I first heard of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) not in a classroom, but in a corridor of the Central Institute of Education, Delhi University. It was one of those late afternoons when the city’s energy fades into a tired hum and students gather in corners, discussing dissertations and deadlines. I was doing my MPhil then, struggling with the familiar tension between ideas and action. I wanted to understand how education lives on the ground; how policies unfold in classrooms, how children and teachers make sense of a world that policy documents only describe.
One day, a friend mentioned that Professor Anil Sadgopal would be on campus. “You should meet him,” she said, “he is one of the rare people who brought science to the villages and the villages to science.” I had read his name in passing, usually followed by words like grassroots activism or science reform. But I knew little about the man or the movement he helped build. Curiosity nudged me to attend.
That evening, in a modest seminar room with flickering lights, I saw a bearded man surrounded by young scholars and activists. His energy was magnetic—focused yet unhurried. He listened carefully, responding not with pronouncements but with questions that deepened the discussion. For a while, our eyes met. He acknowledged me with a nod and returned to his conversation. When the room began to empty, he turned toward me and asked, almost as an afterthought, “Would you like to help organize the thirtieth anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy?”
I said yes before I had time to think.
A week later, I was in Bhopal. For three days, I pasted posters on walls, greeted guests at the railway station, and guided them to their temporary lodgings. The city carried an unspoken grief; survivors still lived in the shadows of that December night in 1984. The event brought together activists, NGOs, and students from across the country. I slept little, but the exhaustion was strangely fulfilling.
Late one night, sitting on the steps of Bhopal Railway Station, I must have looked half asleep when Professor Sadgopal walked by. He smiled and said, “This is how we learn—when our hands are tired but our minds are awake.” That line stayed with me.
It was my first real lesson in what it means to work in education as a moral and civic act. I may not agree with everything he says, but the sheer commitment with which he has worked at the grassroots, with empathy, patience, and precision, makes him one of India’s true organic intellectuals of education.
That encounter drew me toward the story of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, or HSTP. The more I read, the more it felt like an origin story of what public education in India once aspired to be: a blend of imagination, inquiry, and faith in ordinary people’s capacity to learn and to teach.
I. A Revolution in Miniature
On a warm afternoon in July 2002, the government of Madhya Pradesh issued an order that quietly ended one of India’s most visionary experiments in public education. For thirty years, the HSTP had redefined what it meant to learn science. It had replaced memorization with curiosity, textbooks with experience, and fear with wonder. The order’s bureaucratic language spoke of “rationalization” and “restructuring,” but behind those words was the quiet closure of a dream.
The story began in 1972 when two voluntary organizations, Friends Rural Centre, Rasulia, and Kishore Bharati, Bankhedi, approached the state government seeking permission to experiment with science teaching in sixteen middle schools. The Director of Public Instruction reportedly remarked, “The condition of science teaching is so bad that these novices cannot possibly make it worse.” The state gave its consent, perhaps in disbelief. What followed was the birth of an educational movement.
II. The Making of a Pedagogical Republic
From its early years, HSTP was not a program but a collaboration. Scientists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Delhi University, schoolteachers from small towns, artisans, and farmers—all found common cause. Names like Yash Pal, Vinod Raina, Sushil Joshi, and Anil Sadgopal came to define the movement. What united them was a conviction that science could not be handed down from experts to children; it had to emerge from the child’s direct encounter with her environment.
The heart of the program was Bal Vaigyanik, a set of slim, unassuming workbooks that replaced rote learning with guided discovery. Students were encouraged to trace shadows, measure rainfall, weigh stones against seeds, and ask why. A single line of text might read: “If you cover a pot of water with cloth, what happens to the droplets?” The child was expected not to recall the right answer, but to find it.
In one classroom in Bankhedi, a teacher asked, “Where does the sun go at night?” The question drew laughter, then silence. The children, many of whom had never seen a globe, began to draw the sun and the earth in the dust outside. They debated, rotated a clay ball, and in that moment, the cosmic became local.
These were classrooms without laboratories, yet filled with experiments. Bottles, strings, pebbles, and spoons became instruments of learning. The HSTP kit, inexpensive and repairable, embodied a simple idea: science is not the property of the rich; it is an act of shared curiosity.
Reading those early reports years later, I was struck by how the program blurred boundaries between the scientist and the villager, between learning and labor. It reminded me of what Ivan Illich once called the “convivial tool”: a tool that empowers without alienating. HSTP was that tool. It gave the child a means to experience the world directly, to discover that knowledge was not distant or abstract but intimate and touchable.
III. The Teachers Who Became Learners
Perhaps the most radical feature of HSTP was its reimagining of the teacher. The program did not recruit exceptional educators; it worked with ordinary government school teachers, many of whom had studied science only up to middle school. What mattered was not their prior knowledge but their willingness to learn.
Teachers attended summer camps where they performed experiments, discussed their observations, and wrote reflections. They were encouraged to see themselves as learners first. One teacher from Harsud famously said, “HSTP made me a student again.”
This reversal of hierarchy was revolutionary. It replaced authority with humility, certainty with inquiry.
At a time when India’s education system was beginning to treat teachers as cogs in a bureaucratic machine, HSTP trusted them as thinkers.
The program’s “Sawaliram” letters, a series of fictional exchanges between a curious child and a scientist, symbolized this relationship. They captured the tenderness of dialogue. When a child asked why bubbles are round or why stars twinkle, she was not dismissed. She was answered with respect.
It was pedagogy as care.
I once asked Professor Sadgopal why this mattered. He said, “Because science is not about facts; it is about a way of being in the world. If the teacher does not experience wonder, how will the child?”
