In April 2023, Ananya arrived in Bwanruangh Taudaizaeng, a remote Rongmei village in Manipur, to volunteer with the community where Kabithui Rongmei, whom she had met during her Teach For India fellowship, was working. She came expecting to volunteer in the community for a few days. A week into her stay, on the 3rd of May, the conflict between the Meitei and Kuki communities erupted across the state. She woke up one morning to find that her phone had no signal, only to later realise that transport and connectivity across Manipur had been indefinitely suspended. What was intended to be a brief visit turned into an unexpected two-month stay that changed the course of her life.
With every route back home sealed, she became completely dependent on the community in Bwanruangh Taudaizaeng. As she immersed herself in the community and lived closely with them during those two months, Ananya began to understand the challenges they faced. The deeper issue, she realised, was the absence of an education system that reflected the identity, culture and lived experiences of indigenous communities.
Together with Kabithui, these conversations led to the idea of reimagining education as a community-led endeavour that combines indigenous knowledge systems with modern learning. This eventually led to the birth of Khaangchu.The name Khaangchu comes from Khangchu, the traditional youth dormitory of the Rongmei. More than a place where young people lived, Khangchu was an important institution of learning and community life. It was where young people learned the knowledge and skills they needed to live, work and participate in their community.
Today, Khaangchu works with the children of Bwanruangh Taudaizaeng while attempting to revitalize this community learning tradition and reimagine what education can look like when it is rooted in the identity, knowledge and lived realities of a community.
Two different journeys, one shared purpose
Ananya grew up in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, before moving to Delhi to study Botany. She later pursued a master’s degree in Environment and Development, where her interests gradually shifted from laboratory work towards the intersection of gender and education.
In 2021, she joined the Teach For India fellowship and taught at a municipal school in Delhi. Her experience there deepened her interest in educational access in remote parts of India, particularly in the Northeast. So, when she received an invitation to volunteer in Manipur, she readily accepted, expecting to spend only a few days there.
Kabithui’s journey was shaped by growing up in a remote village in Manipur. Born in the late 1990s, shortly after the Naga-Kuki conflict, his childhood was largely spent within the village. “When I was a child, I thought places like London and New York were villages that were walking distance away.” he recalled, describing his perception of the world beyond his village.
He left his village at the age of six and moved across the Northeastern states of Manipur, Assam and Nagaland to continue his education. After completing his 12th standard, He was in Hyderabad looking for work when he got a scholarship to pursue his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati.
Looking back, he realised that the opportunity to leave home for education was a privilege that many of his childhood friends never had. By the time he completed his masters, many of them dropped out of the education system and were raising families instead. His own experience eventually led him to Teach For India, where he wanted to help children become independent thinkers and develop the confidence and skills to solve problems within their own communities.
Discovering a deeper problem
When Kabithui returned to his village as a substitute teacher, he found that students in Class 9 were struggling to read and comprehend textbooks meant for Class 2. To him, this learning gap was not simply a matter of poor academic performance. He began to question whether the system was designed with these children in mind at all. The curriculum had little connection to their everyday lives, language and surroundings, and was largely designed from a Delhi-centric perspective. For children growing up in a remote Rongmei community, school often felt disconnected from the world they knew.
These questions became the starting point for conversations with Ananya, and eventually led to the birth of Khaangchu.
Reviving Tradition, Reimagining Education
According to Kabithui, education in indigenous communities existed long before the arrival of colonial schooling systems. For the Rongmei, Khangchu was one of the institutions through which young people learned how to become members of their community.
Khangchu was more than a dormitory where young people lived. It was a space where children and teenagers learned the knowledge and skills they needed to navigate everyday life. They learned farming, hunting, carpentry, crafts, songs, stories and other forms of traditional knowledge. But just as importantly, they learned how to live with others. Young people participated in community life, learnt to take responsibility, resolve conflicts and make decisions collectively. Learning was therefore not separated from life or from the needs of the community.
In many ways, Khangchu functioned as a community institution for raising young people. Its purpose was not simply to prepare them for individual success, but to prepare them to contribute to the wellbeing and continuity of the community.
For Kabithui and Ananya, reviving the idea of Khangchu does not mean trying to recreate the past. It means asking what can be learnt from an institution that once placed community, responsibility and lived experience at the centre of education.
Khaangchu therefore seeks to bring together the strengths of two worlds. It draws from the knowledge, values and ways of learning that already exist within the community while also giving children access to the knowledge and skills they need to navigate the modern world. Children learn to read and write in English and Rongmei, engage with mathematics and digital technology, while also learning about their culture, environment, community and the land they come from.
The larger idea is to move away from an education system that prepares children only to leave their communities in search of opportunities elsewhere. Khaangchu wants children to have the confidence and capabilities to imagine opportunities within their own communities and to become people who can shape the future of those communities.
In the long term, the founders hope to work with communities and the government to transform underutilised or non-functional schools in remote areas into community-led learning centres, drawing on the principles of Khangchu while adapting them to the needs of children today.
Building an organisation in Manipur amidst the conflict
Turning that vision into reality has not been easy. While the community welcomed the idea of Khaangchu from the beginning, building an organisation from a remote village in the middle of an ongoing conflict meant that even the most basic things could become difficult.
Registering the organisation, for instance, took months. Government offices in Imphal were frequently shut because of the conflict, making what would normally be a routine administrative process much harder. Khaangchu was eventually registered on November 5, 2024. Even after that, the challenges continued. Living in a remote hill village meant that the founders did not have access to many of the documents that are taken for granted elsewhere, such as electricity or Wi-Fi bills that could serve as proof of address. Banking services were 25 to 30 kilometres away, and even basic materials needed to run the centre were not always available locally.
