Education on wheels

Sharada Prahladrao
[Article published in Deccan Herald]

Agastya's Mobile Labs have successfully revolutionised the approach to education in rural areas.

Einstein once said, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” Transforming moribund systems of education into creative engines of learning requires a shift from passive learning to methods that engage, energise and liberate children and teachers. Studies show that countries which have invested in primary education have progressed faster than those who have concentrated on university education.

Transforming the education scenario in India is a daunting prospect - the constituency is a mind-boggling 250 million children and 5 million teachers. A large proportion of the nation’s 1 million schools do not have laboratories, and the pupil-teacher ratio in some areas is about 100:1. Boring classes, rote learning and endless examinations dominate student life. Poverty and gender related issues discourage children from going to school, contributing to a knowledge divide between urban and rural India.

Hands-on education with its ability to motivate the learner, can best leverage and stimulate the inherent strength of rural Indians to jump-start careers and lift communities. Injecting enthusiasm into this system is Agastya International Foundation with its mobile labs - for science, ecology and art.

Last year nearly 600 children made time during their summer holidays to work on Science and Environment projects at Agastya’s science centres. With 35 mobile labs and nine science teaching centres, Agastya expects to reach 1 million children and 20,000 teachers annually.

Mobile science labs teach children complex concepts through simple experiments and ignite their curiosity. They learn about gravitational forces, eclipses and how the brain deciphers signals. As urban areas come up, nature gets denuded and subsequent generations suffer. Agastya’s Mobile Ecology Lab and community education programme aims at mobilising local community support and awareness to rejuvenate local ecosystem services.

The local ecosystem (water and soil conditions) has degraded significantly over the last two decades. There are no open wells any more. Bore wells are running dry and the underground water level has gone down from 100 feet a decade ago to 600 feet or more and is going down annually. Farmers complain that the natural fertility of the soil has degraded so drastically that they are unable to cultivate the land without large use of chemical fertilisers, raising the cost of inputs and possibly damaging the soil further.

Ecology

A Mobile Ecology Lab to promote the understanding of ecology for students and the general community has been developed and a dry run was conducted in early August, 2007. About 10 models dealing with Water, Soil, Energy and Agriculture were developed and made at Agastya’s Creativity Lab. These models will facilitate hands-on learning and understanding of key ecology concepts. The models will be upgraded regularly. The first Mobile Ecology Lab has been sponsored by Agilent Technologies in Kunigal, Karnataka, 60 kms from Bangalore. This is the first Agastya mobile lab for rural India, which deals with critical environment and livelihood challenges. Developed after extended interviews with five village communities, Agastya hopes to make it an effective model-instrument to spread awareness about the scale and nature of environment degradation and generate home-grown strategies to reverse it. With the help of A N Yellappa Reddy, the seeds of ‘Coclosprem gossipium’, a local keystone species, have been collected. It is a hardy, drought resistant plant ideal for the local environment, but exploitation of the tree for fuel wood has made it almost a threatened species.

The specialty of this tree is that it blooms in dry / lean periods of the year and flowers of the tree are an excellent source of nectar and water for birds. The avian (bird) community in turn plays an important role in the local ecosystem as they are a natural predator of pests and will thus reduce the incidence of pest attacks on agro crops. This will help to reduce the consumption of pesticides and eliminate a major ‘non-point source’ of pollution by agro-chemicals, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem. The proliferation of the trees will increase the infiltration of rain water and help recharge the ground water.

Art lab

Agastya recently launched a mobile art lab to reach out to rural children and encourage them to draw, paint and sculpt. It’s not enough to build only a nation of scientists, one needs to nurture art, beauty and creativity too. Agastya’s Creativity Lab, Jhunjhunwala Exploratorium, the Oberoi model making Center, and the Teacher Education Center sponsored by the Schlumberger Foundation are among the upcoming additions that promise to expand significantly the array of interactive, discovery-based learning opportunities for teachers and students.
One organisation, one initiative is enough to have a ripple effect. But more volunteers, more organisations and more environment-conscious approaches need to be adopted if we want to improve and save the world we live in.