Ep. 2 – Stories from the Schools of Bharat: How we carried our smart classroom down a mountain, by hand

Before any child at a school near Rudraprayag, Uttarakhand, ever saw a smart classroom, that classroom had to survive a mountain. 

Naveen Sharma who has spent six years with iDream Education’s operations team, and today he shapes the company’s teacher-training programmes. In this episode 2 of Stories from the Schools of Bharat, he tells Rohit Prakash, co-founder of iDream Education, about a school he visited himself, where there wasn’t a road wide enough for a vehicle to reach the building. Teachers, villagers, and hired labourers carried the interactive flat panel down by hand, along a narrow path that turns treacherous once the monsoon sets in.

What happened after that panel arrived says less about the technology itself. It says more about what a working smart classroom can do for a school that’s been losing its students year after year. 

Here’s what came out of the conversation. 

Why there was no road to drive the panel in

The school sits below a mountain, reached only by a narrow track that Naveen describes as barely walkable once the rains arrive. 

There was no way to drive the panel in, so on installation day, teachers and villagers helped carry it down themselves.

Training day meant the same walk for Naveen’s team. The vehicle could only go so far, and from there, they walked roughly 1.25 kilometres down the same path that teachers and students use every day, in both directions.

Wild animals live along that route. His team saw one during the implementation itself.

A school with many classrooms, but no students

When training began, Naveen assumed a few children were simply away that day, since the group of students present in the room looked small. The actual number surprised him: the school has 8 to 10 students in total, across classes 6, 7, and 8, and there’s no single village nearby to draw them from. Homes are scattered 2 to 3 kilometres apart across the hillside, one house at a time, and children walk in from wherever they live.

The school itself has three to four classrooms and four to five teachers, split across two working areas: one used as an office, and in the other one, we set the iPrep Digital Class.

Why children are now staying past class 5

Naveen still keeps in touch with the teacher who runs that classroom. A group of teachers formed around it, taking the setup as a working example to show families in nearby hamlets what their children could have access to. Enrolment has been climbing since.

The bigger shift, for Naveen, has less to do with the number of students and more to do with a pattern he’s seen repeated across the country. Plenty of children drop out after class 5, often because the nearest option for class 6 onward means poor infrastructure or a longer commute somewhere else entirely.

“Children who used to drop out after Class 5, or take admission elsewhere, are now enrolling here for Classes 6, 7, and 8.”
– Naveen Sharma, Assistant Manager – Operations, iDream Education 

Enrolment numbers alone don’t tell the full story. What matters is whether the same children stay in that school past class 5 instead of dropping out or transferring away, since that’s what determines whether they continue their education at all.

The classroom that’s never needed a live connection

When asked what changed for the teacher running that classroom day to day, Naveen came back to one detail before anything else.

“Our setup is completely offline. Once it’s installed, there’s no need for the internet at all,”
– Naveen Sharma

No internet reaches that mountainside, and the classroom was never built to need it. Years after installation, with wild animals along the only access path and no vehicle route in, it’s still running exactly the way it was set up.

For Naveen, one panel changed more than a single classroom. Once infrastructure is genuinely usable, families make different decisions about where to send their children, sometimes the difference between dropping out after class 5 and finishing class 8. 

He hopes the teachers there keep finding reasons to use it, and that the children now finishing class 8 actually go on to class 9–10, and beyond. 

Rohit’s own reason for pursuing these stories ties to a pattern that shows up nationally: children often drop out after class 5 because the nearest option for class 6 onward means poor infrastructure, a longer commute, or both. Rudraprayag had a school nearby already. What it didn’t have, until this installation, was one family felt was worth staying at past class 5. 

If your CSR or NGO programme is trying to keep children enrolled past Class 5 in hard-to-reach schools, iDream Education partners on exactly this kind of implementation, one built to work with no road access and no internet. Get in touch to talk through what it would take for a school like this in your own programme.