There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

She helps dyslexic children discover joys of writing

2010-11-10T02:03:00.000-08:00

Rediff.com

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After weaving stories for kids in beautiful books, dyslexic author Dheera Kitchlu is now helping children like her bring out their writing talents into the open.

Through her initiative 'Anyone can write', Dheera Kitchlu who has penned a total of eight books says writing for children is very unique and kids should be encouraged to write from a young age.

"Being a dyslexic, I never wrote due to fear. Children have a lot of talent but they feel inhibited and do not write. They have wonderful stories to tell. I want to encourage them to write," says Kitchlu, whose first book was published in 1992.

In collaboration with the self-publishing portal Serene Woods, the free-of-cost initiative allows children to get help from Kitchlu to create original, individual work, through one-on-one interactions.

Children send their stories to Kitchlu through post and email, who reads and guides the writers to better their writing. The initiative aims to make children confident of their writing at an early age.

"I am compiling the stories into a book. There are around 30 stories and the book would be out by mid next year," says Kitchlu.

Describing herself as a late bloomer, the author says she came to know very late about her dyslexia. "I was always a bad student. I could not spell and still have difficulty in reading. While in my 30s, I came to know that I was marginally dyslexic," she says.

Her reading disability prompted her to write for children and make learning fun for them. She began writing when her children left home and her books are autobiographical.

One of her novels Maya is about a dyslexic child and his feelings. Kitchlu has also written a booklet for the Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare to help parents coming to adopt a child. The booklet is distributed free to all parents who come to adopt children at centres in Mumbai.

"The booklet reflects the belief that all children are a special gift. It strives to help the adopted child grow with a conviction that she is loved, wanted and cherished," she says.

Kitchlu has also written From Darkness to Light for The National Association for the Blind, which is a compilation of uncommon lives of 25 blind women achievers who have received the Neelam Kanga award for excellence in various fields of work.

"I did not know much about the psyche of the blind. During the writing of this book, these indefatigable ladies became my friends and were instrumental in allowing me to appreciate more deeply the human experience," she says.

The author contributes part of her proceeds from her from writing to an orphanage in Bandra. She is happy that children literature is picking up gradually in India.
"Though a lot of children's books are still sourced from abroad, I am happy that many Indian writers are writing for them. We need children books in Indian context," says Kitchlu.

Along with cinema, literature too plays an important role in shaping children's future and making society aware of their problems and needs, she points out.

Can Meena Build An Indian Google?

2010-06-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

Tech Crunch by Vivek Wadhwa on Jun 26, 2010

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We wanted to make change affordable

2010-04-27T17:58:00.001-07:00

Rediff Get Ahead

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Now that Ujjaini's trust was won, the next important step for SIFE HRC volunteers was to collect funds to buy solar lamps to light up the village and seek a vendor who would provide them with these lamps at a reasonable cost.

They accidentally chanced upon a social entrepreneur, one Mr Kumar -- who is quite secretive about his identity and has requested these students not to reveal more about him -- who agreed to sell them at a nominal cost of Rs 3,650 per unit that would include one LED-powered lantern, one tubelight, one battery encased in a protective cover, two solar panels and wiring.

"To light up entire Ujjaini comprising 111 households at the cost of Rs 3,650 per unit we needed Rs 4,05,000, a rather difficult task for us college students," says Jyotirmoy.

They had never engaged in this kind of money-raising exercise, but it had to be done. Going to corporates would not have been of much help because these students only had a noble idea with no history, no record, nothing that could prove their sincerity and ability to execute a project of such enormity to corporate bigwigs.

"Why would anybody give us that kind of money?" they would often think aloud at their meetings to brainstorm over ways to raise money.

As they say, adversity is the father of all inventions, so these college kids, facing a financial crunch, started thinking about their strengths. After a few days they got their Eureka moment. They were 6,000 students in all and if each one of them contributed even Rs 10, they thought, they would have made a small beginning.

"At the very next moment we came up with a slogan: Rs 10 for light," says Abhinav.

"We could have easily gone to rich bakras in our college and they would have donated us the money we wanted. But we wanted to make change affordable," says Jyotirmoy, elaborating on the fact that they wanted their entire college to partake in this noble affair without burdening any one student.

They had heard a lot of young people in their college talking about bringing in change so they thought their idea could give the youth in their college a chance to become part of that transformation.

The idea was to make all feel proud about their little contributions. "Let's not make even a peon feel that just because s/he is a peon s/he cannot help bring about real, meaningful change in our society," says Afsheen.

"If anybody can afford to save Rs 10 every day of the year s/he could easily muster the Rs 3,650 needed to buy one unit of the solar lamp," says Prachi.

All the students from junior as well as degree colleges came together and unanimously decided to work on it. They wanted to experience the thrill and joy of getting something beyond a college award or a passing certificate.

They wanted to prove a point to all those (read: government, corporates) who always talked about improving the lives of the backward and the disadvantaged, who have the money to bring about that change but have not brought about the change they could.

"We wanted to prove a point that if students of one college can collect the money and light up a village, what kind of tremendous change can corporates and governments bring about given the resources they have," says Afsheen.

Image: Clockwise from top: SIFE HRC volunteers installing solar lamps and tubelights inside a tribal's home; Volunteers with Rs for light placards.

Today tribals know us as the light people

2010-04-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

Rediff : Get Ahead

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SIFE HRC, established in 2008, was initially concentrating more on urban projects. But soon the volunteers felt the need to glance at exploring sustainable business models for rural development as "a majority of Indians still live in its villages".

"So when we got a list of dark villages from TERI we randomly picked up one village that was populated and without any kind of guidance took a car and wandered into the forests to find Ujjaini," says Abhinav, Jyotirmoy's classmate.

After coming back from Ujjaini they decided to work on a five-point transformation model that was scalable and could be applied to any dark village in rural India.

This five-point plan would look at a holistic solution to transform rural lives and provide for:

Solar electrification
Health and sanitation
Education
Economic upliftment and
Social development

"Phase I of Project Chirag is to electrify dark villages using solar lighting because achieving the remainder of the four points in the transformation model depend on lighting up villages first," says Prachi, a third-year commerce student.

During their trip to Ujjaini the students found that the tribals spent a lot of the day, their productive period, going into the forests to collect firewood to light up their homes or cook food.

"So we thought introducing solar lighting would help them use their time productively," explains Prachi.

Why government is important

While their motive was noble, it wasn't going to be an easy task. They knew that the key to Project Chirag's success lay in winning the tribals' trust. After all, they were the biggest stakeholders in the entire exercise and making them understand the benefits of Project Chirag was very crucial for its implementation and further spread.

Hence they needed somebody who would introduce the SIFE HRC volunteers to the tribals and act as a facilitator. With the help of their college principal they managed to get an appointment with Jayant Patil, Maharashtra's rural development minister who, after listening to their five-point transformation model, was mighty impressed and helped them touch base with deputy COO of Thane zilla parishad, Deepak Waigankar.

"When we went to Ujjaini with him we understood how important he was, for the villagers gave us a grand welcome," says Pawan, a second-year commerce student, talking about how they managed to break the ice with Ujjaini's inhabitants. That meeting, which also included Ujjaini's gram sevak and block development officer, helped these students establish trust among the tribals.

"Obviously, they would feel more comfortable with the involvement of a body like the zilla parishad (a local self-government organisation) rather than dealing directly with a bunch of enthusiastic students who were total strangers to them," adds Prachi.

No matter how good their ideas were, they could not execute them without the help of the existing government machinery. Only after that were the people receptive of their ideas and plans.

"Today they know us by our faces and call us the 'light people'," says Prachi, a third-year commerce student, with a big smile.

Image: Clockwise from top left: SIFE HRC volunteers training village women in using soil to make artefacts; Training to make garlands; Installing solar panels; SIFE, HRC volunteers at Ujjaini; Villagers register for light by paying Rs 500.

These college kids want to light up 'dark India'

2010-04-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Rediff : Get Ahead
Prasanna D Zore

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Mohan Bhargava, the reel-life NASA scientist portrayed by Shah Rukh Khan in Swades who lights up his native village using hydro power can take a walk. A bunch of young college students -- no scientists, these -- have done the same in real life, in a simple, innovative way through their passion, innovation and ingenuity.

The striking part, though, is the speed with which they have executed their idea. They conceptualised it on January 11, 2010, and by March 12 had accomplished their task of lighting up 82 out of a total of 111 homes in a tribal village in Thane district of Maharashtra.

What's praiseworthy is that in less than 100 days a group of 250 college students managed to win the faith of the tribals -- without which Project Chirag (more about it later) would have been a "super flop" -- raised a "humongous amount of money" (their own words), selected a vendor who gave them the technology to produce quality solar lamps, trained a disadvantaged section to assemble the lamps, trained their own volunteers to impart training to the assemblers, transported and installed solar lamps in this village and sold these lamps that costs them Rs 3,650 a piece for just Rs 500 to make Project Chirag a reality.

In doing so, they have created a value chain of several disadvantaged communities -- both rural and urban -- that has the true potential to transform the country's landscape.

According to some estimates, approximately 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity and it is this gap these students aim to bridge.

With guidance and encouragement from their college professor Pratibha Pai and principal Indu Shahani (who also happens to be Mumbai's sheriff), more than two score students of HR College of Commerce & Economics lit up Ujjaini, a tribal 'dark village' deep in the forest, spread across a radius of two km and made up of 111 households, barely 110 km from India's financial capital Mumbai in Wada tehsil in Thane district.

Rediff.com met five of these activists -- Jyotirmoy Chatterji, Prachi Bali, Abhinav Mehra, Afsheen Irani and Pawan Bhatia (all under 23 years of age) -- in their college canteen to discuss Project Chirag started by the Students In Free Enterprise, HR College.

Project Chirag

"A village that does not have any source of electricity or does not have even one electrified household. is a 'dark village'," explains Jyotirmoy, a third year commerce student and president of SIFE, HRC.

"Project Chirag is about lighting up rural life using clean and sustainable solar energy," he says.

And these volunteers chose Ujjaini out of a list of 30 dark villages in Thane district that the Tata Energy Research Institute provided them with "because the tribal folks here have never seen light in their entire life".

The solar lamp unit is a portable LED (light emitting diode) device that comprises a solar lantern, a battery inside protective casing, a tubelight and two solar panels that capture sunlight and convert it into light energy.

"All one has to do is put two panels on the rooftops of these tribal houses where one can get maximum sunlight, connect the wires coming out of these panels into a battery which in turn energises the tubelight and lantern and they are ready to go," says Afsheen, a second-year student at HRC who has trained many tribals in Ujjaini to work on these lamps.

Image: Clockwise from top: A grandmother with impaired vision excited that her grandson can finally experience light; A happy Ujjain family; Tribal children reading a book under solar lamps.

Photographs: Project Chirag

Deepak Saha gave up IAS to develop villages

2010-03-02T13:59:00.000-08:00

Prabhakar Kumar / CNN-IBN

Published on Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 16:59, Updated on Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 01:46 in India section

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Jai Prabha Foundation

Banka District (Bihar): In CNN-IBN's Special Series Real Heroes, meet Deepak Saha, who could have been an IAS officer but shunned the life of comfort to transform 40 villages in his home state Bihar. Read more...

The semi-plateau terrain at the Bihar-Jharkhand border was a virgin experiment bowl for Deepak Saha, where not even a blade of grass grew. Today, this region has everything - right from well irrigated green lush fields, mango gardens, schools for kids, safe drinking water for all, vocational training centers for women folks-churning out new breed of women entrepreneurs, successful models of women's self help groups and health centers in every village.

Today, in this entire region, not a single soul lives below the poverty line and sex ratio has been completely reversed in favour of girl children.

"I started this social entrepreneurship. It was primarily because of the economic comfort my family background provided me. I really didn't have to think only about bread and butter and it gave me liberty and scope to do what I enjoyed doing the most. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur."

It all started in 1990, when Deepak cracked the civil service exams. But instead of taking up a Government job, he chose to return back to Bhagalpur to join Jaiprabha, the NGO being run by his mother. After 18 years of long journey, today he looks back with contentment.

"The motto that our organisation has is towards self reliance. So we don't want the population to be dependent on what we are doing for them, but they should become self-reliant so that they are able to fend for themselves, so that once we are redundant, once we phase out of this area, they should be able to look after all this. People's participation is important," he says.

A usual day in Deepak's life starts early morning with newspapers and breakfast with the family members and soon after, he is on move to what he calls his experiment bowl. Nothing refreshes him more than joining children in their playground and playing Santa Claus to them.

Today, Deepak runs 13 such pre-schools, where dance and songs are the medium of teaching. After teaching at the school, he joins the mothers of the children for the weekly Self Help Group meetings. It's this initiative, which has had maximum impact on the lives and earnings of families. For the first time, females of this area can walk out of their houses and start their own ventures from the petty loans they take from their Self Help Groups. In this way, they are able to contribute to family income. Today, they walk tall and proud.

"It was almost seen as a economic enterprise. We didn't just want it to be some women gathering together and starting some small manufacturing unit or a small business enterprise. We started social engineering through these groups, to empower them. They started dressing better, had their own money and they had their own investments. They could take loans. We linked them up," explains Deepak.

Irrigation had been another stress area for this nearly barren plateau region. The answers came in the form of deep bore wells, de-silting of natural water bodies using satellite imageries and building check dam and using lift irrigation for farming.

"Just because of water problems whenever we used to go to the field and exert pressure on people to send the children to school, they would refuse to. They used the children as working hands because they did not have the means to sustain themselves. I realised the reason they were not able to sustain themselves was because the irrigation was very weak and primitive. It was absolutely monsoon dependent. They needed means of irrigation especially since this entire area is a plateau with a reverse from both sides. So we lifted the water high in this low lying area with the help of a check dam. It has been replicated in 10 villages and all their fields have become fertile. They are getting free crops, they are doing multi-cropping and the land is getting fertile," says Deepak.

