Nabarangpur sits on the Odisha-Chhattisgarh border, in a belt long associated with Naxal activity. Large parts of the district fall under Forest Department land, and that means no mobile towers, no broadband, no internet at all.
The iDream Education team has now set up smart classrooms in 33 schools across Odisha. Most visits follow the same routine: install the panel, train the teachers, and move on. The visit to Mali Dhanwa village didn’t. It’s the one Dev Vrat Dubey, from the operations team, tells Rohit Prakash, co-founder of iDream Education, about in this episode 3 of Stories from the Schools of Bharat.
What Rohit and Dev talk about is a story in two halves.
- The first is about a screen that had to work without the internet it was built for.
- The second one is about what the same school’s principal did, off the school grounds, with the same conviction.
Reading rather than watching? Here’s what Dev told Rohit.
Two visits, and a classroom nobody had been trained to use
Dev calls Mali Dhanwa’s government school one of the strongest in the state. His first visit there didn’t go to plan. He arrived late, and the school had already closed for the day.
He came back a second time for training. This time, it was the students asking the questions. The panel had gone in, and so had the content, but nobody had shown the children what was on it.
Dev’s fix was simple. Train the students alongside the teachers, not instead of them. That way, a student could switch the panel on and run a lesson even if no teacher was in the room. Dev says the response from the children was strong.
From YouTube clips to digital content in Odia
Mali Dhanwa had smart panels before this one. What it didn’t have was anything on them worth watching.
“That school already had smart panels installed before this one. But there was no digital content on them. They used to study through YouTube.”
– Dev Vrat, Programme Lead – Operations, iDream Education
The new setup was a 65-inch interactive panel with digital content in Odia. That mattered here more than most places, because Mali Dhanwa has no internet connection at all. Before this, the principal managed on his own. He’d download videos onto a pen drive at home, or screen-record a lesson, and carry it into class himself.
It worked, but only as far as one person’s time and effort could stretch. This time, the students had animated lessons, syllabus-linked books, and science simulations they could run without him. Nobody had to be in the room for the learning to happen.
A police complaint that reached the Naxals
The principal has been at Mali Dhanwa for 8 years. Soon after he arrived, he noticed the village clearing a stretch of forest every year. He filed a police complaint.
It worked, in that the logging stopped. It also reached people he hadn’t accounted for.
The local sarpanch had links to the Naxals active in the area. The group picked the principal up over the complaint, and the sarpanch stepped in. He told them the principal hadn’t known who was behind the cutting, or why – that’s what the complaint had been about.
Teaching the village through its children
Dev asked him what happened after that. The principal didn’t talk about the police, or the risk he’d taken. He talked about the village instead.
Nobody there, students included, had ever been taught why the forest mattered. So instead of filing another complaint, he changed his approach. He taught his own students.
Those children went home to the same families every evening. Slowly, their parents learned alongside them, and the forest cutting stopped completely. These days, Dev says, the principal is held in real regard at his school.
He had one more thing to say, about why that worked where the complaint hadn’t.
“Schools don’t lack talent. What’s missing is resources – ways for children to study.”
– what the Mali Dhanwa principal told Dev Vrat
Teachers, he pointed out, aren’t only accountable to their own classroom. They’re government employees, and when a school’s closed, they’re often needed elsewhere. Sourcing and organising content on top of that isn’t something most of them have hours to spare for, alongside a life outside work.
Mali Dhanwa’s students stopped waiting on one man’s pen drive once the panel arrived with real, offline content in their own language. The principal solved a different problem the same way, by treating his own students as the quickest route to their parents, and using that to end years of unchecked logging.
Hardware alone didn’t fix the classroom, and a police complaint alone didn’t fix the forest. What worked, in both cases, was someone inside the school who kept going after the obvious first attempt failed.
iDream Education partners with schools like Mali Dhanwa’s to bring offline, language-specific content into classrooms that can’t rely on an internet connection to work. If your CSR programme or NGO is designing for a similarly disconnected or hard-to-reach district, get in touch to talk through what that could look like.
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