grassroots Innovation: Biomass Gasifier that generates energy at a low cost
Raj Dahiya with his Biomass Gasifier
One such innovator is Raj Singh Dahiya who has developed an efficient biomass gasifier that ensures smooth operation of any engine at a low operational cost. Biomass gasifiers basically convert woody biomass, agricultural wastes like rice-husk, coconut waste etc. into a combustible gas which can be burnt like conventional gaseous fuel for thermal applications, or fed into diesel and gasoline engines. The Innovation
The unit consists of a gasifier, which generates producer gas (from bio waste) which is used to run diesel engines. The bio mass based gasifier can process about 20 kilograms of bio-waste to run an engine of 30 HP for one hour. The furnace of the gasifier can be built according to various specifications as per the availability of residual biomass and agricultural residue. Even after including all the operational costs fuel, machinery and casual the cost per unit of power is still substantially lower than the electricity we receive from power grids.
Biomass Gasifier running a water pump
Applications This Biomass gasifier can be used for operating pumps in remote rural areas, lift water, operate saw mills, flour mills and for generating electricity. The fuel consumption of this biomass gasifier is reported to be 1kg/KVA , which is approximately 30-40% less than other available designs. The Price range varies from Rs. 1,25,000 for 10KW unit to Rs. 3,25,000 for 35KW unit. Raj Singh Dahiya was initially supported by Micro Venture Innovation Fund of the National Innovation Foundation.
Communities/entrepreneurs who wish to utilize these grassroots innovations can get in touch with National Innovation Foundation. NIF will mediate the technology transfer between innovators and communities/companies following a fair and just benefit sharing system guided by the prior-informed consent of the knowledge providers .
For Business Development, please get in touch with the Chief Innovation Officer, National Innovation Foundation at bd@nifindia.org
Previous Grassroots Innovation articles here.
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Interview: Mr. D. Dhanuraj, Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR)
CPPR has carried out research projects and published policy papers for government bodies, private institutions, and academic institutions. Their work has had a profound impact at the governance level. CPPR aims to contribute towards an equitable, socially just and environmentally sound society enriched by the principles of democracy and secularism.
Mr. D. Dhanuraj, Chairman, CPPR
Here is an interview with Mr. D. Dhanuraj, Chairman of the board of CPPR: What attracted you to policy research? What motivated you to set-up the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR)?
Policies influence the destiny of mankind. From my childhood days I was curious to understand how the government takes decisions and who the stakeholders are. Given the existing democracy process, I often wonder what role the public plays in decision making when the elected representatives fail to meet people’s demands. Coming from a science background, I have always been interested in conducting inter disciplinary research to understand the relationship between governance and philosophy. During school I was fascinated by the fact that certain lessons in History and Geography were given more importance over others, though there was little opportunity to understand even the ones which were covered. All these different thought processes led to the establishment of Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR).
A large country like India requires more policy debates and think tanks to understand and promote the interests of the general public. We need thousands of policy research organisations and I believe that CPPR belongs to the post liberalisation period genre.
What type of research work do you undertake? How do you choose your projects?
We undertake research work related to governance, with a focus on the development of projects that have a large impact on the public. Our research focuses on improvements in the governance structure that benefits the general public. CPPR believes in innovation and ideation, maximising the entrepreneurial spirit and is totally against crony capitalism. In all our projects we promote – the rule of law, decentralisation, community ownership of natural resources, etc. We believe that the government should be a facilitator rather than a provider and the policies and processes should aim to deliver and prevent leakages. We are approached by various stakeholders for most of our projects but CPPR also runs a few initiatives on its own.
What would you say has been your most successful project till date?
The most successful project has been the Mobility Hub for Cochin (Kochi). If the hub operations are implemented as suggested, the project has the potential to solve the city’s mobility problems. The government has accepted the report (available on the CPPR website) and the project is under execution.
How can you encourage participation of citizens, particularly the youth of the country, to become more aware and actively involved in issues of governance?
CPPR is a research based organisation. In the last five years, more than 50 interns have gone through CPPR’s intense research training program. This has helped them to understand the nuances of the governance system in our country.
Our internship program attracts youth from within as well as outside India, to work with CPPR on live projects. Debates and dialogues are the key features of this program and most interns get a first hand experience of the systems and processes by working on live projects.
Most of our interns have opted for public policy as a career and become the change agents in their subsequent careers.
What is the level of impact that policy research can have? How can you ensure that research does not remain in the form of reports but influences formulation of policies?
We have two types of research processes in CPPR – one fits into the working paper category and the other one is more project oriented, as per the client’s requirements. But in both the cases CPPR ensures that it comes up with innovative recommendations and there is a sellable proposition included in the reports prepared. Most of the client given work is based on existing demands in the public sphere, so we can expect a natural evolution of the report submitted. With regard to working papers, CPPR aims to come up with various approaches and share it within the public domain. As a consequence, this sharing has led to several new projects in turn. We focus more on real time projects which have a policy angle and influence.
Do you agree with the view that ‘the game of politics’ overshadows issues of governance? How much does policy suffer due to the interference of unscrupulous politicians?
No. I don’t agree with this view. The problem lies with the governance structure that enables politicians to push policies to the back burner. Reform at the administrative level is the need of the hour. Licensing and permits should be abolished and entrepreneurs should be given equality and social justice, so that they are able to exploit new opportunities easily. If politicians are unscrupulous systems and processes should be changed. These systematic changes need to be implemented before we proceed to call politicians corrupt. At least in India politicians are accountable to us once in five years. This is much more preferable than monolithic bureaucracy, which is largely pervasive.
What can India do to ensure transparent, speedy and effective formulation as well as implementation of policies?
Effective decentralisation can change public discourse. Cities as well as states should be given more power. Direct election to the mayoral post is another change that can help.
In the rural areas, effective and empowered gram sabhas can help. RTI offers a check against corruption and if it still persists, it is because of the obsolete acts and rules in existence. As I said earlier, the government should act as a facilitator for the effective implementation of policies, rather than framing policies at the grassroots level. Focus should be on decentralising vital sectors such as agriculture, education, health and infrastructure. Moreover, the need for effective change in the Indian Civil Service has become a clarion call.
What are your future plans for CPPR? Where do you see CPPR after ten years?
Centre for Public Policy Research is deemed to play an important role in policy making and articulation and is poised to become a leading think tank in another five years. We are also planning to set up an academic institute which will offer various training programs and exposure to the world of policy making. We are trying to pool the best brains in the field and become a one-stop arrangement for policy dialogue in India.
In another ten years, we would have produced thousands of graduates who are going to influence the policy making in this country.
Check out their website to know more about the various initiatives at CPPR.
Malvika
Saraogi is a graduate of the London School of Economics and lives in
Chennai. She is an avid reader of business magazines and likes to write
in her spare time.
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Changing Delhi: One Cab Ride at a Time
It’s no secret that New Delhi is unsafe for women. With recent articles showing that at least one woman is molested in New Delhi every day and reports of women being molested by their cab drivers, it’s no wonder many women choose to stay at home.
And yet, as of last December, there is another option: call Sakha. In 2008, Meenu Vadera founded Sakha, a cab service run by women for women, in order to provide safe cab and chauffeur services to women in Delhi by training women from marginalised communities as drivers.
Ms. Vadera worked closely with Start Up, an angel investor for social entrepreneurs, to develop an award-winning business plan business plan and create a non-profit arm of Sakha, the Azad Foundation, which focuses on providing young women from disadvantaged urban communities with the training and support they need to navigate the formidable Delhi streets. The Azad Foundation provides a 4-6 month long training programme that covers everything from self-defense to changing tires.
Over the course of one and a half years, Start Up worked closely with Ms. Vadera to assess consumer demand, develop and facilitate strategic partnerships. In 2010, Start Up helped Sakha win the Women In Business Challenge Award, attaining a much-needed cash prize of 15,000 Euros.
As of April 2011, Sakha and the Azad Foundation have trained 70 women, 18 of whom are employed as private chauffeurs and four who are pioneers of the Sakha cab service.
But Sakha is more than just a cab company. As Ms. Vadera explains, “Driving is just an excuse, what we’re really to do is break an image and provoke a change in mindsets towards women.”
Although Ms. Vadera maintains that Sakha and Azad are still in the “chrysalis” stage, the organizations have undoubtedly already changed many minds, both in the marginalized communities where they source their employees and among their customers.
Sakha’s COO, Nayantara Janardhan explains, “When the women come into the program they are so clearly downtrodden. The training strengthens them, gives them confidence and then they start earning and gain economic power—from an average monthly family income of Rs 3,500 and to an individual salary of Rs 5,000-7,000 per month. They become the principal breadwinners in their families!”
Their clientele too is changing. Whereas once Ms. Janardhan found herself forced to persuade customers that women are capable of driving, now she has a waiting list for customers wanting to hire Sakha chauffeurs. In the future, Sakha hopes to expand to corporate tie-ups in order to ensure a steadier sense of employment for their newly licensed radio cab fleet. To hire a cab or engage with Sakha, email Ms. Janardhan at nayantara.janardhan@sakhaconsultingwings.com.
Update: You can call +91 99991 93004 to hire a cab from Sakha.
Start Up is currently looking for other early-stage initiatives to incubate. For more information, contact Sahil Vasudeva at sahil.vasudeva@startup-india.org.
While India still has a long way to go before women are widely recognized as valuable members of society, innovative social enterprises like Sakha provide hope amidst bleak statistics.
Lisa Curtis is an intern at Start Up!
where she has been continuously impressed by the innovative and growing
field of Indian social enterprises. A native of California, her
experience ranges from working in the White House to serving as a Peace
Corps Volunteer in a rural Nigerien village. For more about Lisa, visit
her personal blog
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Are you a Paperman too?
Mathew hails from Kochi, Kerala. After completing his graduation in commerce from MCC Tambaram in 2009, Mathew started working with his mentor and guide MB Nirmal, Founder, ExNoRa (Excellent Novel Radical) International. It was here that he grew to learn a lot about the environment and what a common man could do to protect the environment. “I worked at ExNoRa International, in Mr Nirmal’s guidance, for a year. I was involved in the lights out campaign of the organisation last year. The idea of the campaign was to create awareness about the causes, consequences and solutions of global warming. It involved switching off lights for just 10 minutes in solidarity at 10PM on October 10, 2010.” Jose was the general secretary of Youth ExNoRa, a platform for youth to engage in social service for 6 months. It was then that he learnt about recycling and how recycling helps the environment. Being the entrepreneur that he is, he wanted to start a venture focused on paper recycling. That’s how Paperman was born.
Paperman is a social venture reaching out to 100 schools and 200,000 students in Chennai – educating them about recycling paper!
