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NPCIL environmentalist A. I. Siddiqui passes away

PTI — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Mumbai: The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd’s environmentalist and editor of prestigious journal Nu-Power A. I. Siddiqui passed away after a brief illness, family sources said on Sunday. He was 54.

Siddiqui, who died at a city hospital on Saturday, was suffering from lung infection and was undergoing treatment for a month. He was on ventilator for the last three weeks, sources said.

Siddiqui is survived by wife Tahseen Fatima, two daughters and a son.

“Siddiqui, an engineer and a technologist, was steering the NPCIL’s Environment Stewardship programme. He was also a crusader in transforming the public perception of nuclear power as an environmental friendly one,” S. Thakur, NPCIL’s executive director (Corporate Planning), said.

Also a spokesperson for the NPCIL, Siddiqui showed how nuclear power plants attracted even the most endangered and migratory birds to their exclusion zone of 1.6 kilometre declaring them safe in a most natural way through his photography skill, he said.

Siddiqui, DGM Corporate communication, hailed from Bulandshahr District in Uttar Pradesh. He began his career from Narora Atomic Power in the Radiography section in 1976.

The top management of NPCIL brought him to the headquarters in Mumbai in 1990 after the Narora project was over where he was made in-charge of the public awareness programme, executive director of Koondankulam Project K. K. Kuldip told PTI.

In 1993, he took over the two leaflet Nu-Power house magazine of NPCIL and transformed it to a sophisticated technological corporate magazine of international standard with his skills of communication, he said.

Even during his illness, he completed his editorial for the latest Nu-Power journal from the hospital bed where he has compared the global financial crisis and environmental degradation, Kuldip said adding three months back he climbed the Great Wall of China and got a certificate from Chinese authorities.

Siddiqui took initiative to enter into a joint venture with Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) to have an environmental stewardship programme to monitor the fauna and flora in the exclusion zones of all the atomic power stations in the country, BNHS’s director Asad Rahmani said.

“We have recently signed an MoU with NPCIL for continuation of the stewardship programme and I hope the NPCIL will continue the programme to keep the spirit of the initiator for the purpose of habitat regeneration,” Rahmani said.

NPCIL had yesterday signed an MoU with the Surat Nature club to start an ‘Open Butterfly Park´ at the Kakrapar Atomic Power Plant site in Gujarat and will be named after Siddiqui as it was one of his dreams, Thakur said.

Virendra (Sam) Singh | Turning young rural girls into assertive, articulate women

Raju Narisetti — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:07:00 GMT

Bichola (Uttar Pradesh): To get a sense of how far Virendra (Sam) Singh has come and how far he still has to go, it might help to begin this story with his family tree.

Names spanning eight generations of these former zamindars (feudal landlords) are painted on a wall inside a family compound in this village, which is surrounded by acres and acres of sugar cane fields and is 3.5km away from the nearest main road.

Names, that is, if you happened to be a lucky male descendant. For, some five generations of Singh’s thakur family tree on the wall, starting with the very first known ancestor, simply list an anonymous Shrimati (Mrs.) when it comes to the women in the family.

Roti-driven model: Virendra (Sam) Singh stands among students during lunchtime at Pardada Pardadi School in Anoopshahr, UP .(Harikrishna Katragadda)

“The pundits didn’t bother to record the women’s names,” says the 68-year-old Singh, whose grandfather had put up the genealogy on the wall, and whose daughter Renu’s insistence led to names of some women being added, starting with Singh’s generation.

Welcome to a little-noticed corner of India, in the Bulandshahr district of western Uttar Pradesh, where women come last, if at all, despite their chief minister being a woman. Here, just a three-hour drive from New Delhi, female literacy is still only around 41%, well below India’s low 54.16% national average.

Mothers around here, when asked about how many children they have, still count only their boys. Macho, out-of-school male teenagers laze around on sagging cots in the sun while their mothers and sisters, head and face typically covered by a traditional ghunghat (veil), collect grass for the cattle that produce just enough milk for families to supplement their largely tiny, leased, albeit fertile, farmland.

And, then, on Malakpur road, just outside Anoopshahr town, there is the quaintly named Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPES), Singh’s work-in-progress labour of love, which has hit upon a creative way to try and not just educate the girls of these villages, but, in doing so, turn them into a generation of women that won’t silently acquiesce to being nameless entries in countless family trees.

“No amount of pity was going to solve the problem,” says Singh. “It is a business problem that only business can solve.”

And Singh has made it his business to do so. On the face of it, PPES has a rather simple, monetary pitch to the parents of these girls.

Send your daughter to PPES’ free, all-girls vocational school every day, where, in addition to academics, she is also taught skills such as sewing and embroidery. She will get three meals a day, textbooks and school uniforms, and, depending on the distance from the school, a bicycle. And the real carrot: for every day she attends school, PPES will deposit Rs10 in a bank account that is opened in the girl’s name. The promise: Rs40,000 in each girl’s name by the time she finishes Class XII and is eligible to receive the money.

If this amount doesn’t seem significant, here is a sobering fact. Singh points out that the average income in many of the district’s 196 villages is just about Rs600 a month for many households that he is targeting.

“We impart knowledge, but we are a roti-driven model,” says Singh. “We want to develop socially and financially independent, future mothers.”

Series so far

All of 2007, in this 60th year of India’s independence, Mint’s 60 in 60 series promised to introduce readers to 60 Indians who, in myriad quiet ways, are contributing to making their country, and in some cases the world, a better place.

It is perhaps only fitting that we began the series with an educator, journalism professor Thomas Oommen in Kottayam, Kerala, and we are concluding it with Singh, another educator, who turns 68 today.

Many of the educators profiled in the series had responded, often a long time back, to what are now mounting concerns that decades—indeed the same 60 independent years—of government efforts have only largely created an education system with small, celebrated pockets of excellence, such as campuses of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management. Meanwhile, it has also contributed to a largely failed, government-run primary and secondary education, especially in India’s villages.

Girls play softball in front of the school during a break. (Harikrishna Katragadda)

Indeed, just last week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that the current 11th Plan, through 2012, will be India’s “Educational Plan.”

But, people, such as Singh, and others we have profiled in the series, aren’t counting on a government-led education miracle any time soon.

“Why are we not the doers?” asks Singh. “Why are we passing the buck to an inefficient government? We need to put our damn feet, mouth and everything else there.”

In Singh’s case, it has also meant putting $850,000 of his own money, worth about Rs3.3 crore these days, into PPES, mostly retirement savings from 37 years of working with E.I du Pont de Nemours and Co., the US-based chemicals giant.

Overseas origins

In some ways, Singh was an unlikely person to take on the role of an educator, let alone educating women. The pampered son of a wealthy, feudal clan that owned hundreds of acres of sugar cane fields, Singh was a talented field hockey player and “a lousy student,” as he puts it. But, the teenager woke up when his father, brought home a copy of the Hindustan Times that showed Olympian Kunwar Digvijay Singh “Babu,” a hockey role model for Singh and past his prime, standing in line with everyone else to buy a ticket for a game at a Lucknow stadium, which had been named after Babu.

That incident would be a turning point in some ways as Singh then sailed through a textile engineering course at Panjab University before heading to Manchester for higher studies.

But, two weeks of perceived racism in the UK was enough for Singh to pack up his bags and head to Lowell, Massachusetts, the other big centre for textile engineering at that time. Here Virendra would become Sam, courtesy Harold Pope, a professor who just couldn’t pronounce the Indian student’s first name. Sam stuck, as most friends and associates now refer to him as Sam Singh.

Eleven job offers would follow after graduation from Lowell and Singh, on the advice of Prof. Pope, who suggested the young man avoid the logical textile belt of America’s deep South (read: racist, back then), ended up at a DuPont plant in Seaford, Delaware. There, Singh, being the only non-white R&D engineer in the facility, found his education and title meant that he was allowed to sit with his white colleagues in a racially segregated cafeteria. That drove home unexpected lessons about discrimination, and the value of education, for a young man who was only used to being at the top of the food chain in Bulandshahr.

Over nearly four decades at DuPont, Singh would rise through the ranks, eventually becoming CEO of South Asia, and moving to India in 1991 to oversee DuPont operations.