Eighteen years of experimentation and consistent efforts has yielded desired results in this region.

Over 131 deep borewells and hand-pumps introduced by Jaiprabha provide safe drinking water to 100 per cent of the population of the region.
There has been not a single maternity death in the past three years.
Education in these villages is almost 100 per cent.
The Jaiprabha Vikas Kendra caters to the personality development of people by providing vocational training in arts, crafts, music, tailoring and other related activities.

Smiles on the faces of the children and the women cycling fearlessly in this Naxal infested area are just few reflections of how one intervention has made a world of difference for people of this region.

This man gives the anonymous dignity in death

2010-03-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

Published on Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 18:04 in India section: CNN-IBN
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Faizabad: In a bustling lane in Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, Mohd Sharif stands out in the crowd. When all around him are living each day, fighting their own battles, 75-year-old Sharif is turning the wheel for the poor and sometimes the dead.

They say tragedy changes lives. It certainly did for Sharif when his eldest son, Rais Khan, died under mysterious circumstances. A month after he disappeared, the police handed over to him a packet containing his son's clothes. Overwhelmed with grief, Sharif gathered courage and decided no one else would suffer death in anonymity.

“We searched for one month and then the police gave us his shirt. Then we found out that he is dead. We hope this does not happen to anyone,” Sharif said.

It is at the small graveyard Taad ki Takiya that Sharif Bhai finds peace. In the last 15 years, he has laid many an unclaimed body to rest, Hindu and Muslim.

“Every human being has the same blood. I don’t differentiate between Hindus and Muslims,” Sharif said.

For a cycle mechanic by profession, Sharif barely makes both ends meet. His family comprises of an ailing wife who still grieves for her son and a young daughter who has to be married off, but personal battles can wait for another day.

'I aspire to make a difference'

2010-01-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

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Courtesy : Rediff

IIT-Madras graduate Apoorve Dubey.

"I aspire to make a difference in the lives of people around me," says Apoorve Dubey, who at 26 delivers motivational lectures in schools and colleges, works as a software engineer with Symantec and has also written a book The Flight Of Ambition.

"No, I may not be able to change the world. But that should not stop me from changing someone's world," says the IIT-Madras graduate, who also volunteers with the Akshar Bharti programme, an initiative meant for taking quality education to the underprivileged masses.

The programme, which began two years ago, has about 140 libraries across the country.

Apoorve is also an executive member of the Kalinga Kusum Foundation which addresses rural education via vocational centres.

When you ask him how it all began he recalls his days at IIT-Madras.

"A friend took me to a small house close to our campus where a couple lived with some 20 children!" he says. "Most of them were between two and 14. As I wondered why they had so many children when they clearly couldn't take care of them, the friend mentioned that all but two of the kids were adopted!"

All of them, Apoorve says, spoke Tamil, a language he did not speak nor understand. Yet he could feel a deep sense of filial bonding.

"I was shocked to learn that it was an orphanage. The couple had two children; the rest of them had nowhere to go. But all of them stayed like a family. It was difficult to distinguish between the couple's real children and the adopted ones. Muthukumar and his wife Kala treated each of them as their own," he says.

The way the couple treated the adopted kids left an indelible impression on Apoorve. It was then that he made up his mind to make a difference to society.

Whenever he is asked what inspired him to write The Flight of Ambition, images of that small house in Chennai flash before his eyes.

The other person who left a lasting impact was a mathematics teacher at school. "Towards the end of his lecture," Apoorve says, "the topic of discussion would invariably drift towards the greatness of India. You knew he was genuine and wasn't making things up. When we were passing out, we asked him what we could do for the country."

The teacher had a very practical answer: "He told us to simply be honest and do our job in the best manner we could. 'Don't think too big; just look around you and you will have plenty of problems to solve. If you don't fix the problem, no one else will', he said."

"It is imperative that we look to eradicate the problems that we see around us and look beyond narrow boundaries of religion and region," says Apoorve.

Having set up knowledge centres and libraries, Apoorve Dubey now plans to set up medical aid facilities. "We are collaborating with some doctors and will conduct health workshops. Providing medical aid, especially to the rural areas, is very important."

He is busy reaching out to young minds through seminars in schools and colleges to catch 'em young. "Kids are very receptive. Their minds are fertile. I am planting seeds and I am convinced each and every individual will shine like a star."

Image: Apoorve Dubey teaching a class
Photographs: Apoorve Dubey

They sell trash to save lives

2010-01-01T21:26:00.000-08:00

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Shail Shah is a 23-year-old IT engineer. He works with Adani Wilmar, a leading edible oil company, but there's something else that keeps this young go-getter busy.

In his free time, Shail along with 65 other young people from Ahmedabad , come together to raise money for deserving, needy families, distribute food and supplies to slum-dwellers and spend time with orphans and old-aged.

While the social activities of this group are varied, one of the more commendable efforts is Shail's initiative to raise money for dialysis patients. He along with 25-year-old Palakh Jain have been raising money by visiting homes, and picking up and selling old newspaper and other recyclable material for the last four years.

People who hear of them through word of mouth or recent news reports call them up and they arrange for the paper or other trash to be picked up. This is then sold at the recyclers', who give them a slightly higher rate than the normal. And this money is channeled into the fund -- a fund provides patients suffering from kidney failure with dialysis. "It is not a one-time expense," explains Shail. These patients need dialyses on a weekly basis and, costing about Rs 12,000-15,000 per month, it is out of reach for many.

But why have they chosen such an unconventional route to raising money? "Well, when you just ask people for money whatever the cause may be, they are reluctant. They are not sure of whether the funds will be utilised for the right purpose, whether the funds will reach the people who need it. This way they can contribute without actually having to give us their money."

The first patient he reached out to was a lady who suffered renal failure during childbirth. Being from an impoverished background she needed help and approached Shail. He extended his assistance from his own pocket but as he learnt of the many others who were suffering just for lack of money, he decided to mobilise funds through his network of friends.

"Another patient, a rickshaw driver, approached me saying that if I could just help him with one week's dialysis, he would live for a week longer enabling him to earn enough money for the next week's session," says Palakh.

So far they have raised Rs 1.72 lakhs but Shail is looking to the future with caution. "While we do want to help more people, we don't want to risk neglecting our older patients. Since dialysis is a recurrent expense we need to ensure that all our patients are taken care of."

The duo has tied up with the Gujarat Kidney Foundation and a panel of six nephrologists. It is from here that deserving patients are identified and assisted. They also collaborate with the Thackershy Trust, where dialysis is administered at a nominal rate. Candidates are screened to make sure that they are truly in need of assistance. The nephrologists charge a marginal amount, which is then covered by the fund.

Apart from this they are also involved in other social activities. They visit old-age homes every fortnight, a school for mentally challenged children every week where they interact with the children and organise dance parties, distribute khichdi and blankets to slum dwellers. A friend's parents have donated two vehicles to the cause, which are used to transport volunteers and supplies every week.

It all began with a drive home from a party. It was winter and this group of youngsters saw people shivering in the cold. This sight prompted them to rustle up some funds to buy them blankets. Since then the group has grown, as has their scope of activity.

And what does the future hold? "Five years down the line, no Indian should die for lack of funds – that is our goal, and we are working towards it," says Shail, brimming with hope and confidence.

You light up my eyes!

2009-11-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

KOUNTEYA SINHA TIMES NEWS NETWORK , TOI Crest 21 November 2009, 05:15am IST

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Born with beautiful large twinkling eyes, Padma Devi's newborn son soon became a favourite in her small village in southern Karnataka.

The baby was born underweight and weighed just about 1.6 kg, but the joy of his birth drove concerns about his weight out of his mother's mind. However, two months later, Padma noticed something strange - his lightbrown pupil had become white and he stopped responding to movement.

A subsequent visit to a primary health centre gave Padma a devastating shock - the child was declared irreversibly blind. He was suffering from Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) - the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness in India.

ROP is a condition that affects up to 47 per cent of the babies born below 2,000 grams in India. Of these, nearly 20 per cent go blind if not treated on time. Interestingly, none of these children are born with ROP. Premature babies actually go on to develop it between one to three months after birth. Strangely, even as vitamin A deficiency and corneal problems have received adequate consideration and funding from the government, retinal malfunctions that account for 22 per cent of the childhood blindness cases in India have failed to draw requisite attention from the relevant authorities.

With the Union health ministry yet to realise the seriousness of this problem, the fight against ROP is now being led by two unlikely heroes in Karnataka - Dr Anand Vinekar, a paediatric retinal surgeon armed with a laser machine and a camera the size of a 165-litre fridge on the backseat of his Qualis, and Krishna, a 25-year-old technician who has barely cleared middle school.

For the past two years, Dr Vinekar, head of Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology's department of paediatric retina, and Krishna - a lab technician trained to identify various stages of ROP with nearly 100 per cent accuracy by just looking at images - have been traversing the most backward roads of Karnataka for 13 hours a day, stopping at villages, screening newborns for ROP and surgically treating those who need it on the spot with the laser machine.

However, what's creating waves internationally is their latest project - a Tele-ROP model. This is how it works. Trained technicians visit remote villages, capture retinal images with a special portable digital wide-field camera (capable of seeing 130Ã‚Â° of the retina with one single shot). These are then sent via email to a special server. Retinal experts sitting miles away view the images and give their diagnosis within minutes. The technician then informs the mother about ROP and gets the child treated by a Narayana Nethralaya ophthalmic surgeon.

"India has less than 300 retinal surgeons,"says Dr Vinekar. "That's why we are training common people to become technicians - those who can just look at images and detect stage one to stage five ROP, negating the requirement for a doctor. It is easy to take a retinal image, so we are training technicians to analyse the images and diagnose. Due to the massive number of babies that need to be screened, and the limited number of trained physicians, there is no other way. At present, babies born in rural areas are either never screened or screened too late for ROP, which can be prevented by timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment. That's why we are now creating self-sufficient districts - training ophthalmologists from peripheral healthcare centres to treat ROP besides having two technicians per district. Besides Karnataka , a similar project is underway in West Bengal." Till now, they have screened over 1,700 infants around a 350-km radius of the Nethralaya. Over 155 kids from neonatal centres in 18 hospitals in south Karnataka's seven districts have been treated.

The ministry has finally taken note of their efforts and through a publicprivate partnership decided to incorporate the model in India's National Rural Health Mission. Six more districts in Karnataka are now being added for the out-reach programme, which will ultimately be taken across the country. "A number of Southeast Asian and African countries are facing similar problems with ROP and have a shortage of trained ophthalmologists," Dr Vinekar says. "India has proved that a technician-driven model works. What's worse about ROP is that the retina does not look abnormal from outside till it reaches stage five when the eye looks white in the centre. The blindness is irreversible then. Till now, we have taken 100,000 images. To ensure that data is not lost via transit on the net, we have developed a specialised server where experts log in, see images and give their diagnosis. The software is now also being incorporated in an iPhone so that live images can be transferred via SMS. This will enable the iPhone to allow experts sitting anywhere to access images taken in any part of the country."

Blind spot

India is home to one fourth of the world's blind children, making it the world's blind children's capital Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) affects up to 47% of the babies born below 2,000 grams in India India has 24 million live births annually, of which 8.4% babies are born below 2,000 grams Of these 15-20 % will go blind if not treated in time Blindness sets in when the child is 4-6 weeks old and becomes complete before the tenth week ROP mainly affects premature infants born before 31 weeks of gestation (a full-term pregnancy has a gestation of 38-42 weeks) The smaller a baby is at birth, the more likely it is to develop ROP ROP was first diagnosed in 1942 ROP is classified in five stages, ranging from mild (stage I) to severe (stage V) Babies can be treated between stages II and III ROP occurs when abnormal blood vessels grow and spread throughout the retina. These vessels are fragile and can leak, scarring the retina and causing retinal detachment - the main cause of blindness

This man saves lives, one click at a time

2009-10-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

Original Article : Link ,

October 20, 2009 15:10 IST , Rediff.com , Abhishek Mande

For over ten years now, Khushroo Poacha has stood by the sole belief that to do good work you don't need money. Poacha runs www.indianblooddonors.com (IBD), a site that lets blood donors and patients in need of blood connect with each other almost instantaneously. He also does not accept cash donations.

The site has been live for almost ten years and with over 50,000 donors in its database, IBD is perhaps a classic example of what the Internet is truly capable of. But more importantly, it is a reflection of a single human being's desire to make a difference to this world.

It all started in the mid-'90s when Khushroo Poacha, an employee with the Indian Railways in Nagpur saw a doctor being beaten up because he couldn't save a patient's life. No one in the mob seemed to understand that it was the lack of blood that caused the death.

"A few years later, I witnessed the death of a welder because he couldn't get blood. The two incidents really shook me up," Poacha says, "And that was when I expressed to my wife my desire of doing something."

Poacha, however, had no clue about how he could make a difference until one day, sitting in a cyber cafe with a 56 kbps connection, the idea came to him.

"I did not know head or toe of the Internet, let alone about domain names, but I knew this would be the tool that would make a difference," he says, explaining the dotcom extension to the site.

Over the next few months, Poacha liquidated practically all his savings, purchased a domain name and started up indianblooddonors.com.

"During the time, there were no companies booking or hosting web domains in India. I was paying USD 300 every three months to keep the site live and running. Meanwhile, I had spent almost Rs 40,000 in developing the site and had gone practically bankrupt," he says.

Poacha says he even went to a local newspaper to place an ad. "I needed visibility and that was the only way I thought I could reach out to the people. The day the ad appeared, I was expecting a flood of registrations," he recollects. "No one registered."

