This is no ordinary train journey. This is a train where the journey itself is the destination. A train that will carry 350 passengers in the age group of 18 to 25 on an 18-day trip from Delhi to Kanyakumari, and teach them lessons on Entrepreneurship and Leadership along the way. This is the Tata Jagriti Yatra.

Flagged off on the 24th December, the educational tour is currently making its way through several locations, exploring innovative initiatives, interacting with role models and getting insights into social entrepreneurship. Be it the dabbawalas in Mumbai, the ‘model village’ of Kuthambakkam in Chennai or Anand in Gujarat, the youths will get a sneak peek at what it takes to run a successful enterprise. Madhavi Rajadhyaksha reports in Times of India on the purpose of the ‘yatra’:

The whole purpose is to get the youth to connect with the genius of India and the focus is on enterprise-led development. Today, enterpreneurship and enterprise are no longer a luxury, but a necessity and we hope to spark interest in the youth,” said Shashank Mani, an ex-IITian and one of the founders of the concept, adding that they hope to make this an annual feature.

The students will also enjoy an interesting itinerary that will give them the opportunity to pack maximum learning in their limited time.

Explaining that the format wasn’t a classroom session but a see-and-learn experience, another organiser Raj Krishnamurthy offered an insight into their itinerary. “There will be conferences inside the train and stopovers to meet role models such as scientist R A Mashelkar (who formerly headed the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Dr M S Swaminathan who is known as the `father of the green revolution in India’ and Ela Bhatt who founded SEWA,” he said.

The final 350 were selected from nearly 10,000 applicants. Let us hope that many of them will be enthused to create successful social enterprises of their own.

Read the complete story here.
Image Courtesy: Tata Jagriti Yatra 2008 website

World Challenge is a global competition aimed at selecting the best projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown innovation and enterprise at grass roots level and provide them a financial aid. It is organized by BBC World News and Newsweek. This year, there were two finalists from India who we feel deserve a mention for their efforts in helping different sections of the society.

One of the finalists was Keystone Foundation, which helps the Adivasi honey-collectors in southern India to get better value for their products. These tribals excel in the art of wild honey collection from bee colonies in the most dangerous sections of cliffs. However due to exploitation by commercial planters, they do not get the right price for their efforts, threatening their ancient way of life and livelihood.

Keystone Foundation has helped them with the processing and packaging of the honey, so as to fetch a better market value. It has also taught the Adivasi hunters to make candles and balms from beeswax, which was earlier thrown away. A range of products are sold in Keystone’s shops, the proceeds helping Adivasis of around 50 villages. Below is described the humane and sustainable way in which these hunters extract honey from the honeycombs on cliffs:

For generations the Adivasi people of Southern India have specialised in collecting honey from wild bee colonies on cliffs. The hunters are lowered by ropes towards the colonies, where they waft smoke to calm the bees before breaking off a chunk of comb. Even in times of hunger, the hunters are always careful to leave enough of the nest for the bee colonies to recover. “They have been able to come up with systems that respect the bees and the environment,” explains Keystone’s Matthew John. “There are certain areas where they do not touch the combs at all, because they feel they are holy cliffs. But for us they are gene pools that they are preserving.”

The other Indian finalist is an organization called She Hope Society, which helps rehabilitate and bring dignity to the disabled in the Kashmir Valley. With help from a New Zealand charity, Sami Wani set up a Centre offering physiotherapy, corrective surgery and low-cost prosthetic legs for all who need it. In its two years of existence, the Centre has already reached out to around 700 disabled people. Sami explains the need that drove him to undertake this initiative:

Two decades of conflict in Kashmir have left a dearth of basic services. The disabled, in particular, have precious little support. “We don’t have big donors and we don’t have any government help over here to rehabilitate disabled children”, explains 27-year-old physiotherapist Sami Wani. Social factors such as poverty and prejudice add to the problem.

She Hope also provides basic education and micro-loans to its patients, helping them stand on their feet in more ways than one.

These are just two of the several thousands of organizations working towards the improvement of conditions of some of the neglected and weaker sections of society, bringing about change in their own ways. Though they have not been selected as winners in this competition, we do hope that they will receive help and support from many other quarters and continue with their good work.

