Edmund Rice International

Dum Dum Road is one of the most choked arteries in Kolkata’s network, struggling with the traffic running between Dum Dum Station (north end of the Metro) and the airport, plus the usual vendors and commercial centres that line its narrow strip of bitumen. Yet immediately to the west of Dum Dum Road, behind a [...]

Tucked away in the south-east corner of Jarkhand, Bongera is a collection of villages where some of the poorest children we teach walk, in sandals or bare feet, upwards of an hour each day to school. Apart from the rice their families may grow in the shallower valleys, they rely on the forests around them [...]

Two big schools, St Patrick’s and St Vincent’s, and a trades-training centre, are now embedded in two eco-parks, thanks to the work of Brother Frank Gale, many young men training to be Brothers, and the local staff and students. Ponds, trees, a vigorous undergrowth, and wildlife give a glimpse of the local ecosystem that almost [...]

Kurseong, at the far north end of West Bengal, clings to the steep slopes where the Himalayas rise from the plains of the Ganga. In the rainy season, one falls to sleep here to the sounds of pouring water, as the white streams rush down their narrow gullies. Goethals Memorial High School, a boys boarding [...]

Chandigarh, capital of two states (Haryana and the Punjab), is a planned city – designed by Le Corbusier, no less, in the 1950s. St John’s College, Chandigarh, shares this inheritance – spacious grounds, tall trees, thoughtful buildings. Fifty years on, we can ask – how far can we plan? The footpaths are so wide the [...]

St Mary’s High School, Mt Abu, in Rajasthan, is one of the most beautiful sites for a school in the world, between a deep lake and forested hills (also a Wildlife Sanctuary). Yet, daily, the forest is being pillaged by local villagers, who are chopping it down and selling the firewood in the town below. [...]

Sunflowers and ground-nuts (peanuts, to some of us), still waiting for the rains in their sandy furrows, have brought an economic boom to Challakere. Surrounded by villages where people are totally engrossed in surviving, Challakere now has mills that produce cooking oils from these crops, and some steady employment. The Brothers have been here for [...]

On the north-east edge of Mumbai, where the seven islands underlying the city merge with the rest of the state of Maharashtra, St Augustine’s High School, Vasai Road, finds itself with room to move. With spacious grounds and some tall trees already established, it stands in marked contrast to the crowded site at Dadar, the [...]

As you arrive at Mumbai Airport, you are greeted by a mural depicting, amongst many aspects of Mumbai, a pair of house crows. It is a fitting tribute to some of the hardest working birds in any Indian city, and their raucous croaking is part of urban India’s constant curtain of sound. I arrived in [...]