Did he start it as a one man enterprise? “At each stage of the
process there were different people who supported the idea, in the
beginning very close friends came to help, then on hearing about the
project we did have a lot of people coming forward spending quality time
on our project. Some of my special supporters are Keshav T Kishore,
John Pereira, Sarah May John, Jikku alex and Stanley John. But a large
part of the credit goes to all those who help collect paper from schools
to the women groups who help process it.”Paperman was started in July 2010 by Mathew with his like-minded friends with the simple objective of raising awareness on recycling and its benefits. It was officially registered by November 2010.
What have been its biggest achievements so far? “We have taken our program to 100 schools and 2, 00, 000 students in Chennai, educating them about recycling and also laying emphasis on the role a paperman (scrap dealer) plays in recycling in India. We have launched sustainable recycling programs with 20 schools whereby we recycle their paper waste through local units. We also deliver it back as products to the schools.” As of now, this innovative model is operational only in Chennai but its highly scalable and replicable nature makes it a potential model for the entire nation.
School students support Paper Man!
Mathew Jose has taken the first steps and it has already generated a ripple effect in Chennai. It won’t be long before his vision and mission will spread in institutes across India. It is these grassroots movements that, we hope, will make India a role model for the world, in dealing with environmental issues.
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The Light of Bihar: Chandrakant Singh
Chandrakant Singh
The Chaitanya Gurukul Trust was set up with the vision to “Educate, Enlighten, Empower & Emit’. A vision that inspired a hundred villagers to give their land (which the Trust purchased at 30% more than market price) to set up the establishment.
Chandrakant Singh tapped in to all his networks to raise funds for this school. As an IIT alumnus, a former TATA steel employee and a researcher at GM at the time, he urged 3000 people to join in. The request was not a casual email soliciting funds, but a thoroughly researched business plan for a school that would eventually become self sustaining.
While many people shied away, a handful of Singh’s former classmates, professors and colleagues knew better than to disregard this determined man’s vision. Financial help poured in, as did the expertise and intellect. Chandrakant Singh was just the catalyst people needed to put into action their desire to give back.
“It’s important to prove that given the same opportunities, every child is capable of academic excellence“. Singh is certain that the school will change the fortune of this remote village with each successful student and soon it’s reputation for quality of education and leadership in academic best practices will highlight the plight of the surrounding villages.
The classrooms and other facilities here would be the envy of even the priciest private school in India. Technology is seamlessly woven into every aspect of student life. Sports and extracurricular activities are used to hone leadership skills, for moral guidance and team building. Teachers from many cities in India and abroad teach eager students via Skype! The school’s teaching staff underwent weeks of training before they gave their first lesson. The principal, Mr Arvind Saxena was awarded the title of Best Principal in Bihar for the year 2008.
“There is such disparity in our educational system currently. How can a student from a fancy private school in Delhi and another who learnt his lessons sitting on a cement sack in a village in Bihar, be expected to compete at the same level? I want my students to feel free and empowered by their education. They will eventually become model citizens for our country”, says Singh.
Chandrakant with his students
“In a decade I will turn this school into India’s leading educational institute. In another ten, perhaps the best in the world”.
At 37, his own ambitions are yet to peak. Singh wants to start his own research venture focused on renewable energy with a push for mass adoption in our country. He says that India’s greatest natural resources are yet to be tapped productively. “With such abundant sunlight and Bio-mass fuel available, it’s illogical for so many villages to still go without electricity in our country”, rues Singh.
But Chandrakant Singh’s legacy has already been decided. He is the man that gave hundreds of eager young minds a level playing field and a little room to dream big dreams.
Tithiya
Sharma is a former journalist turned backpacking blogger who’s
traveling the world looking for adventure and inspiration. She’s using
social media for social good as she finds and meets a hundred everyday
heroes and discovers a world worth saving. Check out her quest for
inspiration: The 100 Heroes Project.
Palliative Care Initiatives in Kerala
Realising that for the chronically/terminally ill, services should be available 24/7, the network was started as a set of community owned projects. Mohammed Saif, State Project Manager at the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) is closely involved in the projects. He explains, “These are supported by a volunteer base that includes health care professionals who provide social support, self esteem, identity and perceptions of control by showing better understanding and cooperation in responding to the challenges faced by the community.”
Working with the government
In essential services such as health and education, government support is a great add-on for most grassroots revolutions. Today, Kerala is the only state with an NRHM project in palliative care. The project, started in 2008, has been working on the implementation of the Palliative Care policy of the Government of Kerala.
What has been the impact of such alliance? “The network was highly successful in delivering sustainable and meaningful palliative and long term care with community participation. The impact of the initiative was so fruitful that the Government of Kerala released a pain and palliative care policy. There has been a lot of awareness generation by events such as Kayyoppu, a signature campaign organised in 2010 to brighten the days of patients who are suffering by creating awareness on palliative care and raising resources from the community. Over one lakh people participated. A seminar on palliative care in campus then saw participation from nearly 700 students.”
Two-third of the palliative care initiatives of the country are in Kerala. There are more than 200 community based organizations running palliative care initiatives in the state in addition to the 300 Government palliative care initiatives.
Student volunteers at Project Footprints
- Getting people from a region together
- Discussing the problems of the patients and their family
- Enlisting the support of those willing to spend a minimum of two hours per week
- Structured training
- Encouraging the group to plan and organize locally relevant services
- Defying action plan in association with the health care professionals
- Mobilizing fund for the project locally
The success of NNPC made the volunteers think about the possibility of involving youth, especially students in this network. “We could easily identify many areas where there was a concrete role for students like fund raising, spreading awareness and even providing psychological support to the needy. We hence started an initiative called Students in Palliative Care (SIPC) to organise adequate and affordable support programs for the bedridden, the incurably ill and the dying people in Kozhikode. The kind of support we are getting from mentors, parents, teachers, etc has been very encouraging,” says Saif.
Read real experiences at http://saifnotes.blogspot.com/
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Project Why: Making A Difference Where it Matters
But not many of us have had the time and the inclination to look into their lives especially their children.
Project Why is one non profit that has been working relentlessly to provide education support and skill enhancement for slum children and their families. The organization started in 2000 and in a short span of time has made a considerable impact in the lives of hundreds of slum children.
Special Children at Project Why
What was the inspiration behind starting Project Why ?
There have been various inspirations in fact. My parents always painted a very positive image of India and instilled in me a love for the land. I felt I owed something back to the society for the very privileged life I led. A visit to my ancestral village in Bihar made me realise what I could have been had my ancestors not migrated from there. Then there was my encounter with Manu, a street beggar – an encounter that made me promise to myself: to give Manu a home. The first step to Manu’s home was to set up Project Why in the street where he was born.
Q : What were the initial hurdles faced by Project Why when you approached slum dwellers in Delhi ?
Not many as it was the slum dwellers who approached us to teach English to their children and were very welcoming and supportive. True there were some elements who felt that we had come with ulterior motives: to evangelise (because of my short hair!) but they soon went quiet. It was the local politicos who were against our work as we were disturbing the social structure – you see all Project Why staff are from the slum and hence we were empowering people – something which perhaps politicians do not want! So we had our share of smear campaigns and were even taken to the labour court. But we held on.
Q : What has been the socio-economic impact of Project Why. Any particular incident that pushes you everyday to take it forward ?
Our main mission was to try and arrest drop out rates and ensure that children learned and performed well. Over the years all our children have passed their examinations and cleared their Boards with good marks. Today many of our alumni are gainfully employed and have broken the cycle of poverty in which they were born.
We created about 40 jobs for people who were earlier considered unemployable. As we felt that every ‘Why’ that came our way needed to be answered we never turned anyone away and managed to sponsor 18 open heart surgeries.
We saved two children who had third degree burns, and today they are studying in a boarding school with 6 other Project Why kids. All these children come from deprived homes and would have been forced into child labur. Today they are toppers in their schools.
Every day is a challenge which has its reward and there is no looking back.
Anouradha Bakshi and The Kids (Credit: ST20060829-Delhi/Wang Hui Fen/Wong Kim Hoh/ For Life Less Ordinary, Asian edition)
Q : What is your take on the work being done by the government in this area? Any policy recommendations you have ?
The state of education in our capital city is abysmal.. I mean state run education. I wish all government schools could be run like central schools, thus every child would have the possibility of changing his or her future. Every child has the right to quality education … it is for the government to ensure this.
Q : Future plans for Project Why ?
Project why is run on individual donations and hence is very fragile . We are now trying to see how to make it sustainable. We are looking into setting up Planet Why which would be a green guest house – the proceeds of which would run our programmes. We have bought land and are now looking for funds to build.
To support Project Why get in touch with them at http://projectwhy.org
Their blog : http://projectwhy.blogspot.com/
A Tour of the 1000 Pillar Temple at Warangal
1000
Pillar Temple, Warangal from the front. Nandi is to the extreme left
(not in picture). To the right is Surya’s shrine. The left side of the
temple has Shiva’s shrine.
The other catch is psychological. When you hear “Veyyi Stambalu” (thousand pillars) you imagine a farm of pillars. For my expectation, the temple was much smaller. More so because a mandapam (see left of the picture below), that contributes 400 of 1000 pillars, was dismantled by the Archeological Survey of India for reconstruction. Unlike pillars in other temples of India, pillars of the main temple, are tightly knit and form its walls and so don’t seem like there are 600 of them.
There’s the mandapa now dismantled. This picture was taken from behind the 1000 pillar temple, Warangal.
Unlike most temples in India that face east, 1000 pillar temple faces south. Because, the Kakatiyas, worshipers of Lord Shiva, wanted early morning sun rays to fall directly on Shiva Lingam. So, of the three shrines, Shiva’s shrine faces east and other shrines face south and west. On the fourth side is Nandi. Adding to the uniqueness, the Nandi in 1000 pillar temple looks east, unlike most Nandis in Indian temples that look west.
Between these four is the Natya Mandapam (dance floor) where dancers performed.
The guide who shared with me his knowledge about 1000 pillar temple, Warangal
In addition to architecture, I loved the rich carvings and sculpture. You have to see it to believe it. The Nandi had on its back, a chain made of bells which seemed real. And the bull was life like.
Impressive Bull was a beginning. The 1000 pillar temple takes it to a whole new level. Enter the temple, you will see four magnificent pillars supporting the Natya Mandapam (dance floor). Each richly carved with exquisite designs. A pillar has multiple designs, 2 centimeters to about 30 centimeters, on the perimeter of circular pillar. They used designs of jewelry of the age. Chains, bangles, rings, crowns and the Kakatiya Dynasty’s symbol, Kalisam, can be seen one after another on each pillar. The design also had flowers finely carved. So fine, the sculptures carved gap between petals. A guide showed us such gaps by inserting a tiny stick into those holes. “This is how fine Kakatiya’s sculptures were.”
Exquisite
design on one of the pillars in 1000 pillar temple. The guide
demonstrates how fine the sculpture is by inserting a tiny stick into a
gap between two flowers.
