Talks by Prakash Garg on Rural Development

Hope is a luxury. We see that when we see the empty walls of a school in a village and blank eyes of the children cramming tables and rhymes there. To fill the walls with colors and pictures of their imagination and their eyes with dreams is the most important thing for me as an artist and for the development of rural areas. The option of opting something different as a career, something that excites their soul and also fills their stomach. This is unknown to them. This is what Batauli Project, an initiative I started, which now has spread into a team, aims at, promoting unconventional education, and not only through painting, but also dancing, music, photography, sculpture art, or any other unusual study field.
For development of any place, be it forest area, rural area, or urban area, we need to live and understand the place deeply in order to bring productive changes. A person who has lived in the area, knows what good he has received and what were the things that he lacked. Now he can provide for these things to the coming generations and work to evolve this place without destroying the essence of it. Like in the Batauli Project, we plan to bring a global spotlight to the local art forms of Batauli and nearby areas, and give them a platform to showcase and teach their age old art practices and get recognized, so that our culture doesn’t die. It takes all the local support we can get to develop and also, preserve.