The Good Harvest School
This all girls, English-medium, Agri based school in ‘Paschim Gaon’ village, some 150 km from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh is sowing the seeds of the transformation in rural education.
Meet the Nath duo, chasing transformation “Inner” and “outer”. 37-years-old Ashita Nath and 35-years-old Anish Nath left their corporate jobs in Delhi and returned to their home state UP to work with the local community in 2013. Ashita was working in development sector while Anish was in the advertising profession. They started working with farmers. While working with the farmers they realised the situation of education among the farmer’s children especially girls was gloomy. They noticed many traditional farmers are leaving the farming, selling their land and shifting to bigger towns and city only to do labor work.
“There are many unaddressed issues in the education system in rural part of India, “Shortage of qualified teachers, poor infrastructure, lack of teaching skills and many more due to which students suffer the most, especially girls.” says Ashita. Women’s contribution is still not much counted despite putting equal efforts in the agriculture, they are not the part of decision making at the farms, they are just like landless laborers in their own fields.
Mrinal Pande in her article, “The Invisible women farmers” stated India’s agricultural industry, which employs 80 to 100 million women, cannot survive without their labor. From preparing the land, selecting seeds, preparing and sowing to transplanting the seedlings, applying manure/fertilisers/pesticides and then harvesting, winnowing, and threshing, women work harder and longer than male farmers. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-invisible-women-farmers-agriculture-labourer-4714072/
In such a situation, what a primary school in the rural area should do? An answer could be they schools must focus more on girls students, they must teach sustainable agriculture practices to them, schools must empower rural girls. The Good Harvest school founded by Ashitha and Anish is on a mission to provide all these, they want to remain Agri- focused and not for profit institute to provide “Free Green Education” as they call it.
From dropouts and non-school goers- curious learner, The Good Harvest school begun with six girl students from the village in 2016 after tough time convincing parents and villagers. Today 45 girls from the village are exploring the world in the decent campus of the school in standard one to forth and kindergarten.
Girls at The Good Harvest School are learning about various plants, land, insects, birds, seeds, natural farming and the sustainable ways to live and harvest with nature. “This year we enrolled a twelve-year-old girl who was in class 6 in some other school, but she is unable to recognize numbers and alphabets. All this while she has been promoted to upper classes every year. And most of the girls have similar stories.” said Anish.
My name is Meenu:
Like every other girl in the village Meenu was helping her mother cooking, cleaning and even in farming, she had to look after the goats and she was not enrolled in school like her brother. Now she helps her mother to count money, she visits bank with his father to fill deposit slip, she helps her brother in school homework and love to talk in English. That’s the change Nath duo is trying to replicate.
Watch the beautiful journey of Meenu – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaWvUhPT_ZU
The journey of Good harvest school has been roller coaster ride, they had a really tough time convincing villagers and then designing balance curriculum for the girls in a village. Personal care and attention is given to every student’s learning journey with the help of volunteers and experts at the school. Starting something radical is not an easy task. They had a tough time to pursue village pradhan (a woman village head) later she realized and offered whatever help she can.
Way forward:
Ashita and Anish are managing all these activities through crowd funding. They are working to build sustainable infrastructure and planning to have fully functional animal husbandry.
“In the next 3 years, we are aiming to set up basic school infrastructure. Within this timeline we want to have our curriculum in place, we are working on developing our own agriculture-based curriculum for primary level. In the next five years, we want to have a fully functional animal husbandry and a profitable agriculture unit. We are working towards self-sustainability. That means through agriculture income we want to run the entire school, without depending on external donation. Our aim is to achieve self-sustainability in the next 5 years.” said Anish.
With such unique initiatives, they are not only educating the girls but also helping the farming community. Imagine, a girl with such unique experimental learning in farming and life, how much she could achieve for herself and for her family and community.