Redefining success

Prof Rajita Chaudhuri follow some off-beat trends like organizing make up sessions

This messiah does not walk on water; his feet are firmly planted on the ground. Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy was educated in the most prestigious of academic institutions ' The Doon School and St Stephen's College ' but he found his moorings in the hinterlands of Rajasthan, where he set up the Barefoot College, now considered a touchstone model of community empowerment and rural development. Starring in the Time magazine's 2010 list of 100 most influential people, Sanjit Roy envisions significant contribution of Bharat to the future of India. An interview with Indira Parthasarathy'

You received some of the finest education one can dream to have in our country. Did Barefoot result because of, or despite that? Did you have to unlearn anything to start Barefoot?

It was Mark Twain who said, 'Never let school interfere with your education.' There is a difference between literacy and education. Literacy is reading and writing and what you pick up in school. Education is what you receive from your family, your community and your environment.

Soon after leaving College, for five years (1967-1971) I worked as an unskilled labourer deepening and blasting open wells for water. That meant going down a 100ft open well by rope and blasting it with explosives. I lived with very poor and ordinary people under the stars and heard the simple stories they had to tell of their skills and wisdom that lectures and university education can never teach you. My real education started then when I saw amazing people ' water diviners, traditional bonesetters, midwives at work. Through an unlearning process I reached this approach of the first Barefoot College of its kind.

Barefoot combines education and environmental activism. Do you think it's high time mainstream education also went for a similar approach?

The CBSE syllabus will be shortly including Barefoot Colleges' initiatives as part of a chapter on Environmental Studies. Since 1993, elected MPs of the seven childrens' parliaments have emerged as environmentally aware future responsible citizens of their villages.

Till 2003, the educational curriculum up till secondary level had a chapter on Barefoot College emphasising its Solar Energy and Rain Water Harvesting initiatives of rural communities.

Children attending schools in Germany study environmental initiatives taken by the night school and Barefoot College students towards spreading environmental consciousness.

What is the biggest impediment an earnest NGO faces in our country?

The main difficulties that I faced in 1971, when we started the Barefoot College, remains even today in 2008. By far the biggest threat to development today, and why the poor will always remain poor, is the literate man and woman who is a product of the formal education system. This system makes you look down on the village. The fact is that the knowledge and skills were used for hundreds of years well before the urban doctor, teacher and engineer turned up in villages.

The biggest obstacle to developing our own Indianness is the mindset of the literate expert who cannot think beyond the box. Einstein's definition of insanity, 'Endlessly repeating the same process hoping for a different result.' There is a far greater number of 'for the rich, by the rich' efforts around us than 'for the poor, by the poor'. How can the distribution be made more equitable?

Distribution can be made more equitable if the Gandhian non-violent approach ' strongly rejecting the classical arrogant top down development approach of the 'experts' ' is instead put into practice incorporating the following beliefs

l Identify, respect and apply existing traditional knowledge and skills and give practical skills more importance than theoretical knowledge.

l There are many more powerful ways of learning other than the written word.

l The demystified decentralised community-managed, community-controlled and community-owned approach put the traditional knowledge and village skills of the rural poor first.

l Taking the people into confidence from the very beginning of the process of planning and implementation, and not after the project is written and approved in places where experience of poverty is merely virtual (like in the World Bank or UN).

Do you think it is practical to suggest mandatory community service for every citizen?

No, it is not practical because anything forced is not going to work. One must not be made to feel community service is a punishment. It is a reflection on our formal system that anyone going back to the village after University or College is considered a 'failure' and mandatory community service will not change this attitude.

Barefoot is reminiscent of Muhammad Yunus' microcredit (Grameen Bank) model. Comment.

There are very few similarities. There are major differences in approaches, in methodologies, in how the Barefoot approach has been scaled up to only work in remote inaccessible villages around the world. While the Grameen Model can be applied in rural and urban situations, the Barefoot model can only work in poor rural communities across the world.

Back when you started Barefoot, Gandhism hadn't even been re-modelled into Gandhigiri. Were you inspired by Gandhian values?

I never read Mahatma Gandhi in school nor did I read him when I started Tilonia (Rajasthan). I read him 30 years later and he made such eminent sense. I did not read Marx and so he was no influence on me. The motivation was to work with the really very poor people and see how best with very little money we could tangibly improve their lives. Free from hunger and want. Free from fear, discrimination, exploitation and injustice. The challenge was all.

