Archive: The World's Youngest Headmaster — Babar Ali

From the TI archives — originally published October 2014.

Babar Ali is a student and teacher from Murshidabad in West Bengal. In October 2009, at the age of sixteen, the BBC called him the "youngest headmaster in the world."

He had begun teaching at nine years of age — mostly as a game — in his parents' backyard in Murshidabad. By his teens it was no game: he was himself enrolled at the government-run Raj Govinda school in Berhampore, and every afternoon at 4 p.m. he taught in the school he had founded, called Anand Siksha Niketan.

By 2009 the outdoor school had some 800 pupils, starting at four or five years old, and ten teachers — all of them students or college-going volunteers. It was tuition-free, serving one of West Bengal's most economically deprived areas. Pupils walked up to four kilometers from nearby villages; Murshidabad at the time had almost no government or private schooling, and the free school was credited with lifting literacy in the area.

Babar got his school formally recognized by the local authorities — a shrewd move, because recognition entitled his pupils to the free rice the government gives schoolchildren each month. In 2009, CNN-IBN's Real Heroes program honored him for the work.

The story didn't end there. Babar went on to complete his own education and became a teacher by profession, continuing the school he had built as a child — the backyard classroom that became an institution.