NEW DELHI: Two years ago, Ranjitsingh Disale, a teacher from a village school in India who won this year’s $1 million Global Teacher Prize, decided to launch a program to bring students from South Asia, including arch-rivals Pakistan and India, face to face to share their similarities and differences.

Since then, 5,000 students from eight countries have participated in the program, where kids use video conferencing softwares to interact over a six-week period. 

“Both Indian and Pakistani students came face to face with each other,” Disale said in an interview with Arab News. “They forgot that they were from enemy nations after they started talking.”

He added that the biggest lesson from launching the cross-border project was that education was the “key” to peace in the subcontinent.

India and Pakistan share a dispute over the Himalayan valley of Kashmir, which both claim in full and rule in part. Their troops regularly exchange fire along the mountainous border.

In this undated photo, Global Teacher Prize 2020 winner Ranjitsingh Disale's students studying on a laptop at a primary school in Paritewadi village, Solapur district, Maharashtra, India. (Supplied)

Disale got the idea for the international project after he read the Global Peace Index 2016.

“I realized that the countries in conflict spend money on the military rather than education,” the teacher said. “What is the outcome after spending so much money on the military when they are still fighting among themselves? If we want to make the world that our forefathers dreamed of, this is the time to nurture peaceful citizens. We should maintain dialogue and increase friendship. Peace is the solution, not war.”

Last week, Disale became the first Indian to win the $1 million Global Teacher Prize for transforming his tribal village of Paritewadi, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, into an education hub by “convincing villagers to study.”

Disale beat more than 12,000 applicants and nominees from over 140 countries worldwide to win the prize. He was praised by the competition’s judges for his work to ensure disadvantaged girls went to school and achieved high results — rather than missing out on school and facing early marriage.

He also provides online science lessons for pupils in 83 countries, apart from running the international project building connections between young people in conflict zones.

“The first task for me was to bring the children to school [in Paritewadi],” Disale said. “I devised a five-year plan and visualized where I wanted to see the school in the next five years. My target was 100 percent attendance.”

In this undated photo, Global Teacher Prize 2020 winner Ranjitsingh Disale with his students at a primary school in Paritewadi village, Solapur district, Maharashtra, India. (Supplied)

Next, he launched an awareness program among parents “who were not bothered about education.”

Disale said: “It’s a village of around 2,000 people, where most of them eke out a living through farming.” He added that slowly and steadily he “inculcated a respect for education among them.”

Within a decade of launching the initiative, the village has reported zero teenage marriages and 100 percent attendance by girls at Disale’s school.

Recently, the school also won the “best school in the district award,” with 85 percent of his students securing A grades in annual exams.

One girl from the village has now graduated from university, an impossible feat just a decade ago.