In that answer lies HSTP’s deepest truth: education is relational. It grows through mutual recognition; teacher and student, meeting as fellow explorers.
IV. The Ethics of Knowledge
At its core, HSTP was an argument about the nature of knowledge itself. Science, for its architects, was not a fixed body of truth but a method of disciplined curiosity. Experiments were not to verify what textbooks claimed but to generate new questions.
This philosophy attracted criticism. Bureaucrats worried that students might fall behind in standardized exams. A senior officer once quipped that HSTP’s only merit was that “children enjoy it.” But enjoyment, in this context, was not frivolous. It was ethical. To enjoy learning is to be free from fear; to approach knowledge as participation, not subordination.
In the 1970s and 1980s, similar reforms were unfolding worldwide. Britain’s Nuffield Science Teaching Project sought to replace rote learning with inquiry. In the United States, the post-Sputnik curriculum reforms emphasized process over content. But HSTP’s significance lay precisely in where it took root: government schools in rural Madhya Pradesh, often with leaking roofs and no laboratories.
Its philosophical kin were Paulo Freire’s literacy campaigns in Brazil and the “barefoot scientist” movement in China; movements that reclaimed learning as a collective act of empowerment. What united them was the belief that education could be emancipatory if grounded in people’s lived realities.
V. The Political Economy of Schooling
By the 1990s, India’s education landscape was changing. Globalization brought new buzzwords: efficiency, accountability, outcomes. Education became a sector to be managed, not a field to be nurtured. The growing dominance of private schooling and donor-driven projects shifted attention from the texture of learning to the metrics of performance.
In this new order, experiments like HSTP appeared messy and unmanageable. They valued reflection over results, participation over performance. As the state bureaucracy hardened, its tolerance for pedagogical freedom shrank.
When the government finally shut down the program in 2002, the decision was justified in technical language. But as those who had worked within it knew, the real issue was control. HSTP had begun to inspire similar efforts across states; it had become a symbol of educational autonomy. Its closure marked the triumph of managerial rationality over pedagogical imagination.
That same year, as one of my senior colleagues, who himself is a product of HSTP, and is now working with an international NGO, recounts how the fear crept back into classrooms. Children now sat in neat rows, repeating definitions. The blackboard had replaced the field as the site of science. Teachers had become clerks of learning, bound by record-keeping and inspection schedules. It felt like the very opposite of what HSTP had envisioned.
As physicist Vijaya Varma later wrote, “Never again will any program in India be allowed such freedom to experiment with curriculum, textbooks, and examinations.” The closure was not the failure of HSTP; it was the failure of the state to imagine education beyond control.
VI. Echoes and Afterlives
And yet, ideas have long shadows. HSTP’s spirit continues to flicker across India in unexpected ways. Many of its members went on to form Eklavya, an organization that still produces inquiry-based materials and teacher training programs. The “learning without fear” framework in the National Curriculum Framework of 2005 carries faint echoes of HSTP’s ethos, though often stripped of its radical edge.
In 2019, during a visit to a government school in Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh, I met an elderly teacher who had once been part of the program. He opened a box filled with pebbles, strings, and broken cycle tubes. “These were my laboratory,” he said, smiling. The pride in his voice was unmistakable. His classroom had no gadgets, but it contained something more precious: a sense of ownership over learning.
When I think of him, I also think of the quiet courage that programs like HSTP represent. They remind us that education reform does not begin with technology or policy but with trust; trust in the teacher, in the child, in the human capacity to ask questions.
VII. Lessons for the Age of Algorithms
Today, as India embraces digital learning, artificial intelligence, and data-driven reforms, the questions HSTP posed remain painfully relevant. Can curiosity be measured? Can creativity survive a system obsessed with metrics? Can the joy of discovery coexist with the anxiety of performance?
Modern education policy often speaks the language of efficiency. Children are expected to meet “learning outcomes,” and teachers to “deliver competencies.” But what is missing is the slow work of meaning-making that HSTP once cultivated.
I sometimes imagine how HSTP might have approached the digital age. It would not have treated technology as a shortcut to learning but as another field of inquiry. It would have asked students to open the back of a computer, trace the circuit, and ask why electricity flows the way it does. It would have reminded us that the screen, like the laboratory, is a tool—not a substitute for wonder.
The National Education Policy 2020, for all its emphasis on “experiential learning,” still inherits a bureaucratic mindset that measures before it listens. The danger is that we may once again confuse reform with progress and forget that education, at its heart, is about building relationships with knowledge, with people, and with the world.
VIII. Remembering as Praxis
Looking back, HSTP was not merely a science program. It was a moral argument about whether knowledge should remain the privilege of a few or become the right of all. Hence, it treated rural children not as beneficiaries but as potential discoverers of truth.
In one of the program’s earliest exercises, a child dipped a glass tube into muddy water to test air pressure. She was not only learning physics. She was learning that the world could be questioned and that her own questions had value. That, perhaps, was the most radical lesson of all.
In the years since, I have often wondered why HSTP disappeared from public memory. Perhaps because it refused to fit into the neat boxes of policy success. It left behind no quantifiable outcomes, only transformed lives. And maybe that is why it matters more than ever now.
When I think back to that evening at Delhi University, when I first met Professor Sadgopal, I realize that the real legacy of HSTP is not in its workbooks or kits but in the posture of mind it cultivated: a posture of curiosity, humility, and care.
Education, at its best, is not about transmitting content. It is about awakening the capacity to ask. And that capacity, once awakened, does not fade easily. It travels through people, across time, and into the quiet corners of classrooms where children still look up at the sky and ask, “Where does the sun go at night?”
References:
Never A Dull Moment: Academic Narrative of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme by Sushil Joshi, translated by Rex D’Rozario, Eklavya, 2014
