Con­clu­sion

A unique fea­ture of the school build­ing pro­gramme was the man­ner in which some of the schools came to be erect­ed. When vil­lagers in­di­cat­ed to Bhadase Sagan Maraj that they want­ed a school in their area, he sim­ply re­quest­ed them to iden­ti­fy the land. If the land be­longed to some­one, Bhadase ne­go­ti­at­ed with the land own­er to do­nate or pur­chase the plot of land. The vil­lagers then pro­ceed­ed to raise the funds and this was sup­ple­ment­ed by build­ing ma­te­ri­als and funds which Bhadase do­nat­ed.

Giv­en the press­ing and strained cir­cum­stances, these were of ne­ces­si­ty sim­ple struc­tures, which lat­er be­came the ob­jects of ridicule for Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) leader Dr Er­ic Williams. He scathing­ly brand­ed them as “cow­sheds.” Bhadase’s re­sponse was that, “It is bet­ter to give a child an ed­u­ca­tion in a cow­shed than none at all.”