The silver lining to the dark cloud came when someone from the outskirts of his hometown Nagpur contacted him, expressing interest. "It was a saving grace," Poacha says.

Meanwhile, the dotcom bubble had burst and Poacha was being told what a fool he had been. And then there were household expenses to be taken care of too.

"There were many occasions when unpaid phone bills would be lying in the house and there would be no money to pay them off," Poacha recollects, adding that "things always have a way of sorting themselves out. And mysteriously during such times, a cheque would make its way into the mailbox."

Poacha admits that his wife was quite apprehensive about his endeavour. "But she believed in me," he says, "And that has made all the difference."

Visibility, however, was still an issue. No publication was willing to write about him. No major hospital or blood bank was interested in taking his calls.

And then the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake happened. As visuals of the devastation flashed before his eyes on television, Poacha realised yet again he had to do something.

Only this time he knew just what.

"I called up (television channel) Zee News and requested them to flash the site's name on the ticker and they agreed."

Five minutes later, the ticker was live. Ten minutes later, the site crashed.

"I spoke to the people who were hosting the site (by now website hosting had started off in India) and explained to them the situation. They immediately put me on a fresh server and over the next three days or so I received some 3,500 odd registrations," Poacha recollects.

Realising the difference he had made, the 42-year-old started working on getting visibility again.

Over the next few months, Poacha had contacted every major magazine and sure enough, a few responded. "Outlook (magazine) wrote about me, then (British newspaper) The Guardian followed suit and then came the BBC," he says.

Along the way, IBD had also gone mobile. All you had to do was type out a message and send it to a short code and you'd have a list of blood donors in your inbox.

As luck would have it, the service became far too popular for Poacha's pocket. "By then I had stopped taking cash donations and had to discontinue it," he says.

Interestingly, IBD is not yet registered as an NGO. "We function as individuals. We don't take donations and only accept bumper stickers (of IBD) and postage stamps to send out those stickers and create awareness," he says, "I was asked to deliver a lecture at IIM during a social entrepreneurship seminar and was asked what my sustenance model was. I replied I didn't have one. And I have been doing this for the last ten years."

Today, the database of IBD is growing at the rate of 10-15 users every day and the requests have grown from 25 to 40 per day.

Poacha says he eats, drinks and breathes IBD. "The zeal I had ten years ago has not diminished and the site continuously sees innovation." The latest, Poacha tells us, is the option of being an exclusive donor to one patient.

"During my journey, I realised there were some patients who required blood every month. So if you want, we can put you onto them so you can continue making a sustained difference to one person's life."

IBD is currently on an auto pilot mode and Poacha continues to keep his day job. He says, "Initially I would take the calls and personally connect the donor with the patient's relative. But I know only three languages and I'd get calls from all over India," he laughs.

Poacha recounts an incident that never left him: "A man from Chandigarh called me and told me he was desperately seeking A-ive blood for his 2-year-old. About five minutes after the call, he got the (difficult to find) blood group he needed. Soon after the surgery he called me up crying, thanking me for saving his child's life. For me, it was just another day at work. But his whole world was at stake that day. I can never forget that call."

Last year Poacha was invited to the Asian Social Entrepreneurs Summit 2008 in South Korea where venture capitalists argued that it wasn't possible to sustain an endeavour without money. He says, "I pointed out that Mother Teresa had no revenue model when she started the Missionaries of Charity. If you want to do good work, you simply do it."

For someone who has sustained his enterprise for a decade with just a few bumper stickers and postage stamps, Khushroo Poacha knows best.

Young India is following her heart, are you?

2009-09-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

September 29, 2009 15:45 IST
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The all new world class sea link, the surge of 3G ready mobile phones, India's say in world matters -- we are fortunate to be born in a blooming nation in the 21st century. Sure enough, this is changing the mood of Indian youth. They are game for exploring different and unusual fields and are continually moving farther from the security of 9 to 9 jobs -- they are tending more and more towards something they are passionate about, something that stems from their very heart.

Does all this strike a chord in your heart? Sounds like your story? Then welcome, to India's new-youth bandwagon, which is driving growth like never before. These are the youth, who want to work, but on their terms and do just what their heart says. YOU could be a part of this brigade.

India is following her heart

Over the past few years, many enthusiastic souls have been quietly and voluntarily involving themselves with causes like educating children and adults in the underdeveloped sections of cities, environmental drives including no pollution drives, plant more trees campaigns, no honking campaigns, liberation and education of child labourers, development of small villages and much more.

Janhvi Somaiya is passionate about the work she does, "I have been visiting a village called Saphale on the outskirts of Mumbai , for six years now. It has been an enriching experience and I am happy I can make a difference to their lives."

Meenakshi Iyer from Chennai, a member of the Satark Nagarik Sanghathan that works towards making people aware of the Right to Information Act says, "I have made it my life's mission to make citizens aware and alert of their rights."

Jishaan Roy, a final year medical student from Kolkata, believes in disseminating knowledge he has to the underprivileged people.

"I like conducting astronomy workshops for children in Pune. They feel excited about seeing the stars and planets and I feel satisfied to see them so happy with a little effort of mine."

Sunita Mahendra, an accounts manager in a private firm in Delhi helps her local NGO to maintain their finances. "The NGO I volunteer with deals with injured animals and birds. So, it becomes important to keep the finances in check for paying the doctors' bills, for medicines, for other equipment and I'm glad I can help them out with this. I feel good knowing that I too am contributing to the spirit of life."

Young India needs to choose between intent and action

With awakening taking place among the youth of India, there has been a strong urge to strike a balance between domestic, professional and social life. People today want to spend quality time with their family along with putting constructive hours into their professional lives.

However, they also wish to contribute towards building a better society, and give back to the system. What they need is an opportunity to strike a balance by utilising their skills they exercise in the professional field for the cause of building a better society.

Moreover, the time has come to convert intent to real action. Not just to think about doing, but actually doing it. Go ahead and volunteer.

India is looking for volunteers like you

Passionate Indians keen to work for the society now get a platform in the form of iVolunteer.

iVolunteer, an initiative of MITRA, a not-for-profit organisation working in the social sector in India, is now urging people to go ahead and do it -- in this case, go ahead and volunteer.

iVolunteer India Fellow Professional is an exclusive volunteering programme for 50 Most Passionate Indians to come and share their professional skills in rural development organisations for mutual benefit.

Therefore, if sharing your time as a volunteer enthuses you, if your heart feels that you can give two months of your life to something exciting and help serve a key sector of the country as well, you are in the right place.

You could visit www.ivolunteer.in/professional and find out what is in store for you and what fits you the best. We wish you the best of luck!

The sickle and the superwoman

2009-09-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Rohit Viswanath, Nilofer D'Souza / Forbes India

Published on Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:40 in India section

Article Link

In Greek mythology, a tribe of women called the Amazons inhabited the island of Themyscira, a world without men. They lived in 1200 BC and were immortalised in Homer's Iliad as the Antianeira - 'they who fight like men'.

Women in Badiya, a tiny hamlet in the Himalayan foothills, may have never heard of the Amazons or the Iliad, but, they run their villages not much unlike the ancient Greeks - with minimal patriarchal interference.

Rural India is undergoing a gradual change in its social landscape. As more men leave for cities in search of the 'great urban dream', women are being thrust into the role of family head, becoming the sole caretaker for everything from farms to parents. According to the Draft National Policy for Women in Agriculture (April, 2008), prepared by the National Commission for Women (NCW), "An estimated 20 per cent of rural households are de facto female headed due to widowhood, desertion, or male out-migration."

Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development, Rita Sharma, says, "We are aware of the phenomenon. Nearly 13 per cent of rural households are headed by wo-men today."

The figures may vary, but it is still considered significant as in the 1970s only about five per cent of rural households were headed by women, according to a Delhi-based labour economist. It's not as if women were never involved in agriculture. According to NCW's draft policy, women constitute 40 per cent of the agricultural workforce. But it was the men who took decisions about which crops to grow, how much bank loan to take and whether it was worth pledging the farm to a moneylender.

Now, the women are getting to make some of the decisions. Yet, even as they step into their husbands' shoes, they have had to face several challenges. The biggest constraint remains less access to land, credit and technical assistance. In addition, they have to battle tradition, and deal with organisations and equipment geared to service men.

Filling the Vacuum

The man-to-woman ratio in Badiya village, in Tehri district of Uttarakhand state, has witnessed a gradual decline over the years and is now approximately 30:70. Joining the army seems to be a favourite option for the men.

Vinita is one such farmer who now heads the household while her husband is away. Her family owns about 400 square metres of farm land. Like before, she gets up at sun rise, tends to the livestock, works on the land, and also looks after her three young children and aged mother-in-law. But the difference is that she's the boss now. She sells the surplus and uses the money for household expenses.

But Vinita is an exception here rather than the norm. Most women in a similar position take over production of food crops for home consumption rather than for the market.

The women of Badiya still don't have a say in property rights. That means they can't negotiate with banks or micro-finance organisations. In any case their holdings are so fragmented and the scale of their farming so small that they don't pledge the land.

The vacuum created by the men leaving the villages has forced the women to come together. In Badiya, the women have formed a self help group to address common problems.

They pooled in their meagre funds to buy fertilisers and other inputs. As this co-operation helped increase farm productivity, though marginally, the women began to sell whatever little surplus they grew each season. Over a period of time, they had enough to pool in Rs 320 each to set up a shop of their own which became the first one to make daily provisions available to the hamlet.

A similar pooling of resources is helping women in villages around the town of Doddaballapur in Karnataka. Under the Government's Stree Shakthi programme, self help groups of women pool in funds, from which money is lent to those in need.

These self help groups are also successfully challenging the patriarchal land ownership. In some cases, men have added their wives' names as co-owners of their land. Where such joint ownership doesn't materialise, help comes in the form of a pool-in fund run by the self-help groups. However, in the total number of title deeds, women account for just 10 to 20 per cent of ownership, according to State Vice-President of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (a farmer's movement), N Venkata Reddy.

Senior Fellow, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, Dr Surabhi Mittal, says, "Policy must be conducive to the changes that are happening. Once married, the women should have a joint title to the land, so that they become eligible for credit, Kisan Credit Cards and other government schemes for small and marginal farmers." Joint ownership will enable them to access various entitlements essential for commercially viable small scale farming, including horticulture and animal husbandry.

Outside Help

Being responsible for the farming doesn't come easy to women. Duties like ploughing and harvesting that were taken for granted as part of a man's chore have become an issue. Also, the additional responsibility often adds to their drudgery. "The women of rural Uttarakhand work an average of 14-18 hours a day. Women who want their children to go to school take on the work children traditionally did such as caring for cattle and poultry," says Manager Uttaranchal Gramya Vikas Samiti, Pawan Kumar.

In Uttarakhand, NGOs working to improve rural livelihood realised that the women needed help. Kumar says, "We realised that the women's lives were tough given the sheer amount of their workload. Our main goal was drudgery reduction."

They helped introduce high-yielding varieties of seeds and also improved agriculture tools. The women have now begun growing cash crops like mustard and groundnuts that fetches them a higher margin in the market.

Sharma says the Government is keeping a close tab on the trend. "Even under our own employment schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, almost 50 per cent are women, going up to 80 per cent in states like Tamil Nadu," she says. According to her, Government agencies are working on various initiatives to help women farmers. Earlier agricultural extension agents were largely men. Now more women have been encouraged to join the profession. The men have been trained to be sensitive to the women farmers. The Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, for example, is developing lightweight equipment, including ploughs, keeping in mind the needs of women farmers.

For Vinita's family, earlier, the paddy harvest was just enough for the family of six for three months. Now with the improved seeds and soil fertility, the yield has increased five-fold.

The concept of banking was introduced to the village. "Bank itself was a foreign word, unheard of in our remote hamlet of Badiya. Today, having seen the advantages of banking each and every woman has come forth and proudly states that they all visit the bank at least once in two weeks," says leader of a self help group, Prameela.

Breaking Social Barriers

With men gone, some social barriers are breaking down too. Vinita, an upper caste woman-farmer, would never have joined hands with Ranjana Devi from a lower caste, while her husband was around. But today all village women come together at meetings where they discuss and solve problems over a cup of tea. This cup of tea hasn't been an easy brew.

They have had to battle old prejudices. During weekly meetings held at members' homes, tea is served in metal and plastic glasses depending on what caste one belongs to. "Elders still don't allow us to mingle at par, hence these practices, but we have overcome all our mind blocks personally," says Prameela.

Missing meetings is out of question. It is, after all, a matter of survival. The initial feeling of incompetence and lack of confidence was overcome within a few meetings.

Challenging the Old Order

The new role assumed by women has changed the perception of their family members towards them. Lakshmi, a woman farmer from Badiya says, "Earlier my husband would speak and I would listen. Today, all major household decisions are taken through mutual discussion. Even my in-laws respect me because I have become a major breadwinner."

Consultancy group Pragmatix carried out a survey in five Uttarakhand districts. It found a 93 per cent rise in the number of women influencing household decisions in the last three years. But some old attitudes die hard. While men are receptive to the changing status of women, they still view domestic duties as part of the woman's responsibility.

With all the hurdles and the extra work, what is driving the women to take up a bigger responsibility in the villages? Hope for a better life for their children. Back in Badiya, Vinita says she is much more confident today that her 15-year-old daughter will get good education. After all, Vinita is not only making money of her own but also getting to decide how it will be spent.

Doc who charges only Rs 2

2009-08-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

A Ganesh Nadar, Rediff News
Article Link

Dr Ravindra Koelhe, MD, lives and runs a clinic in Melghat, Maharashtra. His fee is Rs 2 for the first consultation and Rs 1 for the second.

