Ep. 1 – Stories from the Schools of Bharat: A school 300 metres from Nepal changed how we define ‘last-mile’

Some schools are hard to find, but Hausalpurwa, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district, is hard to reach even once you know exactly where it is.

Getting there means 280 kilometres by road from Lucknow to Lakhimpur Kheri, then another 60 to 70 kilometres deeper into open, marshy country bordering Dudhwa National Park. There’s no obvious sign you’ve arrived until you hear children playing somewhere past the treeline.

In Episode 1 of Stories from the Schools of Bharat, Rohit Prakash, co-founder of iDream Education, sat down with Jay Vrat Dubey, from the operations team, who made that trip to set up a smart classroom in Hausalpurwa’s government school. What he found once he got there changed how he thinks about a phrase every CSR programme and NGO uses without quite pinning down: the last-mile learner.

Here are key insights from the conversation.

Where 6 in 10 students cross from Nepal to attend school 

Hausalpurwa sits inside Dudhwa’s stretch of the India-Nepal border, in the kind of open terrain where the line between two countries is a field, a stretch of grass, sometimes nothing at all. Jay Vrat noticed it almost as soon as he arrived: the school is roughly 300 metres from Nepal, close enough that people simply walk across.

More than 60% of the children studying there come from the Nepal side. There’s no gate and no formal crossing. For the families involved, there’s likely no real sense that they’re commuting internationally to attend school. They’re just going to the nearest one.

This changes what “reach” means altogether. This school serves children from two countries, informally, because the geography leaves no other option. A district boundary on a map doesn’t mean much when the nearest classroom sits on the wrong side of it for six in ten students.

Why a 65-inch screen was a first for these children

When Jay Vrat began setting up the iPrep Digital Class, the children were sitting on the floor, the way their teachers usually arranged them. He remembers them being curious before anything even played. Most had never seen a screen that large. None had seen a touchboard.

Once the content started, the mood shifted. These are children without YouTube access at home, so watching animated content on a 65-inch panel, right alongside a teacher who was still very much present and teaching, wasn’t a small novelty for them. It was the first time many had seen that what they were normally taught could arrive in more than one form.

Jay Vrat described the children as fully absorbed through the training session, asking questions and staying engaged well past their first curiosity about the screen.

Setting up a classroom designed to run without a signal 

There’s a second reason these children had never seen anything like it, beyond limited access: the network doesn’t reach that far either. Indian mobile networks don’t work reliably in Hausalpurwa. People there use Nepali SIM cards to get online.

The fact shaped how the classroom had to be set up. The team used the internet exactly once, during installation. Everything about the classroom afterwards had to run without depending on a connection. A setup built around “there’s probably a signal nearby” simply wouldn’t have survived contact with this village.

“Our session was built so that no internet was needed there. We used it only once, during installation. Everything else ran completely offline.”
– Jay Vrat Dubey, Manager – Growth and Impact, iDream Education 

The headmaster who walks into Nepal to fill his classroom 

The person most responsible for making the classroom matter wasn’t on iDream’s team at all. The school’s headmaster runs his own informal outreach, walking into villages on the Nepal side to tell families about the smart classroom and persuade them to send their children to school.

It isn’t an easy case to make. Most parents in the area are farmers, and Jay Vrat mentioned that some others take up informal or illegal work simply to get by. 

Getting children into the classroom regularly, rather than occasionally, turned out to be the harder problem, one the technology alone couldn’t solve.

After the installation, the headmaster took Jay Vrat through the village himself, introducing him to parents and explaining what had been set up and why it would help their children. 

That groundwork changed attendance. Teachers who had taught with chalkboards for years now teach every class through the smart classroom instead.

What “last-mile” actually means

Before this trip, Jay Vrat’s idea of a “last-mile learner” was a fairly ordinary one: a child in a remote area, hard to physically reach. Hausalpurwa complicated that.

“Last-mile learners are not just in a remote area. They’re in a place where the system itself doesn’t work, because neither the Nepal government nor the India government has much intervention here.”
– Jay Vrat Dubey

Hausalpurwa sits in a gap neither country’s administration fully owns. Jay Vrat pointed out that the village itself splits along the border, its residents counted as Nepali on one side and Indian on the other, with neither government running much in the way of intervention there. If development was going to reach a place like this, he said, someone had to go and do it themselves, and he described feeling a mix of gratitude and responsibility once he realised that.

That’s the case Hausalpurwa makes for anyone funding or designing a last-mile programme. A location on a map is easy enough to identify. A location no government checks on regularly, whether it’s a CSR-backed education initiative or a state department’s own outreach, is a different kind of problem, and it’s the one Hausalpurwa’s headmaster ended up solving on foot: going door to door on the Nepal side until parents agreed to send their children daily rather than occasionally.

Reaching a school like Hausalpurwa’s takes more than hardware. It takes a setup built to survive zero connectivity, and enough groundwork with parents on both sides of a border to get children there consistently. If your CSR programme or NGO is planning for a similarly hard-to-reach school, iDream Education partners on exactly this kind of implementation. Get in touch to talk through what it would take for your programme.