Rishi Valley is situated in the rural interior of South India, in a chronic drought area in the state of Andhra Pradesh – 600 kms from Hyderabad, 200 kms from Chennai and 120 kms from Bangalore. Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI), set up in 1928 as a charitable institution by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Annie Besant, started the Rishi Valley Education Centre (RVEC) in the 1940s in Madanapalle, as a small residential fee-paying school with an independent entity, for students from middle class families. Rishi Valley School is well known for its high standards and outstanding staff and is considered one of the best in the country. RVEC promotes no other ideology apart from a love of nature, concern for our fellow human beings and a global outlook.
RVEC is located in a dry tropical landscape among the broken hills that border the Mysore Plateau. The population consists of marginal farmers, shepherds and daily wage earners living is small isolated, sometimes inaccessible, hamlets. The State ranks low on human development index. Infant mortality rates are highest in south India; malnutrition is widespread (72% of children between 6 to 35 months of age are anemic); female literacy rates (51%) are lower than the national average; 25% of children between age 5-14 in Andhra Pradesh work as child labor as per global definition.
Being located in a degraded landscape has brought to the people at Rishi Valley the challenge of a long-range agenda for regeneration through education. That agenda has served to guide our efforts by teaching us to care for the earth, to share our technical resources with our neighbors and to help them rebuild green spaces in their villages. The school has organic relationships with the local village populations through its work in rural education, rural health, reforestation, bio-diversity conservation and watershed management. In the 1970s, the Rural Education Centre (REC) rose out of these concerns, in a modest way and is today considered one of the foremost practitioners of community based quality school initiatives pioneered, since its inception in 1986, by the training cum resource development facility of Rishi Valley institute for Educational Resources (RIVER).
