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The Hindu : When I told my mother that I was quitting a lucrative bank job to work in the village, she was horrified,” recalled Bunker Roy at the beginning of his talk on ‘Demystifying Professionalism: the Gandhian Approach’. “She did not speak to me for years.” This was way back in the 1970s. Today, Roy can justifiably be proud of his decision. The Social Work and Research Centre – more famously known as the Barefoot College – he founded in 1972 in Tilonia, a nondescript village in Rajasthan, has gained national and international recognition. Its astounding success in identifying poor rural jobless and unemployable youth, and training them to be ‘barefoot’ engineers, teachers, communicators, architects, and IT professionals has been a role model to others.Going far beyond the confines of Rajasthan, the Barefoot College has worked in several places from Ladakh to Kerala and even in villages of other countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bhutan, Senegal and Sierra Leone.The College’s achievements range from making holistic community development involving all age groups and social sectors; use of rain water for irrigation, recharging of ground water and providing quality water for human and animal consumption; creating employment opportunities for rural men and women; setting up night schools; using solar energy to electrify homes of hundreds of villages; provision of new markets for rural artisans, to establishing women’s pressure group to fight for minimum wages.Focus on poor“We have never believed in paper qualifications,” asserted Roy. “The College does not take students who have a paper degree and diploma; in fact it could be a disqualification if they had one! We place our trust in the power of traditional knowledge, skills and experience of ordinary people, very poor, illiterate rural folk living in remote, inaccessible villages of this country, or for that matter anywhere in the world.”Having lived for more than three decades in villages, Roy has realized that imparting skills people…More