“Dad never had the intention of staying here (in the US) forever,” says daughter Renu Singh, a lawyer in Washington, DC who recalls the many fights she had with him on how women were treated in her extended family and in Bichola. “When I was small, he used to talk about having a hockey team or sponsoring one in Bulandshahr,” she says. “Somewhere along the way, he started thinking about a school just for girls. I don’t know if he saw the light that women there needed help.”

Singh, for his part, simply says: “When you leave your country, you become more conscious of who you are,” recalling how ashamed he felt on seeing yet another newspaper photograph, this time on the front page of The New York Times, of Indian children rummaging for food in a garbage dump.

Frequent discussions with a marketing colleague and friend, Gene Kreuzberger, in the late 1980s at DuPont’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters, would often revolve around the fantasy of how, if their CEO, Chad Holliday Jr., came with a $100 million budget and said go “solve India’s poverty” because it would create millions of future customers for DuPont, how Singh might go about it.

One day, Singh remembers vividly, an excited Kreuzberger came to him saying how a model actually exists in India itself. “Some fellow named Dalai Lama was already doing it in India,” Singh remembers Kreuzberger saying. “Gene had no damn idea who the Dalai Lama was.”

And, when Singh explained who the man was, he recalls Kreuzberger pausing for a few seconds and then saying: “Sam, our name may not be Dalai Lama, but we know much more about marketing.”

Singh promptly headed to Dharamsala where he spent nine days watching how the Dalai Lama was combining education (Tibetan Buddhist values) with economics (the making of Tibetan textiles and handicrafts). By the end of the trip, Singh would pay for two carpets and pick up, for free, the business case for what would become PPES.

Back home

In April 2000, with both daughters out of US colleges and in jobs, Singh formally retired from DuPont and headed home.

Battling bureaucracy—it could take two years to simply get a license to start a school—and bias—why would a rich, old man want to spend money on our daughters?, Singh decided to gather up 100 acres of family sugar cane fields that would be gradually transferred into a trust for the PPES campus. Today, PPES is a large, plain building with several class-rooms, workshops, small offices, a computer lab, and some apartments for teachers, all built around a large open assembly area where the children also eat their daily meals.

Singh also discovered very early on that it wouldn’t be enough to set up a free school and expect grateful parents to send their kids. He realized that even though most of the children were often not in school, they are all in school as far as the local government school records were concerned. The government pays each child Rs300 a year for attending school so, often, teachers were only too happy to register the kids with a tacit understanding that, when it came to paying out the Rs300, the teachers would simply keep 50% of it.

Another obstacle, Singh realized, was the government’s free mid-day meal programme. Again, children would often show up at lunchtime and many schools would overlook it because either they took pity on the hungry kids or because the more kids in the programme, the more the budget for such meals and the ability of the village headman, who was in charge of the funds, to pocket some of it.

Singh’s response was to come up with the pay-for-attendance model and three free meals a day. And, rather than continue to simply wait forever to get all the required permissions, Singh struck a deal with a local principal who agreed to keep the kids on his rolls (he got to keep their Rs300 dole) just in case the school had to stop functioning over any bureaucratic snafus.

To get teachers, Singh also reached deep into southern India, hiring a group of six teachers, primarily skilled in vocational skills, from a Christian mission in Tamil Nadu.

And, then, Singh went from village to village, sometimes invoking his family heritage, at other times the money the children would earn, to cajole parents into sending their daughters. PPES started in November 2000 with 45 girls from what Singh estimates is a pool of 40,000 eligible girls.

Like many social entrepreneurs, Singh is starting to worry about what happens to PPES after him

The learning curve

Despite what seemed like meticulous planning from a distance, the early years were rough for Singh. While the money attracted parents, it also became the cause of significant attrition, as high as 85%, as some parents started asking for the money by taking their child out of school. Other parents simply sold their daughter’s bicycle and books. Absenteeism was also a chronic issue as the girls were often roped into helping raise other siblings or deal with any family crisis.

Singh, who would hold a Sunday morning conference call with his two daughters in Washington, remembers those days all too well. “I was a brave guy when I talked to my daughters,” he says. “Inside, I was scared. I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating like hell.”

But, the biggest hurdle was something that Singh says he just hadn’t planned for.

Asked why all the skills that were being taught at the school weren’t enough to send her daughter to PPES, one mother, showing the utmost respect, put it bluntly in Hindi: “Bauji, khodegi tho ghaas hi,” as in, after all, my daughter will only end up cutting grass for the cattle.

Only then did it dawn on Singh that it just wasn’t going to be enough to equip the girls with education and vocational skills, and expect them to somehow find livelihoods that would be different from what their mothers and grandmothers did in an area where there just weren’t such options. While moving out of the village in search of a job was an option, Singh faced families that had a long tradition of only sending their girls off in marriage. “In solving a problem, I realized I was creating one,” says Singh. “The girls themselves didn’t want to leave their village, and I also didn’t want to add to the ghettos we have created in places like Noida,” referring to the suburban Delhi neighborhood that is home to a lot of migrant workforce from UP.

PPES was always envisioned to be run by a marketing head, whose job it is to find avenues to sell the bedspreads, pillow covers, quilts and bags that the girls are taught to stitch. While that was to be a way to generate some income for the school, Singh realized that to succeed, he would actually need to create local jobs. “You gradually get pregnant,” says Singh.

Shifting gears

Singh began by tweaking his model.

No longer can the girls get their money simply by dropping out. They would need to graduate to be eligible for the funds, putting pressure on the parents to leave them in school. The school doesn’t take married students either, an attempt to try and reduce the incidence of early marriages. And, when the girls do graduate by finishing Class X, the money is only theirs when they turn 21 or if they turn 18 and then get married.

Girls who come without wearing the uniform or show up very late, for instance, can be asked to go back home. And, those absent without prior approval or skip school beyond the annual paid (12) and unpaid (12) holidays that the school sanctions, lose Rs20 a day.

Children travelling more than 7km to get to PPES are now picked up and dropped off by two school buses, all aimed at helping reduce absenteeism.

To try and break down caste and communal barriers, as well as to teach them household skills, Singh insisted that PPES would have no cleaners or servants. Each day, 20 girls chosen from across various classes, take turns to cook and feed the entire school, including the teachers, and then wash the utensils and clean the school, including its toilets. When it is their turn, which comes about once in 20 days for every student, the 20 girls are exempt from attending classes.

In 2006, PPES graduated its first 14 students and there are 17 girls set to take Class X exams in 2008. PPES now has 730 girls on its rolls from 43 villages, and drop-out rates have fallen dramatically to about 11%, notes Singh.

Six of the school’s graduates now work at the school, drawing monthly salaries of Rs2,000, even as they are studying, via distance education, for their next levels.

It is clear that these PPES girls have turned into assertive—and articulate—young women, such as Preeti Chauhan, who now handles the school’s accounts, including the bank accounts of the girls. Or Kavita Kumari, who works with the school’s marketing office in Meerut, which may not be too far from her village Dugrauth but is far removed from how life could have been. It wasn’t that far back, before Singh intervened, that Kavita’s mother, who limps from polio, and her father, who had been in an accident and was temporarily disabled, were facing demands from a local landlord, from whom they had borrowed Rs40,000 at 300% annual interest rates, to literally hand over a teenaged Kavita to him.

Then there is Asha Pal, who won a coveted 60-day annual trip to US schools and homes that goes to the best performing student of PPES’ senior class. Having only seen planes in the sky that seemed about the size of her outstretched hands, she simply refused to believe, even when she was sitting in one, that it could ever soar.

Students at their sewing machines. (Harikrishna Katragadda)

A vocational teacher at the school now and a clear ringleader of PPES graduates, she is a mix of steely determination and shy idealism, having discovered that others do seem to want to follow her lead. Asha called off her engagement, telling her parents she wouldn’t want to marry until she is older and done with her education. And, not too secretly, she hopes she might yet be able to take advantage of her five-year US visa, having seen how men and women seem to share equal tasks there—be it at home or in school. “They don’t treat women differently in America,” she says.

S. Shanti, one of the teachers from Tamil Nadu, who heads skills training at PPES, proudly notes that it is because of Asha that her village, Karanpur, now sends 63 girls to the school.

While turning student leaders into the next generation of teachers is precisely what Singh had hoped would happen, PPES still needs to figure out how to help the growing number of school graduates.