With roots in the village community and a deep rooted respect for proper use of water, air, earth and the sun, the Barefoot educators have set an example of how not to waste or over exploit nature resources. They are a living testimony to Mahatma Gandhi's famous saying, 'The world has enough for every man's need but not for one man's greed.' The Barefoot Blueprint

Highlights: From 1972 to 2007, the Barefoot approach has reached three million men, women and children living below poverty line through 20 community based organisations all over India.

Drinking water: 3140 hand pumps installed: 1042 hand pump mistries trained repairing hand pumps in 764 villages in seven states. Reaching nearly one million people.

Alternative energy: Solar lighting to 9347 houses, 274 night schools, distributed 4736 solar lanterns. 289 Barefoot Solar Engineers trained. One 30 KVA micro-hydel plant established in Ladakh providing lighting to 150 families. One Reverse Osmosis (de-salination) plant powered by 3 KWp solar power plant.

Barefoot architecture: Barefoot Architects have constructed 200 houses for the homeless in 76 villages benefiting 3000 families in Rajasthan. Fabricated 178 geodesic domes of scrap metal with ferrocement roofs in 56 villages for 4000 rural artisans in six states.

Education: 714 Night Schools in 673 villages for 235,000 dropouts (170,000 girls) attending school for the first time in eight states

health: Barefoot College is working through a network of 605 traditional midwives: 231 Bare foot doctors, 14 barefoot lab technicians.


An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Thomas Mann to Ludwig Lewisohn

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German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, Thomas Mann can easily be termed as one of the most enlightened intellectuals of the Nazi era. Thomas Mann moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. Among Mann’s most famous works is Buddenbrooks, which appeared when he was 26. In the following letter written to fellow writer Ludwig Lewisohn, Mann laments the death of his friend Menno Ter Braak.

September 30, 1940
Dear Ludwig Lewisohn,

Your book has arrived, has occupied me a good deal, and I would have written to you sooner were it not that my morbidly swollen correspondence, the product of these times, some days keeps me from my own writing. Today I received the news—or rather the confirmation of a report I had not yet brought myself to accept—that a good friend of mine, the Dutch writer and eminent critic, Menno Ter Braak, took his own life when the Germans invaded. It’s heartrending. Two other important Dutch writers have likewise fallen victim to this new variety of world history. The very best are those who are destroyed—which I suppose is only natural when ultimate baseness is victorious. Much trash has found refuge in America because such people raise a ruckus, while the nobler types go under silently. Your book, now: I read it some time ago, very quickly, almost at one sitting, and understandably with keen interest, for American as it is, it breathes in, if not out, a most European atmosphere. In literary terms it is close to the French, English, German spirit, so that I felt at home with it. In addition there was the emotion aroused by the human document—a somewhat mixed emotion, I will have to add, inclining toward the side from which, evidently, a state of being filled with one’s own ego, one’s own fate, one’s own errors and own happiness, one’s own loving and being loved, which antagonizes people—not only out of ill-will and a petty insistence on discretion, but also out of an irritated pudeur. And at least in times of great public tribulations, when there is a certain justification for that feeling. I might put it this way: The book really needs the shield and protection of posthumous publication. Let us assume that your considerable literary achievement were crowned and completed by a few more powerful works; that after you had become entirely what you are, you had departed this earth and friends had published these pages from your posthumous papers—in that case not only would there be nothing to be said against them, but they would be a real contribution. But as it is now, coming out in the midst of life, the book does constitute, if you will (I don’t “will” at all, but others do, so it seems, and I cannot entirely blame them) a kind of imposition, an act of naïveté, which to be sure is probably a condition for your productivity and without which your works (for this is scarcely a work) probably would not have been written—and yet the nakedness does, after all, have something disturbing about it.

As you see: interested, moved, but not entirely in agreement—that is how I feel. A public statement of mine on Haven would necessarily turn out somewhat tortuous, and since I have reservations about the book’s public existence, I have even more about my giving a public opinion on it. Thanks for something so personal had better remain personal. The occasion for my testifying once more to your literary gifts will come again—I prefer to wait for a new work cast more objectively, confident that you will not make us wait long.

