March 10, 2004
At The Barefoot College, Tilonya
The Barefoot College is an organisation which was set up in 1970's to promote self sufficiency, tribal and gender rights and sustainability among the Rajasthani poor. It is probably one of the most sucessful NGO's in the world, having won countless international awards with funding to boot.
It was concieved by Bunker Roy, who remains the driving force behind the organisation. He was recently awarded the "Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year" award by the World Economic Forum amongst many other plaudits he has received. The BFC has scores of centres all over India, focused on its mission. The campus at Tilonya is the headquarters, where the funding applications take place and the accounts are prepared. The Campus is completely self-sufficient with regard to Water and Electricity. Every day 200 people are fed from the kitchen, which uses the solar collector shown here to cook most of the food.
It is largely an Indian organisation, with very few westerners involved in the day to day administration. There's a big emphasis on employing marginalised or handicapped people on the campus and there are visitors from literally all over the world. While I was visiting there were a couple from Ethiopia training in order to bring back the techniques to Africa. This was besides the small group of westerners from Canada, Germany and Norway.
I heard about the Barefoot College at Tilonya from my sister Jean, who works at UNESCO in Paris. Since this is the International year of sustainability in Education, organisations like the Barefoot College are highlighted as successful examples. At Tilonya, there are parts of the campus focused on Solar Power for lighting, Solar collectors (seen below), communications; which is the team which raises consciousness on rights and environmental issues through music and puppet shows. There is also an impressive retail outlet for a wide selection of local crafts. They also do a lot of work constructing vast rainwater harvesting tanks to collect the waters of the monsoon for later, when they are badly needed during the summer droughts. The huge collection tank at Tilonia is so large that it replenishes the local subterranian aquifiers, something which no other orginsation does despite their being depleted at an alarming rate for agricultural activities
The College builds and promotes the use of these parabolic solar collectors, designed by a visiting German engineer. Made from simple components and requiring no energy to run, the college also trains locals in their construction and maintainance. The communications team even have a catchy song in Hindi about why you should get one for your village. This one is double-sized and is used to cook three meals per day for the 200+ people who live or stay on campus. There's no shortage of sunlight in Rajasthan.
The collector pivots horizontally during the day to track the sun, using a system of coutnerweights, like a grandfather clock
Using the vertical pivot, the collector can be adjusted to point at the sun during the Summer and Winter
The sun's ray's focused on a "hot box" to cook spuds, rice, or heat water
An array of solar energy panels. The campus is self-sufficient in electricity because of these and many like them on the rooftops.
I spent a while phoning the campus from nearby Pushkar, in the hopes of talking to someone about coming to visit. Laxman Singh was kind enough to encourage me out. I took a local bus from Pushkar from Ajmer and then a local train from there to the village of Tilonya. The men hanging around the chai stand chatted to me and treated me to a chai before one of them escorted me to the extensive Campus. As it turned out I spent almost two weeks in total there, in two separate stays. The first to come and suss it out, meet the people and explore a bit. An on the second occasion I was invited to set up an Open Source pilot project for the headquarters of the Barfoot College, where they do the accounts and coordinate their vital funding applications.
The Following is a report written for Bunker on the pilot open source project, which had mixed success but did put Open Source on the agenda of the orginisation. In retropsect the issue was probably one of routing once the second network card had been introduced to the system, although the removal of the second card and its configuration files did not solve the problem. Either way, we were pressed for time and as there was no internet connection freely available, I did not have access to the usual online technical documentation which might have assisted with the issue. I did succeed in sorting out many issues with the windows PC's on campus and assisting generally in preparation of documents. There seems to be quite a big requirement on the campus for IT expertise.
Linux in Tilonia.
_______________________________________________
Linux and Open Source software in general have potentially very useful application with NGO's. Not just because these technologies have matured to a sufficient degree to provide reliable and cost-efficient IT infrastructure but also because the development methodology with its focus on openness, empowerment and community is closely aligned with the objectives of most NGO's.
Sanjay and myself arrived in Tilonia initially with the plan to set up a demonstration of concept in Open Source software for Tilonia, assisted by Sutanand and Rustam. This evolved quickly into a plan to provide file sharing, internet sharing, porn filtering and Hindi localisation services to the accountants office building on the campus. We also wished to explore a demo of LTSP whereby several older computers can be run from a powerful contemporary computer, saving tens of thousands of Rupees.
We aquired a computer from the Solar team and an installation of Fedora Core 1 went smoothly. Bringing the computer over to the accountancy office, we suceeded in getting windows file sharing operational between two offices, removing the problem which the staff had experienced prior to that which prevented them from sharing files across the network that were over a certain size.
We also were successful in installing VNC and with this, enabling office staff to open a window on their desktops which contained the desktop environment of the linux server. This would allow them to use the desktop of the server while seated on front of their own machines.
The overall plan was to connect the server to the router in Shiv Ram's office and through this connection, feed out the ISDN Internet connection to all of the computers in the other offices. These other offices already had cables and hubs to interconnect themselves, so it was just a question of connecting the server to this existing infrastructure to provide file sharing, internet sharing and desktop export.
It was at this point that we were beset with a hardware problem which unfortunately, we were not successful in resolving before we had to leave. A second network card, installed on the server using an automatic service, caused the existing network card to malfunction. It was only able to accept incoming connectons, not outgoing ones. This prevented us from connecting the server to the internet hub and caused the existing services which we had set up to become disabled.
This was a positive experience, despite the technical issues and we got to demonstrate the potential of file sharing at least. I think that our demonstration should be followed up quickly with another which will more convincingly demonstrate the useful services that can be provides using Linux and Open Source software. In the future, once file, email, intranet and filtering services are in place, an exploration of the potiential that wireless connectivity holds for the campus would be the logical next step. LTSP could also be employed to turn the training room beside the Internet Dhaba into a decent Open Source IT training room, all running off the same contemporary machine.
On a personal note, I had a great time in Tilonya and will be looking to return in the future when I can. Despite the frustration we experienced in setting up this demonstration, I think that we have put Open Source on the agenda at Tilonia and this will reap dividends in greater efficiency and productivity for the Barefoot College in times to come.
Mark O'Sullivan
mark@tinderbox.ie
http://mark.tinderbox.ie/