Seeing this architectural marvel is an experience in itself. It taught me more about myself, from where I am and the about the legacy of my ancestors. Thanks so much for building such structures which could withstand the test of time and be there to show us who you were!
A parting thought: I discovered a great video on Kakatiyas called Mana Kakatiyulu (Our Kakatiyas) made by Dr. Ambati Srinivas Raju. A well researched documentary with video footage of all the temples and Sila Sasanas (stone inscriptions) detailing the history of Kakatiya Dynasty. If you are someone from Andhra or anyone from India, you will enjoy this video. Thankfully, they published their numbers if you want to contact them. +919849333795 or +91 9949568285. Get drenched in history!
About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is an entrepreneur
and blogger based in Hyderabad. He is passionate about India and Indian
culture. He loves to read articles written by the freedom movement era
leaders. He has a Chartered Accountancy degree and a management degree
from the Indian School of Business. He runs Perceptive Analytics, a data analytics company and blogs at ChaitanyaSagar.com
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Water Women: How Jyoti Nagar Turned On The Tap
The road roller operator working on repairing a damaged part of the road inside the Jyoti Nagar slum on the outskirts of Kolkata decides to take an unofficial tea break. A frail woman standing nearby steps up to the man and ensures that he gets him to work promptly. The woman is a member of the local Community Development Society (CDS), which monitors all the development work in the locality with a hawk’s eye.
“It’s a successful way to ensure that the beneficiaries living in the area themselves participate in ensuring proper implementation of the various slum improvement projects,” says Seema Basak, 36, Town Project Officer, Rajarhat-Gopalpur Municipality (urban local body), under which the Jyoti Nagar slum falls.
Forty municipalities outside the Kolkata Metropolitan area are involved in the CDS project under which women living below the poverty line (BPL) in the slums are motivated to join the Society, get trained and work for social development.
A group of 4,000 families gets one CDS, and members are elected from the Slum Neighbourhood Committees formed at the local level. They work in close association with the municipal officials. The CDS members are elected on area (ward) wise representation. The Rajarhat-Gopalpur Municipality, with 35 wards for a population of 12,500, has 60 slums with four CDSs.
“The success of this venture is obvious from intense community participation, especially from local women. They have scripted the success stories in Jyoti Nagar and other shanty towns. Every development work, including setting up of stand post water taps, constructing a pump house, repairing drains and paving roads, undertaken in our slum is monitored by our CDS,” says Promila Haldar, 62, CDS President.
Women of Jyoti Nagar at the stand post water tap. (Credit: Pritha Dutta Majumdar\WFS)
“Earlier, it was a struggle to get water. Water for drinking or for household use was a scarcity for the 650 families residing here. We thank the women of our locality who worked hard to get this water project implemented,” says Champa Rango, 43, standing behind Jharna in the queue to fill her bucket.
The CDS in Jyoti Nagar realised from experience and after feedback from families living in the slum that water-logging took on disastrous proportions in this low-lying slum with its mud roads. Things got particularly bad during the rainy season from June to November.
Recalls Namita Baidya, 52, CDS Secretary, “Our mobility was drastically curtailed. Women waded through knee-deep dirty water, and men could not go to work. The children missed school while many – especially the children – fell victim to water-borne diseases like diarrhoea. We realised that proper drains and roads were needed to solve this recurring problem. Our CDS worked in tandem with the urban local body officials towards this end.”
A deep tube well, a pump house and about 27 stand post taps were set up in the Jyoti Nagar slum between 2007-09 by Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor (KUSP), with funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID). More often than not, such projects fall behind during their implementation stage. But in Jyoti Nagar this did not happen because the CDS women not only monitored the project but continue to effectively maintain the infrastructure.
And they are well up to this task, considering the rigorous training they have received from the urban local body (Rajarhat-Gopalpur Municipality) engineer – on area measurements for road work, maintenance, cleanliness and repair needs. They have also learnt how to supervise ongoing development work.
The Community Development Society (CDS) women with patients at the mobile medical van. (Credit: Pritha Dutta Majumdar\WFS)
Adds Alok Chakraborty, Assistant Engineer with the municipality, “They understood that if the implementation is done properly under their supervision it would benefit their families, neighbourhood and locality.” And this approach has certainly given the desired results. “The water-logging has vanished. The CDS women ensure that the sweepers keep the drains from clogging and liaise with municipality officials for road repairs and maintenance work on a regular basis. The CDS has counselled us to realise that we as a community are required to keep the drains and roads in good condition through constant supervision,” says Anjali Biswas, 32, a resident of Jyoti Nagar.
“We also teach residents about the use of sanitation facilities and to adhere to proper hygiene norms,” says Putul Mondal, a CDS member.
Today, Jyoti Nagar has complete sanitation cover thanks to the efforts of the CDS, adds Biswas. Health is also a top priority here. “Various national health programmes like pulse polio, malaria intervention, HIV-AIDS intervention and tuberculosis DOTS are carried out with support from the CDS. They convince families to receive family planning advice, continue the pre-natal and post-natal healthcare, ensure the necessary vaccinations as well as use the services of the mobile medical van for pathological tests,” reveals Dr Sobha Gupta, Health Officer, Health Administrative Unit (HAU), set up by KUSP and the Municipality jointly.
A tailoring training session under auspices of CDS. (Credit: Pritha Dutta Majumdar\WFS)
In Jyoti Nagar, the CDS has initiated a cycle rickshaw project. It has bought 160 rickshaws for Rs 1.5 million (US$1=Rs 45.5), funded by the municipality. The CDS will rent these to unemployed youth and the money will be used to give loans to needy women.
While community participation in development is the best way to ensure sustainable improvement and progress, the CDS have simultaneously provided extremely poor women with confidence, a sense of self worth, as well as a stake in social development. Real empowerment, you could say.
This article has been written by Ajitha Menon for Women’s Feature Service (WFS) and has been published here based on an arrangement with WFS.
Ajitha Menon is a senior journalist from Kolkata focussing on development issues.
Article and images copyright: Women’s Feature Service.
Ajitha Menon is a senior journalist from Kolkata focussing on development issues.
Article and images copyright: Women’s Feature Service.
Watch: Stories of People with Visual Impairment
Think about it and you will realize that it’s the stories of people that you have met or heard of that serve as the strongest source of inspiration. Stories of our parents, role models, and people that we admire!
Inclusive Planet is a social web for the visually impaired. It occurred to them – why not use Inclusive Planet to bring together stories told by visually impaired people? There are so many strong and amazing visually challenged people who have achieved so much in their lives! Why not encourage them to share their stories with the world? They decided to ask their members to talk about the challenges that they have faced in life, education, or while looking for employment, about their aspirations and advice they can give to others.
They started creating short videos of people telling their stories and now have some amazing stories to share with you! You can listen to the first 9 stories on the Inclusive Stories page. And every week they will upload more and more inspiring stories, so you can just subscribe to the channel to stay updated.
You can watch some of these videos below:
Inclusive Stories Introduction
Advantages of being visually impaired
The people know I am blind and yet they ask!
Hiring the visually impaired
Inclusive Story of a Visually Impaired Girl Suprita Gupta
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Step into a Stepwell – See the Adalaj Ni Vav
In times of RO purifiers and blah blah, I quenched my thirst for an ancient story with a mesmerizing Stepwell from a bygone era. This is Adalaj Ni Vav at the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
It’s a well, but there is no drinking water available. Exchanging pleasantries with damp smells and a few bats wasn’t exactly the introduction I was looking for. But having overlooked these nags, what you do get to see is an example of function blended so well with the form, that it puts commercial architects to shame. A Vav in Gujarati, means a stepwell – a well that is accessed through many steps.
Built as a resting place for pilgrims and traders by the then Queen, Rudabai, this Vav served more than a utilitarian purpose. Alternatively, you could call it the Facebook of the 15th century. People who came in to fill water or to quench their thirst and rest, would eventually interact and mingle and even trade. So you 21st centurions have no reason to swell about the advent of social networking – the wise Yodas of yesteryears have been there, done that!
The Adalaj Ni Vav stands as the only major monument of its kind, with three entrance stairs leading to a stepped corridor. These three entrances meet at the first storey, underground, in a huge square platform. There are openings in the many ceilings which make way for good ventilation for the octagonal well. However, direct sunlight does not touch the flight of steps or landings except for a brief period at noon. The structure’s interplay with light is worth a see. Best time to go would be when the sun’s up and when you, are underground.
It is also a spectacular example of Indo-Islamic architecture and design. The cross pollination of creativity brings its rewards in more than the intended area. As a hub that encouraged interaction, business, culture, the Vav stands as an edifice of innovation and craftsmanship that one can only marvel at.
Talking further won’t help unless you see this objet d’art. Also, a very small but interesting mirror temple adorns the site. Again, not worth a miss!
About the author:
Shuchi Kapoor left a decade of madvertising (that’s how she likes to
call it) to pursue something more fulfilling, like travel. A writer by
profession, a photographer, a storyteller and a curious traveller by
instinct. The word local and street adds the flavour to her journeys.
Trust to find her in some nooks and corners getting her hands dirty or
learning a new language with the locals. She doesn’t belong to a
particular place or genre anymore. Nevertheless, she is known to take
you along on her journey with her words.
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Street Magicians of India: Bringing you closer to reality
As children, all of us enjoyed watching the magician pull out a rabbit from a hat. Over the years, it has become one of the most familiar magic tricks. Yet the world of magic is deeper and darker. For those of us who carefully watched Christopher Nolan’s Prestige, we know magic knows no bounds and can drive one to dangerous means to get the act right.
Watching a magician perform may look glamourous on stage, but there is much more to it. The best people to know this are those who are in the trade, making a living out of surprising people every time with their tricks. In India, traditional magicians are taking the trade forward, and along with it, the Indian heritage.
Ever heard of the Indian mango mystery? Or the Indian basket trick (Indrajal)? These masterpiece illusions and several others such as the flying Indian man have several hundred years of history behind them. In the modern era, two traditional magicians performing them are Aas Mohammed Khan and Babban Khan. A few years ago, they were confined to the slums of Delhi and their rare art could not reach beyond these small sections. Until Peter Theobald, at that time a sales executive in Mumbai and also an amateur magician, saw their conditions and decided to take them places. He met them for the first time in May 2008 at the Magic Convention in Kerala. While he was astounded by their skills, at the same time he was shocked by their poverty and the way they were being treated. That is when he started Street Magic India.
“I am not a street magician. I perform mostly for kids and also some mind-reading for adults. Am not a street magician. I work with a group of traditional Indian magicians (wrongly referred to as street magicians, because unfortunately they have been reduced to working on the streets). My motivation to perform magic was to bring a smile on the faces of poor, disadvantaged or sick children for whom I usually perform.”
