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Winner of $1 million teacher prize changed girls’ lives in India

December 05, 2020

By Newsdesk

LONDON: This year’s Global Teacher Prize has been awarded to Ranjitsinh Disale for his work helping girls, most of then from poor tribal communities, at a village school in western India. Disale immediately announced he would share the $1 million prize money with the nine other finalists. He was honoured for having “transformed the life chances” of girls at the Zilla Parishad Primary School in Paritewadi, in Maharashtra state, prize organizers said. The announcement was made by actor and writer Stephen Fry at a virtual ceremony broadcast from the Natural History Museum in London. A jubilant Disale heard the news at home in India, surrounded by his family. He started teaching at the school in 2009, when it was in a rundown building next to a cattle shed, according to organizers. School attendance was low and teenage marriage common. The curriculum was not even in the girls’ main language, Kannada. Disale moved to the village, learned the language and translated the class text books. He also introduced digital learning tools and came up with personalized programmes for each student. His system of QR Coded Textbooks is now used across India. School attendance is now 100 per cent, and one girl from the village has graduated from university, the organizers said.