Ladakh’s tryst with modernity is
proving to be a mixed bag. With the advent of formal democracy, modern medicine
and better commercial avenues, the region has witnessed much progress. However,
Ladakh’s experience with formal education, particularly of the Western variety,
has not necessarily delivered the outcomes many had hoped.
Formal Western education came to
Ladakh in the 1970s, following strenuous efforts by the region’s leaders who
had long fought the apathy of the State administration and the Central
government. Evidently, the objective of this endeavour was to bring the area in
sync with the modern world.
Today, there are more than 370
schools in Leh alone according to 2012 figures. Despite the advantages, one of
the significant drawbacks of this formal model of education was its inability
to acknowledge a Ladakhi’s child’s lived experience—a fact that continues to
haunt the region.
“In every corner of the world today,
the process called “education” is based on the same assumptions and the same
Eurocentric model. The focus is on faraway facts and figures, a universal
knowledge. The books propagate information that is meant to be appropriate for
the entire planet. But since only a kind of knowledge that is far removed from
specific ecosystems and cultures can be universally applicable, what children
learn is essentially synthetic, divorced from the living context,” writes
Swedish linguist, Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book Ancient Futures: Learning
from Ladakh. She visited Ladakh in the 1970s and became one of the first
Westerners to master the local language.
With a curriculum that is nothing but
a poor imitation of what is taught in mainland Indian schools, which in turn is
a poor man’s version of the formal British system of education, Ladakhi
children were left in no man’s land. They were neither capable of competing
with their peers in the outside world, nor unable to use local resources and
function in their own world.
This is a sentiment, which Sonam
Wangchuk, the legendary social activist/entrepreneur who founded the Students’
Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), has also expressed.
“Twenty-five years ago, when I was finishing my own engineering degree, I saw
that schools were a pain for everyone, but for mountain children, it was doubly
painful and irrelevant. Children who spoke Ladakhi or Tibetan at home were made
to sit all day memorising study material in alien languages like Urdu or
English. What’s the point of learning ‘F for fans, S for ships, and T for
trains’ in a high altitude cold desert?”
Until the mid-90s, nearly 95% of the
students would fail their class X examinations. Exasperated with the system,
Sonam Wangchuk and some like-minded friends decided to do something about it
and founded SECMOL in 1988. Under Operation New Hope, which was a collaborative
effort by the State government, village communities and civil society to reform
the government school system in Ladakh in 1994, SECMOL instigated the process
of reformulating the curriculum and retraining teachers. In addition to other
measures by the local administration, this initiative helped increase the pass
percentage from 5% in 1996 to 75% in 2015.
However, for those who continued to
struggle with the conventional education model, SECMOL started an alternative
school, where students “learn by doing things” instead of limiting themselves
to the confines of textbooks written by people “who have never set foot in
Ladakh, and know nothing about growing barely at 12,000 feet or about making
houses out of sun-dried bricks,” as Helena Norberg-Hodge notes. The emphasis here
is on real learning, “where they engage in various innovations to solve
real-life problems.”
SECMOL is a place “where students run
the schools themselves like little country with an elected government and learn
management and governance; where they learn communication by running the campus
newspaper and community radio; where they learn science by designing and
building their own school solar-heated mud buildings that remain at a
temperature of +15 degrees Celsius even when it’s -15 degrees Celsius in the
winter season,” says Sonam Wangchuk.
Today SECMOL is a popular institution
of alternative education not only in Ladakh but around the world producing
students who are today renowned journalists, filmmakers and social
entrepreneurs, despite failing their Class X examination on multiple occasions.
SECMOL took them out of the rut. It is this spirit of hands-on learning and
out-of-the-box thinking that also delivered Sonam Wangchuk’s most popular
achievement to date—the Ice Stupa (Read more about it here).
“If Ladakhi students go on to higher
education, they may learn about building houses, but these houses will be of
concrete and steel, the universal box. So too, if they study agriculture, they
will learn about industrial farming: chemical fertilisers and pesticides, large
machinery and hybrid seeds.” —Helena Norberg-Hodge
In 2015, Sonam Wangchuk turned his
attention to the dismal state of higher education in the region. There are two
Government Degree colleges in Ladakh—one in Leh and another in Kargil.