Read more about the competition and all 2008 finalists here.
Link Courtesy: Amita Chauhan from GiveIndia. Thanks!
Image Courtesy: World Challenge 08

Twenty-five year old Rehana has faced several hardships in her short life thus far. As a nineteen year old, she had to take up the mantle of the household, when her father, a salesman in a local cycle shop, fell seriously ill. The eldest of 4 unmarried sisters, she started stitching clothes for her neighbours to earn a living. Today, she runs a successful clothes boutique and a general store in her village Chandwak, near Jaunpur. Rehana is also the National Winner (North) in the recently concluded Citi Micro Entrepreneur Awards.

Rehana was aided in her progress by the NGO, Nazir Art Seva Samiti, which helped her in getting an initial loan and guidance for setting up a tailoring unit. While providing her with marketing opportunities to expand her reach, the NGO also helped her obtain a second seed capital when Rehana decided to set up a general store in her house. The support provided by the NGO and Rehana’s own determination has changed her life as well as improved lives of others around her.

Presently, Rehana has 5 employees, 3 at her tailoring unit and 2 at the store. She has borne educational expenses for some who have started their own enterprise. She also provides free training to needy women at her boutique and later on engages some of them in the work.

The work done by these NGOs in uplifting the lot of the underprivileged and affording them entrepreneurship opportunities is highly commendable. This is one of the several stories of successful micro entrepreneurs who have been helped by local NGOs to achieve social and economic empowerment. Click here to read the other inspiring tales of struggle and success.

Link Courtesy: Arvind Singh. Thanks a ton!
Image Courtesy: Citi Micro Entrepreneur Awards Brochure

A significant section of young students appear to be apprehensive of mathematics as a subject. They view it as their nemesis, and this in turn, prevents them from learning this beautiful subject during their school years. To dispense the notion that Mathematics is a difficult subject to comprehend, the teachers and students from different schools of Ludhiana district have come together to hold a first of its kind ‘Maths Mela’.

Anupam Bhagria writes in an article in Indian Express:

Exhibited models, charts and slogans related to mathematics not only created awareness among students but also conveyed the message that ‘mathematics is an interesting subject if taught in right way”. This two days maths mela was held at Bhartiya Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School Udham Singh Nagar.

The idea was the brainchild of Mr. Krishan Kumar, the Director of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Punjab. The event was organized under the supervision of Pradeep Kumar Kapoor who is the Science Supervisor of Ludhiana district.

You can read the complete article here, including about a maths-tambola which was played at the mela.

A few residents in a locality in Bangalore have created a safe haven for birds to nestle and feed. For over a period of 16 years, almost 30 households of 5th Cross, Pipeline on Magadi Road have been actively involved in feeding over 50 kilos of food grains to hundreds of birds daily. This has helped to create a ‘sanctuary’ in the heart of the city, where many species rendered rare in other urban areas, find a habitat. Subhash Chandra N S and Chethan Kumar write about this citizen initiative for the Deccan Herald News Service:

Not just a few but hundreds of various kinds of birds come to this citizen-created ‘sanctuary’. “There are parakeets, sparrows, pigeons, mynas and other birds which descend at a self-scheduled time, once in every mornings and evenings”, said C Umadevi, the lady who began this noble work. Over a fifty kilos of food grains goes to the chirping friends every month, a ritual in practice for the past 16 years.

Despite being a densely populated area full of traffic and people, the residents have taken care that the avian visitors are not disturbed and receive their daily due on time.

“We have restricted people from going up to the terrace when the birds are there,” says another lady. The practice has resulted in holding back sparrows, almost extinct in urban environment. “More than 20 are coming here now while the numbers were much more earlier” a resident informed.

The simple initiative of these residents has gone a long way in teaching habitat conservation and co-existence among species, besides the added benefit of nurturing fast disappearing species in the urban landscape. While we applaud their efforts, we urge all our readers to adopt this easy and do-able practice in your daily lives. The pleasant chirping of the sparrow sitting on your ledge will be worth it.

Read the complete article here.
Image courtesy: Pigeons by Pratosh Dwivedi at imgoftheday.blogspot.com

Virendra Kumar Sinha is a resident of Belbanwa colony, Motihari town in the East Champaran district of Bihar. He possessed a generator set which started inviting many complaints from his neighbours and other people of the colony. After being told that the set is causing too much sound and air pollution, Virendra decided to do something about it himself. The result: A silencer which not only reduces the sound levels but also decreases the level of carbon emission!

An article in The Mint reports about Virendra and his innovation:

Virendra Kumar Sinha, a resident of Belbanwa colony of the Motihari town, has invented the silencer-cum-exhaust filter for the generator set after a hard work of six years. 

