In the dusty village of Tilonia in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, a quiet revolution has been unfolding for more than five decades. Women who were once told they belonged only to the kitchen now fit solar panels on rooftops, assemble circuits for LED lanterns, and train engineers from across continents. At the heart of this transformation is a grassroots organisation that rejected conventional ideas about education, expertise, and who gets to call themselves an “engineer”. Its model of financial empowerment through solar engineering has become one of the most cited examples of how a community-based organisation can reshape rural livelihoods without waiting for the state or the market to arrive.
Table of Contents
- The origins of a barefoot revolution
- A college that breaks every rule
- Why women, and why grandmothers
- Sign language, colour codes, and a six-month curriculum
- Kamala Devi: the first woman solar engineer
- What financial empowerment really looks like
- Scaling a community-based model
- The three pillars of the barefoot approach
- Why this matters for public administration
- Gender, energy, and the intergenerational effect
- Lessons and limitations
The origins of a barefoot revolution
The story begins with Sanjit “Bunker” Roy, a young postgraduate from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, who volunteered during the 1966 Bihar famine and came back convinced that India’s development model was broken. In 1972, he founded what was then called the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) in Tilonia, later known simply as Barefoot College. The organisation was built on the Gandhian idea of reaching the last person, with the conviction that the skills and intelligence of rural people, combined with demystified modern technology, could empower entire communities without external experts.
The founding philosophy drew directly from Mahatma Gandhi’s argument that poverty in India had to be addressed through “production by the masses” rather than mass production. Roy believed that if the rural poor could design, build, and maintain their own technologies, dependence on outside professionals and government programmes would shrink dramatically. This belief shaped every aspect of the college, from its dirt-floor classrooms to its refusal to issue any degrees or certificates.
A college that breaks every rule
Barefoot College looks nothing like a traditional institution of higher learning. The college does not issue degrees or certificates, and formal qualifications are often considered a disadvantage rather than a requirement. The eight-acre campus, built by the villagers themselves, is entirely solar-powered and features rainwater harvesting. Puppetry is used as a teaching method to communicate lessons on health, human rights, and education. Students sit on dirt floors because, as the founders explain, this helps poor learners feel comfortable and removes the intimidation of a classroom.
This deliberate simplicity is not a compromise. It is a political statement about what education ought to be and whom it ought to serve.
Why women, and why grandmothers
The first cohorts of barefoot solar engineers actually included men. The experiment quickly ran into a problem. Once men learned marketable technical skills, they tended to migrate to cities and abandon their villages. The programme then pivoted to training women, and eventually to focusing specifically on middle-aged women and grandmothers. The programme initially enrolled men, but these students proved disinclined to return to their villages once they had marketable skills, and when the school began recruiting grandmothers instead, the initiative took off.
The logic was simple and powerful. Older women had deep roots in their communities. They were unlikely to leave, more likely to share knowledge with daughters and granddaughters, and carried the moral authority to shift social norms. By training the least likely person in a village to perform the role of a solar engineer, Barefoot College simultaneously electrified homes and rearranged local power structures.
Sign language, colour codes, and a six-month curriculum
The training lasts about six months. Because many trainees cannot read or write, and many more do not share a language with their instructors, the curriculum relies on colour-coded components, hands-on repetition, and gestures. Women learn to fabricate, install, repair, and maintain solar photovoltaic systems, LED lanterns, and charging stations. By the end of six months, a grandmother from a non-electrified hamlet in rural Odisha and another from the highlands of Malawi can communicate fluently about circuit boards using only sign language. Trainers bridge linguistic and cultural barriers using gestures and signs, and the results speak for themselves.
Kamala Devi: the first woman solar engineer
No account of the Barefoot Solar Engineer (BSE) programme is complete without Kamala Devi. Coming from an economically disadvantaged background, she faced strong social resistance when she decided to pursue solar training. Rural Rajasthan in the 1990s was not a place that welcomed women into technical trades, and her decision to travel to Tilonia and study electronics was considered unusual, even inappropriate.
In 1997, against all social odds, the college produced its first woman solar engineer, Kamala Devi, who went on to become the head of the solar unit at Kadampura in 2012. She did not stop at installing panels. She built and ran an independent solar power unit, trained other women, and became a public advocate for girls’ education and women’s economic independence.
Her testimony captures the everyday meaning of financial empowerment. She has spoken about how the organisation gave people like her an opportunity, and how the biggest change has been ensuring that her son and daughter both receive a good education, even though she herself never had any formal schooling. For a woman who started life with no schooling and no independent income, this is the quiet arithmetic of empowerment: a steady livelihood, a household she can support, and children she can educate on her own terms.
