Global Teacher Prize 2020 has been awarded to Ranjitsinh Disale for his work helping girls

For the year 2020 Global Teacher Prize has been awarded to Ranjitsinh Disale for his work encouraging girls, most of them from poor tribal communities, in a village school in western India.

India :For the year 2020 Global Teacher Prize has been awarded to Ranjitsinh Disale for his work encouraging girls, most of them from poor tribal communities, in a village school in western India.

He was chosen from 12,000 nominations from more than 140 countries throughout the globe.

The Indian teacher was declared by renowned actor Stephen Fry as the winner of the Global Teacher Prize 2020 at a virtual ceremony aired on Thursday from the Natural History Museum in London.

Disale immediately declared he would share half the $1m prize money with the nine different finalists.

Disale is the sixth winner of this award, established by the Varkey Foundation and is given in cooperation including this United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

He said the global coronavirus pandemic had revealed the importance of education over areas.

“In this hard time, teachers are performing their best to make sure every student has access over their birthright of a great education,” he said.
Indian currently has higher than 9.5 million coronavirus cases, the second-highest in the world after the United States.

Disale continued that all teachers were “the real changemakers who are changing the lives of their students” and it was in that sense that he said he was sharing his winnings.

The teacher came at the Zilla Parishad Primary School into a small village near Solapur, in Maharashtra state, western India, in 2009.

At the time, this school was in a rundown building next over a cattle shed, according to organisers. School attendance remained low and teenage marriage common.

The curriculum was not even in this girls’ main language, Kannada. Disale moved to the community, learned the language and translated the class textbooks.

He also introduced digital training tools and came up with personalised programmes to each student.

His system of QR-coded textbooks is now used across India.

School attendance is now 100 per cent; also one girl from the village has graduated from university, the organisers stated.

Stefania Giannini, assistant director-general for education to UNESCO, said teachers like Disale would make “more peaceful and just societies”.

“Teachers like Ranjitsinh will reduce inequalities and drive forward economic growth,” she said.