Not only is he a doctor and social worker, Dr Koelhe has also taken the government to court for having failed in its duty to protect the Korku tribals of the region.

After completing his MBBS, he worked in Melghat for a year-and-a-half only to realise that he needed more expertise to handle the problems of the tribals. So he went back to medical college for an MD in preventive and social medicine.

"I have now been here for 24 years. In those days there were two public health centres and no roads. Once a week, I used to walk 40 kms from Dharni to Bairagarh to reach my clinic. I used to see at least one tiger every month. Since the last three years I haven't seen a single one," he says remembering his early days as a young doctor.

After completing his MBBS from Nagpur University, he decided to work in rural India. An ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, he was also influenced by Ruskin Bond who wrote, 'If you want to serve mankind, go and work among the poorest and most neglected.'

He toured the rural areas of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and decided that Gadricholi in Maharashtra was the most backward amongst his travels and decided to work there. His mother discouraged him since it was a Naxalite affected area. She told him that Melghat was equally backward and that he should work here instead.

Dr Koelhe has been in Melghat since then. It has been 24 years now.

Melghat means the place where mountains meet. It lies on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border and is easily one of the most beautiful places in the country, its greenery only broken by the brightly coloured clothes of the Korku tribals who have made these mountains their home.

But the region's beauty is overshadowed by its hostile terrain. Its infrastructure is deplorable. The roads are pathetic, the only way one can access its remote villages is in rugged four-wheel jeep.

Melghat's problems are far too many. There is no power for miles, new power lines are discouraged because this a designated tiger reserve. Though the tiger is rarely spotted here, the so-called presence of the tiger has contributed to the total neglect of this region.

The poor tribals live off the land. They cultivate their small patch of fields on the incline of the mountains. There is no irrigation system and no wells because there is no power to pump the water.

In this wilderness, Dr Koelhe has stayed on to alleviate the misery of the tribals.

He feels Melghat is a socio-economic problem, which needs to be dealt with holistically. "We as doctors can look after them when they fall sick, but there are other shortcomings that have to be addressed like education, skill enhancement and assured economic activity through out the year."

"When I came here the infant mortality rate was close to 200 per 1,000 babies. Now it is 60. In Kerala it is 8 and in rural India 9. We have to bring it down to the national level. That is why I have filed a public interest litigation in the Mumbai high court."

Discussing the case, he says, "We have filed our affidavits. Now the government has to reply. They don't file a reply for months together. Who can do anything? We want to sit down and discuss the problem and solution, but they don't want to sit with us. We cannot force them."

Stressing on the need that it was important to improve the health of the tribals he feels the attitude of doctors assigned to the government's public health centres has to change.

"They have to learn to serve. They should not make the tribals feel they are doing them a favour."

Highlighting the problems of the area, he says farming depends on the rain and tribals are jobless with no avenues of income for eight months in a year.

To add to that, there is no availability of food in Melghat from March to October. Milk is scarce and irrigation facilities are absent. Before 1978, tribals used to hunt and eat small animals like the rabbit to sustain themselves but after the region was declared as a tiger reserve, hunting became illegal.

Since there are no veterinarians, the cattle owned by the tribals often die without the right medication. There are 20 artificial insemination centres but are all shut for want of vets.

The Melghat area shot into the national limelight last year because of infant deaths due to malnutrition, but Dr Koelhe said it was wrong to label them as 'malnutrition deaths.' "It is more like starvation," he had said when I met him last year while reporting the infant deaths.

"There is no availability of food here from March to October. The mother is therefore malnourished, and thus we have neo-natal deaths," he explained.

Milk is in short supply because the milk co-op closed down due to the competition between the Jersey and Indian cow. "The Jersey doesn't get enough nutrition here and the Indian cow does not give milk here. The reason being, the cow does not get enough nutrition. Where does it have the energy to give milk?" he said.

The tribals are unable to rear poultry for their livelihood because the chicks often die within the first two days. "There is a vaccination that has to be given in the first 36 hours after birth, but how do we give it? Since the tribals are a scattered population, it is not possible."

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the government's programme to provide rural employment for 100 days, was started here, but was then halted. Bhandu Sane, the founder of the non governmental organisation Khoj, told rediff.com that the NREGA was not functioning in the Dharni and Chikaldhara talukas. Moreover, workers who had worked under the NREGA had not been paid wages totalling Rs 3 million in the Chikaldhara taluka. Wages were also pending in Dharni.

Dharni has been declared a drought hit area. Many areas in Chikaldhara also face drought.

"What we need is awareness. There are 400 schemes to look after the tribals from the womb to the grave, but the tribals don't even know what these schemes are. And those who know are not interested in implementing them," says Dr Koelhe resignedly.

The tribals have to be provided with safe drinking water and need well stocked ration shops in every village. "The agricultural board is closed. It has to start again. Irrigation facilities to store water are needed and tribals have to be taught the use of fertilizers and pesticides."

"The best thing the government has done here is to open more than 300 schools. In those days there were no teachers. The even better thing that the government did was to introduce Korku text books in 1985. Now primary education is in the Korku language. This has gone a long way in making the tribals literate and given them confidence to attend school."

Instead of discussing what the government should do for the tribals, Dr Koelhe firmly believes that the tribals should be taught to be independent and demand what is theirs.

"I run training classes here for batches of tribal youth. We tell them about their rights and the schemes available for them. We teach them to demand what is their right and tell then never to bribe," he declareS proudly.

He also advises them to grow vegetables which are necessary for their nutrition.

"We are not here to duplicate the government's work, but to supplement it. I tell all my patients to go to the public health centre, and come to me only if they are not satisfied there. Even then after seeing them I always send them back to the PHC. I also call the PHC to explain the problem so that they can solve it."

The doctors at the PHC respect him and follow his advice. The cooperation of the medical faculty in this area makes life easier for the tribals who feel assured with Dr Koelhe around.

Dr Ravindra Koelhe can be contacted on his Bairagarh landline: 07226-202002, Dharni landline: 07226-202829 and mobile: 094231 46181.

The manager who does funerals for abandoned bodies

2009-08-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

Shobha Warrier in Chennai, Rediff News
Article Link

A lazy Sunday morning, when the majority of people relax with a cup of hot coffee and a newspaper, S Sreedhar is at the mortuary at the general hospital in Chennai. The hospital authorities hand over 17 bodies wrapped in a white cloth to him. No, they are not his relatives. In fact, all those 17 people are strangers to him -- unclaimed bodies with no one to give them a last farewell.

Sreedhar takes all these unknown bodies to the cemetery, and gives them a decent burial after showering them with rice, flowers and milk with a prayer on his lips. They are buried because the names or religion of the dead are unknown. If the deceased are Hindu and from an old age home, he gives them a proper cremation according to Hindu rites.

Back home, Sreedhar, associate vice-president, IndiaInfoline, does not feel bad that his weekly holiday starts in a burial ground. On the contrary, he feels calm and blissful, having bidden farewell with dignity to some unknown souls.

Sreedhar started this service of cremating the unknown 24 years ago in 1985 after he happened to read the book Daivathin Kural (God's voice) by Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, the Paramacharya or senior shankaracharya of the Kanchi Mutt.

"In the book, he says that a dead man should be given a decent farewell irrespective of the cast or religion the person belongs to. When the atma (soul)) leaves the body, it should be given a proper farewell. This is the belief of all Hindus."

The observation made Sreedhar think of all those unknown and unclaimed bodies in the hospitals and the abandoned old people in old age homes. And when he expressed his desire to cremate the abandoned bodies to the Paramacharya, he blessed Sreedhar and asked him to go ahead.

Soon after, when he went to an old age home called Vishranthi, he found that Savithri Vaithi, who ran the home, was not there. She had gone to cremate a person who had died that day.

Ever since she started Vishranthi, Savithri Vaithi has been performing the last rites of all the inmates who die there. He told her he would like to take over her job.

Within a few days, he was there at Vishranthi to collect the body of an elderly woman. She had a son and a daughter, but the man who lit her pyre was Sreedhar, a stranger.

That night, he couldn't sleep. The image of the old woman came to haunt him, and he could only think of the futility of all relationships.

"I couldn't eat or sleep that night. At that time, we had the conventional type of cremation where firewood was used, not the electric crematorium. So I lit her pyre and cremated the body of a total stranger."

Then, there was this old man on his death bed in a government hospital, yearning to see his only daughter. He had refused to see her when she married a man of her choice. Sreedhar went to see the daughter to let her know that her father was in the last days of his life and longed to see her.

But she refused to forgive her father or visit him. He told the old man that his daughter was not at home and that he had left a message for her to come and see him immediately.

For more details log on to www.dharmaa.org

Email: sreedhar.1955@rediffmail.com

Phone: 98407 44400

He gave up a 5-star job to feed the mentally ill

2009-08-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

A Ganesh Nadar in Madurai
Rediff.com, Article Link

'I don't feed beggars. They can look after themselves. The mentally ill won't ask anyone for food or money,' says N Krishnan who has been feeding them thrice a day for the past seven years.

For more information on N Krishnan's trust, log on to: http://www.akshayatrust.org/

Do you know Extraordinary Indians like N Krishnan? Please send us their name, contact information and a description of their work at extraordinarylives@rediffmail.com

N Krishnan feeds 400 mentally ill people on the streets of Madurai three times a day, every day, all 365 days of the year.

The 28 year old has been doing this for seven years via a charity called the Akshaya Trust.

A look into the kitchen reveals a spotlessly clean room. Sparkling vessels stacked neatly, groceries and provisions all lined up in rows -- rice, dal, vegetables, spices -- all of the best quality. One would think this was the kitchen of a five star hotel.

Maybe Krishnan achieves that effect because he was once a chef at a five star hotel in Bengaluru.

"Today's lunch is curd rice, with home made pickle, please taste it," he says, serving me on a plate made of dried leaves.

The food is excellent.

"I change the menu for different days of the week. They will get bored if I serve the same food every day," he says with an enthusiastic and infectious smile.

Krishnan cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner with the help of two cooks. He takes it himself to his wards on the street each day.

"I don't feed beggars. They can look after themselves. The mentally ill won't ask anyone for food or money. They don't move around much too. I find them in the same place every day."

That morning he put the food in a large vessel, the pickle in a smaller one and loaded it into a Maruti van donated by a Madurai philanthropist.

Ten minutes later we stopped near a man lying on the ground by a high wall. Krishnan put the food next to him. The man refused to even look at it, but grabbed the water bottle and drank eagerly. "He will eat the food later, looks like he was very thirsty," said Krishnan.

At the next stop, he laid the dry leaf-plate and served the food. He then scooped some food and started feeding the mentally ill man himself. After two morsels, the man started eating on his own.

We then crossed a crowded traffic signal and stopped the vehicle. On seeing Krishnan, four individuals moved slowly towards the Maruti van. They stood out in the crowd with their dirty, tattered clothes and unshaven beards.

They knew this Maruti van meant food. But they did not hurry, knowing that Krishnan would wait for them.

Krishnan served them under a tree and carried water for them. "They are not aware enough to get their own water," he explained.

And thus we went around the city till the Akshaya patra was empty. Of course, it would be full again for dinner later in the day.

As we returned, a startling fact hit me. Not a single mentally challenged person had thanked Krishnan. They did not even smile or acknowledge him. Still Krishnan carried on in a world where most of us get offended if someone doesn't say thank you, sometimes even for doing our jobs.

The food costs Rs 12,000 a day, but that doesn't worry him. "I have donors for 22 days. The remaining days, I manage myself. I am sure I will get donors for that too, people who can afford it are generally generous, particularly when they know that their hard earned money is actually going to the poor. That is why I maintain my accounts correctly and scrupulously."

He then pulled out a bill from the cabinet and showed it to me. It was a bill for groceries he had bought seven years ago. "This bill has sentimental value. It is the first one after I started Akshaya."

The economic slowdown has resulted in a drop in the number of donors. Earlier, they sustained meals for 25 days.

Software giant Infosys and TVS were so impressed with his work that they donated three acres of land to him in Madurai. Krishnan hopes to build a home for his wards there. He has built the basement for a woman's block which will house 80 inmates, but work has currently halted due to a lack of funds.

This, however, is not the sum of his good deeds. Krishnan also performs the funerals of unclaimed bodies in Madurai. He collects the body, bathes it and gives it a decent burial or cremation as the need may be.

He gets calls, both from the municipal corporation and general hospital for the funerals.

He recalls with a little prompting how one day he saw a mentally ill man eating his excreta. He rushed to the nearest restaurant and bought the man five idlis. The man ate voraciously, and then smiled at him. The smile made Krishnan want to do it again and again.

Krishnan has not married and wonders if anyone would want to marry a man who spends his days cooking food for others. He is firm that his life partner has to agree to this kind of life.

His parents were initially shocked, but are now very supportive of their son. They advise him about the cuisine and also about how he can streamline the process.

One wonders why he left his job in a five star hotel to bury the dead and feed the mentally ill. To this he just smiles and says, "I like doing it."

