Pabal - a 1 year science boarding school

About 6 hours outside of Mumbai is a place where I've been wanting to go for awhile. The point of the visit was to observe how an often touted 'successful' rural tech development center runs, and what community it engages in what stages of the design process.

Vigyan Ashram means something like 'science community' after the Ghandian ashram concept. It brings in 40 students (grade 8-10) from around rural India for a 1 year program to 'learn by doing'. I visited for 4 days to absorb their approach to engaging communities with technology. In their case community is students (and this batch is all male). They treat their campus as a lab and then replicate what works with the students in a network of 72 rural schools through a program they have been developing over many years. They started in 1983.

Here students are learning measurement by quantifying the difference between cabbage that is grown with a special covering for the first 3 months and cabbage that is grown normally.

The students wake up at 6am to take care of the goats, chickens, and cows. Some of them are raising chicks for sale in the nearby community to earn some money and learn a bit of accounting.

This place is famous (at least in MIT development circles) for its FabLab. Fablabs are criticized widely for being MIT's parachuted lab sent round the world stocked with inappropriate tools (cnc routers, laser cutters) that inevitably break down and repairs are expensive and imported. This happens to be one of the highlighted successful ones, because it has a committed and handy manager, Vinayak. Vinayak is an electrical engineer who codes and soders the day away. They don't use much more than their circuit making tools, which is far under the aim of the FabLab (where you can make almost anything, most importantly machines that make almost anything themselves)

Vigyan Ashram did some work on displaced person housing and as a result ended up with a bunch of ferrocement geodesic domes used for staff housing, storage, and classes. This one houses the Energy and Environment 'subject' which is one of 4 subjects.

In these rural labs, look what they've made! a massive automatic solar concentrator for passive water heating! No, not actually. They bought the concentrator and water heater design was existent. But they did take a water heater design and convert it into a chicken egg incubator. They have a couple other solar cookers they bought and it seems they had some money given to develop a solar cooker village concept, where villagers can centralize the cooking of things like boiled potatoes for the entire village. Hmm...but the concentrator is cool - except when you put your hand in front of the focal point - then its burning hot.

This is a view from the vigyan ashram campus, which is just outside of the village Pabal. Below is some space where the students and staff go play cricket - almost every day unless the ball is lost.

Space is nice, and vigyan ashram has given its 5 acre, government-granted plot of land a history and tradition that speaks for itself. It's founder set out to revolutionize rural education in India and his organization has continued to be at the center of that long after he has gone. They certainly engage youth in technology and their 'community' is this year-long group of students as well as their wider school network. They focus on education rather than design or technology or innovation - which is an important lesson for what we want to do. In addition, Vigyan Ashram has tested some basic ways of connecting their hands-on education with communities. First, the communities are required to pay Rs.40,000 to have their school participate in the program with the understanding that their school will be offering services and basic tools that will be offered to the community at modest cost and the government then agrees to fund a teacher-trainer to be assigned to that school. How can a workshop in a community replicate some of these things? If you were able to set up multiple workshops in multiple communities tied by similar mission and values then maybe you could have exchanges of students at the 8-10th standard, but how can you offer them a certified education? Maybe Vigyan Ashram could help train us to offer a certified sort of program, but then we have become structured and exclusive.

In speaking with Vigyan them they expressed interest in expanding their labs, and were interested in setting up a more developed water, sanitation, and hygiene lab. An interesting idea, with a home to house, and a network to scale it. But the issue is finding the right people to do things like this, who can connect culturally and linguistically, who share the values of the location and are passion-driven rather than money-driven. But be careful with passion - a true Hindu might disapprove.