ABSTRACT
Social movements have proven to be an important process for challenging and transforming the establishment. This chapter is about the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS), a social movement for adivasi empowerment which emerged in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu and the impact it has had on local education. Organizational structures that give primacy to knowledge cultivation and building of professional teacher and researcher identities rather than to activism and political mobilization may yet have a constructive role to play in educational change. The penetration of the AMS volunteers right into the power structure of the school was a remarkable feat, helped by the support the movement had garnered even within the government bureaucracy. AMS leaders have a say in the admission of students to the school. The cultivation of a substantive democracy with continued participation of the people is a keystone of AMS’s work.
