Barefoot College

Amrita told me about this. Under the leadership of Bunker Roy, a small group of students started Barefoot College in 1972 in Tilonia, Rajasthan. They train poor and jobless college dropouts who have returned to their villages after trying to make it big in the cities, to be barefoot doctors, engineers, and architects. The idea is that no formal college degree is better than a hands-on experience. The campus now spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a library, meeting halls, an open air theatre, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher's training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, a public call booth, an Internet dhaba (cafe), a screen printing press, and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified. It serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areas. A good overview is given on the Schwab Foundation website, and this is the link to the Barefoot College website.

And here is a wonderful story on Barefoot Solar Engineers where women have been trained to set up solar panels in villages with erratic power supply. It is an amazing read.