“We lack the most basic supplies; even screws are hard to find in village shops,” Kabithui said.
The conflict also made raising funds difficult. Many potential supporters remain hesitant to invest in Manipur because of the uncertainty and security concerns surrounding the region. The founders have also had to navigate the perception, from people outside the state, that financial support sent to a conflict-affected area could somehow be diverted towards the conflict itself.
For Khaangchu, however, the challenge has not only been operational. There has also been a deeper question about what kind of education children in tribal communities need.
There are people who worry that an education rooted in tribal culture could limit children’s opportunities or prevent them from becoming globally competitive. But for Kabithui, the choice is not between being rooted and being global. He believes the two can strengthen each other.
For him, identity begins with knowing where you come from. A child can begin with their village, understand their community and culture, and from there expand their sense of belonging to the state, the country and eventually the wider world. Being rooted, therefore, does not mean closing children off from the world. It gives them a place from which to engage with it.
This is central to what Khaangchu is trying to build: an education that does not ask children to leave their identity behind in order to access the wider world, but gives them the knowledge and confidence to carry that identity with them wherever they go.
Learning that reflects children’s realities
Today, Khaangchu works with 118 children between the ages of 2.5 and 11. But rather than organising children strictly according to their age or grade, the programme looks at where each child is in their learning and groups them according to their needs. This is particularly important in a community where children may enter the programme at very different levels, even when they are the same age.
A strong focus is placed on foundational literacy and numeracy. The idea is simple: before children can meaningfully engage with the wider curriculum, they need to be able to read, understand what they are reading, communicate and work with numbers. Khaangchu therefore focuses on building these foundations rather than simply moving children from one grade to the next.
Language is an important part of this work. Most children in the community grow up speaking Rongmei at home, while much of the formal education system they encounter is in English. Rather than seeing the children’s home language as a barrier to learning, Khaangchu uses it as part of the learning process while helping children develop proficiency in English. The aim is not only to help them perform better in school, but to give them access to books, information and opportunities beyond the immediate community.
But Khaangchu’s idea of education extends beyond academic learning. The organisation also places emphasis on what Ananya describes as “whole child wellness”, recognising that children growing up in a conflict-affected region carry experiences and realities that cannot be separated from their education. Learning therefore also includes space for children to develop physically, emotionally and socially, and to build relationships with one another and their community.
This approach has also meant moving away from the idea that success in education can be measured only by examination results. Khaangchu’s founders are interested in whether children are actually learning, whether they are attending regularly, whether they are developing confidence and whether they are able to see themselves as active participants in their community.
The approach has shown encouraging results. According to Kabithui, the proportion of students performing at grade level increased from 39 percent to 87 percent within a year.
Khaangchu is now also working with two government schools, exploring how some of these approaches can work within existing government infrastructure. The longer-term ambition is to take what they are learning in Bwanruangh Taudaizaeng and adapt it for other communities across the district and eventually the state.
Looking beyond classrooms
For Kabithui, education cannot end with what happens inside a classroom. Ultimately, it has to help communities build sustainable futures for themselves.
Across the Northeast, many children grow up in families and communities with access to land and natural resources. Yet the education they receive often does little to help them understand, manage or build livelihoods around these resources. Instead, children are often prepared for a job market outside their communities, even when the opportunities they are being prepared for may not exist where they come from.
Khaangchu wants to explore a different possibility. Rather than seeing education primarily as a pathway out of the community, it wants children to also see the possibilities within it. This means developing the knowledge and skills to work with the land, understand the local environment, build sustainable livelihoods and eventually create opportunities for others around them.
This is also why the founders believe that children from conflict-affected communities should not be defined by the circumstances they have grown up in.
“We want to move away from looking at our children through a lens of pity,” Ananya says.
For Khaangchu, the starting point is not what these communities lack, but what they already possess: indigenous knowledge, strong relationships with the land, resilience, resourcefulness and a deep sense of community. The question is how education can recognise these strengths and build on them while giving children access to the wider knowledge and opportunities of the modern world.
For the founders, therefore, the future of education is not a choice between tradition and modernity, or between staying rooted and becoming global. It is about creating an education where children can know where they come from, understand the possibilities around them and have the knowledge and confidence to decide where they want to go.
And perhaps that is ultimately what Khaangchu is trying to do: not prepare children simply to leave their communities, but give them the agency to decide what the future of their communities can look like.
The Logical Indian Perspective
Khaangchu’s journey raises a larger question about what education should look like in communities whose histories, languages and ways of life are often missing from the systems designed to educate them.
Its approach is not about choosing between indigenous knowledge and modern education. It is about asking what becomes possible when the two are brought together. By drawing from the traditional Rongmei Khangchu and combining it with modern approaches to learning, Khaangchu is exploring whether education can help children remain rooted in their identity while also giving them the knowledge, skills and confidence to engage with a much larger world.
Building this kind of education in a remote conflict-affected region comes with enormous practical challenges, from basic infrastructure and funding to questions about what children need to learn and who gets to decide. But perhaps the larger challenge is also the opportunity: to move away from seeing communities like these only through what they lack, and to recognise the knowledge, resources and possibilities that already exist within them.
Khaangchu’s story is ultimately a story about trying to make education belong to the community again.
What do you think? Should schools do more to integrate local culture and indigenous knowledge into mainstream education? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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