THE SOCIAL
ENTREPRENEUR
I LIKE -Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy.

Social Entrepreneurship in India – Changing the Life of the Poor India has the world's second largest labour force of 516.3 million people and although hourly wage rates in India have more than doubled over the past decade, the latest World Bank report states that approximately 350 million people in India currently live below the poverty line. With an estimated population of 1.2 billion people, this means that every third Indian is bereft of even basic necessities like nutrition, education and health care and many are still blighted by unemployment and illiteracy. Social entrepreneurs can help alleviate these issues by putting those less fortunate on a path towards a worthwhile life. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, they can solve the problem by changing the system.

What is a Social Entrepreneur?:
Over the past two decades, the citizen sector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.
Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.
Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to move in different directions.
Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are visionaries, but also realists, and are ultimately concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.
Social entrepreneurs present user-friendly, understandable, and ethical ideas that engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of citizens that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement it. Leading social entrepreneurs are mass recruiters of local changemakers— role models proving that citizens who channel their ideas into action can do almost anything.

The Social Entrepreneur I Like: In a world full of people wanting to live a luxurious live, is a social activist who preferred to rather live as a poor in a country where more than half of the population lives without the daily basic needs. His name – Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy. Famously known as Bunker Roy, he is an Indian social activist, educator and the founder of Barefoot College in Tilona, Rajasthan.

Bunker Roy was selected as one of the TIME 100, the 100 most influential personalities in the world by TIME Magazine in 2010. Bunker is a founder of what is now called Barefoot College.After conducting a survey of water supplies in 100 drought prone areas, Roy established the Social Work and Research Centre in 1972.Its mission soon changed from a focus on water and irrigation to empowerment and sustainability.The programs focused on siting water pumps near villages and training the local population to maintain them without dependence on outside mechanics, providing training as paramedics for local medical treatment, and on solar power to decrease dependence and time spent on kerosene lighting.

Biography: Bunker was born on 2nd Aug 1945 in an influential family to a Mechanical Engineer (father) and a trade commissioner (mother) in Burnpur, Bengal (present day West Bengal). He attended the Doon School (1956-1962) and St. Stephens College (1962-1967).
He received a very expensive education. He went to a very expensive public school called the Dune School.He also went to a college, St. Stephen’s College. He was all set to become a doctor or ambassador or minister or some such thing. Then he decided to go to a village for the first time, in 1965. It changed his life because it was the first time he ever saw poverty face to face. The education he got was very exclusive, very arrogant—just not in touch with reality. He told his mother one day: “I’d like to go to a village,and I’d like to dig wells, go 100 feet below the ground to try to find water.” That was in 1967. His mother was horrified; she didnt speak to him for six months. She said to Roy that “What will the family say? You get the best education in the world and you go dig wells for five years.” But that is when Roy's education started: living with very poor people with absolutely no resources at all. Although the turning point in his life came when he volunteered and visited the famine affected villages in Bihar (1965-1966). Seeing thousands of people die of starvation, he had decided his future. Despite of having a Masters degree in English and being a National Champion in Squash for 3 years, he decided to devote his life to social service, shocking his parents. 22 years old Bunker left the world he knew to live and work in the villages of Rajasthan. He changed his lifestyle from a sahab in a 3 piece suit to a daily wage worker in kurta pyjama which he acknowledges to still wear in India and abroad as well. Bunker is married to his classmate Aruna Roy, a social activist who was a prominent leader of Right to Information movement and is a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay award.

BAREFOOT COLLEGE: In 1972, Bunker founded the Barefoot College, known as Social Work and Research Centre, which has been transforming the lives of rural women for 4 decades.
Why Barefoot? * It is symbolic of the recognition, respect and importance the College gives to the collective knowledge and skill that the poor have; * By calling it ‘barefoot’ they want to give its application a unique category of its own that is superior, sophisticated and enduring. Far more valuable than any other paper qualification.
Why College? * Because it is a Centre for learning, with a difference:- * A centre of learning and unlearning * Where the teacher is the learner and the learner a teacher; * Where everyone is expected to keep an open mind, try new and crazy ideas, make mistakes and try again; * Where even those who have no degrees are welcome to come, work and learn; * Where those are accepted who are not eligible for even the lowest government jobs; * Where tremendous value is placed on the dignity of labour, of sharing and those are willing to work with their hands; * Where no certificates, degrees or diplomas are given.