The school is trying hard to brand and market its bed-spreads, quilts, curtains and pillow cases, with hopes of finding customers who would place regular orders for ethnic exports from Bulandshahr. It has opened a 2,100 sq. ft Pardada Pardadi boutique in the MGF Plaza Mall in Gurgaon, the sprawling suburb of Delhi, as well as sales outlets in Meerut and Bhopal, and started an online shopping link at its website (www.education4change.org).

The goal is to generate enough orders so that the school becomes a production centre where graduates can also end up working for a salary, in addition to helping fund future generations of PPES students through any profit.

Apart from all of Singh’s personal investments in the school so far, the push to create jobs for the girls means significant new investments, in stitching and other textiles-related machines, marketing and retail space. The rent for the Gurgaon shop alone runs to Rs210,000 a month. And, if steady orders do come, PPES will also need to invest in secure power back-up in a region where there is often only about eight hours of electricity at best, often supplied sporadically or only overnight. The school’s current operating expenses average around Rs470,000 a month and it typically generates revenues of about Rs200,000 each month.

Having ploughed in a lot more than the $500,000 he had originally set aside as his upper limit, Singh has tried to raise money, mostly through word-of-mouth and a network of friends from his corporate days. Still, his unique model of wanting to do everything internally, especially getting the children to cook meals or clean toilets, doesn’t always sit well with goals of potential backers who just want to fund education.

Sam is “a very genuine man and his heart and soul is in there,” says Badri Agarwal, president of Satya Bharti Foundation, the philanthropy arm of conglomerate Bharti Enterprises, whose flagship company is Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s largest mobile phone company by customers. “But, I keep telling him his sales and marketing model is not right. He needs tie-ups with others.”

The Bharti Foundation, which aims to set up 1,000 schools, has, however, asked Singh to set up and run two primary schools, which he has promptly started, including one that is temporarily in the same Bichola compound as his family tree.

Students doing the dishes. (Harikrishna Katragadda)

Others, such as the Sehgal Foundation and the US Embassy in Delhi’s Program Development Office, have also provided funding and computers. UTI Bank (now Axis Bank) recently agreed to spend up to Rs14 lakh over three years and some 50 individuals, from a UK entrepreneur to a Mumbai public relations executive, are sponsoring the annual education of 71 girls, at Rs17,000 per year.

Singh notes that there are 150 primary schools spread across the 196 villages in Anoopshahr tehsil, or adminstration subdivision, alone. “Give me 75% of whatever you are spending on primary education,” he says of what he would like from the state government. “And, when they are done studying there, we will not only guarantee the children 6th grade admission in PPES, we will bus them.”

This way, India’s education ministry can actually become the education audit ministry because, audits “are a good thing,” says Singh. “And, if I am succeeding, then give me the neighbouring tehsil’s schools.”

Bharti’s Agarwal agrees with Singh’s suggestion. “Some 99% of schools will have to be set up by ourselves (the Foundation) as there are not many people like him,” he says. “We need to expand his area of influence.”

Like many social entrepreneurs, Singh is starting to worry about what happens to PPES after him, noting that “730 girls is not even a drop.”

Singh hopes that perhaps one or both of his daughters would want to manage the trust after him. Back on the PPES campus, each graduate of the school is asked to leave behind what should stand tall for future generations of girl students: each of them gets to plant a tree and, in front of each tree, is a plaque that simply shows her full name.

Then, perhaps, it won’t matter so much if some of the Pardada Pardadigraduates are still denied equal billing in their family trees.

Sixty in Sixty was a special series that we ran this year, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. Starting with Mint’s 1 February debut issue, we introduced you to 60 Indians—both here and abroad—who were not rich or famous. These were people making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We conclude the series this morning with our 60th profile. We thank you for all the letters you wrote on the series and the many names that you recommended. Mint will continue to write about such individuals in other parts of the paper. Your feedback is welcome at feedback@livemint.com.

Nurul Islam | In West Bengal, one man’s on a mission to educate Muslim kids

Rajdeep Datta Roy — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:02:00 GMT

Khalatpur, West Bengal: Saima Khatoon’s father died when she was a year old. Her mother washed utensils to support young Saima and her brother.

“I want to join the state civil service,” says Saima, now 17, and studying humanities in her pre-university course. Her mother and brother still live in a remote village in North 24 Parganas.

Meanwhile, Kashmira Khatoon, another student from Joynagar in South 24 Parganas, who topped the class X examination among girls, says she wants “to become a doctor”.

Saima and Kashmira, who are not related to each other, are among 1,836 Muslim girls and boys who stay and study at a network of residential schools run by the Al Ameen Mission in five districts across West Bengal. This year, 115 of the mission’s students made it into engineering colleges and 69 went on to study medicine. A couple of thousand more students attend tutorial classes and the day schools run by the mission. These are open to students of all religions.

“I was inspired by the Ramkrishna Mission, whose institute of culture I used to frequent,” says Nurul Islam, the general secretary of the mission, who is based at the organization’s first and biggest establishment in Khalatpur, some 75km from Kolkata.

“I was very impressed by the selfless service of the Ramakrishna Mission monks. Since our religion doesn’t have the system of celibate monks, we are trying to put together husband-wife teams who work and stay on campus.”

Showing the way: Nurul Islam with students of the Al Ameen Mission campus at Khalatpur, Howrah. (Indranil Bhoumik/Mint)

Though the Al Ameen Mission itself came into existence in 1987, following the renaming of the Islamic Institute of Culture, which Islam founded in 1984, his philanthropic streak had shown itself much earlier.

In 1976, while still studying in class X in his village, Islam set up the Khalatpur Junior High madrasa, the Arabic word for any school, though it has become more synonymous with religious schools in recent years. Even today, in a corner of the sprawling 70 bigha (about 23 acres) compound, stands the pale-green madrasa. A little beyond it is Islam’s greatest achievement—a school and hostel for about 300 girls. The residential school caters to students from class V to class XII.

But soon after he set up the madrasa, he says he realized that the community sorely needed an institution of mainstream learning.

“Our youngsters stay away from studies because their parents are not educated and send them into manual labour,” says Islam, who is also a political science teacher. “Muslims who stayed back in 1947 have been badly off and wrongly believe that more children would mean more hands to labour and bring in money to the family, but the biggest handicap is that they don’t know how to dream.”

It was to overcome these hurdles and to give them what he calls a mainstream education that Islam established Al Ameen Mission in 1986. “Al Ameen means The Truthful and Trustworthy and is associated with the Prophet,” explains Islam. “I felt that if we could come out of the traditional madrasa system, there could be a chance of keeping these kids in school.”

Toofan Ali from Murshidabad is one of the early Al Ameen success stories. The son of a Murshidabad criminal, he is now a Union government employee. Around 20 others from Ali’s village, which had no access to higher education, have now joined the mission.

The hostel for Islamic Institute of Culture was set up in 1986 in the madrasa itself, its operations literally funded by collecting one fistful of rice from every home in Khalatpur.

“I would then sell the rice at the local haat (market) and the money would be used in running the hostel,” recalls Islam.

Then, Islam and his friends went to local businessmen asking for zakat (alms)—typically 2.5% of yearly income—that traditionally could have gone to a madrasa to set up a secular school. Some 20 years later, the mission is still mostly run through these zakat donations.

“Muslims throughout the country contribute to the mission, which has about 25% seats reserved for poor, destitute and orphans,” says Islam. “Apart from this, there are many individuals who have come forward whole-heartedly to help the Al Ameen Mission.”

One-third of the students pay half their fees. Admission to the schools run by the mission is purely on the basis of merit. “No student with an impeccable academic record is turned away if he/she can’t afford to pay the fees,” says Islam.

Just as Islam is recounting instances of local merchants donating sand, cement, stone chips to fund the mission, one of his staff members runs up to announce jubilantly that a local merchant has agreed to supply wood for a fresh set of doors and windows.

“See, that’s how we manage,” says Islam.

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians —both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

D. Ashis | Keeping more hearts beating in City of Joy

Rajdeep Datta Roy — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:03:00 GMT

On an autumn afternoon, a motley group of people file into the courtyard of a decrepit old house in Hatkhola, a neighbourhood in the city’s deep north.

They were hoping for a heart.

In one corner of the courtyard in a small cubbyhole, D. Ashis holds the key. He is the man behind Medical Bank, a unique experiment in community medicine that delivers pacemakers and medicines with equal aplomb to those who can barely afford it.

