ඣIt was when Kamlesh Joshi joined Delhi University’s Dyal Singh College in 2007 to do an honours degree in physics that he realised two things. One, he was not interested in the sciences and had chosen to study it mainly due to pressure from his family and two, the gap between him and his peers in Delhi University was more like a valley than a schism. Culture shock at finding himself in this new environment was putting it very mildly. Everything he encountered was a shock at some level, coming from his rural background as it were.
💃Unable to cope and despite family opposition, he dropped out after his first year and took up political science at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College. But this too proved a challenge: not only was he dealing with a total change in stream (he was a science student in school), but a lot of the teaching was in English, whereas he had been at a Hindi medium school (Sanskriti Vidya Mandir in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand). A lot of what was said in classrooms went over his head,“like a bouncer” as he puts it.
𒐪When the forms to take the examinations came out, he kept them with himself for a week before filling out which language he would tackle his exams in. Hindi was what he was comfortable with but English was what he needed to conquer. Ultimately, he picked the hard way, studied non stop in libraries and with his other friends from his village who were pursuing similar subjects at Jawaharlal Nehru university (JNU). His hard work and perseverance paid off as he eventually managed to top his class of 18 students (many dropped out from the original class strength of 55) and won a gold medal, one of the redeeming features for his family in Rudrapur. Kamlesh then went on to earn an MBA in international business with a specialisation in tourism from Gwalior’s Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel, assuming that a professional degree would land him a decently paying job, even if his career in tourism would make no true difference to the world at large.
🧔A chance discussion with his JNU friends led them all to question their futures and what contributions they could make to society. That’s when the seed of the idea was sown: why not start a school in their village so that the future generations don’t suffer all the cultural and other shocks they had all witnessed and get a “real” education as opposed to the rote learning they had all experienced? “We learnt everything with a “danda” and with this type of fear based learning, you can only become well trained not well educated”, he argues. The consensus among the group of friends was that they must do something to change this: the future generations from Nanakmatta deserved and should get a better education, more in tune with the rest of the country and the world so that they don’t stick out like sore thumbs.
𝕴It was this discussion in the precincts of JNU that shaped the next few years of the small group of five who had ventured outside their state for their higher education, a trend that is mostly discouraged by the families back home.
The Early Years
ဣDeciding to start a school and actually walking the talk was a different ballgame. None of the five founders had any kind of formal training as educators, none had any kind of financial backing and nobody had really worked with or had any real experience with children before.
ဣWith a first batch of six students and an initial investment of Rs 40 lakh cobbled together somehow, Nanakmatta Public school got going in 2012, at a former orphanage with six students, minimal resources and know-how at their disposal. The only thing that the founders were clear about was that they were aiming to provide a holistic education with 21st century skills, something none of them had experienced themselves. Initially, nothing really seemed to be falling in place and things were a bit haphazard. Besides community support, they really had nothing in their favour. The early days were anything but easy but the founders decided to persevere.
🍌That’s when they decided to start learning by watching and studying others. They began to observe the practices of Teach for India (TFI) after being part of TFIx (TFI's incubator program), Avishkaar (a center for science and maths in Palampur), Bal Vigyan Khojshala of Berinag, Uttarakhand (supported by Pratham Science Program) and other organisations vested in the space and invited many to their campus. Simultaneously, they began to use films - world cinema, art films, documentaries and Bollywood - more aggressively to expose the students to what is happening outside their immediate environs. For the last 5 years, they have been using cinema as a pedagogical tool to complement classroom learning under the Cinema in School Initiative with the guidance of cinema activists and educators from different parts of the country. "We didn’t just watch the film for fun but actively debated, discussed, argued, drew lessons and insights from what we had shown them," explains Kamlesh Atwal, a former JNU student who is now the principal at the school. Film, he says, slowly but surely became an integral part of their learning and expression as did field studies and research and every single subject within the sphere of social sciences was explored and made clearer to students through the use of films.
Since Nanakmatta remains quite remote from today’s India, the school started collaborating with as many organisations outside their state so that students could be exposed to the best learning practices and feel connected to the outside environment. People’s Archive for Rural India (PARI), Teach for India, Pratham Science programme, KER (//www.kidseducationrevolution.org/)🌸, Books for All, Claylab, Joy Of Learning foundation, among several others were early collaborators and acted as sponges for the Nanakmatta team and teachers to learn, imbibe and absorb how to further learning in its entirety.
