Ladakh has always held a unique place in India's political landscape. Physically cut off from New Delhi by the Zanskar range, and administered from afar by the Jammu & Kashmir state government, Ladakh struggled for decades with the effects of unresponsive governance. Nowhere were those effects more visible than in the territory's government schools. Students and their parents made do with absent teachers, inappropriate curricula and a matriculation percentage that sat firmly in the single digits.
In 1994, villagers, local education-department officials and civil-society organisations of Leh District came together, at the behest of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), to launch a movement dubbed Operation New Hope. The goal was to overhaul the territory's schools, and the time proved ripe for just such a large-scale reform movement. Test scores improved, attendance went up and local communities gained a critical feeling of involvement in their school systems. Suddenly, however, within a period of just months, all of these gains have become endangered.
In the decades prior to 1994, Ladakh's education system was plagued with problems at every level. Although government schools were scattered throughout the area, many were located in remote mountain villages, and teachers often faced immense difficulties simply in getting to their post. Once they did arrive, they found themselves without accommodation and with only limited supplies. As a result, teaching posts were frequently left unfilled for months at a time.
Even the most dedicated teachers were insufficiently trained, and saddled with curricula and teaching materials irrelevant to local contexts. Primary schools used the national Indian textbooks, and students, for instance, had to learn from language and science textbooks that used mangoes, coconuts and banyan trees as examples – all of them alien to Ladakh's highland topography.