“Most of them are (here) to collect free medicines, though some are also looking for a heart,” says Ashis, eyes twinkling. “D stands for Datta, my surname, but I have followed the college roll-call system of surname first,” says the man, who goes about by his first name. And that’s not his only break with tradition.

Ashis, born into a family of businessmen, had quite a pampered childhood and cocooned existence. The Medical Bank was not really on the road map, until he chanced upon a slum.

“I was appalled to see people throwing away unused medicines, while in the slums people died because they couldn’t afford medicines,” says Ashis, who was all of 17 when he first noticed life in a slum in North Kolkata.

Cure for the poor: A weekly Medical Bank camp near Bagbazar Yuba Academy in North Kolkata.

To bridge the gap, Ashis and a few of his friends embarked on a drive to collect unused pills and potions from houses in their neighbourhood. That initiative, in 1980, marked the beginning of Medical Bank.

Today, 27 years on, Medical Bank not only takes medicines to those who cannot afford them, but has also extended the model to spectacles and pacemakers, which it collects from those who don’t need them anymore.

“We also have an arrangement with eminent doctors, hospitals and clinics by which patients referred by us get treated either free of cost or at a discounted rate,” says Ashis.

As part of the bank’s pacemaker project, 300 second-hand pacemakers have been implanted in hearts, which would otherwise have stopped beating.

“While a new pacemaker costs Rs30,000-1,00,000 in the market, we have them taken out of bodies lying in hospitals or crematoriums, refitted and sterilized before they are listed in our register,” says Ashis.

The Medical Bank maintains a database of patients who need a pacemaker, but are not in a position to buy one. “When their requirements match the specifications (make, model, weight) of the machines we have, they are handed over to them,” says Ashis.

Before they are handed over, the pacemakers have to be refitted and sterilized. Refitting means replacing the lead wire of a pacemaker, which is cut before taking it out and costs Rs10,000-12,000. Sterilization costs about Rs500.

“Those who can bear this cost do so, otherwise we step in to the extent help is required,” says Ashis. “We do not receive any aid from the government or any organization. Public donations have kept us going, from ambulances to medical equipment, all have been donated.”

Apart from such donations, Medical Bank also receives funds from local legislators though not on any sustained basis. “None of us draws any salary for working in Medical Bank and we’re truly a voluntary organization,” he notes.

Ashis, however, rues the fact that large pharmaceutical and medical appliance companies hardly make any concessions, let alone provide pacemakers free of cost. The supply line of pacemakers is kept open thanks to Medical Bank’s network among crematoria and hospitals who tip it off the moment a patient with a pacemaker dies.

“A body with a pacemaker inside cannot be cremated in an electric furnace due to technical reasons. Therefore, family members of the patient or the crematorium authorities call us to take out the pacemaker,” he says.

Among Ashis’ recent initiatives are Footpath Hospital, which provides treatment to hundreds of slum dwellers, and Negative Blood Group Club, possibly the first of its kind in the country.

“Footpath Hospital consists of an ambulance and a team of medics who go out, on alternate weeks, to the river bank slums and provides basic medical assistance,” Ashis says. “Those in need of advanced care are referred to hospitals and subsidies arranged.”

Negative Blood Group Club, which has 250 members, has only one criterion for membership: a negative blood group.

“By becoming a member, you can not only save lives of others, but also your own,” Ashis says. “Anyone who avails of the services of the club must be ready to give blood when asked for.”

According to Ashis, Medical Bank decided to set up the club after seeing the insecurity among people with negative blood groups. “Negative blood groups are rare compared to positive ones. Hence, people with a negative blood group and their relatives live in fear,” he explains.

Members of the club campaign in the districts to collect negative blood. “We have got a good response in South and North 24-Parganas, East and West Midnapore and Hooghly. Relatives of patients from Bangladesh and Nepal are also contacting us for negative group blood. Whenever relatives of patients face problems in procuring negative blood, the hospitals refer them to us,” says Ashis.

The patients and relatives in Bangladesh and Nepal are asked to send names and contact details of people with a negative blood group in their countries. “We are also issuing identity cards to people of negative blood groups so that they can easily get help in case of an emergency,” he adds.

The man behind Medical Bank is a bachelor and an avowed disciple of Swami Vivekananda. Ashis makes it clear that his is not a non-governmental organization, which he waves off for working for the poor, but from behind glass doors in air-conditioned offices.

But the road ahead seems rough.

Medicine collections have halved in the past few years after drug companies cut down on free sample supplies to doctors. Says Ashis: “This has forced us to increase our open market purchases and spend valuable cash on them.”

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Madhav Chavan | Empowering India through education

Priyanka P. Narain — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:04:00 GMT

Mumbai: Madhav Chavan, the founder of educational non-profit Pratham, has a singular mission: he wants every Indian to learn to read.

While leading a college teachers’ strike in 1988, the chemistry graduate met a bureaucrat who asked him to give more than lip service to a cause. Nearly a decade later, Chavan has become a beacon of hope in a country where half the children cannot read or write properly. Within the last decade, Pratham has reached one million children and aims to reach 60 million more in the next three years.

Under the Pratham model, a motley group of different trusts in 21 states draw literate local volunteers and paid workers in slums and villages to teach illiterate children within their own communities. Pratham attacks the fundamental problem of access to educational opportunity among India’s poor by providing basic salaries and reading materials to teachers. The classrooms could be anywhere: under shady trees, amid rubble heaps of pavement, homes of migrant workers in cities, and sometimes, just in front of a blackboard propped in the narrow alleys of Mumbai’s slums.

The three Rs: Madhav Chavan aims to provide basic education to 60 million children in the next three years.

Although reticent and self-deprecating, 53-year-old Chavan is animated about his team, describing their passion and commitment in making a difference. Empowering both teachers and students is the bedrock of his leadership style. “It is a principle of Lao-Tzu. You have to disempower yourself to empower others.”

Well-read himself, he cites the Chinese philosopher: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little, when the work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ouselves.’”

Nearly 200,000 people volunteer and work with Pratham in 262,000 villages; they are paid as per their skill level and expertise. “There are professionals who take a sabbatical to come and work with us, other professional investment bankers and consultants, who leave their jobs to work with us, and retired military professionals. They oversee administration, analyse data, define strategy and train others. Others are college students, young graduates and homemakers, who want to accept a challenge, basically anyone who has a skill set and would like to help empower others with it.”

Chavan describes his childhood in an idyllic socialist home, with little money, lots of books, ideas and poetry. His father, Yashwant Chavan, was the founder of the Lenin-inspired Lal Nishan Party, a party rooted in trade union activism. During Chavan’s teens, he fought for causes and issues.

In a sense, activism never left him, leading him into education. In 1988, while leading a strike of college teachers, Chavan wrote to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. “Something I had written in that letter caught his eye and I was invited to meet his educational secretary, Anil Bordia.” Bordia was heading the National Literacy Mission, which aimed at imparting functional literacy to 80 million Indians.

“During the meeting, Bordia asked me why was I talking about social change without participating in it. I remember him asking me what was the point of printing pamphlets if people it was meant for could not read it. It got me thinking.”

And it changed his life. He became an “educationist”.

After producing literacy programmes for Doordarshan for a few years, Chavan was invited to work with a Unicef project to teach in Mumbai’s slums. However, Unicef did not back the project financially. The non-profit needed money to begin, but corporate houses would not fund the programme without a complete plan. A year went by and Pratham was founded as a way to drum up funding and fix the problem. “We went to some people I knew and found a friend in ICICI Bank. Narayanan Vagul headed the bank at that time and I don’t know why, but he believed in the idea. He offered financial support and also brought his friends like the Ambanis and Birlas on board,” Chavan recalls. Suddenly, the project became possible.

Since then, “we have not looked back”. Ujwal Thakar, chief executive of Pratham India, has worked closely with Chavan for five years. “He truly believes big problems have simple solutions,” Thakar says.

For Chavan, the idea of a balwadi, or a preschool, is of a room and getting to work. “I believe in people. I let people go wherever they want, no questions asked. I trust them to do the right thing and the amazing thing is that when you trust people, they don’t let you down. Plus, it gets the job done,” he says.

Speed and scale are factors that drive Chavan, says Thakar. A certain “go-go” spirit has driven Pratham’s growth over the last five years from a small organization with a budget of a few crores to a giant non-profit with a Rs60 crore budget; from impacting one million to six million children. International donors now contribute about 80% of Pratham’s budget and the programme has expanded from one slum in Mumbai to more than 100 districts, 21 states and six countries.

