The Society for the Integrated Development of the Himalayas (SIDH) started in 1989 when community members from villages around Mussoorie approached Pawan Gupta and Anuradha Joshi with a request to start a school for their children. Three years later women from some of these same villages told Pawan and Anuradha that their children had been ruined by the new education. This unexpected feedback is what kick-started an introspective journey to explore and understand the idea of ‘quality’ in education.

Over the last 30 years, SIDH has worked to provide access to education in over 40 villages of Jaunpur in the Tehri District of Uttarakhand. In these years SIDH stood witness to the transformation of local, self-reliant culture. An increasing financial dependency on the larger economy coupled with the allure of the ‘good life’ was resulting in the impoverishment of the local community and the gradual vanishing of their traditional knowledge systems. For SIDH the key issue facing today’s society is that of the individual vis a vis the community: what does it mean to ‘educate’ an individual while allowing/enabling his/her community to be destroyed?

To challenge this modern trend, SIDH started its experiments with educational curricula and sought to re-orient the focus of study to the issues facing the local ecology and culture. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Buniyada Shiksha’ (Foundational Education) SIDH has been committed to the idea that schools should be at the center of community life and that the ‘stuff’ of education should be embedded in their social and contextual realities. SIDH has done pioneering work in developing innovative pedagogical material, in particular, handbooks for teachers that utilize the local environment – physical and social – as the medium for facilitating learning and education. SIDH has also carried out numerous well-received research studies on the impact of modern educational curricula on the socio-cultural fabric of rural hill-based communities.