The Barefoot College is a non-government organisation that has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable. These ‘Barefoot solutions’ can be broadly categorised into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development. Today, the college is training illiterate and semi-literate, poor, rural women from 32 countries to become Barefoot Solar Engineers. The idea of the Barefoot College sprouted during his stay with the poorest of people who would tell him their stories about their skills, knowledge and wisdom that no books had offered him before. Seeing the enthusiasm of the people towards their work and their determination to live with nothing but their dignity and self-respect, he reached the villages and with both sides offering nothing but their hard work, the first of its kind Barefoot College started. He refers it to be a college “started by the poor, managed by the poor and owned by the poor.” The college takes illiterate and semi literate men, women and children from lowest castes, and most remote and inaccessible villages in India, and trains them to become “barefoot” water and solar engineers, architects, teachers, communicators, pathologists, midwives, IT workers, accountants, and marketing managers. Once trained, these villagers work within their own communities, thus making them less dependent on “outside” skills.
The Barefoot College acknowledges being having not a new approach but something that was already followed by Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhian non-violent approach followed, incorporated and institutionalised into work style and life style of the Barefoot college strongly rejected the classical arrogant top-down development approach of the “experts” and instead put into practice the following beliefs : * Identify, respect and apply existing traditional knowledge and skills and give practical skills more importance than theoretical knowledge. * Just because someone is illiterate, nowhere it is written in stone that he/she cannot be a solar engineer, architect, designer, communicator, feed Information into computers and construct rain water harvesting tanks. There are many more powerful ways of learning other than the written word.
Barefoot College doesn’t recruit people with the so called “formal education”. Most of the people here are either drop outs, cop out or wash out, poor, semi-literate, perhaps physically challenged, with no hopes of getting any job. Although no one comes for the money because one barely receives around 10K Indian Rupees per month. What they come for is the learning experience, trying new ideas and the desire to bring about a change. The Barefoot College refuses at any political inclination or religious beliefs, only the spiritual beliefs that every man has towards his work.
All students are equipped with basic literacy, health and first aid skills and are then urged to move from one area to another, understanding their inter-relationships and learning the principles of community building and sustainability. Taking from Mark Twain ““Never let school interfere with your education”, approach to leaning is very different in this college. Here both teachers and students are learners and the process of learning is continuous. They believe that people should be encouraged to make mistakes so that they can learn humility, curiosity, the courage to take risks, to innovate, to improvise and to constantly experiment. The college‟s achievements are staggering across various fields. Its barefoot engineers have provided solar powered lighting to over 136 virtually inaccessible Himalayan villages; over 15,000 children have been educated at Barefoot College night schools; and thirteen villages and 15,000 people now benefit from community piped water supply systems, designed, planned and implemented entirely by the local people.Today there are 20 Barefoot kind colleges in 13 states in India. Plus the college is now involved in training villagers from other countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bhutan, Senegal and Sierra Leone. But the real achievement, says Roy, is the process rather than the result – the fact that the community has done this on their own, by sharing their own knowledge and skills. He feels that if someone wants to work in a village, the formal education system discourages them as the mindset that this system inculcates in students is that going back to the villages is a losing proposition. Remaining in the city is considered a success.
Commenting on government run education system Roy opines that, taking some of the responsibility for education out of the hands of government could speed up progress towards universal primary education in his country. He says that with out commercializing education private initiatives should be encouraged, given more responsibility, more space and freedom. According to him as things stand now, the formal system alone cannot answer the challenge of rural education on the contrary it can destroy initiative and creativity as it expects you to do everything the way they say, the way they do Major Difficulties faced: The major difficulties faced during its foundation by the Barefoot College and still does is, as acknowledged by Bunker Roy, are the “literate” men and women as a product of the formal education system. “The formal system makes you look down on the village. After graduating anyone who goes back to the village is looked on as a failure. The formal system does not make you look back to respect and value your roots if they are in the rural areas. So people with degrees and qualifications would rather survive in demeaning city slums and pavements than go back to their roots”, says Bunker Roy. The formal education system demeans and devalues the village skills and practical knowledge just because it doesn’t fall under their education. But the fact remains that these were the very skills used before the urban engineering and doctor came into being. In 2003, Barefoot College decided to train only illiterate rural women, not less than 40 years of age as solar engineers. According to Bunker, women who are older and more mature tend to stay with the families while men as soon as they are trained leave to find work else where. Once they are trained they will never leave their communities because no one will ever give them such a chance to prove their worth to their own communities. No transalation, no interpreters and no written language is required. They will pick up everything so along as they are practical and intelligent and willing to learn and have patience. Using this approach 186 women solar engineers have been trained from 28 countries in more than 100 remote villages all over Africa.