The COVID Breakthrough
♊Oddly, when most other schools were grappling with how to keep themselves relevant during the pandemic, Nanakmatta school found its feet and began to get noticed when the rest of the world came to a standstill. By this time, the school had close to 980 students and around 65 teachers and had managed to secure admission for some of its students in reasonably good institutions in Delhi and other cities in India. Not only were they coping well, but in many cases the students were thriving. “The pandemic allowed us to pause in our efforts, catch our breath, and share our learnings with the rest of the world in a way; on how multidimensional an education can be,” says Atwal, who calls 2020 a “watershed” year for their school.
𒊎The students began to teach small groups within their community while maintaining the protocols set in place during COVID. They started setting up libraries in their villages (this is continuing), publishing a newspaper that kept everyone abreast of the happenings. Many videos were made and disseminated through WhatsApp, YouTube, and other mediums, highlighting its innovative learning methods, and these began to resonate with schools and organisations not just in India but even outside the country.
✨Some organisations from outside made the effort to connect with the school. The Heritage schools from Delhi for instance, got in touch and wanted to use some of the material put out by Nanakmatta. Virtual classrooms and virtual visits of members of TFI were also organised at this time, which gave the outside world a peek into the school’s workings. The validation from those who had been in the business gave the founders more confidence and the energy to redouble their efforts. By then, Nanakmatta had also been taken under the TFI network in a more formal manner, a program under which the latter offered support to schools from rural settings.
ℱIn November 2024, 56 students from the school went on a week-long educational tour to Jaipur and Delhi, the learnings and insights from which they then compiled and illustrated in their school magazine 'The Explorer.'. “These collective efforts of learning and working together give our students invaluable exposure and teach them that true learning happens outside the four walls of the classroom,” points out Atwal. A journalism and social media club help the students stay in touch with the daily and relevant happenings, both in India and globally.
🌟More recently, the school has been awarded the Wipro Earthians award for adopting and spreading the use of safer menstruation practices among girls who have switched to using menstruation cups rather than pads and other options, which are less environmentally friendly. This project is supported and guided by the Nature Science Initiative, an organisation based in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. The practice was started by the senior girls of Nanakmatta and is now being spread across schools in the vicinity by the students themselves. So far, students have shared this practice with 40 other schools in the region.
💫A school for entrepreneurship has been launched with 120 students so that they better understand this concept and learn to market the goods made by the tribal and other communities to begin with. Pankaj Wadhwa, who runs the Udhyam project which nurtures, supports, and finances entrepreneurs in Uttarakhand, says that many of his future entrepreneurs could be a result of this unique initiative, hitherto unseen in virtually any schools in the state.
A Small, Quiet Revolution
ܫWhat has surprised parents, the community, educationists, and academicians around India is where the students are finding themselves post school and how they are standing out wherever they go.
🐼Almost ten of the school’s students have got admission (with full scholarship) at Sonepat’s Ashoka University, a first for any school virtually from this rural setting and considered harder to secure admission than the best colleges including St. Stephen’s college in Delhi. One of the Nanakmatta students at Ashoka has more recently won the RISE fellowship and will be making his way to Oxford and Columbia through this. Another student from Nanakmatta and studying at Ashoka recently accompanied Teach For India’s CEO Shaheen Mistri to an education conference in Romania as a student representative. According to Mistri, the school is doing “something very different and very right” as she is yet to meet such self assured and aware students from India’s rural landscape.
♋Close to 15 Nanakmatta students have made their way into Azim Premji university in Bengaluru and Bhopal and a few are in good colleges in Delhi University. To help its students cope with the level of English required at these institutions, a mentor is allotted to each student at the school from Class 9 onwards, who helps them hone their language skills. Ninety-five percent of the Nanakmatta school kids are first generation kids going to an English medium school, 20 percent of them belong to families that are below the poverty line (BPL) and 40 per cent come from the Tharu tribe in these parts. A few of the early pass outs are now working in high paying and reasonably secure government and private sector jobs in the metros, something unimaginable for the parents from these communities.
🍬All the validation received by the Nanakmatta school founders has led them to launch a two year Himalayan Fellowship for Transformation, sans any government support or intervention. With six fellows to begin with, the two year fellowship is nurturing young leaders who can replicate this model and contribute by introducing innovative learning and teaching methods in schools across the state, which the founders argue is the biggest need of the hour for its next generation.
🍌Meanwhile, the school is slowly growing and now has a total of 1350 students with a teaching staff of around 70, is managing to break even and be self sustaining with its fees ranging from Rs 750 (primary) to Rs 2000 (Class 12) a month and delivering a quality of education that many high-end private schools in India’s metros are failing to manage with minimal resources at its disposal.
🎶Till recently, the Nanakmatta gurudwara, a few kilometres away from centre, was the sole crowd puller in this unremarkable town but of late this small school is offering a new beacon of hope to its parents, students and the wider community while helping the five founders realise their dream of making a difference.