This year, Chavan launched his next campaign: the Read India Campaign, which aims to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic to 60 million children in 600 districts by 2009. While his fast-paced projects are sometimes criticized as they are harder to monitor quality, Chavan says he would switch course if someone has a better way to do it. “We need a solution now. We need to implement it now. Alternatives have to be scaleable and fast.”

The campaign, which will cost Rs120 crore, has received an endowment of $9.1 million (Rs35.76 crore today) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Hewlett Foundation in the US. Pratham’s promoters in the UK have raised £2 million (Rs16.38 crore today) from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. The Netherlands-based Oxfam Novib has pledged €1.2 million (Rs6.84 crore today) a year for this project. “We are all set for this year’s expenses on the project,” says Ashok Gaitonde, chief financial officer of Pratham India, who has worked with the organization for the last five years.

Chavan returned to India in 1983 after his post-doctorate at Ohio University. “It just was what I wanted to do,” he explains. “In the US, there’s a set of problems and in India there is another set. It just depends on which set of problems you are ready to deal with.”

But whatever he thought he was coming back home to, Pratham was unexpected—not that he really stops to think about it too much. “I have met some incredible people, discovered great friends, travelled so much and had a lovely time. This is good,” he says, laughing off any implication that what he’s done is extraordinary. “I don’t have much time to reflect because there is so much more to do.”

Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Devendra Shivlal Desai | Bringing good times to the lives of underprivileged children

Tamal Bandyopadhyay — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:41:00 GMT

Every Monday and Thursday, Sampat, Seema, Gokul and Mahadev eagerly wait for the doors of a toy library in their school to open. Here, they play games, tell stories, draw cartoons and even enact impromptu skits. Their school doesn’t offer such a luxury on other days and in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, where they live, toys are a luxury. Sampat’s father, a tailor, can afford to buy balloons for his three children on special occasions—but not toys.

Devendra Shivlal Desai, founder and managing trustee of the Children Toy Foundation

Hundreds of students of the pre-primary and primary sections at the City of Los Angeles Municipal School, Matunga in central Mumbai, and Passpoli Municipal School, Powai, a western suburb, play and learn twice a week at their toy libraries, for an hour each.

The Matunga library was set up six years ago while the one in Powai has been around for two years. They are two of the 26 toy libraries that have been operating in municipal schools in Mumbai. Ever since these centres opened, students’ attendance has gone up and administrators say there is a distinct improvement in their performance in mathematics and languages.

The volunteers at these centres are trained at the city’s S.N.D.T. Women’s University and Nirmala Niketan, a college of home science and social work. These centres, part of a project called Khel Vigyan, are the brainchild of Devendra Shivlal Desai, founder and managing trustee of Children Toy Foundation, that celebrates 25 years of its existence this month.

The son of a paper merchant, 61-year-old Desai still loves playing with toys andbelieves in sharing the joy of playing with underprivileged children who cannot afford toys.

“Khel Vigyan centres can supplement the normal school curriculum,” insists Desai. “We would like to set up such centres at every municipal school because students of these schools have hardly any extra-curricular activities. They cannot afford toys at home or join summer workshops to learn skits.”

It may take a while to spread the message of Khel Vigyan but Desai has already set up 260 toy libraries across 13 states, including Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

“On the lines of traditional libraries and archives, the toy libraries can cater to the healthy intellectual growth of our children,” says Desai. “The toys are not meant for only fun and entertainment, they are a very effective tool for teaching. They can educate the children, stir their imagination and boost their creative zeal.”

Desai, a bachelor, says he is particularly fond of children. What drives him is his passion for playing and his love for toys. “When I was 14 years old, I took a bet with my sister that I would not get married,” he says. “I never regret this. After looking after so many toy libraries, where is the time for family?”

According to Desai, his foundation plays the role of a midwife. It delivers the baby (toy libraries) and then the local bodies—be it charitable trusts, social welfare groups, old age homes, jails, hospitals, temples and municipalities—nurture them. For instance, Surat Municipal Corporation has been nurturing 35 toy libraries. Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai and Yerawada Jail in Pune host two such libraries. In Mumbai, Tata Memorial, St George, KEM and seven other hospitals run toy libraries in their paediatric wards.

On an average, each library has 300 members. This means, about 78,000 children have access to the world of toys and games through these libraries. All members who take toys home are required to keep a refundable deposit of Rs100 and pay a monthly membership fee of Rs10. At hospitals and jails, the inmates use the facility and since they do not take toys home, they do not pay any membership fee or keep deposits.

“I can’t call it a movement as yet but we can develop this as a movement if corporations come forward to support the cause,” says Desai.

Companies are indeed coming forward. The foundation’s first mobile toy library was on the road in 1998, courtesy Excel Industries Ltd and a few other firms. An ardent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Desai travelled across North India in October 1998 with the mobile toy library, going all the way to Jammu and Kashmir in an effort to introduce fun and games—and education—to thousands of children.

Apart from hundreds of toys, the mobile vans play educational video films. There is also a projector to show films on a big screen and provision for hosting puppet and magic shows. Then, there are stamps and coins to encourage children to take up hobbies such as philately and numismatics. Children can even play with the colourful body of the van which has magnetic counters. The foundation’s first van, which is now nine years old, cannot ply in Mumbai any more under the road transport norms. So it has been serving 20 schools in hamlets surrounding Varanasi. It also toured 162 villages in Latur, about 400km to the south-east of Mumbai. Latur was ravaged by an earthquake in 1993 which killed 20,000 people.

The foundation, in partnership with Godrej Sara Lee Ltd, now runs “Good Times Bus” service, carrying toy libraries to mobile creches, children’s hospitals and various construction sites where children of construction workers play with sand, stone and iron rods.

“Our two mobile libraries serve 10 construction sites and 10 hospitals from Matunga Road to Dahisar in the western suburbs and Byculla to Thane in the central suburbs,” says Desai. One more van will soon be on the road, courtesy India’s biggest engineering firm Larsen & Toubro Ltd.

The foundation has also helped Vidyarambam Trust in Chennai to build two such vans that reached out to thousands of children in the tsunami-affected villages in South India. “Now, Share, another NGO, would like to make such mobile vans. We are also guiding Healing Hands, a women’s organization in Sri Lanka, on a similar project,” says Desai.

Toys and games have always fascinated Desai who, despite his elder brother’s insistence that he must complete his graduation before joining the family business, dropped out of college and chose to look after the warehouse of paper merchant R Desai & Co. at Fort, Mumbai, so that he could get time to solve the chess problems appearing in Ramji’s Chess Corner in The Timesof India.

While Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s movement against cow slaughter and NGOs, such as Beauty without Cruelty, initially took his time and attention, Desai says he always wanted to do something different. He stumbled on the idea of setting up toy libraries by accident. In June 1982, he happened to visit the Chacha Nehru Toy Library at Petite Municipal School in Bandra, Mumbai’s western suburb. Established by Share Your Toy Foundation and adopted by the Lion’s Club of North Mumbai, it was a sort of local Disneyland, open to hundreds of students every Sunday.

“I picked up an IQ puzzle but could not solve it,” herecalls. “Another game, Memory Skill, excited me and immediately, I picked up a Make and Know game to build an aeroplane. I was 36 years old at the time but behaved like a child. I told the organizers to set up more such libraries but they could not do so.”

Without proper supervision, the Chacha Nehru Toy Library wasn’t making much headway. Very few toys were returning to the library in their original shape because of the overwhelming enthusiasm of children and, despite the consul general of Canada replenishing the stock and the then finance minister Morarji Desai exempting the gift toys from custom duty, the library died a premature death.

Desai then opened the first toy library of the foundation, Khilona Ghar (toy house), in January 1984 at the Servants of India Society, an institute founded by Gopal Krishan Gokhle, at Parthana Samaj, central Mumbai. The cost of setting up the library was Rs22,000, with Desai chipping in with Rs5,000. The second centre was opened for the street children on the pavement at Fort outside Desai’s office. Here, nobody was allowed to take toys home but they could come every evening and play. At 7pm sharp Desai would be seen picking up the toys and keeping them in his office to bring them back the next day. Desai still dreams of spreading the message of the Khel Vigyan centres across municipal schools in India. He is also busy drawing up plans for Sunday family play centres where even privileged children can spend time with their parents, learning a few things.

