Ranjitsingh Disale: Cross-border project ‘erases differences’ through student dialogue NEW DELHI: When Ranjitsingh Disale said “let’s cross the border” two years ago, 5,000 students from eight South Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, answered with a resounding “yes.” The project he built lets students from different countries interact for six weeks a year to talk about their similarities and erase their differences. “Just a few weeks ago, we interacted with students from the Lyceum School in Karachi, Pakistan,” Disale, who won the prestigious Global Teacher Prize 2020 last week, said during an exclusive interview with Arab News. “Both Indian and Pakistani students came face to face with each other. They forgot that they were from enemy nations after they started talking,” he added. Disale said that the biggest lesson from launching the cross-border project in 2018 was the realization that education is the “key to peace in the subcontinent.” He said: “The amount of money India has spent on fighting conflicts with Pakistan — had we spent half of that money in education, we could have found a peaceful solution to the problem.” He added that dialogue between students from across the border was “important for peace and prosperity in the world.” Citing an example of a recent interaction between students, Disale said a Pakistani girl “was surprised that India and Pakistan don’t talk to each other” despite sharing many similarities. “Zahira said that there are so many differences among European countries, with each country having their own culture and language, but that they still exist together. India and Pakistan have so many similarities, but we are still fighting,” he said. “This is what children feel when they interact with each other. It helps them in understanding each other.” The idea for the project began after he read the Global Peace Index 2016, he said. “I realized that the countries in conflict spend money on the military rather than education. What is the outcome after spending so much money on the military when they are still fighting among themselves? “If we want to make the world that our forefathers dreamed of, this is the time to nurture peaceful citizens. We should maintain dialogue and increase friendship. Peace is the solution, not war,” he said. On Thursday, Disale became the first Indian to win the $1 million prize after transforming his rural tribal village of Paritewadi, in the Solapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, into an education hub and “convincing villagers to study.” Disale, who teaches at a primary school in Paritewadi, beat more than 12,000 applicants and nominees from over 140 countries worldwide to win the prize. The Global Teacher Prize was established in 2015 by the Varkey Foundation in Dubai to recognize exceptional teachers who have made an outstanding contribution to the profession. Disale was chosen for devising a new digital tool for teaching. “I was dealing with 21st-century kids, and I wanted to teach them according to the modes of the 21st century. I did not want to be a teacher teaching students a technique from the 18th century,” he said. In 2009, he joined Paritewadi primary school as a teacher, at a time when “it was a cattle shed.” “I was shocked to see my school,” he said. A majority of the village girls are from tribal communities where school attendance used to be as low as two percent and “teenage marriage was common.” An additional challenge students faced was the delivery of a curriculum not in their primary language, leaving many unable to learn. To facilitate them in the process, Disale learned the local language and translated class textbooks into his pupils’ mother tongue. Later, he taught them how to use unique QR codes to access audio poems, video lectures, stories and assignments. He also created a personalized learning experience for each student. “The first task for me was to bring the children back to school. I devised a five-year plan and visualized where I wanted to see the school in the next five years. My target was 100 percent attendance,” he said. Next, he launched an awareness program among predominantly rural parents “who were not bothered about education.” Disale said: “It’s a village of around 2,000 people, where most of them eke out a living through farming.” He added that slowly and steadily he “inculcated a respect for education among them.” Today, the results are for all to see. Within a decade of launching the initiative, the village has reported zero teenage marriages and 100 percent attendance by girls at the school. Recently, the school also won the “best school in the district award,” with 85 percent of his students securing A grades in annual exams. One girl from the village has now graduated from university, something considered impossible just a decade ago. Another unique tool he employed for the initiative was an “alarm on, TV off” program. “I put a siren on the rooftop of the school which would go off at 7 p.m. in the evening. This was an indication that it was time to study and everybody should switch off the TV. Parents needed to spend at least one hour with their children and pay attention to the children’s homework,” Disale said.