The magical trio of Aas Mohd, Babban Khan and Nadir Khan
Today these street magicians perform various shows. With Theobald’s help, their skills can now shine and get noticed by thousands of people. Additionally, they are also getting paid for their work. Theobald discusses an incident, “After our Mumbai show, later in the evening, I handed over Rs. 11,000 to Aas Mohammed, the balance money that I had planned to give him for his efforts. “Are you happy?” I asked him. “I would have been happy even if you had not given this money,” he had replied.”
Babban ready for a rope escape
For traditional magicians of India, it is a ‘khandani pesha’ and they have been doing it for generations. What is unique about them is that they make their own tricks, are self taught and never teach others their tricks. Regular magicians go to a magic shop, buy tricks, go to a magic teacher, buy videos and books and learn the same tricks that everyone performs. “The tricks the traditional guys perform – no one quite knows how they are done,” says Theobald with a conviction that makes magic all the more real, even for nonbelievers.
For more magic, please visit their website.
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Indian Gastrodiplomacy to Help Feed Perceptions of an Emergent India
Public diplomacy works to communicate culture and values to foreign publics; gastrodiplomacy uses culinary delights to appeal to global appetites, and thus helps raise a nation’s brand awareness and reputation.
As this author previously noted in this fair site, Thailand was the first to engage in gastrodiplomacy as foreign policy, while South Korea and Taiwan have also been cooking up culinary diplomacy of late. Meanwhile, Malaysia has been conducting a dynamic Malaysian Kitchen for the Worldgastrodiplomacy campaign that has combines elements of culinary and cultural diplomacy by showcasing its cuisine and culture in nightmarkets set up in London, New York and Los Angeles.
Indian Gastrodiplomacy
photo © 2009 Jonathan McIntosh | more info (via: Wylio)India is a natural spot to conduct gastrodiplomacy (“Samosa Diplomacy”), as India’s mark on global cuisine is profound. It was the quest for India’s spice bounty flavored the European age of exploration and sent intrepid navigators sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India’s shores. As Shashi Tharoor noted, today in Great Britain — the isle that once considered India to be her crown jewel — Indian curry houses employ more workers in the UK than the iron, steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.
In an age of increasing obesity and heart disease in the West as related to Western diets, as well as diseases outbreaks like BSE, E. coli and salmonella that have plagued meat supplies, India’s more healthy vegetarian diet could be a source of soft power for India. India would be wise to take the advice of Beatles legend and vegetarian enthusiast Paul McCartney, and declare an “International Vegetarian Day.”
Yet so much of what passes for Indian food abroad stems from its northern Punjabi cuisine. India would be wise to start promoting the delicious and fresh cuisines that are found in its southern regions like the banana-leaf sadya thalis with its delectable coconut chutneys, idlys (lentil cakes) and vadas (donut fritters) or the rice and black lentil crepe dosa stuffed with masala potatoes and onions.
Meanwhile, India would be smart to promote the delicacies that are found at a more local level. Indian street food never seems to make its way to Western palates, which have sadly been missing out on the multitudes of dishes that local Indians savor. Also, it is culinary fare that is often a bit more posh and pricey. The hearty, cheap and delicious street food treats like chole (fiery chickpea curry) with puri (fried bread), aloo tikki (potato croquettes stuffed with spices and served with mint, tamarind and yogurt) and a multitude of various savory chaat snacks.
And what is dinner without dessert? Indian sweets like the immaculate barfi (condensed milk squares), kulfi (sweet, creamy traditional Indian ice cream) and the delectable gulab jamun (fried dough balls swimming in rosewater syrup) could all be after-dinner favorites for an Indian gastrodiplomacy campaign. Of course, such would go well with a cup of India’s famous spiced tea — the sweet, milky and gingery chai.
In Delhi, the Indian Ministry of Tourism — in collaboration with a variety of other ministries and tourist boards, helps host the popular tourist destination Dilli Haat, a rural market-style center to showcase Indian crafts and cuisine from all across India’s varied 28 states. Such efforts should be distilled into a traveling cultural diplomacy campaign sent abroad, much like the innovative Malaysian night market initiative, to bring wide-ranging examples of Indian cuisine and culture to wider global audiences. When culinary diplomacy is combined with cultural diplomacy, it is at its most successful as it engages all the senses.
Indian cuisine has always been an informal part of Indian public and cultural diplomacy; what is required today is a more focused use of gastrodiplomacy in its public diplomacy efforts. As India is conducting public diplomacy and cultural outreach campaigns, like the immaculate India Calling event in Los Angeles or the wildly successful Maximum India festival in Washington, DC, to introduce global audiences to the cultural reality of an emergent India, it is also time for India to engage in more robust gastrodiplomacy to raise the cultural awareness for all of India’s cuisine heritage.
A gastrodiplomacy diplomacy campaign could help raise Indian brand awareness, spur tourism and introduce global diners to the authentic Indian palate. A bit of digestive diplomacy is just the dish to help pique global interest and appetites in the new India.
Paul Rockower is a gastronomist and graduate of the Master’s of
Public Diplomacy program at the University of Southern California.
Rockower works as a Public Diplomacy Guru with INDIA Future of Change,
an organization that conducts Indian public diplomacy and nation
branding.
This post originally appeared in the HuffingtonPost and has been republished here with permission from the author.
This post originally appeared in the HuffingtonPost and has been republished here with permission from the author.
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Women Entrepreneurs Go Organic!
Organic food is eco-nutritionist Kavita Mukhi’s passion. First as the founder of Conscious Food and now as the person behind Mumbai’s first weekly organic farmer’s market, she has consciously spread the word on nutritionally healthy foods.
Of course, now with the ‘Go Organic!’ mantra finding favour with many eco-conscious city women – simply because the advantages of choosing natural over adulterated are far too many – it’s little wonder that the number of organic product companies and consumer stores across Indian metros is only growing. Behind these ventures are successful women entrepreneurs for whom ‘healthy’, ‘farm-fresh’ and ‘chemical-free’ are the magic words.
Organic food is eco-nutritionist Kavita Mukhi's passion.
Though she moved on from Conscious Food years back, she put her energies into setting up the farmer’s market. “I started this market to help our farmers get their due. The response has been good if not overwhelming. But as I see it, we have a long way to go. People who come to visit this market are those who truly believe in organic,” she says.
Organic fruit and vegetables apart this market, located in Mumbai’s western suburb of Bandra, also has goodies like organic sugar candy floss, organic tea and coffee, auro natural wall paints and macrobiotic food.
“It is not easy for farmers in India to get organic certification for their produce especially when standards for hygiene maintenance and transportation are high and when there is copious paperwork involved. There are many certification agencies that label organic produce; in our case, we have tied up with EcoCert, an international agency that certifies organic products,” she adds.
But is organic really the “real thing”? “Yes,” says Mukhi, “Organic foods are those that are grown without chemical fertilisers and pesticides, on land that has not been contaminated for at least three years. I have been using the term planet-friendly to indicate produce grown with natural manure and natural pesticides only.”
Nutritionist Ishi Khosla is the founder and director of Whole Foods.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), by 2015, India is likely to incur a loss of $236.6 billion due to unhealthy lifestyle and faulty diet. Khosla points out, “As Indians are genetically predisposed to chronic diseases such as diabetes and coronary artery disease (CAD) it is necessary to be conscious of the food choices we make. With many more people now indulging in dietary indiscretions – given the plethora of processed foods at our disposal – and eventually inviting serious health disorders, going organic is a sensible way of bringing about the much needed healthy changes in not just food but our overall lifestyle.”
Though Khosla continues to spread the word on organic foods through Whole Foods, she believes that a sea change in the attitude towards health can only take place with government intervention: With the help of necessary policy changes that will promote the consumption of healthy food.
Reetha
Balsavar, director of Navdanya, has seen the change in consumer
patterns and vouches for the growing popularity of all things organic.
Urvashi Mody, partner of Eco Corner Mumbai, a store that encourages living a healthy and eco-friendly lifestyle
Khosla adds to this hopeful attitude, “The market for organic products is growing rapidly and although some of these, particularly organic foods, cost 10 to 15 per cent more than that of conventional food items – which are anyway not cheap, given the current economic climate in the country – with higher demand and consumption of organic products, the prices are likely to come down eventually.”
In fact, Navdanya’s organic foods prices are more or less in line with regular market rates: A 500 gram packet of Toor dal comes at Rs 65 or Masoor dal at Rs 60; flours like besan (gram flour) and ragi (finger millet) are sold for Rs 47 and Rs 42, respectively, for 500 grams.
The price difference was also visible at Mukhi’s farmer’s market recently. According to media reports, a few weeks back when the onion prices shot up, retailing in the regular markets from anywhere between Rs 60 to Rs 70 per kilo, at the organic market, they sold for Rs 40. The vegetables at the farmer’s market are supplied by a co-operative of over 2,000 farmers in the Nashik region near Mumbai, whose practices are attested by Ecocert. The farmers harvest and transport the produce to the city at their own expense while the market provides them with the space to sell. Prices are set depending on the farming labour, costs and a fair return.
But while this market may not be exactly a fair comparison price-wise – since there are costs involved for regular retailers which are not included into the price of the vegetables here (they have the support of the market organisers) – what it does demonstrate, is that organic foods can soon actually become a viable alternative.
Article and images copyright: Women’s Feature Service (WFS). Published here based on an arrangement between WFS and The Better India
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Zero: Mobile Platform for Branch-less Banking
Our 626,000 villages make up 70 percent of the workforce and contribute 20% to India’s GDP. Yet rural India is severely impoverished. The Rangarajan Committee defines financial inclusion as “ensuring access to financial services, including timely and adequate credit where needed to vulnerable and low income groups, at affordable costs.”
Even after the RBI declared “a bank account for every household” as a primary policy goal, a staggering 40 percent of India remains unbanked. The primary reason for that is rural India is considered unprofitable for traditional banking operations.
On the other hand, an estimated 8 million rural Indians who own mobile phones do not have access to banks. According to the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), rural tele-density has soared to 12.72 percent from 0.4 percent in the past decade. So, technological innovations built on telecommunications network can quickly fill this vacuum.
Zero, a mobile platform for branchless banking aims to completely transform banking as we know it in rural areas. Created by Zero Mass foundation, Zero is a an end-to-end technology driven platform for branchless banking – enabling banking , insurance and other such services to reach the rural population. The main features of the Zero platform are :
- Mobile phone as a core bank branch
- Biometric Authentication in the local service area
- Voice prompts during enrolment and transactions
In January 2009, GPS functionality was launched on the standard ZERO platform for automatic tagging of latitude, longitude and global time to customer enrolments.
Zero Mass Foundation is presently the largest business correspondent in the Indian banking sector (by number of affiliated banks & live outlets) having tie-ups with 25 banks led by the State Bank of India.
As of now, over 3 million unbanked customers across 20,000 villages in 18 states have opened biometric-enabled accounts on the Zero platform.