“The computers are robbing children of their childhood. I want them to play with toys at least once a week,” says Desai.

And, at heart, he still remains a child. When he is not travelling to set up another toy library in a remote Gujarat village or playing with children of construction workers on the magnetic body of the mobile toy library, he makes sure he indulges in a game of cards with Joy, a ragpicker and the first member of his pavement toy library, at the paper merchant’s warehouse on Shahid Bhagat Singh Road at Fort. Otherwise, Desai says, he simply cannot sleep at night.

He seeks the forgotten’s right to live

Aparna Kalra — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:55:00 GMT

Balakrishna Renake fights for people who do not exist, at least not on paper. They do not own ration cards. They do not feature on voters’ lists. They do not get subsidized homes or other such sops from the government that regularly hands these out to the underprivileged. They, quite simply, do not exist.

They are the Nats, the Durgis, the Dewars, the Bhantus, the Pardhis, the Khanabadoshs, the Kalandars, the Gadia Lohars—almost unrecognizable names—who constitute the denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of India. Denotified tribes are those declared criminal by the British in 1871. This law was repealed after independence but the stigma attached to these tribes remains.

“The government has not been able to do anything for them,” said Renake, 68, who has worked as an advocate for such tribes for almost four decades.

Now, a few months short of completing a two-year term as chairman of the government-appointed National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic & Semi-Nomadic Tribes, Renake has toured 14 states to prepare a list ofthese tribes. He is also suggesting ways to stop atrocities against them.

His most recent case is the lynching of 10 men last month in Bihar’s Dhelpurwa village for alleged theft. Renake volunteered to investigate and found that none of the men had a criminal record. They were members of the Kureri tribe of Bihar, which survives by collecting honey from beehives in forests and killing small birds.

“These people are not given the right to live, the right to exist,” said Renake.

Renake understands the plight of such people. He hails from a family of Gondhalis, a nomadic tribe that roams the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, singing songs for food. On one such visit, a local leader spotted Renake and requested his parents to leave the then seven-year-old boy behind so that he could be educated.

Renake spent the next few years running away from school to rejoin his parents, till a sports scholarship got him hooked to school. But theroad was not smooth, and after graduating in science and spending two years as a teacher in a private school, Renake found himself homeless again. This time, he made Mumbai’s famed Dadar station his home for six months.

Just as Renake did in his youth, hundreds of nomadic tribes roam around Indian cities. Children of the Nat tribe turn cartwheels and dance for money at traffic signals; members of the Bhat tribe specialize in puppet shows and have graduated to playing drums at marriages to suit urban tastes; the Gadia Lohars sell iron implements by the roadside.

Cities and villages of modern India are equally unwelcoming to nomads, although the country’s folk tradition draws substantially from their stories and music. Pop culture has used them to add colour to stories; Bollywood movies of the 1960s and 1970s including Caravan, which is often described as India’s first road movie, romanticized the Banjaras, a nomadic tribe.

Only a handful of Indians have cut through the haze of prejudice surrounding these people. Writer Mahasweta Devi is one and has written stories based on the exploitation of denotified tribes.

Renake respects the contribution of writers but he prefers action—something that results in a material improvement in the life of denotified tribes. He says he’d like to see tangible benefits such as the guarantee of livelihood for pastoral tribes so that they can settle down. To inspire state governments to give land to denotified tribes, Renake conducted a livelihood experiment in 2001 in Solapur, a semi-arid region in Maharashtra. Inspired by Japanese scientist Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution that looked at small-scale, high-yield farming with minimum inputs, he set out to extract the maximum yield from one-fourth of an acre to prove that poor communities can become self-sufficient with even small amounts of land.

The focus on tangible gains that can be won for forgotten people makes Renake unique, says a fellow activist. “Anna is a constructive thinker. He is not one to come out in the streets and shout slogans,” said Minar Pimple, who heads the United Nations’ Millennium Campaign in Asia and affectionately calls Renake elder brother, or Anna.

Pimple met Renake in 1992. As founder of a non-profit organization, Yuva, Pimple had successfully sued the Maharashtra government for custodial death of one and illegal detention of 20 Pardhis, a denotified tribe. It was then that Pimple came across Renake, who had been working for denotified tribes since the late 1960s and had organized a rally of 25,000 people from denotified and semi-nomadic tribes in Mumbai as early as 1972.

Renake’s entry into activism was sparked off by a report in 1966 which said the Maharashtra government had set aside funds to train the youth of these tribes for jobs as automobile drivers. He began to study these schemes, and talk to members of such tribes, only to realize that the money was not reaching its target. At the same time, the Dalit Panther Movement in Maharashtra made him realize the power of mobilizing and bringing a community together. Since then, Renake has been a tireless campaigner for denotified tribes, highlighting their problems, and urging governments to help them with everything from jobs to land to houses.

Through this period, including some stints in jail, Renake survived on the salary of his wife, Sharda, an officer at the Mumbai Port Trust. The two met and fell in love when he was working as a salesman while living at Dadar station.

Now, Renake is part of the very administration he has clashed with time and again, and he is aware that he is in a position to do a lot of good—provided the government listens to him.

He has a wish list ready: he wants the Planning Commission to set aside money for these tribes; he wants state governments to enact laws to stop the persecution of these people by the police or mainstream communities; and he wants land to ensure livelihood for them. More than any other thing, he wants a population census of these tribes. He says their number will touch 120 million—more than one-tenth of the country’s population. There’s more to this demand than there being strength in numbers—a census will be the ultimate recognition of the fact that denotified tribes actually exist.

Ahmad Rashid Shervani: ‘It is the duty of every Muslim to acquire knowledge’

Aparna Kalra — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:39:00 GMT

Gurgaon: Ahmad Rashid Shervani gives out scholarships to Muslim students—small amounts, Rs100, Rs500, maybe Rs1,000 for the lucky—but money is hardly the point. Rather, Shervani wants to reward young Muslims and their schools that are performing on a par with, or better than, the rest of India. The 75-year-old, son of a sugar baron, has retained a single passion: to increase the presence of Muslim students in mainstream education.

In the 1980s, Shervani recalls with laughter, he had to convince a hajji, someone who has taken a pilgrimage to Mecca, to allow girls to enrol in a Muslim school in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), a state where an estimated one-fifth of the population is Muslim.

“He was afraid that he will go to hell if he allows a co-educational school to function. I told him, ‘Hajji Sa’ab, you will go to jahannum (hell) anyway, as not educating girls is against Islam. So why not let girls join your school and then go to hell’,” recounts Shervani with a laugh. Shervani does not tour schools any more to bully them into letting girls in or keeping up their examination results. But through his prizes and awards, he finds his way into nearly a hundred Muslim-managed schools dotting the cities and towns of UP, the state he grew up in.

Ahmad Rashid Shervani says his wife Nusrat has been his strongest ally, especially in schools where girls observe purdah

Thirty million Muslims now live in UP—more than the population of Saudi Arabia—but half are illiterate. The prizes go to students between the ages of 14 and 16 who do well in Class X and XII; the awards are for teachers who improve the performance of their class.

“The money is irrelevant”, says Shervani, who was born in a large family that included his father, a sugar factory owner and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and two indulgent uncles. One of them put up the seed capital for a trust when Shervani turned his attention to Muslim education in 1976. He still draws income from his father’s shares in the sugar mill, now run by his nephews.

“I never kept account of how much I was asking from my uncle,” says Shervani, his voice booming through his Gurgaon house. “If you look at it, it is very little money. It is just enough nowadays to pay the phone bills of a few ministers.”

Shervani selects recipients strictly on the basis of results of examinations conducted by boards such as the Central Board of Secondary Examinations (CBSE), and discourages appeals for donations for school buildings. His formula is a bit more complex.

“What I am interested in is the entire result of the school. I compare it with last year,” says Shervani. “Then I see if percentage of students passed has increased, how many have achieved first division; if it is a co-ed, how did girls perform compared to boys, how did Muslim students do versus Hindus,” he explains.

Shervani’s data sheets, which he collates with the help of an assistant, show neat columns. Schools that fail to send him their results are dropped, replaced with new ones. His stress is on Muslim-managed schools where the majority of children are Muslim. He is dismissive of madrasas, the traditional institutions of Islamic learning; they do not form any part of his prizes and awards scheme.

