Opinion Peer to peer learning,between Bihar and Chicago

A scrappy new school in Chamanpura has no electricity,but has big plans

May 6, 2011 02:16 AM IST First published on: May 6, 2011 at 02:16 AM IST

With an accent that pins down exactly where he comes from,he jokes that he is a product of St. Bora school. Bora is the Bhojpuri word for cement sacks. Then he explains that until Class 6,at his remote Bihar village school,he and his fellow students sat on discarded cement bags. At night,he studied by the light of a kerosene lamp since the village had no electricity.

Today,about two-and-a-half decades after Chandrakant Singh left the school and became successful in the conventional sense of the word,with an IIT education and a job with General Motors many things still remain the same at Chamanpura,a poor village in Gopalganj. There is still no electricity.

The rickshawallas,thelawallas and coolies of the village would still be unable to afford a decent education for their children had it not been for one transformation the modern,hi-tech Chaitanya Gurukul Public School that Singh started at the village.

Singhs school has been operational for one whole academic year during which it made news for its Skype-imparted lessons and its biometric teacher attendance system. Into the second year of its academic existence,Singh wants to take the school a step further into the globalised world. A few weeks ago,he resigned from his technical job at General Motors in Bangalore to realise his dream make a global school out of Chaitanya Gurukul,so what if it is in a village with not a single electricity pole?

Singh says he and his fellow founders,half-a-dozen other Biharis who have made it outside the state,are in talks with three schools in the United States to forge a school-to-school collaboration. As the world becomes flatter by the day,an alliance across the world is the natural thing,he argues. Whether physics,math or biology,the concepts that an eighth grader in Chamanpura in Bihar studies is exactly the same as the theory taught at a school in Chicago or elsewhere in the United States.

The challenges that these students will take on in their careers,whether finding renewable energy solutions or finding cures for chronic diseases,would be the same the world over,says Singh.

The collaboration between a school in rural,impoverished Bihar and a school in the United States seems a dream concept but Singh says he is determined to make it work. He envisages students from the same grades working on projects together,tapping into mentors from Singhs own network. He pictures teachers from the Bihar school teaching students in urban United States and vice versa. He talks of exchange programmes between students and teachers of the two schools.

Chaitanya Gurukul is well into its second academic year with 430 students from a cross-section of Bihar society. The fees paid by children of well-to-do doctors and businessmen subsidise the tuition of 55 children of the poorest families landless labourers and daily wage construction workers. It is a sustainable,self-renewing model that could lead the way to scale up such efforts.

Electricity is still to arrive at Chamanpura so the schools needs are powered by its own generators. Internet connectivity is another challenge and Singh and his fellow-founders are constantly experimenting with various free tools to remote-teach,supplementing the work of its 16 resident teachers.

Despite its remote location,Chaitanya Gurukuls teachers prepare lessons on their netbook computers. Every classroom is equipped with either a projector or an LCD player. The schools broadband-connected computer lab is open 24×7 and so is the school library. Our technology and teaching content is on par or better than the content at DPS schools, says Chandrakant Singh. Which DPS can have IIT-ians teach eighth graders?

Meanwhile in Bangalore,Singh is setting up an education R&D start-up which he says will work in the fields of education technology and renewable energy,to support the needs of schools in rural,backward India. It is a tall and daunting mission but Singh,a patent holder for General Motors,has made a worthy beginning.