With over 25,000 new accounts being opened everyday, ZERO platform is making our society more inclusive by the day.
For more information, please visit their website: www.alittleworld.com
An illiterate Farmer designs a Water Mill to generate Electricity
Siddappa, an illiterate farmer from Somapur village in Gadag district of Karnataka, has designed a water mill to generate electricity. Right from conceptualizing to materialisation, the farmer has done everything on his own. He operates the water mill in the canal near his house.
Using timbers, Siddappa prepared a giant wheel that joined at a central hub. There are eight arms, five feet each, extending from the central hub. A plastic bucket is dangled at the tip of each arm. When the water from two pipes gushes into one of the buckets, it generates the pressure that turns the 10-feet wheel in an anti-clockwise motion. The bucket could also be spun in the horizontal plane using a central steering wheel, similar to a teacup ride. As one after another bucket is driven by the flowing water, the first arm declines back to the ground while the other rises in the air. This process spins the black wheel attached to this giant wheel. The spinning black wheel rotates another wheel connected to a dynamo.
A converter converts the Direct Current from the dynamo into Alternating Current. Siddappa claims to have spent a mere Rs 5000 on building the entire apparatus. This is his second attempt to show the villagers that anybody can produce electricity for self-consumption using the resources at hand. “Many people who have canals flowing near their villages don’t know how to use that natural gift. I want to show them all practically that electricity problems can be solved by being creative. There is no need to beg to the government for everything,” he says.
He gets 150 watts of power from this water mill when water flows in the canal. Siddappa claims he can create electricity for the entire village through his machine. But the problem is that the canal in his village flows only for three months a year!
This
article originally appeared in The Sunday Indian (TSI) magazine and has
been reproduced here as part of an arrangement between The Better India
and TSI. The author, Suprabha Naik is a correspondent with the Kannada
Bureau of TSI.
Read previous article of this author here.
Readers: If you know of any such ideas/people that you believe we
should feature here, please mail to contact [at] thebetterindia.com.Read previous article of this author here.
Grassroots Innovation: Mini Sanitary Napkin Machine for Rural India
Sanitary napkin, an essential personal hygiene product, has very low penetration in India due to it’s high price. The survey showed that 81% of rural women use unsterilized cloth since it is relatively cheaper than sanitary napkins.
The Innovator and the Innovation
Muruganatham (47) has developed an assembly of low cost, portable machines that produce quality sanitary napkins at a cost of Rs. 1 to Rs. 1.50 per pad approximately.
Tenth standard passed and with no further formal education, Muruganatham always had an attitude of a scientist – observing, experimenting and giving birth to new ideas. When he became aware that most rural women couldn’t afford sanitary napkin thus putting them in grave danger of various infectious diseases, he decided to do something about it.
The Process of Innovating
Initially he worked with cloth but that didn’t give the desired results. He got a commercially available napkin and found out that they used wood fiber for draining the fluids and retaining shape of the pad. He sourced the requisite raw material and developed the final assembly of machines in 2004. He got encouraging feedback on it’s efficancy and subsequently improved the machine by adding UV sterilization unit, calibration and increasing the production rate to 1000 pads per day.The Social Impact
This machine heralds a new revolution in low cost personal hygiene for women across all sections of society. Muruganatham has developed a social entrepreneurship model where-in SHG groups can buy the machine and market or sell the product according to their requirements. Many self help groups (SHGs), corporates and organizations like M S Swaminathan Research Research Foundation, All India Woman’s Conference etc. have placed orders for the machine.These napkin making machines in India are already in place in more than 200 location across the country empowering local women and banishing the stigma away from menstruation and feminine hygiene.
The National Innovation Foundation (NIF), India, was established on Feb 28th 2000 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The main goal of NIF is to provide institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green innovations and help their transition to self supporting activities.
NIF has been supporting and incubating a number of interesting innovations over the past many years. We have been showcasing these innovations here as part of an ongoing series called ‘Grassroots Innovation’.
You can view all the Grassroots Innovations articles here.
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African grandmothers study Solar Engineering in India
“We can learn things from Africa, and Africa can learn from us”
“We were very proud,” Okasia says. “We learned about solar power and it is now working everywhere here.”
Okasia is one of a growing number of women from across Asia, Africa and Latin America who have participated in Barefoot College’s international solar program. (Read our previous article about Barefoot College.) The women travel to the small town of Tilonia in the desert state of Rajasthan to learn how to be solar engineers, and how to train others to do the same.
Illiterate engineers
Bunker Roy founded Barefoot College in Ajmer, in 1972. He says that there are only two conditions for acceptance to the program: that the women are older than 45, and that they are illiterate.
“Once we train an illiterate woman, they never forget what they’ve learned,” says Roy. “We find that literate women tend to forget because their mind is so cluttered. With illiterate women, we find that when we visit them in their villages after a few months, they haven’t lost their knowledge.”
A grant from the Indian government pays for the women to come to India for six months and learn how to build, repair and maintain solar lighting systems. Their communities purchase the basic equipment at a subsidized rate from an Indian solar power company.
Men are “quite untrainable”
Roy says Barefoot College’s program makes communities more independent. It also elevates the roles of older women. Choosing students between the ages of 45 and 55 – grandmothers in name or in fact – is key to making the program effective.
“We’ve found men are quite untrainable,” he says. “They are restless and ambitious. They want a certificate, and as soon as they get it, they move to cities looking for work. Grandmothers are not interested in a paper to hang on their walls. They stay in their communities. Also, they have the patience to be great trainers.”
Saving money with solar
The programme was so successful in India that Roy decided to go international. Since 2005, Barefoot College has trained 200 women from Africa. Those women have brought solar power into 12,000 houses in 160 villages on the continent.
Azouassi Togbe from Benin works on a circuit board
“With it, we don’t have to buy paraffin [for oil lamps],” says Okasia. “Nobody works here. Buying paraffin is not easy. We are happy with solar.”
Truly sustainable development
According to Roy, “the future is south-south cooperation. We can exchange practical knowledge and skills at the community level. We can learn things from Africa, and Africa can learn from us. This is community-to-community knowledge sharing.”
As for Loda Okasia, she says that her only complaint about her training in India was the spicy food. Otherwise, she is happy with her new skills. Now, she says, she wants to build a solar workshop so that she can assemble and repair more solar tools for her village.
Article written by Sara Nics for Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) and has been republished here based on an arrangement with RNW.
Dear readers: If you have come across any such ideas or ventures
that you believe we should write about, please feel free to mail us at
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From Fields to a BPO in just Six Months
Just six months ago, Puja, 18, and Bimla Devi, 35, spent their day cooking meals, tending to cattle and working in the field – the everyday work of village women across Haryana. Never in their wildest dreams had they imagined that they could one day be sitting in an office working away furiously in front of a computer.
Today, this is the remarkable reality of hundreds of women in Tikli and Aklimpur villages. Their agrarian way of life has not changed – they still cut fodder for their cattle and clear the cow dung – but they are now equally adept at using a computer. They work in a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centre, which has set up shop in the heart of their village. A first-of-its-kind women-only rural BPO in India, this centre was started by ‘Harva’, which stands for harnessing value of rural India.
“I never thought I would be able to work on a computer. It was a big thing for me. But now working on the keyboard comes so easily to me. We come here for eight hours and do our job. I’m so proud of myself,” says Puja.
Women of Tikli and Aklimpur villages in Haryana attending a training session. (Credit: Hemlata Aithani\WFS)
And how did these simple women get the hang of using a high-tech device like pros? It’s all thanks to a three- to four-month rigorous training course. Bimla can now type 35-40 words a minute, can mine relevant pieces of information from a pool of data and can do data entry perfectly.
But accomplishing this was not easy. Getting these women to step out of their homes was no mean feat. It took a lot of persistence to get them to break the rigid cultural and social barriers of their male-dominated society. It was the persuasive powers of Ajay Chaturvedi, a banker, who is a business management graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and an engineer from BITS Pilani, that worked like magic on these women. “When we heard of Ajay’s proposal we were elated that we would be trained and get jobs,” recalls Puja.
Thanks
to the three- to four-month rigorous training course, rural women in
Tikli and Aklimpur villages of Haryana can use the computer with élan.
(Credit: Hemlata Aithani\WFS)
So it all began six months back with 500 women, who were selected to be trained in computer basics. “Irrespective of their formal education, they were selected for their ability to read and write, and some basic understanding of the English language, apart from their willingness to learn,” says Chaturvedi.
Training was provided free-of-cost and during the course they learnt about office culture and etiquette, basic English and communication skills, apart from Microsoft Office computer applications. Initially this was difficult for them, recalls Archana, 29, who has a 12-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. “We were shy, a bit hesitant and all of a sudden had to deal with machines and technology. But gradually, with training and motivation, we picked up fast,” she says.
Their determination not only got them through the training but they were rewarded with short-term employment. Out of the 500 women initially selected, 200 completed the course and 50 were deployed on various projects. Twenty women are still working on projects, which involve data mining, while 30 more women are likely to get work as new projects come in.
Women working at the computer in the first-of-its-kind women-only rural BPO in India. (Credit: Hemlata Aithani\WFS)
While the opening of the BPO has created jobs for these rural women, Chaturvedi emphasises that this is in no way an NGO (non-government organisation) project, which aims at social welfare and plays less attention to accountability. He believes that the only way to better utilise the rural India market is through “socio-capitalistic business models”.
“This is a business venture with a conscience and social responsibility. I am a capitalist, who would see whether a business model is viable and profitable or not. After ensuring this, the social cause can be served. If I create value, create business and opportunities, it will benefit everyone, including the villagers,” says Chaturvedi.
He also frankly admits that he did not employ the women out of charity. “Women are overall superior beings, far more hardworking and serious. They can do a job in half the time that men can. They are good at multi-tasking and efficient and can work at a stretch without taking breaks, whereas men tend to always take many small breaks during work hours,” he says.
Chaturvedi proudly gives the example of a 25-year-old woman – a Class VIII graduate – who learnt all the characters on the computer keyboard in just three hours, “something that is not easy even for people like me,” he smiles.
Interestingly, the BPO centre is not Chaturvedi’s only rural venture. This entrepreneur left his lucrative job with Citi Bank to tap rural talent and opportunities. He has already dabbled in community farming for non-rain-dependent cash crops in Uttarakhand. He wants to expand this project to 10,000 acres across the country that will benefit 10,000 farmers in the next four to five years. He has also been providing credit to rural people through micro-financing. Waste management is his upcoming project.
But for now, he wants to take this BPO model to other villages after seeing its success in Tikli, Aklimpur and surrounding villages. He has six other states
In mind and has already laid the groundwork to open a centre in Bihar and Uttarakhand.
Working at the BPO centre has helped to enhance the image and status of women in a state notorious for its skewed sex ratio and masculinised culture. It has proved to be their ticket to economic freedom, even though in a modest way.