Sinha said his product was put under test in three stages in the laboratory of Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Ranchi, where it was proved that the product was capable of reducing about 60 to 70 per cent of the harmful carbon-dioxide and carbon-monoxide gases emitted by generators.

The invention has now been patented by Virendra.

Considering that a huge number of generator sets are being used in India, and that this invention helps in bringing down carbon emissions signficantly, it is a great boost to reducing the levels of pollution of our country. We look forward to this invention being rapidly delivered to all generator sets and at minimal costs, thereby helping India’s environment in the long run!

Read the complete article here.

Image courtesy: www.merrylandmoonwalks.com

Perhaps not many Indians know him, but he is widely credited to have been the inspiration for Nobel laureate Al Gore’s interest in climate change. Now, renowned environmental scientist Dr. Ashok Khosla has plans for creating 100 million jobs by 2018 in rural India. As founder and chairman of Development Alternatives, a New Delhi-based non-profit involved in the creation of micro-factories that would make basic facilities available to the village-dwellers, and enable them to generate employment. The initiative has already created 3 million jobs over the past 15 years.

Sunita Sohrabji writes in indiawest.com about the ideas and ideals of the man who is the brain behind the successful $120 million venture:

“Poor people are seeing more products, but have little access to them. The poor do not have purchasing power,” said Khosla, the 2002 winner of the United Nations’ Sasakawa Environmental Prize, and the Schwab Foundation’s outstanding social entrepreneur award in 2004. Khosla, an alumnus of Cambridge and Harvard, was recently made an Officer of the British Empire.

Development Alternatives uses a market based approach to further its cause, rather than relying on charity. Wondering how it works?

In a typical model, the village will form a cooperative to purchase the equipment needed for the project, and determine wages for the workers, typically slightly above the area’s minimum wage. Development Alternatives’ social enterprise arm, Technology and Action for Rural Advancement, markets the products created by the villagers.

The organization’s compressed earth block technology is being used throughout the country to ease the shortage in housing for rural dwellers. More than half a million homes have been built using the technology, in which villagers mix raw earth with a stabilizer to create a brick, with a mechanized or manual soil press.

The organization believes in innovating to create new opportunities for the poor, and lays particular emphasis on social as well as environmental sustainability.

TARA and Development Alternatives have also created a new-generation weaving machine that allows its user to be more productive and create higher-quality handlooms.

The organization has also created a paper-making machine, which recycles wastepaper and cotton rags into high-end paper goods, or standard paper for use in classrooms.

This is not all. Besides helping the villagers in improving their agricultural output, Development Alternatives has now started a new project – franchised village cyber kiosk. Called Tara-kendras, these centres can impart vocational training, career counseling, agricultural and medical advice, a market place for buying and selling as well as accessing government services.

“This is one of the most revolutionary things we’ve developed,” said Khosla. “It brings the village into the global economy and the global economy into the village.”

“It’s extreme value at very low cost and one of the major solutions to solving the problem of poverty in India,” he asserted. Three hundred Tara-kendras are currently in operation throughout the country, and the enterprise will become profitable when 1,000 kiosks are established.

The efforts of Development Alternatives and Dr. Khosla are laudable. He has several awards and achievements to his name, not the least of which is that as a Harvard teaching fellow, he was responsible for designing and teaching the very first class on the environment! Yes, the same that Gore took during his first year there!! In spite of all his success, Dr. Khosla’s heart lies with India’s rural poor, and his endeavors speak highly of his commitment.

Development Alternatives and TARA have taken some innovative steps in promoting rural employment. Read more on these in the article here.

Image courtesy: indiawest.com

Act Now For The Better India.

There is a deep chasm between the street children and children from affluent families. This is obvious to all. What might not be as obvious is the similarities between the two groups. This was brought out in an interactive session between the children of Ummeed – an ashram for homeless and street children near Gurgaon, and the students of Shriram School – an elite institution also in Gurgaon.

While the rich students were shocked and appalled at the stories of the street children, who came from extremely poor families, and had undergone several atrocities including sexual abuse, they were better able to understand the lot of these unfortunate children who they pass regularly on the streets outside their homes. At the same time, lives of the rich are not always enviable, and 5 days of being together brought out stories from the children from Shriram School as well that melted the hearts of the inmates of Ummeed Ashram. Harsh Mander writes more in The Hindu about this initiative and the noble thought behind it:

The purpose was to try to open a dialogue between children who were of exceptional affluence, and those who were the most deprived in the city, children who survive without adult protection on the mean and rough streets of the metropolis. We hoped that the conversations would lead to mutual understanding, empathy and maybe even — if nurtured over time — to friendships across vast chasms of class.