It is not possible to ascertain what, if any, effect Shervani’s programme has on the success rates of Muslim students. Individually, though, principals say, he is making a difference. In 1976, among Shervani’s data from 18 schools, one Muslim female earned a first division, or 60% marks, in her final year of schooling.

More than three decades later, one school, the Al-Hamara Farooqui Girls Inter College in Allahabad, reports a whole lot more; it collected seven prizes based on the 2007 examination results totalling Rs2,300.

“Out of 41, 38 of my girls got first division in the inter exam (Class XII). But they chose just five girls for the prizes,” the school’s principal Shaheem Zaidi says in a telephone interview. “In high school, two girls got prizes.”

Zaidi, who has been principal since 1999, says the school began receiving Shervani’s prizes in 2004. One of the school’s prize-winners this year is 15-year-old Tahreem Ahmad, who scored 62% in Class X and landed Rs300.

“It does feel good,” says Ahmad, who belongs to a household of seven siblings, and wants to graduate in science. “Everyone in my family congratulated me and told me to work harder.”

It is precisely this kind of encouragement that Shervani wants. Through journals and forums, he drew attention to the lack of education among Muslims long before the government-appointed Sachar Committee statistically defined it in November 2006. The committee said the literacy rate for Muslims at 59.1% was below the national average of 65%. It found that one in every four Muslim children in the 6-14 age group had either never attended school or had dropped out, and concluded that the educational levels of Muslims are close to that of scheduled castes and tribes.

“A Hindu dhobi will educate his children, a Muslim dhobi will not. I can’t understand why,” says Shervani. “Talabul ilm fareezatun ala kulle Muslimin wa Muslimatin” (It is the duty of every Muslim man and woman to aquire knowledge).

Shervani says his wife Nusrat has been his strongest ally, especially when he travels to schools where girls observe purdah. She would go and speak to the girls and insist, “You must study”.

The management of the trust, which gives away the prizes, will go to Saleem Shervani, his nephew and a member of Parliament. But Ahmad Rashid Shervani does not think anyone in his family will adhere to the complicated formulae and criteria he uses.

Eventually, his community, he says, must learn to stand on its own feet.

Joe Madiath | Toilet training and hygiene lessons for Orissa’s rural poor

Paromita Shastri — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:03:00 GMT

Standing in the middle court of India Habitat Centre, one of New Delhi’s best laid-out environment-intelligent spaces, Joe Madiath asks, with a mischievous grin, if we’d rather take him to a nearby toilet and photograph him there.

That wouldn’t be a bad idea because Madiath is the man who has helped build

Clean-up: Joe Madiath, executive director of Gram Vikas, has been ‘prickly’ about poverty since childhood despite his prosperous family background. Today, he can be credited with spearheading campaigns for development and sanitation in several backward villages.

the maximum number of toilets in the country, if efforts by the government’s sanitation departments and Sulabh Shauchalaya, a commercial venture by Bindeshwar Pathak, are discounted.

And he has built them where it matters—2,700 toilets in 361 very poor and mainly tribal villages across 21 districts of Orissa. This year’s target is another 10,000.

The subject of toilets certainly gets 58-year old Madiath going. “Ever seen the stuff the government builds? A pan, a tank and three walls with a thatch roof, without a water source. By next monsoon, they’re either stinking, full, or being used as a shed. Why build a toilet for poor villagers you yourself can’t use? Aren’t they human beings? Or is it that poor people don’t deserve anything better?” he asks.

Madiath thinks they do.

The toilets in and around Mohuda village in Berhampur in the Ganjam district of Orissa, the headquarters of Madiath’s organization Gram Vikas, are well-constructed, clean and an integral part of homes.

Each comes with a bathing room and a permanent water line from overhead tanks. The cost of around Rs3,500 is shared between the family and Gram Vikas, the latter providing external materials such as door, cement, steel and the pan, and technical support.

“Low-cost doesn’t mean low-quality. These are subsidized toilets city people would love to use,” says Madiath, executive director of Gram Vikas.

Statistics pertaining to toilets do not paint a very impressive picture of India. According to the 2001 census, 63.6% of India’s 192 million households do not have toilets (the proportion is 78% in rural areas and 26% in urban areas). And 54% of the households do not have any drainage facilities (66% in rural areas and 22% in urban ones).

As compared to this, 68% of the households do not have a television (71% in rural areas and 36% in urban areas). That means that in rural areas, more households have televisions than toilets.

The situation is bad even in relatively richer states such as Haryana. According to a 2006 report in The Tribune, based on data released by Haryana’s Directorate of Census, 53% of the households in the state had a television while only 44.5% had toilets.

Another 2006 report based on census data, this one in the International Herald Tribune, said that 42% of the households in Tamil Nadu, long-considered one of the most progressive states in the country, had televisions and only 14.7% had toilets.

The government does have a programme, Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), that it launched in 2001, with the aim of improving sanitary conditions in rural areas.

It gives poor rural families a subsidy of Rs500-Rs1,200 per toilet. That’s nowhere near what’s required especially because most rural areas lack proper water and drainage networks. The result is poorly built toilets that people just stop using after some time.

“When you build a home in the city,” asks Madiath, “how much do you pay for using the city’s vast drainage and sewerage network? A small tax perhaps. Why must the poor pay 100%?” According to the Centre for Science and Environment, a non-governmental organization (NGO), New Delhi’s citizens pay 3% of the cost of distribution of water (through taxes) and Bangalore’s citizens pay 12%.

Madiath, born into a prosperous family of planters in Kerala, has always been prickly about poverty. He helped organize the labourers at the family rubber plantation against his father. Boarding school, the family hoped, would cure him. It didn’t.

Then, in 1971, as a bright, young student activist from Loyola College, Chennai, he decided to go to Orissa to help cyclone victims.

And his life changed.

Although it has made rapid strides in recent years by leveraging its mineral resources to attract companies to invest in the state, Orissa remains one of India’s poorest states.

According to a 2004-05 data, 86% of its population lives in rural areas; 47% earns Rs360 a month and 38% belongs to scheduled castes and tribes.

Madiath’s parents were devastated when he decided to stay back at Ganjam, struck by the terrible poverty around him, and hoping to expand the limited local economic options for the local people, through better working techniques and the use of technology. In 1979, he set up Gram Vikas .

“The NGO word had not been coined. As students, we were enamoured by technology, naively confident that if we could just pour down some technical support on one end of the tube, development would come out of the other,” he says. As Madiath discovered, it didn’t.

Gram Vikas’ first experiment was a dairy, which floundered after a while because the tribals didn’t believe in milking cows. Biogas plants came after that and saw success.

“The forest was receding at an alarming rate, mainly because of indiscriminate felling. Most of the families had cows, the slurry was also good for agriculture, so we could make the omelettes without breaking the eggs,” says Madiath.

The Deenabandhu biogas plant became a model for a government scheme that late prime minister Indira Gandhi launched. Gram Vikas has so far set up 55,000 biogas systems to provide inexpensive fuel for villagers.

But it was toilets that made Madiath a name to reckon with in some circles.

In 1992, Madiath came up with a Rural Health and Environment Programme after a Gram Vikas study found that more than 80% of the deaths in rural Orissa could be traced to water contaminated by faeces.

The programme seeks to harness all physical and human capital in a village, while demystifying construction techniques and enhancing local employment by teaching them brick making and other skills. Every family in a village must agree to be part of a programme before it can proceed and also must contribute equally in cash, materials, skill and labour to make a corpus fund. A committee of 50 people is formed to thrash out all issues and execute the work, with proportionate representation from women, and each community and tribe. That’s because if there’s even one family in the village defecating in the open or using the pond to wash or bathe, it contaminates the water and affects the health of all. The committee also has to bring everybody around if caste or community problems surface.

Gram Vikas has used the same approach to build roads, drainage systems, community halls and schools, under a complete village development programme called MANTRA. Whenever needed, politicians and government schemes have been tapped, to ease financial constraints. “Politicians are very people-savvy; it is the bureaucrats who are resistant to change. But we’re a democracy, so officials work when we put pressure or when we scrape or prostrate (ourselves before them),” he says.