Bimla, mother of a girl who is in Class VII and a boy in Class II, was over the moon when she received her first salary of little over Rs 2,000 (US$1=Rs 44.6). “Whatever little amount I got, it was mine. It was a result of my hard work and I realised its worth,” she says.
Adds Suman Devi, 28, a mother of two, “We feel economically empowered. It gives us a sense of security. We spend the money on ourselves and contribute to household expenditure, apart from saving some for the future.” Reena, 18, the most vocal of the lot, gives her take: “I feel city people always think rural women are illiterate and uncultured. But now we have proven them wrong. We are educated and all we need is just an opportunity. Since the villagers know we are getting salaries every month, they too want to send their girls and daughters-in law over here.”
The last six months spent at the BPO have made them better with time management and multi-tasking. “Earlier we used to spend the entire day in doing household chores. But after joining the BPO, we finish all our work by 10am, come to office, work here and go back for the evening chores,” says Bimla.
Apart from being a source of their financial independence, the BPO centre has become a place for these women to make friends. Now they have their own space amidst 20 computers in this two-room centre nestled among sprawling fields. “We have bonded really well. During our breaks we share our happiness and sorrows, married life, problems and issues, at home or outside. It gives us a lot of emotional support,” says Manju Yadav, 25, who has a daughter.
All they want now is some sustainable long-term projects, which would guarantee them regular work and income. But for the time being they are enjoying their new avatar, and ‘keying’ in their success story.
This article has been written by Hemlata Aithani for Women’s Feature Service (WFS) and has been published here based on an arrangement with WFS.
Note for readers: If you have come across any such ideas or
ventures that you believe we should write about, please feel free to
mail us at contact[at]thebetterindia.com.Also, get positive news delivered directly to your mailbox by subscribing to our e-mail alerts.
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Meet Chintakindi Mallesham – The inventor of the Laxmi Asu Machine that relieved the pain of several Weavers
A hand winding process called Asu is required in the traditional ‘Tie & Dye’ Pochampalli silk saree tradition. This involves moving the hand over a space of one meter up and down around semi-circularly arranged pegs 9000 times (yes, 9000 times!) for one sari. For each sari to be completed it takes almost 4 to 5 hours.
Chintakindi Mallesham (37) was born in a small village of handloom weavers , Sharjipet (AP). His mother, Laxmi, used to do the Asu that caused tremendous pain in her shoulders & elbow joints. Even though Mallesham didn’t have much knowledge in mechanical or electrical technology, a strong desire to relieve his mother’s pain egged him to achieve his goal.
Perseverance
Part by part he developed and fitted mechanical devices to a wooden frame. Because of lack of requisite skills, he ended up wasting his hard earned money many times. He used to go to Hyderabad to shop for relevant components. By observing different machine parts he managed to complete some portions of the machine successfully. His family was now fed up of his obsession of making Asu process, so he left the village to make a living in Hyderabad. Within a short while, the machine was almost ready except for one movement. He reached a blind spot where he had no idea which part to use for the action that involves the thread to go round the peg and slide down the last thread perfectly.
Breakthrough
In feb 1999, he went to work in a machine shop in Balanagar area in Secunderabad. In one machine he noticed a movement similar to what he required. He took leave for the day and rushed to the workshop to get that component manufactured. With his heart in his mouth, he fitted the component in the machine and started the operation. The machine worked. His friend then used the Asu machine processed yarn to make a sari. The quality that came out was better than the hand woven Asu process!
Laxmi Asu Making Machine
The first machine was made in 1999, mounted on a wooden frame. Next year, the same was changed to steel. Now many electronic components have been added thereby increasing the functionality and flexibility of design. The Asu machine has reduced the time taken to weave a sari from 4 hours to just one and a half hours. This means that women in the village can now make 6 saris instead of 2 saris per day – earning more in the process.
The Road Ahead
Till date Mallesham has sold over 600 Asu machines. His next dream is to develop a loom for weaving saris – this loom currently requires 3000 leg and hand movements over a period of 2-3 days. Mallesham has already developed a small prototype. Here’s wishing this innovator all the very best in his pursuits!
The National Innovation Foundation
(NIF), India, was established on Feb 28th 2000 by the Department of
Science and Technology (DST). The main goal of NIF is to provide
institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up
grassroots green innovations and help their transition to self
supporting activities.
NIF has been supporting and incubating a number of interesting innovations over the past many years.
Previous Grassroots Innovations: Here and here.NIF has been supporting and incubating a number of interesting innovations over the past many years.
[Note for
readers: If you have come across any such ideas or ventures that you
believe we should write about, please feel free to mail The Better India
at contact[at]thebetterindia.com.
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Delhi Cyclists: Conquering the Road Ahead – Pedal by Pedal
The Delhi Cyclists believe that there is no better thrill than picking your bike every morning and setting out to pedal till one’s heart’s content. There is a great joy in being able to propel yourself with your own two feet and being able to travel long distances, feeling the wind on your face and competing with the petrol powered motor vehicles. The appeal of biking is in exerting control over how fast and where you can go.
In a month, the group goes for three 30 kms rides and a single 50 km ride. Additionally, they also go for “off-road” events (basically cycling outside the city).
Ajay Chawla, one of the senior most biker even appealed to Sheila Dixit for having a cycling lane made in Delhi. “I really want Delhi to have a cycling lane of its own to support the riders. In fact there should also be special parking available for bikes along with relevant security. I want the cyclists to not be looked down upon by people in the cars! Cycling is an eco friendly sport which is also good for an individual’s health and I have been promoting it for the last 15 years now”, he says.
Vikrant Narang, an astronomer and ardent biker further adds, “We help all those who are interested in learning the sport, spread the knowledge and also make the bikers complete in every respect. From proper diets to work outs to safety equipments – we do it all.”
Delhi Cyclists organizes many cycling events and also takes part in events organized by others. Having taken part in the Dare to Change event by the Lance Armstrong foundation and the Cyclathon in The Earth Hour (organized on 13th march 2011), Delhi Cyclists is now ready to take the flag of cycling high across the nation.
We hope there is indeed a positive change in the lifestyle of people if Delhi Cyclists and other similar groups succeed in their mission. Of course, this change will happen slowly – perhaps pedal by pedal.
Akshita Jain is a freelance journalist, a vivid blogger and an
entrepreneur. Writing is her passion and she loves to write about the
youth and showcase their talent. She has been writing for Delhi Times,
My Times and HT Edge. Her entrepreneurial initiative is Dr. Ankul’s
Tarot and Holistic organisation which she co-founded a year ago.
All images copyright & credit: Zehra WarsiArvind Gupta: Teaching Science by Creating Toys from the Trash Can
Back in the late eighties when I was still in the single digits, my father bought me an junior science encyclopaedia and a book called 101 Science Experiments. Considering that it was the pre-internet era, I read and re-read those books many times over the years, eventually learning more from them than I ever did inside a classroom.
Few in our country are lucky enough to have access to good books and great teachers. Fewer still if you assess the availability of good books about science in Hindi and other regional languages, and the state of our schools’ science labs and computer facilities.
Arvind Gupta with his newspaper cap
For almost 30 years now, Arvind Gupta has been taking his love for science and learning to the children of India. He’s the dream teacher we all yearned for. Gupta has travelled to over 3000 schools, demonstrating captivating science experiments to wide eyed children. What sparks their imagination further is that Gupta uses only everyday garbage as the building blocks of these experiments.
“All teaching aids we use are hand made. It‘s important for children to see that you don‘t need fancy materials. Science can also hep you look critically at materials that are often considered trash, there is a lot of learning in that itself”.
Arvind Gupta with his pupils
He takes trash and creates unforgettable experiments and experiences for children. An encore purpose for everyday trash is a wonderful by-product of his work.
Watch Arvind Gupta’s TED Talk
Gupta believes that a love for science and the hunger to learn isn’t just the prerogative of the English speaking elite. On his website Gupta hosts thousands of books on science, that are free to download. Many of which he has painstakingly translated to Hindi himself. There are books in over a dozen regional languages too. The site also boasts over 700 science projects with videos, pictures and instructions. More than 6000 books are downloaded each day!
He
explains phenomenon like light and its laws of convergence &
divergence with only used up ball-point pen refills, rubber slippers or
empty tetra packs!
He also distributes CD’s packed with a massive collections of e-books
and videos to the schools he visits. Often, these are the only teaching
aids they have ever received or used. The keenest minds of our country
might be hidden away in a broken down municipality school, in a town you
and I have never heard of. A tryst with Arvind Gupta could open their
eyes to endless possibilities and give them the chance to dream, despite
their limiting environment.Gupta’s dedication, perseverance and brilliance have not gone unnoticed. He has been recognized by organisations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, International Toy Research Association, Boston Science Centre, Walt Disney Imagineering and Research. He has received a special award given by the National Association for the Blind for designing teaching aids for pre-school blind children and the Ruchi Ram Sahni Award for science popularisation, among others.
“I have an enduring passion for my work because it allows me to reinvent myself. Every child has a dream in their eyes, and each of them instils a hope in me about the future”, he shares.
In true Gandhian spirit, Gupta signs off all his communication with the words ‘with love and peace’. He certainly lives by them.
Tithiya
Sharma is a former journalist turned backpacking blogger who’s
traveling the world looking for adventure and inspiration. She’s using
social media for social good as she finds and meets a hundred everyday
heroes and discovers a world worth saving. Check out her quest for
inspiration: The 100 Heroes Project.
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How Carbon Finance is making a difference. Also, inviting applications for the atmosfair India Renewable Energy Innovation awards
In the Kolar district in Karnataka, a slow but radical transformation is taking place. The villagers are altering their source of energy. Century-old practices of using firewood for fuel and decade-old practices of using kerosene are being systematically replaced by sustainable and clean biogas. Innovative biogas digesters made from locally available materials are being implemented in a joint project between local NGO’S and – not international aid agencies – the German carbon offsetting company Atmosfair. Carbon credits provide the project partners with additional income, making the project feasible.
Carbon offsetting and skewed sustainability
Carbon offsetting projects are mostly known as large scale ventures, prevailing in India and China, used by western countries to offset the emissions they cannot (yet) avoid. One major shortcoming of the majority of carbon offsetting projects is their limited demarcation of sustainability. As clean energy seems to imply sustainable development, social and economic aspects that should be taken into regard for a full picture of sustainable development are neglected. The wellbeing of people affected by the projects is barely regarded. This bleak picture, however, is not the full portrait. Though small in numbers, strong efforts are being made to guide carbon funding in the direction of people working on projects that make a difference; a daily life difference in the lives of people who need it most.There is much controversy questioning the ethics of offsetting with the common argument that it is reinforcing business-as-usual energy use in western countries and obstructing real change. Further controversies involve incidents of forces relocation of local residents as land for renewable energy projects is required and carbon funding used to implement energy efficiency regulations in what remain highly polluting new energy plants.