Most families in Ladakh, who can
afford the expenses, send their children to Delhi, Chandigarh, Jammu, and
Srinagar, for a college education. Children from families that can’t afford to
send them outside tend to either drop out of school or college and instead get
into the tourism business or join up with the Ladakh Scouts regiment. Divisions
between those who leave Ladakh, and others who can’t, play along class lines
and provoke either inspiration or low self-esteem among those who stay back.
This isn’t healthy for any tight-knit
community. Akin to the quality of school education, or lack thereof, a similar
situation has come to pass in higher education. In fact, the problem is more
acute in higher education considering the scarcity of avenues available for
young Ladakhis.
Responding to these concerns, Sonam
Wangchuk is in the process of setting up a university in the Leh area called
the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), which will primarily
follow a model similar to SECMOL. This venture aims to break the conventional
models of higher education once again and engage young people from not only
Ladakh but other regions and countries perched in the Himalayas. Resources will
be dedicated to research and local innovations on subjects like education,
culture and economic development with the environment at the heart of it.
“Once again, it will be a hands-on
doer’s university where the School of Business runs real-life companies on
campus. The school of tourism runs high-end hotels and simple homestays. School
of Education runs innovative schools. The revenues from these ventures will
sustain the university, while students receive free higher education and
hands-on experience,” says Sonam Wangchuk.
Supported by important religious
luminaries, the Leh Autonomous Hill Development Council, and well-wishers
around the world, HIAL has made massive strides in the past year and a half.
The Hill Council has allocated approximately 200 acres of land for this
project. In 2016, Sonam Wangchuk won the prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise
for his famous Ice Stupa initiative. He has decided to use the prize money,
$150,000, which is approximately Rs 1 crore, as seed money for the university.
For the first phase of the project, he is looking to raise Rs 150 crore.
HIAL has managed to raise nearly Rs 5
crore via the crowdfunding site Milaap. “This is an important milestone as HIAL
team prepares to get cracking with the on-ground implementation of the project.
We are already preparing to start the first batch of Diploma in Integrated
Mountain Development this coming summer,” Sonam Wangchuk writes in this
Facebook Post.
The aim is to raise a further Rs 2
crore on the crowdfunding site. Additionally, Rs 7 crore is expected to come
from the CSR corpus of various corporate ventures, but the crowdfunding process
is very important for Sonam Wangchuk, who wants to establish a “Peoples’
University.” He cites the example of an 8th grader in Delhi’s Ridge Valley
School, who helped raise Rs 1 lakh and another schoolboy in Mumbai, who raised
Rs 2 lakh. HIAL needs approximately Rs 14 crore to construct the first school.
All green,
no fossil fuels
Taking cognisance of global warming,
and its deleterious impact on Ladakh’s fragile ecosystem, the aim is to set up
a “fully solar heated mud-built university”. All transport on campus will run
on solar-powered engines, while local energy requirements will be met with
biogas and solar energy. Food will be grown on campus with very little
dependence from the outside world. Vegetable gardens on campus will be
irrigated by the local stream and ice stupas.
“All buildings shall be oriented
south, 10-15 degrees variation, to maximise exposure to the Sun and encourage
passive heating of the buildings. Even at a sub-zero temperature of -20 degree
Celsius the room temperature remains +15 degrees Celsius. The intelligent
design makes the campus one of the few zero-energy campus archetype in the
country,” says the HIAL website.
Sprawling over 120 acres, the campus
is expected to house over 6,000 residents, and with sustainability as their
mantra, all buildings will be constructed using rammed earth (a technique for
constructing foundations, floors, and walls using natural raw materials) with
Trombe walls (a passive solar building design) fulfilling insulations
requirements and roofs serving as greenhouses, according to the HIAL website.
By any stretch of the imagination,
this is a unique venture set out to revolutionise higher education in not only
Ladakh but the rest of the country. For someone with an exceptional track
record of innovation in the sphere of education, and a believer in the fruits
of tradition and modern science, Sonam Wangchuk is uniquely placed to fulfil
these lofty ambitions.
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