

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education methodology by the great man. The book may be

out of print. Summary with quotes available at: http://
kireetjoshiarchives.com/philosophy/philosophy_other_essay/
education_philosophy.ph .
13.

Uttarakhand Seva Nidhi: This is an Almora-based

NGO which has produced the workbooks Our Land Our Life
that I have referred to in the book. They have other learning
material, mostly relevant to the Himalayan region, at http://
www.usnpss.org/ .
14.

Shri Sachchidanand: His small handbook on

cottage industry, Swadeshi Ki Dishamein Swavalamban Ki

Vidhiyan is the one which taught me to make soap. It also
contains many other home-production ideas. Publisher: Sarva
Seva Sangh, Varanasi.
15.

Dr. T.L.Cleaves study: This British naval doctor

has authored an excellent research study on the conditions

caused by the taking of refined carbohydrates, such as sugar
and white flour. The Saccharine Disease (1974) is available
for reading and download at: http://journeytoforever.org/
farm_library/Cleave/cleave_toc.html .

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SOME PICTURES OF BODHSHALA SCHOOL

Himalaya Haat:

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SOME PICTURES OF BODHSHALA SCHOOL

Carpentry-Maintenance:

Rainfall Measurement:

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SOME PICTURES OF BODHSHALA SCHOOL

Hand-made Paper-Making:

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BACK PAGE

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