In current debates on the transformation to a low carbon economy, sustainability is so strongly associated with renewable energy that the social and economic aspects of genuine sustainable development are drowned out. This is reflected in the nature of carbon offsetting projects that have highly meticulous regulations to ensure high standard implementation of renewables. Social and economic impacts are treated as an occupational hazard, tested superficially, if at all, in order to get the paperwork through.
Critique of carbon offsetting is not without reason, but there is a need to also highlight efforts of organizations within in the sector that aim to guide carbon funding in the direction of people working on projects making difference in people’s daily lives, driven by a holistic and encompassing view of sustainability.
Encompassing people’s wellbeing in renewable energy projects
Biogas from Cowdung - Construction at Kolar. Source: http://atmosfair.de/
Biogas from Cowdung completed at Kolar. Source: http://atmosfair.de/
The Gold Standard Foundation is a international non-profit organization based in Switzerland. They developed standards that complement the existing Kyoto and voluntary market requirements with strict measures to target the development of projects with a positive local impact. These can be both CDM Gold Standard projects as well as VER Gold Standard micro scale projects. Both facilitate locally run businesses and raise the quality of life of people in the project area. Atmosfair strictly supports Gold Standard projects.
India has huge potential to develop vast amounts of projects like the one in the Kolar district. Demand from abroad is rising. Moreover, the Indian industry is also exploring the options of carbon offsetting. In some cases due to the looming inclusion of airlines in the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). (In it, all aircraft operators flying in and out of Europe will need to conform to the set allowances, foremost by increasing energy efficiency, then by offsetting what is unavoidable though the acquisition of carbon credits). In other cases due to company policies to attain a green image or even become fully carbon neutral.
The atmosfair India Renewable Energy Innovation awards
Niiti consulting is a Bangalore based firm seeking to be change agents in the society. They partner with organizations interested or engaged in projects that aim to create a strong social impact by providing local sustainable solutions. Having realized the potential of carbon offsetting projects to make this impact, Niiti consulting has undertaken a feasibility study to determine the scalability potential of carbon offsetting projects with triple bottom line sustainability in India and to assess the demand for the investment potential for the same. The study includes identification and assessment of suitable projects that meet the stringent Gold Standard criteria. In partnership with atmosfair, Niiti consulting has launched the atmosfair India Renewable Energy Innovation awards to promote the potential of high quality offsetting projects and provides them the opportunity to win additional funding and support.The atmosfair India Renewable Energy Innovation awards are looking for innovative proposals for existing projects, new projects or projects under incubation, that meet the following profile:
- Reduce greenhouse gasses in India, preferably biogas, cook stoves, waste management, solar lamps, pump efficiency or solar water heating
- Enhance the quality of life of people in the project area
- Provide opportunities for economically viable, locally run businesses
- Preferably, should be able to develop into a GS CDM/GS VER (Gold Standard Clean Development Mechanism/ Gold Standard Voluntary Emission Reduction) project
An award of 9 lakh INR is being offered for the best application. Moreover, the project will be able to gain 10-100% project support from atmosfair, depending on the technology used and the large-scale triple bottom line impact it creates in the destination.
To apply for the awards or for more information please go to http://atmosfair.in/innovation.htm. If you would like to support the promotion of the awards and/or get updates on the awards as well as related topics you can follow the #atmawards hash or @niiticonsuting. You can also follow this facebook page.
About
the author: Mariska has a background in social sciences and sustainable
tourism. She is currently part of the Niiti consulting team where she
is contributing towards a feasibility study on the carbon offset market
in India, with a focus on renewable energy projects with triple bottom
line sustainability.
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Esha: Braille Cards, Workshops and more – Empowering The Visually Impaired
Esha, a non-profit initiative is working to help the blind realize and utilize their potential by designing innovative ways of sustainable livelihood. Also ,they do workshops to sensitize the non-blind towards the special skills and needs of the blind.
As of now Esha has 5 small enterprise providing sources of livelihood to the blind:
Braille Cards: Braille enabled visiting cards are standard cards with your name embossed in Braille. The brailling is done for a rupee per card and can be done on your existing cards. The money made on each card goes directly to the blind.
Braille Enabled Greeting Cards:The blind usually do not get greeting cards. If you know someone who is visually impaired, send them a Braille greeting card. Esha has both options – all Braille or normal greeting card with Braille.
Theatre Workshops: Primarily in schools and offices. The aim of the workshop is to make the participants aware of the gift they have (gift of sight) and be a little more sensitive to special needs of the differently-abled.
Tactile Maps: A tactile map is a map that can be read by touch. A tactile map of the layout of your building/office ensures that a blind person is able to find his way around without being escorted.
Accessibility Audit and Consulting : Auditing organizations to ensure that their premise is accessible to the blind and advising them to make the required changes.
Here’s an interview with Nidhi Arora, an IIMC alumnus and founder of Esha.
How did the idea of Esha come about?
I have been working with the blind since 1994. The idea of Esha evolved slowly, as one realized here were some unmet challenges in the world of the blind. We started as a mail order book store for the blind, and in 2006, directed attention to finding revenue streams for the blind. What set Esha apart was the thought that we will not just create contract workers, we will create entrepreneurs. We will develop services and products that the blind can create/deliver. Using these, it should be possible for the beneficiary to lead a life of dignity – with financial independence. So all our products have to pass the market test of potential earnings of 10,000 a month or more. If the service does not have that kind of demand, we do not pursue it. One of the products we abandoned was bookmarks, because we realized that selling 1000 bookmarks a month was not possible with our limited marketing reach.Very recently, in August 2011, we started the CLABIL project – Central Library of Audio Books in Indian Languages. This project aims to bring free audio books in Indian languages to all the blind children across the country. Using an early intervention program, we will work with the children to ensure that listening to stories for pleasure is a habit inculcated early. We will be giving every child a personal mp3 player with SD cards, so that the library can be refreshed by them on need basis. It’s the biggest project of its kind in India.
Tactile Maps
Braille cards in a very novel concept in India. What has been the general response towards it?
Very, very good. When we started, people appreciated the concept, but did not see the practical utility of it. They argued that no blind person is likely to see their card. It took some time to convince them that the reason the blind will not see this card is the reason they MUST get Braille on their cards. We have successfully and completely isolated the blind from our growth story.The other, and more important thing is that Braille on your cards makes a statement – about you as a person, and the organisation. Braille enabled cards are a great ice breaker, they make a fantastic first impression, and they are a very visible statement of being inclusive. A Braille card is worth way, way more than the 1 rupee that the person pays for it.
Almost everyone who tried Braille cards has repeated the orders. They have spoken about the benefits with their organisations, and today, a lot of our clients acknowledge that Braille on their cards gets them brownie points with their clients, and helps them break ice and start conversation on a good note even if the situation is otherwise difficult.
Today, most of our orders are automatic. We have never had the money or resources to advertise. Always, all our orders have come through reference, but repeat orders, and so many of them, indicate that people are really getting value out of the service. We think that’s good. Because its not about charity. That service was priced at a nominal cost of 1 re. per card only because we wanted people to see that what they get out of this card is way more than the one rupee that they pay for it.
What basic policy recommendations would you suggest to make public places and govt. offices more blind-friendly>
1. The Copyright Act should be amended to make it possible for the blind to access audio and braille copies of the book. The US Copyright Act already has this provision, so long as the copy is used only for the benefit of the blind. I really think that we need this change in india too.2. Accessibility Audit, tactile maps and Accessibility ranking should be done and displayed at the entrance of all public use buildings, so that a disabled person (with any disability) can know upfront what to expect and what to prepare for inside the building. We understand that all buildings will have different levels of accessibility. All that we ask is that an audit should be conducted for all public buildings at the time of completion, and the accessibility index should be displayed at the entrance.
Do qualified Blind professionals get the same opportunities as other people in the corporate sector? What is Esha’s role in this?
It is obvious that they do not. A lot of good organizations are working towards making the blind employable and employed in the corporate sector. We are in the business of creating blind entrepreneurs. Not employees. Our beneficiaries are independent, they work flexi-time, they do their own invoicing, and they collect their own payments.Website : http://www.braillecards.org/
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How Teenaged Tribal Sunita Won A National Bravery Award
Sixteen-year-old Sunita Murmu is quite the celeb in her locality these days. This teenager had the courage to approach the remote Mohammadbazar police station in Birbhum, one of West Bengal’s most backward districts, and lodge a complaint against the powerful criminal elements from within her community. Of course, she did not stop there – young Sunita also ensured that these men were arrested for sexually harassing, torturing and ostracising her.
Sunita
is one among the 26 children who has been honoured with the National
Bravery Award for her exemplary act of courage. (Credit: Saadia
Azim\WFS)
There was a time, not so long ago, when Sunita was just another tribal girl, with little education, living quietly in a male-dominated society. She had no idea of her rights and spent her days working as a daily wage labourer to support her parents. And like most girls her age, she too fell in love. Her life, however, turned into a nightmare the day her involvement with a non tribal boy from the nearby village was discovered by the local tribal panchayat in June last year.
The self-proclaimed panchayat met and decided on what they thought could be the only punishment for her romantic attachment: She was stripped publicly and made to walk around the village, even while being jeered at and sexually harassed by random villagers. Those who were party to this heinous crime even went a step further – they took photographs and videos of her in that situation, which were later made into multi-media messages (MMSes) and sent to everyone in the village to ensure that no other village girl would dare to repeat Sunita’s ‘crime’.
Not one person came forward to help the traumatised young girl while she was being treated in this heinous manner. The authorities at the nearby Mohammadbazaar police station did not bother to come to her rescue. As for her shocked parents, they too could be of little assistance. The incident lasted for about two hours – she was made to walk for around eight kilometres after which she was literally dumped. Plucking up whatever courage she had left, Sunita made her way back home only to be taunted by her neighbours and others. No case was registered against her attackers and no one dared to defy the tribal panchayat’s diktat, even though there is an elected panchayat body in the area.
Since the leaders of the community had been party to the crime, all evidence was tampered with. For two months Sunita lived in a corner of her hut, left in isolation and generally neglected. It was during those dark days that she made up her mind to raise her voice for justice. When she told her parents that she wanted to see action being taken against her culprits, they tried hard to dissuade her, even keeping her secluded and trying to divert her attention to other matters.
Fortunately,
even though her own village is shying away from taking back its
courageous daughter, her story is bringing smiles to the faces of many
girls in the region. Remarks Kuntalshree Bhatacharya, a headmistress of a
local girls’ school, “I keep telling my girls that enduring crime is
equal to being a party to it. Learn from Sunita, who could win accolades
for defying the wrong in the society.”