It was a humbling experience for the affluent kids to know that they could have very well been in the shoes of these poor children, and it was just a thin line of fate that separated the two.

A child was talking of how he lost his home and ended up on the streets. He was travelling with his parents in a crowded train when he was very young. He got off the compartment at a station, and the train left with his mother and father. He never found his parents again. For most of his childhood years, he grew up on railway platforms with other homeless children as his only family, earning his food through selling water bottles or picking rags, battling sexual abuse and police batons, seeking solace in drugs and the comradeship of his street friends.

A teenaged girl his age was listening intently to him. Her parents were wealthy, and she studied in one of the most privileged schools in Delhi’s capital region. She recounted, as the boy spoke of his life, that she also got lost once and was separated from her parents. She recalled her enormous fear and helplessness at that time.

However, soon similarities began to emerge, camaraderie was established, and friendships began to forge. And in the entire process, there were many lessons to be learnt all round.

The initial dialogues in small mixed groups of children were about their joys and hates; and their dreams. It took only a morning together for many of them to discover how much was common between them: they all loved cricket, films, songs, and were quickly debating their favourite cricketers and actors. They also discovered profound differences, but on unexpected lines. The Shriram children often included “studies” among their pet hates, but for the children of Ummeed, education was almost unanimously chosen as their most precious acquisition. Many boys were unlettered when they joined Ummeed a year ago, and they have studied hard and surprised most people by even qualifying recently for entry into a formal middle school. Reflecting together on this difference, the Shriram children recognised that they took education for granted as it came to them so easily, whereas for the Ummeed teenagers, it was invaluable precisely because they were always barred from it.

Sharing experiences, joys, sorrows, chores and moments of life brought the children of an elite school and a home for street children together. The hope is that the lessons learnt and the impressions made over five days carry on for the rest of their lives, benefiting both sections of the society in untold ways. We do wish for all schools to undertake such initiatives and bring their students into contact with the other half that is present every where, and yet invisible, so that they can learn to empathize at a young and receptive age.

Read more about the results of the interaction in the article here.
Image Courtesy: The Hindu

Act Now For The Better India.

There is a new trend in website hosting. It’s called “Green Hosting”. The essential premise is that some of the money paid by the website developer will be used by the website hosting company to host the website on a carbon-neutral server, viz one whose carbon emissions are offset by the web-hosting company’s green activities like planting trees or purchase of carbon credits. While this concept is widely in use by some of the American web-hosting companies, it is starting off in a small way in India. It needs to create a lot more awareness to get the requisite impetus to make a large difference.

Aditi Utpat of Times of India explores this phenomenon in its infancy and talks about the steps being taken to promote it. Although she has found only one website as of now, the Pune Gourmet Club Association, who has adopted the green hosting feature for its new website, we all hope this is just the beginning of a whole new internet revolution.

While an extensive search by TOI threw up only one website that was hosted on a green server, Znet India, one of the country’s largest web-hosting companies, has confirmed that they have up to 100 clients who have opted for green hosting.

Munesh Singh, CEO of the Noida-based company, said, “Our contributions have helped towards the purchase of one hectare of land in Noida. Our staff are taking responsibility to grow trees on this land. This is a long-term project and will take twenty years before the forest becomes well-grown. The whole project is expected to sequester some 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide while making a real contribution to wildlife conservation.”

And since reducing (or neutralising) one’s carbon footprint attracts benefits from the government, green hosting is actually more cost efficient in the long run than conventional hosting.

Be it to reduce costs, gain publicity or make a difference, the efforts of web hosting companies to introduce and popularize the concept of green hosting will have long term benefits. It is good to know that corporate India is taking note, and the idea is getting the support of organizations like NASSCOM and the government.

Directi, a multinational conglomerate, told TOI that the Green IT’ agenda is gaining momentum in India and has already attracted private and government funding.

Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi, added that while the company does not undertake green hosting initiatives of its own, green hosting is sure to become “increasingly popular” among the consumers, as “concern for the environment increases”.

So while we have a long way to go before we can boast of a ‘green internet’, it is still a great sign that web-hosting companies and consumers in India are waking up to the fact that there is a way to do things in a more environmentally friendly manner, and are playing an active role in propagating it. The Better India supports them in their efforts, and is also now attempting to move to a green server on its part.

Do read the complete article here.
Link Courtesy: Munesh Singh, CEO and Founder – ZNet India
Image Courtesy: www.metaefficient.com