Rishi Valley School

Mark Edwards

Rishi Valley may be less an Indian success story than it is a human success story. It shows that there is hope, that we as a species will not necessarily destroy ourselves. But it also taught me that if these hopes are to be realized, then solutions must emerge locally. Hope and solutions cannot be imported by big government or from international bureaucracies thousands of miles away.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth

In 1926, modern philosopher J. Krishnamurti established a boarding school in Rishi Valley. In the years that followed, the staff started a day school for village children, which became the hub of an expanding network of innovative “satellite schools” for the surrounding villages. Contoured to prevent water runoffs and planted with fruit trees, each school is a green public space, a village commons with numerous facilities to serve the whole community – a place for village entertainment, adult education classes and a centre for preserving local biodiversity.

I was fortunate to have met Krishnamurti and travelled with him to Rishi Valley in 1970. I have returned many times over the years, a welcome antidote to assignments reporting on disasters that all too often seem to have no real and lasting solution.

Padmanabha and Rama Rao, the husband and wife team who run the project, developed a set of five hundred story cards modelled on Indian epics that promote ethnic harmony, sexual equality, and love of the environment. Today, their “school in a box” concept has been adopted by over two hundred thousand government and non-government schools throughout India. Despite differences between the continents, it is also burgeoning across Africa, and is applicable to rural communities throughout the majority world.

A hospital serves the large village population in Rishi Valley’s immediate surroundings. It has special facilities for eye care and for the treatment of tuberculosis and also runs a “Safe Mother and Child Care Programme”.

In further developments, an agricultural expert works with farmers who wish to return to organic methods of growing food, while land was recently purchased for a living experiment in biodiversity.

      

Reading class, Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh

Shadow-play preparation and performance

Collecting manure for compost

Harvesting peanuts (above) and organic rice (below)

All © Mark Edwards/Still Pictures