The school is Government Mahatma Gandhi Sandipani Higher Secondary School, in the township around the Bharat Heavy Electricals plant in Bhopal. Many of its pupils come from labourer families, some of whom moved there from Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal. Such a school has little money for glass cabinets and plastic anatomical models. Shukla made the lab out of what other people had thrown away.
She uses broken floor tiles as the base for three-dimensional models of the excretory system and other biological systems. The students build the organs in clay, then outline and colour them with sketch pens and tape. Old welded benches now hold the frames of mathematics models, and discarded tyres have become a math game the students can handle. Two students, Sumit Vishwakarma of Class 10 and Rudransh, were among those who worked on the models.
Shukla holds a doctorate and teaches science and biology. She says the method works because building by hand forces a student to think. A pupil who shapes a kidney or a tract out of clay has to work out how the parts connect and in what order. Copying a diagram from a book does not demand that.
The lab is one part of a larger practice. Over about fifteen years, Shukla has built her teaching around projects and the environment. The campus has more than a thousand sparrow houses and a map of its trees, with a QR code for each one. Another of her projects is called Plant Emotion. Each school day begins with ten to fifteen minutes of activities, including a check on how each child is feeling and lessons told as stories. ETV Bharat reports that some of her former students have gone on to the IITs, to AIIMS and into the civil service.
This month, she received the National Teachers' Award. She learned of it from an email that arrived at about six on a Friday evening. On Teachers' Day, President Droupadi Murmu presented the award to her at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi. She was one of two school teachers from Madhya Pradesh to receive it. The other was Shailendra Pratap Singh, a headmaster in Sidhi district.
The school is named after Maharishi Sandipani, who in Hindu tradition taught Krishna at an ashram in Ujjain. In Shukla's school, the students do the building themselves, starting with broken tiles and nails.