Deve Kichche’s local leadership boosts education in Chhattisgarh villages, inspiring community-driven change across India’s vast public school system.
Deve Kichche teaching students in Misma village, Chhattisgarh, fostering a 90% improvement in attendance and learning outcomes through community leadership.
At just 24, Deve Kichche has transformed education in the Manikonta and Misma villages, located in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. As a volunteer with Shiksharth NGO during the pandemic, she ensured children continued learning by distributing learning materials offline. She deepened her commitment at a single teacher school in Misma, where she now teaches 31 students, in their regional language fostering a strong learning culture. The impact is undeniable—student at tendance and learning out comes have seen a remark able 90% improvement.
Deve’s role in transforming this community’s education system exemplifies the part a local leader, a community member, can play in facilitating learning. What if we could enable millions of similar leaders who could drive effective education change in their respective communities by leading continuous micro-improvements? How could a people’s movement - where everyone exemplifies agency by leading micro-improvements in their context, and thus, becomes an education leader— and transform the lives of 3.7 million students who drop out each year (Source: UDISE+ 2023-24)? How could such a people’s movement trans form the learning experiences of 250 million children in our country?
India’s education system is one of the largest in the world with more than 1.5 million schools, 9.5 million teachers, and 265 million students (Source: Performance Grading Index 2022). This sheer scale complicates problem-solving, as challenges vary widely across states, languages, and with students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. For millions of Indian children in public schools, these institutions are the only viable path to education and vibrant life opportunities..
How can such diverse problems be solved at scale to ensure that all our children have access to schools that are thriving centers of learning, equity, and opportunity? The answer lies in the school education reimagined with community members, parents, youth, and local leaders who are equipped and engaged to participate meaningfully with the education system. It literally takes a village.
In the public education system, each actor has a role to play. For instance, the government provides the framework to draw and scale solutions, civil society shares their knowledge, innovations and expertise, market players help enhance infrastructure and invest in research, and philanthropic organisations and corporates ensure financial sustainability.
However, local challenges demand local solutions. These need to be driven by leaders at every level; leaders who harness the collective strength of communities to create meaningful change. Community, women and youth leaders are the most influential decision-makers in a child’s educational journey. These leaders give voice to the marginalised and bring communities together. On the ground, these take shape in the form of initiatives like school planning committees, local resource mobilisation, skill-based volunteering, learning support centres in the community, etc. When parent and community investment in education is built, education becomes a priority in every household, dropout rates reduce, avenues for mentoring are created, and overall school performance improves. Because many of these issues are deeply socio cultural.
In Haryana, Nagaland and Punjab, School Management Committees (SMCs), constituted through focused efforts by the respective school education departments and Samarthya NGO, have equipped both parents and students to lead school transformation. Across different geographies, SMCs have con ducted enrolment drives, and communities have both advocated for and participated in infrastructure improvement. This includes construction of a school building and playground, ensuring student safety through installing CCTV cameras and building speed breakers outside schools. These micro-improvements have led to sustained impact on student learning in the respective schools.
During the ongoing Shiksha Chaupals in Bihar, an initiative under the Shikshagraha movement, women are playing a central role in identifying challenges to school education, highlighting issues such as dowries, inadequate documentation, societal stigmas, and mobility barriers. Working with local women groups, these women are co-creating actionable solutions like increased parental involvement, community study groups, local-level support systems to prevent early marriages and a piggy bank system to assist poverty-stricken girls.
These inspiring stories are a template for collective action by the stakeholders to enable distributed leadership. Local leadership which has a pulse on the community’s needs is able to draw innovative solutions that are contextually appropriate and culturally relevant. Communities work alongside the government which provides the wide ecosystem canvas and budget, and civil society to identify local needs and to draw solutions. There is effective engagement with relevant stakeholders across all stages of solution design and implementation - prototyping, iterations, execution and learning. The community comes together and leverages its wisdom to solve challenges. With the ownership of the problem and the solution, there is an increased accountability leading to results, which aspires leaders to achieve more.
As Lao Tsu, the Chinese philosopher said, “To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence … When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’”
Across India’s 1 million public schools, education needs to serve as a catalyst for equity, justice, and hope, reaching every child—from the remotest villages to the busiest cities. By adopting a community-first approach, where education is not just a government responsibility but a societal mission, we can co-create sustain able, community-driven solutions that ensure every child has access to quality learning opportunities. And as a result public schools become equipped to shape future leaders, and education becomes the driving force of national progress. Khushboo Awasthi is Co founder & COO - Shiksha Lokam and Santosh More is Founder, Mantra4Change.
