You teach a man, you teach a man. You teach a woman, you teach a generation
Kiran Kumari lives in Mansoorpur town of Bihar. She is the trainer and coordinator at CIRC Mansoorpur. Kiran (28) and her husband Raghav have been consistently working towards the upliftment of her community. A runaway couple spent their initial years after marriage at the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan. There, Raghav used his experience of running an illegal community radio station in Mansoorpur to help the College set up a legal community radio station. Kiran, on the other hand, learnt solar engineering and had soon become a pro at making solar lamps, solar cookers and other solar-powered devices.
Two years after their marriage when Kiran returned to her village, DEF established a CIRC in Mansoorpur and asked Kiran to take over a coordinator-cum-trainer. Kiran was an integral part of Helping Women go Online, a project initiated by DEF in partnership with Google, under which close to 1,000 women were trained in digital literacy.
Kiran frequently visits the local schools, panchayats and other centres of community engagement to make people aware about the importance of computer training. She also makes sure that every mobilisation drive or activity is video recorded, and then edited the same day for dissemination. Kiran and her local staff has also set up a projector on the outside wall of the centre on which these videos — and other inspirational videos — are screened. In the evening, when the videos are being screened, the centre looks no less than a mini open air theatre, making it a hub of information dissemination.
Kiran now wants to expand her centre by creating multiple sub-centres in the village’s viscinity. Taking inspiration from Barefoot College, she wishes to open a network of training divisions where villagers can come and pick an array of skills from solar engineering to making craft by recycling waste.
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