He put his life's savings for a home for prisoner's children

2009-08-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Rediff.com

Article Link

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Do you know Extraordinary Indians like Mani? Please send us their name, contact information and a description of their work at extraordinarylives@rediffmail.com

Weaving the magic carpet: Forbes India

2009-07-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

Neelima Mahajan-Bansal / Forbes India
Published on Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 16:08 in Business section

Jaipur Rugs Website

Article Link : Read

Kanni Devi’s hands work deftly as they knot brightly coloured wool on tightly wound warp threads. “Do taar chodd ke lagaale re; lal jhai sabaj bachcha; kala chalta,” she sings.
Her husband Chottelal, who is working at the other end of the loom, chants, “haanji”, in sync. It sounds like a Rajasthani folk song but is really instructions based on the design template this carpet has. Loosely translated, it means, “Leave two strings and then put the red on the red; put it behind the green; and put it right on the black.”
Kanni and Chottelal are two of the 125 carpet weavers in Narhet, a tiny village close to Jaipur. Narhet is what local administrators term as a “landless village”. No one here owns land. Most belong to impoverished backward classes and 70 percent are into rug-making.
Carpet weaving is an industry associated with worker exploitation in the popular imagination. But over the last three years, things have changed for Kanni and Chottelal.
Chottelal, who has always lived hand-to-mouth, recently took a Rs. 1 lakh loan to build a pukka house. He put both his daughters in a private school, for a fee of Rs. 100 per child. One month ago, he filed a health insurance claim — and got Rs 1,400 — for hospital visits. He keeps his latest acquisition, a Nokia mobile phone, under his loom. “We would love to buy a TV too but because of the hill ranges around, we don’t get TV signals here,” says Chottelal. Kanni wears bright magenta lipstick now, an indulgence that was unthinkable three years ago.
Earlier the couple used to weave carpets for contractors who paid them Rs. 50-60 per day per person. Now they earn above Rs. 100 a day each. The raw material is delivered to them unlike before when they had to travel to town to get it. Chottelal now has a better sense of carpet weaving, as he has received rigorous training.
Like Kanni and Chottelal, scores of families in this village have made the crossover to a better life.
Changing the Template
The soft-spoken Nand Kishore Chaudhary, founder of Jaipur Rugs, is the person responsible for all this. Chaudhary doesn’t speak much English and has never studied in a business school. But the social enterprise model that he has created for Jaipur Rugs has changed the lives of 40,000-odd weavers in villages across 10 states in India.
Under this model, his Rs. 67.75 crore (turnover) company engages independent weavers in far-flung villages — none of whom are on his rolls.
The idea first came to him in 1990, when he realised that the government was keen to promote carpet weaving in the tribal belts of Gujarat. “The government was using co-operative societies to develop carpet weaving in Gujarat. But I felt that co-operatives couldn’t do this well so it would be a great opportunity for me,” says Chaudhary.
So he relocated to Gujarat and, for eight years, developed a weaver network there. He deputed area commanders to oversee the existing business in Rajasthan. “We had 200 looms in Rajasthan by then and wherever we had a concentration of 50 looms, we would depute an area commander to monitor them, distribute raw material and supervise quality,” says Chaudhary.
Communication was a problem in those parts of Gujarat and Chaudhary needed to be in touch with his weavers. So in 1992, he set up a wireless network there! Since then, he has travelled across India to develop a weaver network. By 2015, Jaipur Rugs aims to have 100,000 weavers on board. For that, Chaudhary has deputed two people who are constantly on fact-finding missions across the country looking for new regions where carpet weaving can be done. “We recently found that in Orissa, there are lots of Muslim women who aren’t allowed to go out of the house. They end up becoming beedi workers earning Rs. 10-15 a day,” says Chaudhary. So Jaipur Rugs started a pilot project in six regions with 500 weavers on board about 18 months ago.
But working with scattered communities of weavers makes it tough to maintain quality standards acceptable to international clients.
Another alarming fact: Each month Jaipur Rugs was incurring a loss of Rs. 5 lakh (on a turnover of Rs. 4 crore) due to defects. “That is Rs. 60 lakh wasted each year due to mistakes!” he says. “After a carpet is woven, it goes through 27 other processes and the defects were proving to be a big drain.”
To tackle that, Chaudhary put in place an army of quality supervisors who visit every loom at least twice a week. The weavers — some of whom have been working for contractors for years — are given intense training where proper processes are enforced. “Changing habits is tough. Weavers, who have worked for contractors all these years, are not used to being process-driven. Even the trainers don’t take us seriously initially,” says Chaudhary. Constant communication, he says, is key.
Chaudhary also embarked on a mission called Zero Defect that is being piloted in Narhet. It lays down the processes that the weaver must follow. Says Deepak Sharma, director, Kanvic, the consultants who have taken on the task, “We developed a booklet for the processes the quality supervisors are supposed to look at — this has a full checklist.”
During a seminar, Chaudhary picked up the idea of implementing Quality Circles, or forming volunteer groups that analyse, discuss and find solutions to larger organisational challenges. “I tried to implement this concept with the weaver community by forming self-help groups for them,” says Chaudhary. “These groups meet regularly, brainstorm and solve problems.”
The Next Level
Chaudhary also ensures that the company implements the most modern techniques to help business. Recently, the company invested Rs. 50 lakh and implemented an ERP package (enterprise resource planning package — a company-wide computer software system). Then, in 2007, it took on board a search engine optimiser to ensure that the company name would show up prominently in Web searches. Says Yogesh Chaudhary, N.K. Chaudhary’s son, who looks after the IT aspects of the business, “Our Web presence was very limited. But after doing search engine optimisation, people can now find our company easily online.” Similarly, they realised that many of the small buyers abroad — who are also the most profitable — did not understand English. So Yogesh launched Jaipur Rugs’ Web sites in other languages.
Chaudhary also realises that increasingly, buyers want to work with companies that do not have exploitative practices. Which is why, Jaipur Rugs applied for and attained Social Accountability International’s SA 8000 Workplace and Human Rights Standards.
Chaudhary believes that everyone working for the company is part of a family.
The Jaipur Rugs Foundation (JRF), a welfare foundation for weavers, fits in perfectly with this belief. Says Devendra Shukla, director, JRF, “The foundation aims to take weavers to the next level and make them stakeholders in the business.” It provides skill training, skill upgradation, computer-aided design training and entrepreneurship development.
It also gets the weavers Artisan Cards, a government initiative that allows artisans several benefits, helps them get health insurance, and forms self-help groups (SHGs) of weavers.
JRF is also trying out a new experiment where it will form SHGs of weavers, bring them together as a company or a trust, and produce carpets under the new company’s own brand. A pilot for this is on in Thanagazi in Rajasthan. The ownership of the brand will lie with the weavers and Jaipur Rugs will don the role of a mentor.
A couple of months ago, Chaudhary got a phone call. The voice at the other end said, “Mr Chaudhary, this is CK. Do you know me?” Chaudhary almost fell off his chair. The person on the line was management guru C.K. Prahalad — Chaudhary had met him at a TiE (an NGO for promoting entrepreneurship) seminar in Jaipur in January and told him about his company. Jaipur Rugs is now being documented as a case study in the fifth edition of Prahalad’s Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Chaudhary is also being invited by business schools like Wharton to talk about his business model. Teams of students and professors from INSEAD and IMD are also visiting his company. Says Chaudhary, “I love exploring. I experiment with small things. When I see the results, I get excited. And that prompts me to do bigger things.”

Dregs in NREGS

2009-07-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

Udit Misra / Forbes India
Published on Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 14:45, Updated on Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 16:05 in Business section.

Article Link : Read

The Roster:
The man
Jean Dreze
The mission
To improve the operation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).

What’s the big deal?
India’s largest social safety net.
Why we need it
To help the rural economy catch up with the cities, the main beneficiaries of economic growth in recent years.
The challenge
Lack of proper field-level records and a mechanism for handling grievances. Need to create locally relevant infrastructure.
What can he do?
As a key influence in the original design of NREGS, Dreze can give ideas to plug loopholes.
People to watch out for
Kaluram Salvi, a village sarpanch in Rajasthan, who has solved some of the problems of NREGS.
Budget highlights
Allocation raised 144 per cent to Rs 39,100.
Kaluram Salvi first came into the limelight in 2002 when he blew his fuse over 50 paise. The labour activist and budding politician was checking out a worker site at Phukiya Thad village in Vijaypura panchayat (council of villages) of Rajasthan. He saw that the officials at the site were paying the workers Rs 59.50 for a day’s work, while the minimum compulsory wage was Rs 60.
Salvi argued with them till the additional money was paid. It was perhaps the turning point in his political career.
Today, with Salvi as the sarpanch (head), Vijaypura has emerged on the national map as a shining example of worker welfare. The grassroots innovations of Salvi and his team has led to a nearly flawless implementation of India’s largest social sector programme — the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).
Salvi’s success has recently got corroborated — the government of Rajasthan now plans to take his ideas across all the NREGS sites in the state to plug leaks and make sure the benefits of the scheme reach the deserving.
For a scheduled caste man in a multi-caste community, this is a rare achievement. “I only promised to do an honest job of implementing the different government schemes. I did not offer any favours,” Salvi says recalling his election campaign three years ago.
The good news about Salvi’s experiments couldn’t have come at a better time for the Congress-led government at the Centre, which is looking for templates of efficient but caring governance.
NREGS is an attempt launched in 2006 by the Manmohan Singh government to transform the rural economy through legally guaranteed employment for up to 100 days at a minimum wage of Rs. 100 per worker. The scheme, run jointly by the Centre and the states, has reached several milestones towards its goal, but suffers from the same deficiencies of most other official projects — corruption and diversion of funds.
An audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) found that crores spent on the scheme may not have reached the targetted beneficiaries.
NREGS is now ripe for version 2.0, without the leaks and the hassles of the first round. In this context, it is worth pondering how Vijaypura conquered the typical problems and made sure the scheme achieves its purpose.
One of the best judges of NREGS implementation is the development economist Jean Dreze, an Indian of Belgian origin. This luminary from the Delhi School of Economics was a key influence in the original design of NREGS. Dreze has lived and worked in India for 30 years, observing the nuances of the rural economy up close. He thinks experiences such as in Vijaypura present many answers to meet the next set of challenges for NREGS.
There is also a clamour for urban employment guarantee and the use of modern technology to prevent corruption. “Many of these things will happen in due course, but it is important to realise that a lot of ground work still needs to be done to ensure proper implementation of the existing NREGS,” says Dreze.
That’s why the Centre can learn from Vijaypura. More than half of the total 1,600 households in this panchayat have participated in the programme. More than 60 per cent completed the full quota of 100 workdays per household. What’s more, at many sites, women account for a lion’s share of the employment. “People work whole-heartedly because the scheme has given them a sense of dignity and partnership in development,” Salvi asserts.
So what did Salvi do right? Basically, he found simple solutions for complex problems.

NREGA, Andhra Pradesh

2009-07-27T06:15:00.000-07:00

Cnn-IBN
Video Link : Watch

Forbes India: Dr Shetty and his business with a heart

2009-07-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

Article Link : http://ibnlive.in.com/news/forbes-india-dr-shetty-and-his-business-with-a-heart/96567-7-single.html

Neelima Mahajan-Bansal / Forbes India

Published on Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 14:25, Updated on Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 14:54 in Business section

Twenty-day-old Samuel Idoko’s parents were worried sick. The boy’s heart condition needed urgent surgery but back home in Nigeria, there were no hospitals dealing with such cases. They didn’t even have the time to celebrate his birth as they rushed him to Bangalore. Their destination: Narayana Hrudyalaya Institute of Cardiac Sciences.

Established in 2001, this 1,000-bed hospital and its sister concern, Rabindranath Tagore Institute of Cardiac Sciences in Kolkata, together do 15 percent of all heart surgeries in India. At the rate of 30 cardiac surgeries a day, the Bangalore facility handles the highest number of heart surgeries in the world.

It’s not for nothing that patients come here in droves. It has an impossible-sounding success rate of 95 percent and charges a fraction of what other heart hospitals do. The charismatic Dr Devi Shetty, the hospital’s founder, has been relentlessly pursuing a mission: To make world-class healthcare affordable to the masses. “Hundred years after the first heart surgery was done, only 8 percent of the world’s population can afford it,” he says, quickly pointing out that this is a five-year-old statistic and today we might be worse off. “What happens to the rest?” asks Shetty.

Filling the Gap

Shetty’s hospital has managed to dissociate healthcare from affluence. The patient is told beforehand what he will pay. This is fixed irrespective of any future complications or the duration of stay.

A heart surgery here costs Rs. 110,000, much less than what it costs elsewhere. Even so, you pay the full price only if you can afford it. Many don’t pay at all. In 2008, out of 6,088 heart surgeries at the Bangalore centre, only 1,232 were fully paid for. Yet, the hospital makes a tidy profit. The Narayana Hrudyalaya group had a turnover of close to Rs. 300 crore in 2008-09, up from Rs. 150 crore in the previous year.

Narayana Hrudayalaya is now moving to have the largest number of beds in the country, beating Apollo Hospitals which has 6,000. It is creating multi-specialty “Health Cities”. The Bangalore facility will be ramped up to 5,000 beds. In addition to the 1,000-bed heart hospital, it has new cancer, orthopedic and eye hospitals. In the next two years, it will add two more, one for women and children and another for tropical diseases. The Kolkata facility will also be expanded to 5,000 beds. The idea is to have a health city in every state of India and have a presence in every emerging economy of the world. Already work is on to set up facilities in Malaysia and Mexico. “Next year our turnover should be Rs. 600 crore and after Phase 1 of the Health Cities plan is complete in 2010, we should be closer to Rs. 1,000 crore,” says Sreenath Reddy, chief financial officer.

All this will be done without increasing the costs of the business. Before Devi Shetty, it was considered impossible to drive down costs to such levels; even now, no one has been able to replicate this. Top-flight management researchers want to understand how Shetty does it. “The mortality rate in Narayana Hrudyalaya is much lower than in New York State for similar kinds of heart disease,” says University of Michigan’s C.K. Prahalad. The hospital has been discussed extensively in his 2004 bestseller, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It has also become a case study at Harvard Business School. Adds Kokila P. Doshi, professor of Economics at University of San Diego’s business school, “Till now the trend was that government serves the poor. Shetty has shown that private enterprise can serve the poor profitably.”