Meanwhile, the MMSes were still being circulated within the
community. All those close to her family suggested that she forget what
happened and move ahead. Says Sunita, looking back, “I wondered how
people can ever think that I can forget what happened with me. I am
living with that pain which will be there all the time. But I shall now
fight against all crimes against women in the name of old traditional
values.”When the police came knocking at her door to conduct an inquiry two months later, she was dissuaded by her family to cooperate with the investigation. But Sunita decided to go it alone and fight all the way. She told the police everything that happened and lodged a formal complaint. But there was no evidence except for the MMSes that were doing the rounds. No one was ready to testify – some stayed away fearing the criminals, others because they thought they were standing up for their traditional tribal values.
But there was no stopping Sunita. Recalls Bidhan Ray, the SDO of Rampurhat, who followed up and investigated the case, “It was amazing to see a victim so confident. We thought she may really be in a deep depression and would not cooperate. Also in such cases the chances of victims turning hostile are very high. But Sunita could identify the criminals since they were from her locality and she knew them well. Her confidence could win everyone’s support.”
Just two days after filing the complaint, the six main accused were arrested. These culprits, barely out of their teens, had incited the crowd and later influenced people to keep quiet.
Fearing a backlash from the community, Sunita was sent to a government welfare home – ‘Pushparag’ in Rampurhat. She continues to be there, trying to pick up the pieces of her life. She has also now learnt weaving and embroidery, and the district administration has opened a savings account for her.
When the district administration decided to propose her name for the National Bravery awards, it was a proud moment for Sunita. “It is an unusual case because despite being a victim, Sunita fought for herself. We decided to propose her name as she has not just taken on criminals but has also stood up against organised crime, regressive and outdated values and self-proclaimed, unauthorised panchayat-like bodies,” says Saumitra Mohan, the district magistrate of Birbhum.
Today Sunita is one among the 26 children who has been honoured by President Pratibha Patil with the National Bravery Award for her exemplary act of courage. The award is conferred annually by the Indian Council of Child Welfare to children for their acts of courage in everyday life.
“Sunita has been able to take back control of her life. She is a fast learner and mixes well with other teenagers. Yet she is still living a life of seclusion and ostracism,” confesses Satyabrata Banerjee, the superintendent of the ‘Pushparag’ welfare home.
Banerjee bases this observation on the fact that Sunita has not been able to go back home. Many of her family members still refuse to talk to her. The culprits are out on bail and the local people say that her life could be in danger in her Santhal village of Burtola, where most people are daily wagers or are dependent on government schemes for their livelihood. However Sunita remains unfazed, “I have not gone back but it does not mean I have done anything wrong. I want to finish my studies and fight for the rights of others who have been abandoned like me.”
Fortunately, even though her own village is shying away from taking back its courageous daughter, her story is bringing smiles to the faces many girls in the region. Remarks Kuntalshree Bhatacharya, a headmistress of a local girls’ school, “I keep telling my girls that enduring crime is equal to being a party to it. Learn from Sunita, who could win accolades for defying the wrong in the society.” Adds Sunita’s friend from the village, who is too intimidated to give her name, “We are proud of her. But what is alarming is that the culprits are roaming free while the one who fought for what is right is living away from home.”
But things are slowly changing. Voices are now being raised in her support. Women organisations are demanding that Sunita be rehabilitated within the community. Says District Magistrate Saumitra Mohan, “We are trying our best but for now she has to concentrate on her studies and better the skills that she is learning at the welfare home. It is a three-year course and Sunita is enjoying interacting with her new friends. Meanwhile, her accomplishments are being recognised even within her community. Our assessment is that her medal, the cash prize and the national recognition that has come her way, will gradually changed public opinion in her village.”
This article has been written by Saadia Azim for Women’s Feature Service (WFS) and has been published here based on an arrangement with WFS. Saadia Azim is a senior journalist based in Kolkata.
Article and image copyright: Women’s Feature Service
[Note for readers: If you have come across any such ideas or
ventures that you believe we should write about, please feel free to
mail The Better India at contact[at]thebetterindia.com.]Article and image copyright: Women’s Feature Service
The Color Caravan: Platform for traditional Indian handicrafts
Here is an interview with Swati Seth, the founder and the main driving force behind The Color Caravan:
Tell us more about The Color Caravan – what is it all about?
The Color Caravan is a platform for Indian handicrafts. It is a link between the artisan and urban market. The Color Caravan is not a NGO. It is very much a business venture but supports a social cause. We basically partner with independent artisans, NGOs and SHGs to not only source products from them but also develop new products with them. In this way, we help create livelihood for the artisans and thus preserve our traditional craft. Besides this, we try to educate our customers about the product that they buy from us by sharing craft stories with them. We want them to know the kind of effort and time that an artisan puts in creating each piece of craft.What inspired you to start The Color Caravan?
Swati Seth
I knew that one day I would do something of my own and it would be something to do with the handicrafts. It was always there on my ‘bucket list’ but I wasn’t sure when and how. And then I reached a stage where this thought that ‘if I don’t do it now, I would never be able to do it‘ started bothering me but I still did not have the courage to quit my decently paying secure job.
They say taking the first step is always the toughest part. After contemplating the idea for months, and with encouragement & support from family and some close friends I gathered the courage and decided to take the plunge.
So, you can say that The Color Caravan was born out of my passion for travel, love for art & craft and concern to preserve and propagate age-old traditional Indian crafts.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Your past experience?
I am a qualified commercial artist with over 10 years of experience across the design & online industry (design, e-commerce & content). I spent the early years of my career doing wall art, designing furniture & interiors for children, painting for a textile export house, visualising & illustrating for digital & BTL agencies before moving over to online content. In between all this, I also had a short stint with a BPO. My last stint was with one of largest Indian websites for advertising, media & marketing.What are the kind of products The Color Caravan showcases? What is unique about them?
Besides sourcing traditional handicraft products that are already available with the artisans, we help them design and develop new products using traditional craft. We try to present traditional handicraft products in contemporary style. So, while some of the products that we sell have been completely created by the artisan, others have been co-created by both the artisan and The Color Caravan. Some of the artisans that we work with are national and state awardees.Currently, we have crafts like terracotta jewelry from West Bengal, Madhubani from Bihar, Pattachitra & Dokra Orissa, basketry & Longpi pottery from Manipur, Charamkari and Kalamkari from Andhra Pradesh, Bandhej & weaves from Gujarat, Chikankari from Uttar Pradesh, Blue pottery from Rajasthan & Batik and Meenakari from Maharashtra. Our current product range consists of fashion accessories, home decor, home furnishing & utility items. Since each product, each piece is handcrafted, there are no two identical pieces!
Handpainted madhubani keepsake boxes
Intricately handpainted Pattachitra bottle
Longpi or the black stone pottery
Handcrafted and handpainted terracotta baalis
I suppose in this field you would have a lot of stories to share about artisans and their crafts. Any particular event/incident that you recall?
Every piece of craft and artisan has a story to tell. However, I’ll share this particular one. I was traveling across Kutch (Gujarat) to explore the local craft and meet artisans to partner with. Every village that I visted, every artisan that I met and every piece of craft that I saw left me awestruck. Then, I met this very old lady in a tiny village. She must have been close to 85 or 90. She was once a very fine hand embroidery artist but was forced to give up the art because of old age. Her family showed me some of her out-of-this-world creations.I asked them if someone would be able to embroider something similar for me. I was disappointed and shocked to know that that particular embroidery art was not passed on to the next generation. No one from the younger generation bothered to learn it. No one from the current lot of artists in the village knew that particular stitch, that particular embroidery and she was too old teach now. She could barely see – it meant that that particular embroidery, that craft was now lost. It was heartbreaking.
Any specific issues that you face and are trying hard to address?
I want to add about one of the biggest issues that we and other social enterprises working for the handicraft sector are facing. People often find our products expensive and we have a tough time explaining that handmade stuff will be expensive especially when we pay fair wages/prices to our artisans and don’t exploit them like others. It is sad that most customers end up comparing our handcrafted products with machine-made, non-ecofriendly products purchased at low prices & sold huge margins & profits.Clearly The Color Caravan is a much-needed initiative in this space. What are your future plans? How do you plan to shape this initiative?
We have already started retailing through a couple of stores in Bangalore and Lucknow and are products will be soon available in Mumbai. We will continue to do exhibitions across metros. Besides this, we have plans of launching a couple of customised services.How does one get in touch with your organization?
Tel: 011-46534315, 0522-2624182Write to us at: swati.seth(at)thecolorcaravan.com
Look for ‘The Color Caravan‘ Page on Facebook and click the LIKE button for updates.
To see where & how can one buy our products, please see the SHOP tab on our Facebook Page.
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Thank you Swati for this initiative. The Better India wishes you and the artisans a whole lot of success with The Color Caravan![Note for readers: If you have come across any such ideas or ventures that you believe we should write about, please feel free to mail The Better India at contact[at]thebetterindia.com.
Also, get positive news delivered directly to your mailbox by subscribing to our e-mail alerts.]
ESIH 2011 Winners: Five NGOs working towards Women Empowerment
The table below lists the organizations and links to their respective websites (except for one which doesn’t seem to have an online presence):
| Sector | Winner |
| Economic Security and Livelihoods | Prajwala, Andhra Pradesh |
| Health and Well Being | Jan Chetna Manch, Bokaro |
| Education | Educate Girls (FEGG), Rajasthan |
| Socio Cultural Rights | STEPS Women Development Society, Tamil Nadu |
| Governance | The Hunger Project, Madhya Pradesh |
The winning NGOs of this year’s award are Jan Chetna Manch (Health and Well-Being), Jharkhand, for the outstanding work done to empower and improve the lives of the weakest and poorest in the villages of Bokaro district, with a particular aim of improving the overall health and well being of poor rural women, Foundation to Educate Girls Globally (Education), Rajasthan, an organization that has significantly improved girls’ enrolment, retention, and academic performance in Government schools, by leveraging existing community and Government resources in the state , Prajwala (Economic Security & Livelihoods), Andhra Pradesh, an NGO that has emerged as an anti-trafficking organization, that rescues women and children from prostitution, enabling their psychological recovery, and rehabilitating and reintegrating trafficked victims back into the society, The Hunger Project (Governance),New Delhi, an organization committed towards gender equality and women’s empowerment through political participation and STEPS Women Development Organisation (Socio-Cultural Rights) Pudukottai, Tamil Nadu, a women’s organization that works on issues to do with violence and women’s rights, with a sharpened and special focus on the rights of Muslim Women.
ESIH 2011 aims to identify and reward organisations that are innovating to empower women in India. The objective is to showcase and support organizations with unique approaches to tackle challenges that women face in our country. Prize money of Rs. 50 Lakhs is being awarded to the winners across five categories of Health & Well Being, Education, Economic Security & Livelihoods, Social and Cultural Rights and Governance. Apart from award money, the Foundation has enhanced its focus this year to provide capacity building support to winning NGOs.
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