Many people praised Kishore Bharati's attempts to change the rural education system, especially when this included training teachers, rewriting textbooks, preparing zero-cost experiments suited to rural surroundings, and trying to involve experts, such as faculty members from ITTs, TIFR, and Delhi University. Even so the questions still remained: What was the goal of this experiment? Whom was it going to benefit?
The group had confined itself initially to the teaching of natural sciences only. There was convincing evidence that the students who had studied natural science under the group's system were better educated than students of schools where this scheme had not been introduced. Though the students were exposed to methods of scientific inquiry, they were no better informed about rural problems. It seemed that scientific and mathematical education could not be readily applied to day-to-day rural problems unless it was supplemented with some village life-oriented activities. This experiment convinced Kishore Bharati that if its educational aim was maximum benefit to rural society, fundamental changes including changes in the syllabus and the linking of education to other supporting activities should be introduced. This fact has been recognized forty years earlier in Gandhi's nai taleem.
Realizing that a voluntary
agency can only innovate a program but cannot manage it on a large scale, the Hoshangabad teaching program was finally handed over by Kishore Bharati to the state government to implement it on a wider scale. Group volunteers deserve credit for working out this model in the face of hostility from other not-yet-convinced teachers and from the educational bureaucracy. Those volunteers who wanted to help in the teaching program formed another group called Eklavya which now has branches in Hoshangabad, Bhopal, Dewas, Dhar, and Ujjain.
Kishore Bharati's original project in the village of Palia Piparia fared somewhat differently. Although the 150 acres of land was already sanctioned to the group by the Madhya Pradesh government, this grant came after much opposition from local politicians. Sadgopal was called a 'foreign agent' at one stage, maybe because he has an American wife or because of an American Ph.D., or simply because, according to some politicians, all volunteer workers in India are CIA agents. The group began transferring technology existing and proven at other places in India. Friends Rural Centre at Rasulia helped the group get started using the Rasulia dug well technique ( a method of making cement rings and setting them on top of each other in a dug well). A cross-bred bull was also brought to carry on the cattle breeding program. As it turned out these programs of digging wells and cattle breeding were of little use to those farmers who did not have cattle or who did not have enough land to need a well or enough money to afford one. Still the progress was useful to small and middle farmers.
It took some time for Kishore Bharati to start their training program for teenagers. They selected a few teenagers from the surrounding areas and began their training schedule on the project site. But they soon discovered that the selected youth went back to their homes in the evening where they flaunted their privileges over the other children in their communities. The group became concerned that they were disturbing the equilibrium of rural life by creating misfits. So, after two years of trial, they abandoned the program. Perhaps in-residence training would have helped; requiring the teenagers to live on the project site might have changed their thinking and lifestyle and given them a greater appreciation of the rural environment. But such a program could have amounted to outside intervention which might have further isolated or alienated them. It also could have required a more total transformation of the lifestyle of the project's volunteers and teachers. The creation of two lifestyle—one personal and the other social—might have ultimately run into obstacles.