Leveraging Scale

But how does Shetty do it? The answer lies in what he likes to call his “Wal-Mart approach to healthcare”. Wal-Mart proved that with size, the cost of inputs could be challenged. “They had the size which let them dictate terms to anyone starting from a giant like Procter & Gamble to potato growers,” he says.

Shetty relentlessly pursues Wal-Mart’s dictum of “everyday low prices”. Only that potato growers have been replaced by pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers, who account for almost 40 percent of a hospital’s revenue outflow.

Here’s how it works: Most catheters sold in India by multinationals, for instance, are not manufactured by them. But the original equipment makers don’t sell directly to hospitals unless they get sufficient volumes. Narayana Hrudyalaya has the volumes: It handles 30 heart surgeries and at least 1,000 walk-in patients a day. It was able to convince them to supply at a low cost.

Scale helped Shetty shave off costs of medical tests too. Take blood gas analysis. At Rs. 350-400 per test, it forms the bulk of the cost for an ICU patient in India. At Narayana Hrudyalaya it costs merely Rs. 8.50 per test!

How? “Most hospitals do just 20, 30 tests in a day. We do about 2,000,” says Shetty. He used that to persuade manufacturers to merely “park” their machines in the hospital and instead make money from selling chemical reagents for the tests. It’s a win-win: Narayana Hrudyalaya saves on the cost of these machines (Rs. 12-15 lakh each) and the manufacturer does Rs 50,000 worth of business selling reagents every month.

Unlike other hospitals that make most of their money through in-patient care (procedures and operations), Narayana Hrudyalaya makes the bulk of its profits in the out-patient department (OPD) — just through registrations and investigations such as ultrasounds and X-rays.

The logic is simple. “At the OPD level, every person can afford to pay Rs 200-300. When he needs treatment that will cost Rs. 2-3 lakh, that is when he expects help,” says Reddy. “Today the revenue point for every hospital is in-patient services, which give a margin of hardly 8-10 percent while our margin in the out-patient is 80 percent,” adds Shetty. “So you try to get huge numbers of out-patients.”

But to get so many people to the OPD, you need a sound value proposition. “Patients will come to you provided your in-patient cost is affordable — if you are doing a heart operation for Rs. 60,000-70,000, or a brain operation for, say, Rs. 10,000. So you reduce your in-patient cost,” says Shetty.

Each evening, Shetty and his team of senior doctors examine a profit and loss account for the day. If they go below their average realisation benchmark of Rs, 95,000 the next day they prefer patients who can pay more. Also, Shetty searches for ways to save — he got his microbiology department to make hand-wash and disinfectants in-house, bringing down the monthly cost from Rs. 4 lakh to Rs. 50,000.

Practicing Quality

‘Specialisation’ is his mantra to ensure quality even as costs are driven down. “We train technically skilled people for a particular job,” says Shetty. So each surgeon specialises in doing only bypass surgeries or valve replacements or paediatric surgeries. That gives them phenomenal experience.

Shetty does something else to cut costs. Every ICU patient has dedicated nurses watching over him, 24 hours a day. They work eight-hour shifts, standing in front of the patient. Shetty doesn’t provide chairs: “The moment you provide a chair, the efficiency of the nurse goes down by at least 30 percent.” He encourages attrition among them: “As they grow older, they don’t contribute as much to patient care, but their salary keeps going up.”

To keep salary costs low, he hires people with basic college education and trains them for jobs like reading radiology charts.

Going forward, the biggest challenge for Shetty is how to make sure all this doesn’t remain a one man show, and get the same quality. “That means enormous commitment to training and recruitment,” says Prahalad.

Shetty is clear that the new facilities will be run by people who have perfected their skills at Narayana Hrudyalaya so that there’s no cultural mismatch. It is already running 49 training programmes and the plan is to turn it into an academic institution. “When you have an academic institution as a hospital, the succession plan is already in place,” he says.

The Wal-Mart Effect

Dr Devi Shetty’s Narayana Hrudyalaya in Bangalore uses economies of scale to keep the cost of treatment low

Rs 8.50 for a blood gas analysis

This normally costs Rs. 350-400 per test and forms the bulk of the cost for an ICU patient. Where others do 30 tests a day, Narayana Hrudyalaya does 2,000. It used these numbers to persuade manufacturers to install machines — which cost Rs. 12-15 lakh each — for free and make money instead by charging only for chemical reagents for the test.

Rs 110,000 cost of a heart surgery; 6,088 heart surgeries (in 2008), 1,232 fully paid for; Rs. 300 crore turnover (2008-09)

Unlike other hospitals, the bulk of its profits come from the out- patients ward, where the cost to the patient is low but the margins are as high as 80 percent. The number of walk-in patients remains high because they know the cost of surgery will be subsidised should they need it.

30 heart surgeries, 1,000 walk-in patients a day

Medicines and equipment account for 40 percent of revenue outflows, but original equipment makers for instance, don’t usually supply directly to hospitals. Narayana Hrudyalaya used these numbers to convince them to supply directly, at a low cost.

College for poor churns out IITians

2009-06-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

TOI, 5 June 2009, Jinka Nagaraju,TNN
Article Link

HYDERABAD: The real performers, they say, never advertise themselves. While corporate colleges have been shouting from roof-tops about the toppers in IITs and other professional colleges hey have been churning out year after year, it is actually a small five-room building tucked away in the remote New Nagole in Greater Hyderabad that has been making history, silently.
The Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Residential Junior College trains students, mostly children of the poorest of the poor and destitutes for engineering courses. Of the 35 students this year, 19 secured top ranks in the IIT-JEE including seven students making it to one of the IITs in the country. Twelve of them are set to get admitted to either the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research located in Bhopal, Kolkata, Mohali, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram, or the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology at Thiruvananthapuram, whose chancellor is the missile man of India and former President A P J Abdul Kalam.
All the remaining students of the 35-member batch of this year are also in line to secure admission in B.Tech courses of various universities in the state. Of the 19 students who got the ranks, 15 are SCs, one is ST, two are OBCs and one is from the general category.
These are the real success stories in the truest sense of the word, as each student carries a pathetic story of poverty behind him. The majority of the students are children of cattle-grazers of landlords or farm labourers. All the students spent their early childhood in the farms rearing cattle or doing odd-jobs. Take B Chinna Raidu, who secured the 464th rank in IIT this year. He is the son of poor and illiterate daily wagers in Nellore district. Y Krishna Veni, who also made it to IIT this year, belongs to Eukala (gypsy) community from Kurnool district. B Eswar Rao, also an IITian this year, is the son of a construction worker from Prakasam district. K Kiran Kumar, who also made it to B Arch in Delhi School of Planning apart from IIT, is the son of a farm worker from Khammam district. Ramdas, son of a cattle-grazer for a landlord in a Telangana district, made it to Kalam’s institute last year.
A beaming principal E Lakshmaiah modestly attributes the success more to the hard work and determination of the students than the alma mater. “The facilities are bare minimum here. But despite that, our students succeeded in the highly competitive nations-wide tests,” he said. “Our success rate is 100 per cent. If more than 60 per cent secured admission into nationally reputed institutes like IIT and NIT, the remaining got selected to other best colleges in the state,” said the principal. The college is run by the social welfare department of the state government while the funding comes from the department of rural development. The students are selected from the various colleges run by the social welfare department through a written test. Once picked, they are given long-term coaching along with intermediate education. “These students hail from poorest of the poor families. It is no mean achievement to secure admission into IITs and other institutes,” said V Nagi Reddy, principal secretary, social welfare.
Buoyed by the 100 per cent success story, the social welfare department now wants to expand the programme to coaching for the medical and law streams from next year. This is education in the real sense from which many a corporate college can take a leaf out of.

Keeping Kolkata Klean

2009-05-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

Kolkata for a Green Cause, NDTV Video

Video Link

IIT dreams come true for Patna students

2009-05-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Viny Mishra, Tuesday May 26, 2009, Patna

Article and Video Link

The IIT entrance exam results were declared on Monday and there were many happy children from Patna, who managed to clear the test. The sweet taste of success was felt at "Super 30" coaching institute in Patna. Mathmetician Anand Kumar started this institute in 2003 and every year 30 children from economically weak backgrounds are coached here for one of the toughest examination in the world. And all free of charge.

Says Vishwaraj Kumar, who cleared the exam: "I worked very hard for this.... I want to work for ISRO in the future."

Founder of Super 30 Anand Kumar says: "From this year, I want to pick up 90 students and work with them, I want to help more and more students."

Until last year Anand Kumar used to run super 30 with Abhayanand, who is the Additional Director General of Police in the state.

This year, they parted ways and the police officer set up another coaching institute. But the good news is, all his students too got through to the IIT.

Vikas Kumar, who too cleared the exam, says: "My father is a clerk at the Patna High Court. He has great expectations from me. I am happy I have managed to do well."

It is a giant leap forward for these students. And perhaps the future of many more such aspirants from the poorer sections of society is in safe hands.

Love for green: Healing the hills with trees

2009-05-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

EcoWatch
Madhu Bharathi
Article Link

Sachidanand Bharti is known as the treeman in Uttarakhand, where he has been dedicatedly planting trees since the last 25 years. He has succeeded in greening about 30000.
Few hills in Uttarakhand were once barren, but now they are lush green, all due to his efforts. Bharti is a school teacher by profession but his real calling is as a climate crusader.

"The holy Ganga emerges from Uttarakhand and nowhere else. So if we do not work dedicatedly and with a pure heart for Uttarakhand, then we will not be able to save it," said Bharti.
Seeing the hills of his childhood turning barren prompted Bharti to use his Sundays for planting trees and soon his mission inspired 15 villages.

"All these hills were barren before without any plants or trees. We started with planting one tree, then two, then three and slowly all the villagers got together and turned this area into a jungle," said Kishan Pandey, a local resident.

Today, more than 25 lakh trees planted by him have created a jungle that supports rivulets.
Sachidanand is now a satisfied man as the hills are green again. However, now his only worry is protecting the forests he created from the timber mafia.

Slum Millionaire

2009-05-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Video Link

"Slumdog Millionaire" is the favorite at Sunday's Academy Awards and was largely inspired by a real location, the Dharavi Slum. Seth Doane reports.

A population that thrives in the shadows is now thrust into the international spotlight.
"Yeah! Everyone is speaking about Slumdog Millionaire, Slumdog Millionaire," says Jaison Thangaraj.
The Dharavi slum - the setting for the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" - defies definition.
Even the film's 8-year-old star was shocked by the poverty.
"There are many people who had stayed in road, near gutters - ate near gutters all mosquitoes on their bodies," says actor Ayush Mahesh Khedekar.
It's known as one of Asia's largest slums - about a million people live here, packed into an area that is less than one square mile. Somewhere around 50 percent of Mumbai's population lives in a slum like this one - and while there are the stories of struggling you might expect - there are also ones that might surprise you.

Twenty-one-year-old Jaison Thangaraj grew up here and shares a tiny home with his parents and sister. He's working hard to get out - by studying for an engineering degree.
"It's a mindset for people - Dharavi is just a slum, slum, slum," Jaison says. "Have they ever come and saw this?"
Maybe not before - but the movie generated business for slum tours - "Reality Tours" lets outsiders explore Dharavi.
"It's really shocking how organized it all is - that there are commercial districts and residential and that there is water and electricity - and services...and schools," says Dages Keates of Brooklyn, N.Y.

But, tours are not the only business.
A maze of makeshift homes and 10,000 small businesses generate an annual GDP of more than $600 million - all in an area smaller than New York City's Central Park.
There's gem-stone embroidery, stones chipped to grind grain and a leather industry which employs 40,000 people.
Believe it or not, Dharavi slum means opportunity for some, Doane reports. Some boys make just about $50 a month here making small leather wallets - but there were no jobs at all where they came from.
Two-thirds of India's population lives on less than $2 a day.

In one small shop, kids say that while education would be a way out, their families depend on their earnings.
But earning a million dollars here - even on the Indian TV show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" - seems out of reach.
"The movie is false," says Arvind, who has lived in Dharavi for 40 years. "A guy from Dharavi would never be considered for the show."
When the movie opened here, it sparked scattered protests among those offended by the word "dog" in the title.

"Indians have always been sensitive to the way that Indian poverty and the lack of development among vast sections of the Indian population have been portrayed in cinema," says film critic Nandini Ramnath.
Still, "Slumdog Millionaire" was the 4th-biggest weekend box office opening ever for any Hollywood film released in India. It's the kind of success that Jaison hopes believes could generate hope and investment in a place that could use both.
"Yeah, I'm definitely proud of living here," Jaison says. "I want to change the whole face of Dharavi, you know?"
And that would be a real Hollywood ending.

'I want to slog, earn and eat. I don't need freebies'

2009-04-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Text: Vicky Nanjappa in Shira | Photograph: Dominic Xavier

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Malleshaiah, 55, a farmer from Shira taluk, Chitradurga in Karnataka is one of the very few farmers who still feel that he has to slog it out to earn his bread and butter.

"Stop feeding us with free or subsidized rice. It is only making farmers like us lazier by the day. Every candidate who comes by my house seeking votes, I make it a point to tell him that the promise to give out free rice is not only ridiculous but also ends up causing loss for the government at the end of it.

"I want to slog, earn and eat. I don't need the freebies. All I need is the infrastructure and the basic amenities from the government.

"I know for a fact that in order to fulfil such stupid promises, the government will end up importing rice from other countries. Not only will the government be spending more on this but will also end up killing the Indian market. Apart from importing the rice, they will buy rice from us for more and then sell it for less, which will only add to the burden.

"Once a person realises that he is getting his food cheap and so easily, there is a tendency of sitting back at home and relaxing which in turn will contribute to laziness.