What financial empowerment really looks like
Financial empowerment in the Barefoot model is not a grant or a subsidy. It is the combination of a technical skill, a recurring income, and the social standing that flows from being the person in the village who can actually fix things. A trained BSE typically earns a monthly honorarium, and families that benefit from solar installations pay a modest contribution for repairs and maintenance. This revenue stream keeps the solar units functional and keeps the engineer economically independent.
Consider the case of Gulab Devi from Harmara village, documented in a long-running feature on the programme. Completely illiterate, she makes electronic circuits and chargers for solar lighting panels, installs and maintains hand pumps, water tanks and pipelines, and is the sole bread-earner for her four children and ailing husband. Her story, like Kamala Devi’s, illustrates how a single technical skill can overturn decades of economic dependence.
Scaling a community-based model
What started as a local experiment has travelled far. Since 2000, 1600 solar mamas have been trained from 96 countries, solar electrifying 60,000 houses and saving 45 million litres of kerosene from polluting the environment, with 300 of the 688 women trained through the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy programme coming from 17 Indian states between 2009 and 2019. The programme is now supported by the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) of the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, UN Women, and the UNDP, among others.
The three pillars of the barefoot approach
Stepping back from the numbers, the model rests on three interlinked pillars. The first is traditional skill upgrading, where indigenous knowledge of crafts, construction, and community life is enhanced with modern techniques rather than replaced by them. The second is capacity building, through the intensive six-month residential training that turns non-literate women into functional electrical engineers. The third is public advocacy, where the college and its alumni push for women’s education, energy access, and recognition of rural expertise in national and international forums.
This combination matters because development programmes often emphasise one pillar at the cost of the others. A pure vocational training programme without advocacy tends to leave trainees isolated in hostile social environments. A pure advocacy campaign without skill building delivers slogans but no livelihoods. Barefoot College insists on all three.
Why this matters for public administration
For students of social policy, the Barefoot College case is instructive precisely because it did not wait for the state. It demonstrated that a community-based organisation can deliver electrification, skill development, and women’s empowerment at a scale that state programmes later adopted. The organisation has seminally contributed to the conceptualisation of development programmes later adopted and scaled up by governments, with Barefoot Vocational Training Centres established in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Senegal, Zanzibar, Fiji and Madagascar.
The civil society lesson is that innovative, bottom-up approaches can address gaps the state has struggled to fill, especially in last-mile service delivery for marginalised groups. But it is also a reminder that such organisations do not replace the state. They often complement, challenge, and eventually partner with public agencies, as the collaboration between Barefoot College, MNRE, and the Ministry of External Affairs shows.
Gender, energy, and the intergenerational effect
The programme is also a case study in how a well-designed intervention can ripple across generations. When a grandmother becomes a solar engineer, her daughters are more likely to stay in school. When homes are lit at night, children study longer. When kerosene lamps disappear, respiratory illness declines and household expenses fall. Women solar engineers have provided light and power to over 1,500 villages and more than 5,00,000 people worldwide, and the indirect effects on education, health, and gender equity are arguably even larger than the kilowatts generated.
Lessons and limitations
The Barefoot model is not a universal template. It depends on a long-term institutional presence, committed trainers, and donor support, and it works best when communities themselves select their trainees. Solar equipment also has a finite lifespan, and eventually villages ask for more than a small lamp can provide. The founders view this as success rather than failure. Once people experience reliable light, they begin to demand stronger systems, better roads, and better schools. The college plants a small seed, and the community grows the forest.
For policymakers, the implication is clear. Financial empowerment is not primarily about transferring money. It is about transferring capability, confidence, and recognition, and then letting people build the rest themselves.
What do you think? If a grandmother with no formal schooling can learn to install and maintain solar power systems in six months, what does that tell us about how we define “expertise” in our education system? And how can government programmes work with community-based organisations without smothering the very qualities that make them effective?
References
- https://skoll.org/organization/barefoot-college-tilonia/
- https://www.shethepeople.tv/women-in-stem/meet-indias-grandmothers-who-are-solar-powering-villages-11182128
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_College
- https://spectrum.ieee.org/barefoot-matriarchs-take-on-indias-electricity-gap
- https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2012/5/lighting-up-lives-african-women-train-as-barefoot-solar-engineers
- https://thetechpanda.com/the-goldmine-in-tilonia-the-barefoot-college/27868/
- https://www.barefootcollege.org/barefoot-college-rural-women-revolutionize-sustainable-development/
- https://indiatogether.org/solarengr-women
- https://mnre.gov.in/en/barefoot-college-tilonia/
- https://csrbox.org/Impact/description/Impact-stories_full_Solar-Sahelis-powering-up-women-confidence–Barefoot-College_190
Leave a Reply