Story of the Himalayan Hero — SONAM WANGCHUK
SEASON 2 | from ZERO to HERO | Stories of Inspiring Indians
For those who have watched the movie 3 Idiots, it is tough to forget Aamir Khan’s character, Phunsukh Wangdu or Rancchoddas Shyamaldas Chanchad (Rancho). Sonam Wangchuk may say he is not “the real life Phunsukh Wangdu”, but it is believed the character was largely inspired by this engineer, innovator and education reformist who worked his way up to the zenith of fame founding the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) which brought in many efficacious reforms including the installation of an Ice Stupa, a perfect solution to the water crisis being faced by the farmers of Ladakh.
Sonam Wangchuk comes across as a very affable and humble person. His lithe frame betrays the years that he has put into engineering an educational and cultural movement in the remote ‘Land of high passes’ that is Ladakh.
He may have been the inspiration for the character of one of the 3 idiots in the movie, but he himself was looked at as being a stupid and branded as such in the Srinagar school which he entered at a rather late age of 9. Yes! Sonam’s own education did not start on a smooth note. It was rather heart-breaking for the child to be maltreated by his peers just because he looked different and could not articulate in the language they were speaking. He recalls this period as the darkest of his life. Unable to bear this ordeal, in 1977 he escaped to Delhi where he joined Vishesh Kendriya Vidyalaya.
A peep into the life of SONAM WANGHUK.
Born in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh, India and brought up in a tiny village of five households about 70 km from Leh, Sonam Wangchuk spent the first nine years of his life learning in what he calls “a holistic, harmonious way”. “There weren’t any schools in my village, so I learnt to read and write from my mother. I played in the fields, sowing seeds, working with animals, jumping in the river, climbing trees,” he says. “My early skills were so developed by these experiences that when I finally joined school at nine, I got promoted twice in a year!”
He earned a B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar (then REC, Srinagar) in 1987 and also underwent two years of higher studies in Earthen Architecture at the Craterre School of Architecture in Grenoble, France, in 2011.
Though a Mechanical Engineer by education, he has been mostly working in the field of education reform for more than 27 years. Due to differences with his father over the choice of engineering stream, he had to finance his own education. While pursuing his mechanical engineering, he began teaching children to earn an income. “That is when I realized how deplorable the state of education was in the region,” the 50-year-old says. According to statistics from the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives (HIAL), an alternative university for mountain development that Wangchuk is setting up, 95 per cent students failed their board exams in 1996. Over the next two decades, this number has steadily decreased to 25 per cent this year — courtesy the alternative learning practices and other innovative measures that Wangchuk helped develop.
In 1988, after his graduation, Wangchuk, along with his brother and five peers started Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). After experimenting with school reforms in government high school at Saspol, SECMOL launched Operation New Hope in collaboration with the government education department and the village communities and the civil society to bring reforms in the government school system. This movement with an alternate and pragmatic approach towards education, led to a massive drop in failure rates of school students. “But then we wanted to take care of the ones who still failed, give them a new chance, re-launch them,” he says. Which is what the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) achieves through its school in Phey, around 12 kms from Leh. Home to 70–100 students, all of who failed their 10th boards, this school “has the distinction of taking failures from the system” and “making living there a learning experience in itself”. Wangchuk says that the students run the school themselves, “like a little country with its own elected government”. “They learn by doing — they farm, keep animals, make food products and engage in solving real life problems that they face in these harsh climatic conditions.”
Ice Stupa
It was while trying to solve one such real life problem, of acute water scarcity in the region, that Wangchuk came up with the idea of ‘Ice Stupas’. “There have been others before who’d worked in this field; a very senior engineer had come up with the idea of artificial horizontal ice fields. But it had problems, such as premature melting,” he says. To address these problems, Wangchuk built vertical ice towers instead, and all through a simple method. Ice Stupas are built during winter, so that the water from it when it starts melting can be used in late spring
In January 2014, Wangchuk started a project called the Ice Stupa. His aim was to find a solution to the water crisis being faced by the farmers of Ladakh in the critical planting months of April and May before the natural glacial melt waters start flowing. By the end of February in 2014, they had successfully built a two-storey prototype of an ice stupa which could store roughly 150,000 litres of winter stream water which nobody wanted at the time.
In February 2018, a group of young local sculptors and artists from Ladakh built an actual 10-foot high ice stupa. The wondrous sculpture was made entirely of ice and it took them 25 days of hard work and dedication to complete the project. What made it more special and challenging for the team was the extreme conditions under which they worked. As the stupa was housed inside another giant ice tower (ice stupa artificial glacier), they had to work in very low temperature of around -12 degrees Celsius. “A pipe brings water from the upstream to the downstream. When you do that, the built-up of pressure in the pipe is used to run a fountain that sprays water in the air,” he explains. When the water is sprayed in the -20 degree temperatures of the Ladakhi winter, it cools and freezes as it falls. And slowly, naturally takes the shape of a giant conical structure. “The idea is to freeze the water in the winter and use it in late spring. The conical tower shape ensures that the surface exposed to the sun is minimal, so premature melting is avoided.”
In late 2016, the idea started gaining traction from the authorities in the Swiss Alps. Wangchuk was invited by the president of Pontresina, a municipality in the Engadine valley, Switzerland to build Ice Stupas to add to their winter tourism attractions. In October 2016, Wangchuk and his team went to the Swiss Alps and started building the first Ice Stupa of Europe, together with the Swiss partners.
