Thursday, 29 November 2012
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Wednesday, 7 November 2012
BUNKER ROY ,,
Bunker Roy was born in Burnpur Bengal, present-day West Bengal. His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother retired as India's trade commissioner to Russia.[4]
He attended The Doon School [5][6] from 1956 to 1962 and St. Stephen's College, Delhi from 1962 to 1967. He earned his master's degree in English. He became the Indian national champion insquash for three years, also representing India internationally in the sport. He then decided to devote himself to social service, to the shock of his parents.
[edit]Career
Bunker Roy, after his education, decided to work in the villages much to the chagrin of his parents. His dream of using traditional expertise rather than "bookish knowledge" for the uplift of neglected communities. He has worked all his life with the Barefoot College, an NGO that he founded.[7]
Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for jobs in the modern world, in buildings so rudimentary they have dirt floors and no chairs.[8] The rural youth selected by the community have to be impoverished, subsisting on barely one meal a day to receive training at Barefoot college.
[edit]Philosophy
Roy professes that he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and has adopted Gandhi's work-style in his college. He is also a protege of Mao Zedong, and modeled his organization after Mao's Barefoot doctors.
[edit]Controversy
He was in the thick of a controversy when he returned the Award to the Aga Khan Foundation in protest for the change in the original citation to include the name of Neehar Raina, a Delhi-based architect who was a part of Roy's team.[9] Quoting Frontline magazine on the controversy,
This is perhaps the first time in the history of the prestigious Aga Khan Awards that anyone has returned the award. The Barefoot College was one of the nine recipients of the architectural awards in 2001. The Tilonia project was found exemplary by the master jury of the Award Foundation as it "augmented traditions and knowledge of a rural community, enabling untutored residents to design and build for themselves". Bunker Roy now wants a debate on the barefoot concept, which is based on the traditional wisdom of the villages and on the capacity and resourcefulness of their common residents. "Who is a barefoot architect? The return of the award should provoke a debate. In this case the ideology of the Barefoot College has been misunderstood and misrepresented," he lamented. "It had been an agonising decision but we have to keep our honour," Bunker Roy told Frontline. "There was no question of accepting Raina as the architect since he was a beginner and was still learning from the elders in the village. When Romi Khosla and Raina came down to Tilonia to discuss the issue with the men and women here in April this year we had agreed to acknowledge Raina as a designer but of course not as an architect," he observes. [10]
The Barefoot College has not accepted the judgement of the Aga Khan Foundation. Staff members of the organization continue to misrepresent facts by claiming that they returned the prize awarded to them in Syria because it was to be shared with another person who had not contributed towards the architecture and design of the Barefoot College campus [11]
[edit]Criticism
Bunker Roy has a history of misrepresenting information. The Aga Khan controversy was just the tip of the iceberg. Bunker Roy shamelessly lies before the western funding agencies, Government of India and the public at large. There is rampant corruption in his Barefoot College, yet funding agencies have continued to fund his operations.
In a recent TED talk[12], Bunker Roy says that when he spoke with a forester for advise on growing trees in his campus, he was told that the effort wasn't worth it because there was no water in the land and the soil was too rocky. Bunker Roy has chosen to conveniently hide the fact that in the year 1993 - 1994, a major project was undertaken by his own organization to regenerate the Tilonia Hill and three other sites in the Silora Block, Ajmer District. The project was funded by Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (German Agro Action) for Rs. 2.6 million. During the project, native species like Neem (Azadirachta Indica), Babool (Acacia Nilotica), Kumtha (Acacia Senegal), Orinja (Acacia Leucophloea), Banyan (Ficus Bengalensis) and Ber (Zizyphus Nummularia) were planted on the Tilonia Hill. These trees had reached a height of 3-4 feet by August 1994 but did not mature into fully grown trees for reasons best known to Bunker Roy. Notwithstanding this fact, in 1998 Barefoot College was awarded the Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar (Indira Gandhi Environment Award), by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. Staggered and Contour trenches dug for regenerating the Tilonia Hill can still be seen on Google Maps.
Bunker Roy claims before the entire world that Barefoot College was fully solar electrified by a hindu priest with only eight years of education in a primary school in rural India.[13] Yet the truth is that Bunker took the assistance of a qualified electronics engineer (Kiran Sindhu) to solar electrify the Barefoot College. Kiran provided professional assistance towards designing the electronics for the solar lighting equipment, capacity planning and building competency in the local community to maintain the solar infrastructure. [14] Bunker Roy rubbishes the education imparted by Universities by claiming that Barefoot College trained women solar engineers in Africa know more than University educated engineers who have spent 5 years earning their engineering degree.[15]
Bunker Roy tells the media that the solar cookers fabricated at his college were designed by Sita Devi who has only three years of education.[16] The truth is that the solar cooker fabricated at the Barefoot College was invented by a renowned Austrian engineer Wolfgang Scheffler [17] [18]who has been visiting Barefoot College since 2003.[19][20]
[edit]Personal life
In 1970, Roy married his classmate Aruna Roy, then an officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Aruna was later to achieve fame as a political and social activist. Later Aruna became a prominent leader of the Right to Information movement, and in 2000 received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership.[21]
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