In the early 1990s, Kabir and Preeti Vajpeyi took up the challenge of transforming a rural government school in Rajasthan with a budget of just `25,000. Could architects transform learning spaces by making them child-friendly and immersive and take their low-cost ideas to scale?

From that special initiative came BaLA or Building as Learning Aid which laid out ideas for inexpensively renovating classrooms to meet the needs of children — bringing in light and ventilation, among other things. BaLA also showed what could be done with open spaces around schools — playgrounds, for instance.