Bunker Roy
School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.
Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world.
You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.
I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and it almost killed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor - all laid out.
In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went into a coma.
You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again.
In India, I'm always 'Aruna Roy's husband.'
Jeff Sachs has the Millennium Villages. He spends $2.5 million in one village. It's an absolutely ridiculous model, because I've said that if you gave me $2.5 million, I can train 100 grandmothers, solar electrify 100 villages - 10,000 houses - and save you 100,000 litres of kerosene.
Wherever I've been, and I've been to over 20, maybe 25, countries in Africa, I've noticed how their backbone is broken. They don't have any confidence in themselves. They always think a white man will solve their problems from outside for them.
We have shown that solar-electrified villages can be technically and financially self-sufficient.
The Barefoot College is supposed to be a sparking off process. People are adopting it and owning it, which is really the story behind the college.
Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum.Collection: Self Confidence
Listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world.Collection: People
[The Barefoot College is] the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.Collection: Teacher
Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.Collection: Jobs
What's the best way of communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman.Collection: Television
I had a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me.Collection: Motivation
We went to Ladakh ... and we asked this woman, 'What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?' And she thought for a minute and said, 'It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter.'Collection: Motivation
The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening.Collection: Morning