Yours

TM

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Water woes intensify

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When it was predicted about a decade back that the next World War would be fought for control of water, sceptics dismissed it as a mere hyperbole. Now, with killings over water being reported from across the country, the spectre of the past is becoming a scary reality. The TSI team of Anil Sharma, Raju Kumar and Nishant Bhadreshwar takes stock

RAJU KUMAR AND NISHANT BHADRESHWAR

Water woes intensify It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in want of a wife must be a good provider. However, what the word ‘provider’ encompasses has acquired a new meaning in Rajasthan. Here, a man must be able to provide water to the family apart from other things. Sounds like a leaf out of Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’, but the acute water scarcity in the state has made a lot of people wary of marrying off their daughters in villages where women would inevitably have to trudge for miles everyday to fetch some water. “Often, women have to walk for miles to collect water. Many people are reluctant to marry off their daughters into such communities,” says Rameshwar Chaudhari, a resident of village Chopra Dhotra in Jodhpur district of Rajasthan. His village is facing severe water crisis.

Rajasthan, spread over 10.4 per cent of the country’s geographical area and sustaining more than 5.5 per cent of the human population and 18.70 per cent of the livestock, has only 1.16 per cent of the total surface water available in the country. This year, the ground water situation has turned alarming in the state with only 30 water blocks out of the total 237 left in the safe zone. With increase in the population and subsequently the demand for water for various purposes, the state is already in the middle of a terrible water crisis. The per capita annual water availability in the state is about 650 cubic meters against the minimum requirement of 1,000 cubic meters. “I am 60 years old and have never seen a situation like this. We get water only once or twice a month and even that comes with low pressure. It takes over half an hour to fill a bucket,” says Kamla, a resident of Naulakhi in Sri Ganganagar district. The crisis has also become so acute in Atru in Baran district that the water department—in spite of spending Rs 20,000 daily on the supply of water—is finding it difficult to meet the local demand through tankers.

The local administration in Akhlera in Jhalawar district, having a population of over 12,000, is now planning to engage 150 plus tankers to supply water. The only source of water in the town, Amalvada Deh dam, is drying up fast. Similar situation has emerged in Sojat Road in Pali district where the administration has demanded a special 65 wagon water train to overcome the crisis. Women in Bhilwara town of Rajasthan recently blocked the road in front of the municipality, demanding increased water supply. “We want more tube wells to be dug up so that we can get water,” says Kamla, a housewife. Water is being supplied once in every five days in the town famous for its textile industry. The scenario in the state capital Jaipur is no better, where water is being supplied once in a day, and that too only for an hour. “To add to our woes, we have heard that the government is planning to make it once in 48 hours. How would we live,” says Ashok Kumar Sharma, a resident of the walled city area.

Gone are the days when people would man pyaos to give water to the thirsty. Now, people are manning water bodies to keep the thirsty away from them. Water shortage has forced the residents of a village near Bikaner to maintain a tight vigil on the village water bodies to prevent water theft. “There is always a threat of water theft, so we have appointed watchmen to keep a vigil on our water bodies,” says Bhola Ram, a resident of Pugal village in Bikaner district.

It is feared that the availability would fall below 450 cubic metres by the year 2050. As per the international accepted norms, availability of water below 500 cubic metres is considered as absolute water scarcity. Although the Ashok Gehlot government is trying to take steps to ease the crisis, but so far the problem persists. “We are doing whatever best we can. Supplying water through tankers and running water trains. We have decided to supply water through tankers to more than 10,000 villages during May and June,” a senior official of the water department tells TSI. “We have also decided to focus on community-based water management solutions instead of predominantly engineering-based ones,” he adds.

The situation in the neighbouring Madhya Pradesh is probably worse. Brawls over water are resulting in people eventually killing each other at many places in the state. Incidents of the killing of three people of the same family in Bhopal, two people in Indore, a person in Bilkhiriya village and a person in Devas dot the 2009 calendar. Water woes intensify This year the first incident of killing over water was reported from the Bakshibagh locality of Indore on March 31. A 16 year old girl, Poonam Yadav, was stabbed to death by one of her neighbours. On April 7, Ramchandra of Alot was shot dead by his neighbour. On May 9, a few people killed 60 year old Madholal of Dhakora village in Rajgarh district following a squabble at the village well. A similar incident was reported from the Naryavali village in Sagar district a day earlier where a few people attacked with an axe and injured one Pushpabai at a well.

This is besides the daily squabbles over water in the state capital Bhopal where water is being supplied only once in 48 hours. People have to unfailingly wake up very early in the morning to fill their tanks. Others choose to keep a vigil whole night lest they miss the chance.

Water is hard to find even at 600 feet at some places in MP. Scores of rivers and water bodies have dried up. Gauri Shankar Bisen, a minister in the MP government, accepts that the crisis in the state is real. “There is acute water crisis in the state. We have allocated sufficient funds for the supply of drinking water to all the districts. We are paying special attention to the districts where the situation is more serious such as in Shyopur and Neemach,” he informs TSI.