"If the newly elected government has some concern about the people in this area, then let them improve the water facilities in this place. I hope they build small dams so that water can be stored. This will ensure that we can till our fields with no worry and earn and then live on our own strength.

"I feel, in Chitradurga, the BJP has a chance. We have given the Congress enough and more chances and no candidate has addressed the basic problem of water and infrastructure. I think the overall mood in our constituency is to vote for a change and I was told that it is better to have the same governments at the centre and the state level because, work gets implemented sooner."

Meet Pravin Deshmukh, Vidarbha's net-savvy farmer

2009-04-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Piyush Pushpak / CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 10:27, Updated on Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 10:39 in Sci-Tech section
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In a CNN-IBN special series Mera Gaon Mera Bandwidth, we are trying to highlight how the Internet is transforming lives in rural India.

Vidarbha: Forty five-year-old Pravin Deshmukh is the new age farmer of Vidarbha. After suffering heavy losses in cotton farming, and incurring huge debts, a desperate Pravin he turned to what he thought had all the solutions - the Internet.

"On the Internet, I found that turmeric is better than cotton. I got so much information, and ideas,” says Pravin.
The journey from cotton fields to turmeric for the net-savvy farmer has truly been an incredible one. He used the worldwide web to come out of the suicide web that cotton farming brings in this part of the world. Pravin is now spreading the good word.

Pravin has doubled his profits in just one year. Now, he travels from village to village, holding chaupals for other farmers and introducing the Internet to them too.
"It's encouraging that it worked for him. Years of cotton farming has only caused suicides. Maybe his technology will change this,” says a cotton farmer, Vishwas Anandrao Pandey.
In the last five years over 3,000 cotton farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha. Pravin says the Internet didn't just help him make profits. It also saved his life.

S U R V I V O R

2009-04-07T07:26:00.000-07:00

Vicky Nanjappa in Haveri, Karnataka | July 2, 2008

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You think India is on the march -- that lifestyles have changed dramatically, and the standard of living has improved tremendously. Well if you thought this is how the real India lives, then read on.

In a small village near Haveri in northern Karnataka, Kattigere Thimappa and his wife toil day after day on a small patch of land so that they can make two meals a day. The meal is ragi roti with onions -- they eat this every day.

Haveri is 375 kilometres from the IT capital, Bangalore, and the lives here are in stark contrast.

Kattigere is 27, he has two acres of land and a family of four to support. The land is of little consolation as the monsoon has played havoc with his hopes. With no water source anywhere close to the field, he is entirely dependent on the mercy of the rain gods. The last two years have been a disaster -- the previous years the rains had failed and this year, excess rainfall destroyed the cotton crop.

Dejected that he could not depend on his land, he started working as a coolie at the local bus stand. Somakka, his wife, went to work at a construction site and with them went their two children.

"Manjunath is four-years-old and goes with his father, while I take Anita, the two-year-old along. There is nobody to take care of them," she says.

Together they earn around Rs 75 a day if they get work and spend all the money on food and some other basic necessities.

"The last time I bought a sari for my wife was a year back. I cannot afford to buy it for another year I think," says Kattigere, "The crops have failed due to heavy rains and the grant promised by the government has not come as yet."

Every morning, the couple set out for work by 7 and return by 6 pm. After that, till darkness falls they work in their field along with the children. Although there is not much work in the field at the moment, they ensure it is kept clean because neglecting it will worsen it.

With an annual income of Rs 8,000, this family has no special days -- time is spent toiling just to be able to subsist.

They hope for a better life, but find their hopes dry as their land. They dream of watching television which they say they have never done so far, and they want to send their children to school.

"We want them to be able to study and are hoping that out condition improves next year so that we can send Manjunath to school," says Somakka.

The last time they had a good meal was around five months ago when Somakka's employer, a construction worker gave her some extra money when work was completed on the building. "It sure was a joyous occasion at our house," she says.

The couple knows no other life apart from their work. Their only pleasure is their children and whatever free time they get is spent playing with them. "I really hope we can give them both a better life. It is not about hard work, it's that our destiny depends on the rain gods. If the rains are good, we are good or else we have to settle for the worst," says Kattigere.

In their misery they never forget one thing -- to pray to god for a good monsoon. They say that is the only hope for a better life.

Vicky Nanjappa responds to those who want to help Kattigere Thimappa:

When Mr Thimappa was informed that Rediff.com readers wanted to help him, he said he was very touched by their thoughtfulness. He, however, declined to accept any monetary help because he said the government was going to give a grant for cotton farmers, which was his legal right and could not be denied to him.

He did ask for one thing, though -- he asked well wishers to pray to the rain gods for a good monsoon.

The people's doctor

2009-03-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Krishnakumar P in Jaipur | June 6, 2008, Rediff.com
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Bachelors of Indo-Allopathic Medicine would probably be among the few educational qualifications that throw up just one result in a Google search -- a matrimonial ad for a girl with the said qualification.

That also probably explains why Dr Pappu Haldar, 24, does not want to speak much about his educational qualification. Dr Haldar, who hails from North 24 Pargana district in West Bengal, is a doctor in a slum of some 5,000 people in Jaipur, most of whom are illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

How did Dr Haldar end up in a place on the other side of the country? And a slum of illegal immigrants at that. It was not at all with the lofty aim of serving the downtrodden, the candid doctor is quick to admit. After he graduated from a Kolkata college, he found it difficult to find a job in the many hospitals he applied.

"There was no opportunity there and I wanted to get out of that place. I chose Jaipur for two reasons. One I have a cousin here and I thought it would be easier for me to come and live with him as I set up my practice," he says before adding: "And the important reason was that Jaipur being a hot place would have more diseases and cases than other parts of the country."

Dr Haldar came to Jaipur in 2003 and settled down at his cousin's home. "I practiced from a small place next to where we lived. That was when I heard about this slum and I was told there were no doctors here," he said.

The fact that there were quite a few people from West Bengal and everyone spoke Bengali convinced Haldar to set up a clinic in the slum.

"You won't believe it, but the day I came here and opened a tiny makeshift place, there was a huge fire and I lost everything.

"I borrowed some money from my cousin and bought a few medicines and equipment to start from the scratch," he said.

From there, it was hard toil for Dr Haldar to reach where he is -- a 6 feet-by-6 feet room in the basti itself. "I don't feel like going anywhere. I will stay here and earn whatever is possible. I am comfortable here. I sleep here in the room. My needs are basic and I have everything that I want here. In fact I am going to buy a house in the Jaipur Development Authority approved building there," he said pointing to the row of houses opposite the clinic.

Dr Haldar charges Rs 20 per sitting as consultation fees. If there is someone in need of a dose of drips, it will cost them Rs 120. He even has stocked a few medicines that are exclusively for times of emergency for patients whose history he knows.

In his clinic, Dr Haldar has two diaries. One is a case diary with the names of almost all the residents of the slum and the other contains their dues and debts. No prizes for guessing which one is fatter and why. "Everyone -- I mean every single one of them -- owes me money. But I can't deny them treatment," he says.

Has the doctor lost his business acumen in five years?

"I was only being honest when you asked why I came here. It is not that I am after money only. I make up to Rs 8,000 a month even with these dues. So I don't mind writing these off. I can't ask an ailing man for past dues when it is clear he does not have money," says Dr Haldar, who is one of the few people who is beyond the slum's politics.

There is a divide in the basti between the Bangladeshis and those who are from Bengal. They do not see eye to eye. But the doctor is beyond all that and nobody messes with him.

In fact, an intelligence agency officer who has been tracking events and personalities in the slum for two years and often hangs out at the doctor's clinic, predicted the day after the Jaipur serial blasts that the police would come to the doctor for help in telling the Bangladeshis apart from the migrants from West Bengal. "He is a respected man and his word will carry weight. He is beyond suspicion and will have to help in the verification process," the officer said.

And true to his prediction, the police came. So did the media and Dr Haldar had his 15 minutes of fame. The days following the blasts, the laidback doctor had assumed the role of an activist. He wanted to know if Ananda Bazaar Patrika had a journalist based in Jaipur. "Now, it is my responsibility to ensure that the people from Bengal are treated properly. The police should not harass them unnecessarily. I will have to do something and get our government to know the plight of the migrants and do something for them," he says.

All in a day's work for a man who came here only because he thought hot place = more diseases = better business.

Thinking green, inventing green for the planet

2009-03-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Sat, Aug 09, 2008 at 20:40, Updated on Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 16:23 in Sci-Tech section
Anu Jogesh- CNN IBN
Megha Mamgain - CNN IBN

Video Link Part 1,Part 2, Part 3

India’s green heroes are men and women of ideas and inventions—ordinary people who found simple ways to help the planet. Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a potter in Rajkot, invented a refrigerator that doesn’t need electricity. M B Lal, a senior citizen in Delhi, built an eco-friendly and low-cost AC. Poppat Bhat, teacher and amateur botanist in Bhavnagar, mixed seaweed and cow urine to make herbal pesticide. Just some of the people you will meet on HSBC Green Heroes.

Dr. Anil Gupta - Founder NIF
Mansukhbhai Prajapati - Mitti Cool
M.B Lal - Snowbreeze
Thadubai - Pawann CHakki
Mahesh Patel - GIAN
Popatt Bhai - Herbal Pesticide
Prem Singh - cell phone pumpset
Valli SHetty - Mobile operated Handpump
Pankaj - shoe Powers cellphone
Moxad Thaker - Water From sewage.

Science on their side, they help elephants, rivers.

2009-03-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

CNN-IBN
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Dr Arun Zachariah, Ravi Aggarwal and Rajendra Singh are the scientific face of environmentalism. Their work for the environment is based on research, expertise and knowledge. Zachariah is a vet at the Wynad Life Sanctuary, India's largest elephant sanctuary in Kerala. Delhi-based Aggarwal is the founder of research and advocacy group Toxic Links. Magsaysay Award Winner Rajendra Singh uses traditional knowledge to conserve water in Rajasthan villages.

Saurashtra rainmaker rejuvenates drought-prone land

2009-03-24T05:29:00.000-07:00

Anu Jogesh / CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 14:44 in India section

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New Delhi: As part of the special series, Green Heroes, CNN-IBN profiles people who are making a difference to save the environment. This week we get you the inspiring story of Shamjibai, also known as the rainmaker of Gujarat. Using simple technologies, Shamjibai has ensured that the wells of drought-prone Saurashtra are no longer dry.

Everytime it rains, Shamjibai utters a silent prayer. In a land with severe water scarcity and a hostile climate, he has managed to do the unthinkable.

This 75-year-old crusader is called the rainmaker of Gujarat. He has been driven by a simple idea - getting farmers to recharge open wells by diverting rain water into it.

"I thought the problem could be solved by diverting rain water into wells. I decided to explain this to the farmers so that they could do it themselves," says he.

Shamjibai realised that there was a well after every five to six acres of farmland in the Saurastra region and that it was here that farmers could not only store rain water, but also recharge the water table.

Twenty years ago, Shamjibai started in a tiny room in a village called Dhoraji, designing pampletes and booklets to distribute to villagers.

Today 3 lakh wells have been re-charged through cement pipes in Gujarat.

Driven by abject poverty and without any formal education, Shamjibai has worked against the odds to help lakh of farmers and rejuvenate the land.

Davender preparing athelets for India

2009-03-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

Saryu Mahajan / CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 15:43, Updated on Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 15:57 in India section
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Dera Baba Nanak (Punjab): This marathon man makes sure that the kids of his small village in Punjab - Dera Baba Nanak - take their sports seriously.
Davinder Singh, a former Army jawan and police constable, set up the Bhagat Singh Academy of Athletics and Boxing nine years ago.

“Kids should be trained from childhood. I used to come during vacation and train the kids here,” says Davinder.

The sports ground in Dera Baba Nanak used to be overrun with the vehicles of the villagers. There was no pucca road leading to the ground.
That is when Davinder along with the kids started leveling the mud track shaming the local authorities into joining hands and making a pucca road.
And even as he weeded out the shrubs, Davinder started planting trees to fence the area.

With the ground ready Davinder started calling the kids out to try their hand at all forms of athletic sports. But his first hurdle was reluctant parents.
“Parents were reluctant in the beginning,” says Davinder.
Nine-year-old Simran came to Davinder two years ago with little self confidence. And, today she has qualified for the State Championship for 400 meters race. The little champion, like all others here swears by her coach

“He is like my father,” says Simran.

All the kids in the village call Davinder paaji (father) out of love.
The academy has produced nine state champions and four national champions. Today there are more than 100 kids trained by Davinder.
“My aim is to send the boys to Olympics,” says Davinder.

This real hero provides limbs to landmine blast victims

2009-03-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

Pawan Bali / CNN-IBN
Time Published on Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 14:59 in India section
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Poonch (Jammu): In the land of conflict and pain, Jagbir Singh Sudan is a true healer. Many people living in the border villages lose their limbs during cross-border firing. But Sudan has brought many of those back on their feet.
Thirty-eight-year-old Mohammad Bashir, a rice seller, lost his leg in a landmine blast at the line of control in 1999.
“He came looking for me. After I got an artificial limb, it was like a new beginning for me,” says Bashir.
A school principal in Poonch, Jagbir Singh starts his day with lessons in social values.
His artificial limb centre has provided free prosthetics to over 3000 victims of landmine blasts in the border villages.

“During rains mines travel deep into the farms. Also people lose their limbs due to cross-border firing,” says Sudan.

The inspiration came from his father, Pritam Singh, who was a soldier and lost his right leg in the World War II. And this is how Sudan went on to set up a trust in his father’s name in 1990.
He walks to villages, scan patients and then take them to artificial limb camps in New Delhi and Jaipur.
Sudan makes his way into remote corners in forward areas risking gun fore even looking for his patients.
“I have only one wish, I want to set up a limb fabrication centre now,” sats Sudan.