It is for this simple yet genius invention that Wangchuk was bestowed with the Rolex Award for Enterprise. He now plans to use the Rs 1 crore prize money as seed fund for his dream project — the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. The institute aims to “create a sustainable ecosystem of constant innovation”, wherein youth from different Himalayan countries will come together to research the issues faced by mountain people — in education, culture and environment. And formulate ways to solve those issues through out-of-the-box ideas and practical application of knowledge. “The world needs real-world universities, ‘doer’ universities. We’re going to set up one model of it in Ladakh. And if it is successful, we hope it’ll have a ripple effect from New Delhi to New York,” Wangchuk enthusiastically signs off.
He is always up with a solution
In 2015, when Ladakh faced a crisis due to a landslide which blocked the Phugtal river in Zanskar and caused the formation of a 15 km long lake which became a huge threat for the downstream population, Wangchuk proposed to use a siphon technique to drain the lake and water jet erosion to safely cut the edges instead of blasting the lake as was being planned. However, his advice was ignored and blasting work was carried on. On 7 May 2015, the lake finally burst into a flash flood which destroyed 12 bridges and many fields.
He was invited by the Government of Sikkim to apply the siphon technique for another dangerous lake in their state. In September 2016, he led a three-week expedition to the South Lhonak Lake in North-West Sikkim, which had been declared dangerous for the last few years. His team camped for two weeks at the lake, amidst rain and snow, installing the first phase of a siphoning system to drain the lake to a safer level until other measures were taken up.
In 2013, on repeated requests from the students’ community of Ladakh, Wangchuk helped launch the New Ladakh Movement (NLM), a social campaign and Ladakh’s version of Green Party with the aim of working for sustainable education, environment and economy. It also aimed at uniting all local political leaders under one banner for the growth and development of Ladakh. Eventually, the members decided to make it into a non-political social movement.
Other activities
From June 1993 until August 2005, Wangchuk also founded and worked as the editor of Ladakh’s only print magazine, Ladags Melong. In 2001, he was appointed to be an advisor for the education in the Hill Council Government. In 2002, together with other NGO heads, he founded the Ladakh Voluntary Network (LVN), a network of Ladakhi NGOs, and served in its executive committee as the secretary till 2005. He was appointed to the Drafting Committee of the Ladakh Hill Council Government’s Vision Document Ladakh 2025 and entrusted with the formulation of the policy on Education and Tourism in 2004. The document was formally launched by Dr.Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India in 2005. In 2005, Wangchuk was appointed as a member in the National Governing Council for Elementary Education in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.
From 2007 to 2010, Wangchuk worked as an education advisor for MS, a Danish NGO working to support the Ministry of Education for education reforms. He was appointed to the Jammu and Kashmir State Board of School Education in 2013. In 2014, he was appointed to the Expert panel for framing the J&K State Education Policy and Vision Document. Since 2015, Sonam has started working on establishing the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. He is concerned about how most of the Universities, especially those in the mountains have become irrelevant to the realities of life.
In 2016, Wangchuk initiated a project called FarmStays Ladakh, which provides opportunities for tourists to stay with the local families of Ladakh, run by mothers and middle-aged women. The project was officially inaugurated by Chetsang Rinpoche on 18 June 2016.
Boycott of Chinese products
In June 2020, in response to the India-China border skirmishes, Sonam Wangchuk appealed to Indians to use “wallet power” and boycott Chinese products. This appeal was covered by major media houses and supported by various celebrities. Following the Galwan Valley clash on 15 June 2020, there were calls across India to boycott Chinese goods
Awards
Year / Title
2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award
2018 Honorary D.Litt by Symbiosis International
2018 Eminent Technologist of the Himalayan Region by IIT Mandi
2017 Indians for Collective Action (ICA) Honor Award, San Francisco, CA
2017 GQ Men of the Year Awards, Social Entrepreneur of the Year
2017 Global Award for Sustainable Architecture
2017 State Award for outstanding environmentalist by J&K Govt.
2016 Rolex Award for Enterprise
2016 International Terra Award for best earth building
2014 UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture, by CRATerre France
2008 Real Heroes Award by CNN-IBN TV
2004 The Green Teacher Award by Sanctuary Asia
2002 Ashoka Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, by Ashoka USA
2001 Man of the Year by The Week
1996 Governor’s Medal for educational reform in Jammu and Kashmir
His Famous Quote
You (in the big cities) need to live simply so that we in the mountains can simply live.”
CLOSING REMARKS:
Quoting from the Harappa blogs……let me take you back to where we began this episode. Imagine a school where education is not just about rote learning, formulae and long passages of text to pass an exam. A school where students learn eco-friendly innovation and engineer sustainable infrastructure. A school with the educational philosophy of learning by doing. A school where the admission criteria is that you have “failed” your class 10 exams. Sounds like a movie plot, doesn’t it?! This might remind you of Phunsuk Wangdu’s school from the popular Hindi film 3 Idiots. Aamir Khan played a character named Phunsuk Wangdu who loved learning for the sake of learning and ended up starting a school in the hills where he taught children innovation and invention. But this is no fiction. It’s the life and work of an out-of-the-box educator, Sonam Wangchuk.
Imagine Sonam Wangchuk is a man who didn’t go to school till the age of nine. There were no schools around him, after all. When he did go to school, he struggled with language barriers and was often dismissed as a ‘stupid’ student. His father was a renowned politician in the region, but Sonam went against the well-laid path of political life to pursue Mechanical Engineering and financed his education himself. Then he realized that his true passion and calling was in innovation and educational reform.
Wangchuk believes that the true purpose of education is to learn skills that help us live a life in harmony with nature. He believes education should teach one how to solve challenging problems, and to find simple and sustainable solutions to real-life problems. A true Indian Hero, who needs to be saluted!