In Maharashtra, farmers are the worst hit because of the water scarcity. “I had 3,200 trees of pomegranate on my farm. Of them, just 600 are left now. I had to cut down most of them due to lack of water,” says Ranjeet Patil who owns 30 acres of land at chakur town, 13 km off Latur. It’s not that Patil did not try to get water. There are as many as 17 bore wells on his farm but there is no water. The first bore well was 3oo feet deep and the 17th one was dug at 625 feet.

Presently, about 36,65,000 hectare of land is under irrigation in Maharashtra. The figure was12,20,000 hectare in 1960. With no considerable change in the rainfall pattern during the last 50 years, farmers had to rely on the underground water to meet the increasing need. But that too is now out of sight. Ecological Expert Atul Deolgaokar says, “According to a report by ‘International Water Management Institute’, if the use of water for drinking and farming continues in same way, then 70 per cent of the groundwater would be used up by 2020.”

In a survey done in March by the ‘Maharashtra State Groundwater Survey and Development Department’, it was found that out of 47 towns in Konkan division, groundwater level in 11 towns has gone down by one metre. In Aurangabad division it has dipped by one to three metres at different places. And this is what has affected farmers like Patil.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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There is still a lot of ambiguity on how they market themselves

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Though value based that stand might be, NGOs are waking up to the fact that there has to be a judicious mix nevertheless. Says Arindam Paul, Director, Aurobindo Chaudhuri Memorial Great Indian Dream Foundation – GIDF – (a foundation supported by global giants like UNICEF, and funded by GAIL and National AIDS Control Organisation), “Even though we have considerable funding available, the fact is that the scope of work in improving disadvantaged classes is so huge, that no amount of funds are actually enough; one reason we have to keep up the fund sourcing effort regularly.”

If this is the situation, how is it that these new age Robin Hoods actually break through the clutter and ensure that people and authorities notice their efforts amidst growing number of NGOs in the country? In simple terms, how do they ensure brand recall, considering that advertising is not a cost-effective way for most non-profits to increase their fund raising or visibility? “Mass campaigning,” answers Rejitha, Joint Coordinator, Sakhi (a Kerala-based NGO that works for women empowerment). She believes that it’s the mass campaigns that have helped them to take their work to the public and authorities.

But there’re many BTL activities too that NGOs utilise for fund generation. Be it organising rallies and fairs, holding seminars or workshops, these marketers have always given such events an eminent position in their fund raising strategies. So far so good! But if industry experts are to be believed, then NGOs today have also started using new age marketing tools like social media as a much more effective way to increase their visibility. “Staffing for social media and developing a clear strategy can be hard, but it’s definitely more cost effective to implement,” agrees Sarah.

One can see the increased usage of celebrities when it comes to brand endorsements in the NGO fraternity. While Aishwarya Rai Bachchan can be seen campaigning for Smile Train (a charity that works worldwide for children with cleft lip), Sonam Kapoor and Vidya Balan too have stepped forward to raise funds for NGOs Khushi (an NGO working for upliftment of women and children) and Nanhi Kali (which propagates education for the girl child) respectively. GIDF even brought in the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Miss Universe 2005 Natalie Gledova for promoting fund drives. M. S. Dhoni, Amitabh Bachchan, John Abraham, Anil Kapoor… all happen to be endorsing a social cause. Raison d’être: a big proportion of the NGOs strongly believe that celebrities really can take the message to the masses. Henri Tiphagne, Director of People’s Watch (a South India-based NGO working for protection of human rights), says, “It makes the job a lot easier when celebrities represent you completely and correctly.” More so because the sad truth is that media is more likely to highlight the event if a celebrity is attending it.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Royal Enfield Classic

The legend is back: Royal Enfield made a lot of news in 2009 with the launch of the much-awaited Classic series. The single spring saddle seat and body coloured bumpers are the main attraction of this offering giving a classic biking experience of the pre-independence era to the rider. The bike, which comes in two variants – Classic 500 and Classic 350 currently, has around 3-6 weeks waiting on an average. While the Classic 500 has a twin-spark fuel injection engine, the 350 carries a carburetor engine. The design for this product has been crafted keeping in mind the looks of the cruisers that ruled the market in the 1950s, but it still has a timeless look and has a loyal set of consumers in the country. The Classic series has been accepted by the consumers with open arms and is expected to create another niche under the Royal Enfield’s umbrella in the long-run.

Pawan Chabra

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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