Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas
30+ years of work in grassroots education in rural Uttarakhand
The Bharatiyata project
Working towards building the Indic civilizational narrative
Over 40 publications based on pioneering educational research
Workshops and online courses on understanding modern education
The Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH), based in Mussoorie, is a non-profit organisation engaged in research and projects in Education, Rural engagement and Youth Empowerment since 1989. With active participation of village communities, SIDH started and ran 35 rural schools (with multiple outreach schools) in Uttarakhand.
Over the years we learnt a lot about our village communities, their value systems, their way of perceiving the world and life and we felt that was an important area to investigate. The modern path of development, largely borrowed from the west, seems to be not in alignment with the Indian ethos and we feel the need to research into this important area.
> 35 village schools and an experimental nai-taleem based school, Bodhshala.
> An year-long program called 'Sanjeevani' to empower rural youth, who went on to create outreach schools all over Uttarakhand.
> Foundational research in the, largely ignored, areas of conflict and contradictions between present day education and traditional rural value systems.
> Support in pedagogy and learning methodologies for several non-SIDH schools.
> Workshops, seminars, residential programs at SIDH campus.
> 40 plus books in Hindi and English, published since 1989.
> A quarterly journal, Raibar
> Workshops, seminars and online courses on education and modernity (Our online courses vary in duration from 8-hour short courses, 1-month long and 2-month long with various levels of participant interaction. Our participants are mainly teachers, principals, educators, parents and young people who are looking for meaning in life).
> A weekly blog on education and modernity for our course/ workshop alumni.
We believe that the fundamentals of Indian traditions are based on eternal, existential Truth (the sanaatan), therefore it is in harmony with the way Existence IS. Modernity imposes its own unnatural order on this existential order causing conflict at the individual and societal levels.
Our endeavour is to work towards a sanśodhana, a correction, in this area towards:
1. Exposing the myths and falsehoods of modernity (moh-bhang and bhram-mukti from modernity).
2. Bringing out and establishing the eternal, the sanaatana.
3. Correcting the narrative of India, its civilization, culture and belief systems which has been systematically built over the last 200-250 years and is still continuing.
To accomplish the above we will be doing research, publications, workshops, seminars,
courses and maintaining a dynamic website on bharatiyata.