Tibetan Children’s Village
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A backgrounder
As of 2025
Pradeep Thakur, January 18, 2025: The Times of India
They say it takes a village to raise a child. This ‘village’ in McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, nestled atop a pristine Himalayan hill around 2,000 metres above sea level, raises about a thousand kids at any given point of time.
Humble Beginnings
Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) started out small in 1960, functioning as a nursery for 51 destitute children who had escaped Chinese occupation of Tibet and sought shelter in Dharamshala along with the Dalai Lama. Tsering Dolma Takla, the elder sister of the Tibetan spiritual leader, volunteered to take care of the kids, but she also recognised a crucial need: family.
She died in 1964, but her ideas flourished. By 1971, after a period of hectic construction, the small nursery transformed into what it is now — a small village, with its own school and homes.
Just like Dharamshala had come to be known as “Little Lhasa” because it was the Tibetan community’s home in exile, TCV also shaped up to become a micro village... and a home away from home for the displaced children.
Today, it has morphed into something much bigger. It’s not just a boarding school for kids from nursery to Class 8. Apart from the regular playgrounds and a school building, the village also has dedicated homes, where these children live and grow up as part of a large family, complete with a ‘house mother’, sometimes even a ‘house father’.
Originally meant for only Tibetan refugees, the TCVs have now opened up to all Indian citizens with Tibetan roots. There are 11 TCVs in all now, nurturing some 15,000 pupils: five in Dharamshala, four in Ladakh and one each in Dehradun and Bylakuppe (Karnataka).
We Are Family
Unlike a traditional boarding school, each home here (or ‘Khimtsang’, in Tibetan) is a tight-knit unit, where the kids — 20-25 per house — grow up together. Each Khimtsang is, typically, a two or three-bedroom house complete with a kitchen, living room, library and washrooms.
But, most importantly, each Khimtsang has a ‘house mother’, who is the guardian of the kids, raising them with love and compassion. Sometimes, she has her husband living with them, as ‘house father’. For the kids, it’s as close to a normal family life as possible.
The boarders’ life is shorn of luxury, but each of them acts as a support system for the others. They cook their meals with help from the house mother, do the dishes, clothes and even grow vegetables in kitchen gardens. The older children act like elder siblings and help the younger ones with homework and chores. And the kids study, play, fight, argue, tease each other and laugh and cry with each other… together, like siblings, like family.
Home Truths
The school follows CBSE curriculum, with the Khimtsangs hosting children from nursery to Class 8. Kids who go on to secondary and higher secondary outside the TCVs take their CBSE boards with a 100% pass rate, with many academic distinctions, says a proud Kelsang Gyatso, general secretary, TCV. Gyatso has served as director of several TCVs over more than three decades.
Fourteen-year-old Jiggle Tenzin, born to a Tibetan refugee couple now living in Canada, has been with the TCV for three years now. “It was difficult when I came here initially,” he beams, “but I am happy now.” Jiggle is happy to answer questions about life in TCV, but there’s no time. It’s around 7 pm, and the household is busy completing homework, sitting in a semicircle on a rug spread across the living room floor, books and exercise books strewn around on wooden desks.
He seems in complete sync with his parents’ decision to send him here for a frugal life of learning and community living — unlike any other boarding school, or even compared to a luxurious life he may have led in Canada, where his mother is a nurse and father a translator.
In the kitchen, two older girls are busy preparing a hot curry for the housemates, with house mother Tsewang keeping an eye on them all. Tsewang, who came as a refugee from Tibet, has been here 19 years, and has acted as a foster mother to hundreds. She has two grown-up children: a son, who joined the Army’s special forces and a daughter, who is studying nursing.
In House No. 9 next door, Tenzin Choephel, 60, is a house father, who lives with his wife Metok, 53. Between them, they take care of 20-25 children. Tenzin was headmaster of the TCV Montessori school before he retired and joined his wife in the upper Dharamshala TCV. Their twins are TCV graduates, now enrolled in a PhD pharmacy programme in Delhi.
Looking Forward
The TCV in upper Dharamshala will celebrate its 65th anniversary in Oct, when its founder, the 14th Dalai Lama, also marks 66 years in exile.
It’s a charitable organisation, fully funded through donations and a small part coming from voluntary contributions from parents of boarders (Rs 4,000 a month for those who can afford it). Besides the boarding schools, TCV runs four day-schools, two thankas (skill development) centres, two homes for the elderly, two youth hostels, a TCV college and an institute of higher learning, all at various places that have Tibetan settlements.
At its peak in 2001, the TCVs had around 20,000 students in all, with about 1,000-1,700 coming in from Tibet every year. After the unrest in Tibet and protests across the world in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics calling for its boycott, the Chinese regime banned all students from leaving Tibet to go to India to study in TCVs.
That resulted in dwindling student numbers. Now, almost 30% of its pupils are Indian citizens, who have Tibetan roots. But the future is bright, feels Gyatso, who holds up the TCV as a beacon for inclusivity and secularism. “We have Muslim children from Ladakh here,” he says, adding, “One home, where the foster mother is also Muslim, is dedicated to Muslim children from Ladakh. They are Tibetan Muslims, and I take them to mosque every Friday for namaz.”
All said and done, it’s not just a school. For a community torn asunder, it’s an oasis. And it’s proof that you can take Tibetans out of Tibet, but you cannot take Tibet away from Tibetans.