Awards:
Roy has received the following awards * The Jamnalal Bajaj Award - 1985 - "Outstanding Contribution in Application of Science and Technology for Rural Development" * The St Andrews Prize for the Environment – 2003 * Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship - 2003 - one of 20 people recognized for Social Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2003. * The Robert Hill Award from the global Solar Community - 2009 - for his work in the promotion of photo-voltaics

Some of the quotes of Bunker Roy: * "The Barefoot College is the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher" * "I had a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me" * "The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she’s prime minister in the evening."
Other work:
Roy was appointed by Rajiv Gandhi to the government's Planning Commission he recommended that legislation be created that would apply a "code of conduct" for non-governmental organizations. He also proposed that a national council be created that would recommend "legitimate" organizations to the government and monitor their activities. Both of these recommendations were "fiercely" opposed as mechanisms that could be used to promote patronage of favored groups and quell organizations that were not supportive of a particular government or party.
In 1983, he was the plaintiff in Roy v State of Rajasthan in which the Supreme Court which struck down an emergency policy which had allowed women famine relief workers to be paid less than male workers.
Roy has spoken at the TED conference,in which he talks about how the Barefoot College "helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient."

How we Can Help
The Barefoot College draws on a mix of resources, such as the Government of India, International funding agencies, private foundations, as well as corporate and individual sponsors, for applying cost-effective and self-sustainable Barefoot solutions in remote, rural villages of India and abroad.
Partners as well as donors provide the crucial support needed to replicate the Barefoot approach. So far, it has been replicated in 17 states of India, 15 countries in Africa, 2 countries in Asia and 1 country in South America. Any contribution, monetary or voluntary in nature, helps the College in social developments of poor, rural communities. For instance, a contribution of:- 1. $100 educates one child in a night school for 6 months. 2. $250 helps in fabrication and maintenance of one solar lantern in a poor rural household; thereby providing light for 4 hours every night for at least 2 years. 3. $500 pays for the installation and maintenance of one fixed solar lighting unit in a rural non-electrified household, and provides it 4 hours of light for at least 5 years. 4. $1,000 trains 5 semi-literate women to become Barefoot computer instructors in 6 months. 5. $5,000 will install a rainwater harvesting tank in a rural school to collect 50,000 litres of water that will provide 50 children with drinking water for 6 months, or will solar-electrify 10 households and train 2 rural, semi-literate or illiterate women to become Barefoot Solar Engineers in 6 months.
Conclusion: For Bunker, it was not Gandhi or Marx who inspired the work of the College but very ordinary people with grit, determination, the amazing ability to survive with almost nothing live a hard life with grace, dignity and self respect. The fact that the college tries to find a place for the weakest,most disadvantaged of all, is its greatest strength.