Not by Teachers Alone

Teachers day it is but teachers alone cannot do much to stem the tide of impending disaster facing humanity unless the syllabus and pedagogy are tuned to equity and sustainability. Late capitalism is sending us all to our doom because it has our education - syllabus, pedagogy and teachers all combined, selling us the myth that industrial development will improve our lives endlessly. Therefore, if we are to challenge the malevolent domination of capitalism then we have to devise our own syllabi and pedagogy of equity and sustainability and our own teachers to teach them in our own schools and colleges. While there are a few such schools, colleges are much fewer. As far as I know there is only one - Swaraj University in Udaipur in Rajasthan.
However, for initiating youth into activism on the ground what is required is a more rooted training given by activists that can analyse the dominance of capitalism and its malevolent effects by discussing mass struggles against it. Most grassroots movements against capitalist development have their in house training arrangements for their cadre but in the heat of the struggle often it is not possible to organise systematic training programmes. Therefore, the activists of mass movements for equity and sustainability across the country welcomed the setting up of the Sambhaavnaa Institute in Kandbari village in Palampur in Himachal Pradesh by the Kumud Bhushan Trust in 2010 for providing training programmes to youth and activists on various issues and strategies of grassroots mass mobilisation. The moving force behind the setting up of the institute is Prashant Bhushan, the people's lawyer par excellence who is both an activist and lawyer fighting for justice and sustainability but it was supported by a huge cross section of mass movements around the country as it fulfilled a felt need. Over time this institute has evolved into a fantastic training centre with a range of training programmes for activists and youth. While some activists work full time there anchoring the institute, the syllabus and the pedagogy is fluid and is often decided by activists from the field who are invited as teachers.
Last winter in December, Subhadra and I were invited to contribute as teachers to one training workshop for college going youth on development. Even though as anarchist activists soldiering on alone among the Bhil Adivasis we are always hard pressed for time and winter is not exactly the best time to be in the snow capped Dhauladhar ranges of Himachal for people who are more accustomed to the searing hot summers and mild winters of the Malwa plateau, we agreed to go simply because the idea of Sambhaavnaa is so good.
The first view of Sambhaavnaa is itself an education because the campus and the buildings in it have been designed and built with local architecture, materials and construction techniques by Didi Contractor, the eco-architect of the Kangra Valley. As a water conservationist what I liked most is the exquisitely designed water tank for the whole campus shown below.

The villagers in these parts are pretty ingenious and have designed over time an irrigation system called the Kuhl which diverts waters from the hilly streams into the farms for irrigation by gravity without the use of any pumps. The Sambhaavnaa campus used to be a farm before it was bought and converted into a training centre. The farm plots are still there with the kuhl running through them and the buildings built on the hillocks surrounding the farms. Thus, the trainees can work on the farm along with their training in equity and sustainability studies and strategies.
Its been a long time since the Alirajpur days upto the early 1990s  that I have undertaken long trainings. So it was a great experience that made me nostalgically remember those exhilarating years of my own youth when we used to think we would overcome capitalism. Subhadra and I had to comment on the presentations that the trainees made on the various people's movements in the country. This they had to do after first going through a training on the political economy of development. This is a very good pedagogy. The youth get a solid practical perspective on various aspects of capitalist development and the movements against it from activists in the field. In political activism today there is a big difference between theory and practice, much more than there was earlier. So it is necessary to bring this grassroots perspective into the training. The youth who came to the training unanimously said that while they had some idea of the theoretical critiques of capitalist development earlier, they had very little knowledge of the nitty gritties of actual ground level activism.
Obviously we need more such institutes across the country if the mass challenge to the madness of capitalism is to gain critical mass but till that happens one has to be thankful that we have at least one such institute in this country.