The average contribution per family towards a permanent village corpus is Rs1,000, with more prosperous families sometimes giving more to make up for the less fortunate. The interest earned by this fund, typically around Rs1-2 lakh a year, is used for maintenance, issue soft loans for specific projects and help out the deserving if needed—basically to ensure that the village’s water and sanitation needs are met. There’s a stiff fine for open defecation or a dirty toilet. “In water and sanitation, the community approach leads to a win-win situation. You get the village to unite and that allows it to take up other development issues. Freed from the killing job of fetching water, women get their children immunized and send them to school and do other work,” says Madiath.

Acknowledging Gram Vikas’ contribution to the popularization of the TSC, Orissa rural development secretary S.N. Tripathi says, “The job becomes much more difficult when you have to work with poor tribals who don’t even have a decent house. And Rs1,200 isn’t enough to build a proper toilet. Wherever Joe has taken it up, he has got success.” Madiath admits the government’s TSC, which even awards villages that have improved their sanitation facilities, has fared better than any government scheme.

He adds that the real issue, however, has to do with sustainability and change in attitude towards sanitation.

“Every time one pan is put,” he says, “one tick will be made on the TSC report card. India will achieve the UN sanitation goal in figures. The operation will be successful but the patient will be dead. Toilets are just one part of our essential campaign for dignity and inclusion.” Secondly, he adds, even if the government meets its target, it is a success only in terms of fixed-point defecation. “What happens to the remaining 95% of the country which is used to open defecation?” he asks.

In much of North and North-West India, Madiath claims, villagers ritually drive in their Maruti cars to the fields to relieve themselves.

Nafisa Barot, executive director, Utthan, a voluntary organization working on issues related to water and sanitation in Gujarat, says that Madiath’s “singular contribution in the field is in working for the poor from the rights perspective, even while challenging the existing paradigms of development with innovative approaches and clearly demonstrated results.”

According to her, Madiath has shown on a very large scale how best the government machinery can be engaged for the benefit of the people.

Among the many awards Gram Vikas has received are the World Habitat Award for 2002, the Tech Museum Award 2003, the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize for 2006 and the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship 2007.

“My effort is to create an enabling environment for sustainable development,” says Madiath, “one that makes clear that poor people really do matter.” He doesn’t want to bring his programme to the city slums “where many people (NGOs) are working.” “Nobody is interested in poor tribals,” says Madiath

Kumuda Bisoi of Samantarapur village in Puri, where one of the three ponds freed from bathing and washing was given over to women to grow fish, says her husband had initially grumbled that the women would soon “wear pants and men, bangles”.

After the ponds made an income of Rs40,000 a year later, she says, he was smiling.

Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to Sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Shankar Ghose | He is passionate about connecting the poor with mainstream media

Sangeeta Singh — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:36:00 GMT

Shankar Ghose retired from a full-time job at the National Foundation of India (NFI), the outfit which gives grants to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—to relax, listen to Beethoven, Mozart and Rabindra Sangeet, finish partially read books, play golf and meet his friends for long lunches.

But, two days after leaving NFI in 2001, Ghose ended up joining Charkha, the development and communication network that his son had started in 1994 and which, until then, was being run by a board.

With long years in the corporate sector—Caltex, Godrej, Philips and Shriram Industrial Enterprises—and a stint at NFI, Ghose, who joined as president of Charkha, decided he had to continue the work of Charkha, which tries to empower rural people by giving them a voice.

Charkha had been started in 1994 by Ghose’s son, Sanjoy Ghose, who was abducted by Ulfa militants in 1997 on a work visit to Assam, and has not been heard from since.

Charkha’s Shankar Ghose says he takes pride in the popularity of the Urdu features service brought out by the organization.

Today, the septuagenarian works almost seven days a week holding workshops in rural areas, getting articles written by them in newspapers and magazines, and creating awareness among them to stand up for their rights. “It’s like an old father following his son’s footsteps, but I enjoy working for people at grass-root levels,” says Ghose.

His nondescript office in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar area is cluttered with paper clippings in Hindi, English and Urdu, and placards of workshops held by Charkha. He speaks passionately about Charkha’s activities, and about his son, even as his tea gets cold. It isn’t an easy conversation. The pain of talking about Sanjoy in the past tense, and the persistent guilt that he could not stop him from going to the North-East are palpable. Charkha’s website describes Ghose trying to dissuade his son from visiting Assam only for Sanjoy to ask: “Then, whose son will you send?”

But, it isn’t all personal. Ghose is no less passionate when he starts talking about how mainstream media does not adequately cover development issues relating to rural areas. Among his favourite topics is how Charkha was in the limelight in the mid-1990s, and how it works now.

Charkha (www.charkha.org) provides a link between people in the villages, grass-roots level activists, NGOs working in the area and mainstream media. Ghose and his team of six in Delhi make sure that “positive” aspects of developmental works done in rural areas are reported in the mainstream media. Charkha tries to use conventional communication as a tool to empower the impoverished. In order to retain what people at the grass-roots levels want to convey, there is minimal editing and rewriting of articles by the Charkha team.

Its feature service provides a platform to activists and development journalists to get their articles published in Hindi, Urdu and English through papers and magazines such as TheIndian Express, Civil Society, Rashtriya Sahara, Amar Ujala, Jansatta and Quami Awaz among others.

“Our Urdu feature service, which started only in end-2005, has got tremendous response and since India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, this is of special significance,” says Ghose who is actively involved in managing the Charkha-Sanjoy Ghose Fellowship for Peace and Development, through which the voices of the people in Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh are brought to mainstream media.

Still, Ghose laments, mainstream media wants to devote more space to sex, glamour and consumerism, rather than talk about development activities in rural areas. “When Sanjoy started Charkha in Delhi, many editors were excited, the The Indian Express even gave him dedicated space, which was called ‘Village Voice’,” recalls Ghose who advocates a balance between stories from rural and urban areas, and would like for newspapers to devote at least one small window on their pages for the voice of the villagers.

Publishers and editors, on their part, say that articles submitted by Charkha should have good journalistic flavour to justify giving them the space. Umesh Anand, publisher of Civil Society magazine, which published articles from Charkha in the past says, “Though I would love to take articles written by activists of Charkha, they should be based on journalistic soundness.” He adds: “Activists may have their own agenda and tend to get repetitive and boring sometimes.” Besides, Anand feels considerable effort goes into rewriting articles from Charkha. Still, Anand agrees, the efforts made by Charkha need to be applauded and supported, and that Ghose is doing as good a job as his son Sanjoy had done.

“In today’s situation, I feel Sanjoy would have faced the same difficulties as Shankar in getting these articles published because stories organized by Charkha are boutique stories, and editors and publishers have much larger objectives,” says Anand.

So far, Charkha has organized 400 workshops in parts of Central and North India. But, these are not ordinary workshops as Ghose has a precondition for these sessions. “If 50% of the total people attending the workshop does not comprise women, we call it off,” says Ghose. “Not just that, we ensure that senior citizens and children are adequately represented.”

Apart from his role at Charkha, Ghose has had a history of philanthropic involvement. “Shankar’s activism dates back to his days with the corporate world,” says Anand of Civil Society. Indeed, since his days at Shriram, where he was senior vice-president and chief operating officer, Ghose has been involved with CanSupport, an organization for terminally ill cancer patients, following the demise of a colleague who died of cancer. Even in those days, “there was so much you could contribute to the society”, Ghose adds. As a senior official at Shriram Chemicals and Fertilizers, Ghose led literacy and cleanliness drives at shopfloor level, where workers participated along with their families. “Together we dazzled the quality-control team with each worker contributing his or her bit,” he recalls. “That too without costing the company anything.”

These efforts have come in handy now. Ghose notes that Siddharth Shriram, chairman of Shriram Industrial Enterprises, is actively involved with Charkha and has been giving grants on a yearly basis.

A follower of Gandhi, Ghose’s office has several pictures of the national leader as well as images of spinning wheels (hence Charkha).

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com)

Joe Madiath | Toilet training and hygiene lessons for Orissa’s rural poor

Paromita Shastri — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:22:00 GMT

That wouldn’t be a bad idea because Madiath is the man who has helped build

the maximum number of toilets in the country, if efforts by the government’s sanitation departments and Sulabh Shauchalaya, a commercial venture by Bindeshwar Pathak, are discounted.

And he has built them where it matters—27,000 toilets in 361 very poor and mainly tribal villages across 21 districts of Orissa. This year’s target is another 10,000.