Nisheet and his wife see capability in their disability

2009-03-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

Tridip Mandal / CNN-IBN

Time Published on Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 16:25, Updated on Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 16:38 in India section

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Gujarat: Life's a joyride for Mukesh and Ranjana Bhen of Bhavnagar in Gujarat but behind their unmistakable smile there is a past, cruel and painful. When they got married, their families flatly refused to cope with 2 disabled persons.
“My wife and I are disabled and that's why we got married. But our families threw us out,” says Mukesh.
That was almost 15 years ago, now there is a spring in their stride. The couple no longer depend on others. They earn a decent livelihood and have their own house. Their world has changed because the efforts of one man their boss and the CEO of Microsign products in Bhavnagar, Nishit Mehta.

“In the beginning of my work I felt this is something I am doing for the social cause but the result has arrived in such a way that I never like to tell anyone that I am doing some social work. By utilizing their in built ability I am and they are in a winning situation. It is fruitful for our company to make better use of their ability at the right place for the better result,” says Nisheett.

The company supplies plastic components for Mercedes Benz, TATA MOTORS and HP. But Microsingn is not just about its products, its is also about people who produce them, 80 per cent or 16 of whom are disabled.
This at a time when the government rider is to employ a minimum of 3 per cent disabled.

“If there is a somebody who has a hearing disability then we always try to put them at the place where there is more noise so that it will not disturb him. When there is concentration involved, and a person is not required to walk etc, we will put the orthopedic handicap. When there is a monotonous work, assembly work then we will put the mentally retarded people,” Nisheet.

This monotonous work has given a new meaning to the lives of Mukesh and Ramani Bhen. Their hands are making up for their immobile limbs.

Nisheet Mehta, along with his employees able bodied and disabled has scripted a real life heroic story. A story which talks of enterprise, courage, ability to overcame all odds and emerge winners. They might be earning just Rs 2 to 5000 per month. But what's priceless is the dignity and respect that they get here.

Having seen the hard times now they can finally enjoy life and show all of us that physically or mentally they are no longer challenged.

This real hero is training kids to be India's Phelps

2009-03-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

Tridip Mandal / CNN-IBN

TimePublished on Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 19:23 in India section

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New Delhi: Karsanbhai Patel has been training children of his village to swim in a local lake and he's been producing national champs, no less. He saw an opportunity where others saw only a dirty lake. For 28 years, There are no professional facilities, yet the children he trained have won medals at the national level.

Olympic Gold medallist Michael Phelps will probably never know about his popularity thousands of miles away in a tiny village of Pratapura, some 150 kms from Ahmedabad.

"Everyone is focused on cricket, but because of the lake, we are teaching them swimming. It will keep our childrenhealthy and sports can ensure a good future for the kids. I am also fond of swimming," says he.

It was his job as a teacher in the village school that brought Karsanbhai to Pratappura in 1978. A state level swimmer, Karsanbhai would hone his skills in the local Chandrasar lake.

The children watched on in awe and Karsanbhai asked them to join in. Twice a day this sleepy village sees 20 children head for the Chandrasar lake, their swimming pool. Its also the the only source of water.

It's this water that the village drinks, here is where they wash clothes and here is where the village children transform into champions, perfecting their strokes amongst turtles and snakes.

There are no fancy changing rooms for these children and in winters, the chilling waters don't deter the young swimmers. Money is tight and with whatever donations Karsanbhai gets, he tries to buy swimming equipment for the children.

"The children here are from poor families. The swimming costume for girls is really expensive. They don't have slippers. If we got all this, the children would perform better," says he.

Despite the hardships, over 200 children from the village have participated at the state level and 45 have made it to the nationals.

As Karsanbhai and his little prodigies walk through the dry arid land of this mini Rann of Kutch, they don't let their disadvantages cloud their aspirations. They have got a dream, a dream to swim their way to international glory, a dream to be the next Michael Phelps of India.

No funding but this real hero feeds the poor daily

2009-03-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

Tridip Mandal / CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 16:23 in India section

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Ahmedabad: 2002: Ahmedabad was burning and there seemed no end in sight to the communal riots. But in the chaos there were those who reached out to help, like Hemant Patel.

Patel is a small time sound engineer and a caterer. He sought the help of some friends and then went to the VS hospital through the burning streets with piles of tiffins full of food. Through the uneasy days Patel continued to provide food to the relatives of the patients.

"Hindus, Muslims, Christians, they all come here. God might keep people hungry while they are awake but he told me I shouldn't let them sleep hungry," he says.

2009: As Hemant Patel's food van arrives in the slums of Vashna, the slum comes alive. The spread is not lavish but it's this that brings back the smiles on riot-ridden, poverty-ridden faces. Over the last seven years Hemant Patel has expanded his free catering to include the slums of Ahmedabad.

When it comes to the cooking, Patel wields the ladle himself, overseeing every stage of the preparation along with his volunteers, ensuring that the food is both tasty and hygienic. By 6:30 pm everyday, the action shifts to VS hospital as relatives of the patients queue up for their dinner.

Identity cards are issued to ensure that it's the more needy who are attended to first.

As Hemant Patel winds up for the day he knows money is tight. He needs Rs 60,000 a month to keep his operations going.

"Everyone can give money. But I need people who'll give their time," he says.

Meanwhile, with a prayer on his lips Hemant Patel keeps the faith that perhaps one day he can feed many more mouths.

Meet the saviour of Nagarhole forest

2009-03-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

CNN-IBN
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In today’s Real Heroes, we meet K M Chinappa, who for the last 35 years has been fighting to save a forest in Karnataka.
Some say that if the forest and its wildlife has survived, it is because of Chinappa, a forest ranger by profession, this man has continued to serve nature even after his retirement.
For three decades, he fought to save a forest. His presence kept the poachers at bay. His grit revived an ecosystem doomed to extinction. He may be an ex-ranger, but the forest of Nagarhole is his first love.
And to the denizens of the forest, this ex-ranger is the Real Hero, ever alert.

The story of K M Chinappa is the extraordinary story of a 35-year long struggle against poachers, miners and encroachers, all for his first love, the forests of Nagarhole.
When Chinappa was posted at Nagarhole National Park as a forest ranger in 1970, there were more people than animals in the forest. Cultivation was rampant on the forest grasslands, and the people inside would invite poachers to protect their crops.
In 1972, a poacher named Parari Thimma entered the scene. No one knew who he was or where he was. He carried his operations in the cover of darkness.
Known tuskers, huge beautiful elephants, he killed and he took their ivory. I took this as a challenge.

For one year, Chinappa tracked and chased him.
Finally I heard gunshots, around midnight. I followed the torchlight and I shot at him. After that he did not come back. People say he is no more, but I do not know what happened to him.

That was just the beginning. Under Chinapa's watchful eye, poaching declined steeply and cultivation on the forest land was stopped.
Slowly, the spotted deer and sambar returned.

I used to think that in thirty years, there would be no Nagarhole, that everything would be gone. But today, it is one the most beautiful forests. And it will live for at least another hundred years.
As he winds up for the day, knowing his work is far from over, he renews his resolve not let any harm come to Nagarhole. At least, not on his watch.

Meet India's youngest school principal

2009-02-24T06:52:00.000-08:00

Original Article Link

New Delhi: This year in our special series Real Heros, we feature India's youth heroes.

Babar Ali from West Bengal, has just one passion in life, education for all.
That's why 16 year old Babar is perhaps India's youngest school principal.
Another day has ended at this school in West Bengal's Murshidabad district.
But for one particular student it's time to start a new chapter.

This is the extraordinary story of Babar Ali who studies in Class 11. Since 2002, every evening, between 1600 hours and 1900 hours, he takes on the role of a principal perhaps India's youngest at a school - the Anand Siksha Niketan in Gangapur village.

Principal, Ananda Shiksha Niketan Babar Ali says, “Aami onk dekhechi ki aamr motor boyesher chele ra cricket khelto football khelto..kintu aami eishober shonge jukto chilam na.Aar aamar porano porano khela tai sho theke bhalo lagto aar eta korar por ei aami ekhane ashe school take dara koriyechi. (Unlike other kids I never wanted to play football or cricket. In my younger days I used to play the role of a teacher and student).

What started off as child's play took the shape of a school on October 29, 2002. At the tender age of 9, with a little help from his parents, Babar set up a room to teach on his ancestral land.

Ali says, “Aami jokhon 5 e pori tokhon ei vidyaloy ta aami 8 jon chhatra chhatri der ke niye shuru kori. She chhatra chatri aaj 8 jon teke baedhe 600 jon hoyeche. (When I was in Class 5 I started this school with 8 students…it has been a long journey since then,,from 8 students we have almost 600 students now).

But getting 600 students to enroll was no easy task. In this hamlet, abject poverty means education is a luxury few can afford. So Babar makes sure that the education at his school is absolutely free.

Today the school has classes from 1 to 8 and a staff strength of 10 including 5 teachers aged between 13 and 18, students themselves of classes 9th to 12th.

There are some hard realities that Babar faces even today. The government provides funds for the midday meal and books till class 4. For other expenses he has to depend on donations from well wishers…which is never enough.
Ali says, “We still don't have a school building.”
Plans are many, so are the hardships. But Babar knows that all these years, running the school has never been a burden on his young shoulders.

An IITian's pursuit of a stronger India

2009-02-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

Published on Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 16:30, Updated on Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 18:22 in Nation » India section

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Now to our special series about ordinary people doing extraordinary work, our Real Hero today is Elango Rangaswamy.

He's managed to bring out his entire village from caste and ignorance into education and self-sufficiency.

It's a lesson learned early. Fight caste discrimination with education. At a village school in Koothambakkam, a predominantly Dalit village, young boys and girls are getting a chance at their future and helping them realise their dream is Rangaswamy Elango, an IITian, a mechanical engineer and Koothambakkam's most beloved Sarpanch.

The first technical graduate from Kuthambakkam, Elango was picked up from the campus in 1982 by Oil India. But Elango quit his job and resumed links with his roots.

Elango says, “I thought of making use of this and find a solution to my villages' problems.”

Elango stood for the Panchayat elections and won.

He feels that the the Panchayat is the right tool for making real development.

Apart from encouraging education, Elango developed small scale industries that make kerosene stoves, energy conserving lamps, first aid kits, all in Kuthambakkam.

In the year 200, the Panchayat constructed this Samatuvapuram or township of equality in a village with strong caste divisions, stand 50 twin houses, with one Dalit and one non-Dalit family each. Now, even fights are fought together.

It's this unity that has been Elango's biggest success. At the Gram Sabha, every question is answered, every complaint redressed, and every success shared.

Elango’s goal is to see a strong self reliant villages from which would emerge a stronger India.

Musicians play for street kids

2009-02-11T07:02:00.000-08:00

Delhi college students show the way for the underprivileged
By IANS . Feb 11, 2009, www.ibnlive.com
http://buzz18.in.com/news/music/musicians-play-for-street-kids/115372/0

Adheer Ghosh, 20, is very busy like many other Delhi University students who are juggling daylong extra-curricular activities in addition to academics. But there is a distinction in this young guitarist's weekly schedule - a two-hour session when he conducts music workshops for street kids at Shastri Nagar in north Delhi.
Ghosh is a volunteer with Music Basti, an initiative of young musicians of the city to interact at a forum with street and homeless children.
At present these informal interactive workshops are conducted for small boys under the age of 12 at a non-custodian boys hostel at Sarai Basti, supported by NGO YP Foundation.
"I enjoy the sessions, it's an interactive informal forum. Each time I take something back with me," Ghosh, a third year English-honours student at Kirori Mal College, told IANS.
Ghosh is a part of his college music society Musoc and is also member of Five8, a popular youth band.
"The first time I came it was just to watch and the experience of watching these kids bubbling with enthusiasm and asking questions about how an instrument works was an eye-opener," Ghosh admitted.
Since July 2008, when the project began, there have been 12-odd sessions.
"This is the coming together of musicians with a purpose - while the music is competent professional music the audience here is not the usual gig," said Suhail Yusuf Khan, a sarangi (Indian string instrument) player of the Advaita band.
When Khan pulls out his instrument and plays a soothing raga or sargam (pattern of notes), it seems to have a calming effect on the otherwise boisterous kids.
With gleaming eyes and rapt attention they listen, ask questions about the music and how the strumming sounds the way it does - soon they too croon along, singing songs originally composed by Advaita.

Muhammad is an eight-year-old staying at the Uma Pandey children's home run by NGO Aman Biradari. The boy is a regular at the sessions and specially enjoys listening to the sarangi.
"I like it here, I used to roam around in the streets earlier, now I got admission in a school," said the enthusiastic child.
"I like it when they (the young musicians) play. I look forward to it - the music gives a sense of peace of mind," Muhammed told IANS.
Avinash Bhagel, a violinist and member of Musoc, who has helped conduct a couple of the workshops, pointed out: "Their interest is overwhelming. They grasp things quickly and remember - things that often an accomplished musician can't get."
The concept of using music as a forum to interact with underprivileged children is the brainchild of Faith Gonsalves, a student of history at the Lady Sriram College.

"I really love music and wanted to use a different medium to interact the kids," Gonsalves said.
These sessions according to Gonsalves, serve a dual purpose.
"Most NGOs focus on teaching maths, Hindi, English to the children - which too is really commendable. Through these music interactions, the kids can learn music and the sessions are also meant for recreation," Gonsalves said.
The music played at these sessions is not the popular Bollywood jamboree; it is in fact a blend of Indian classical and western music.
Music Basti has a simple process to volunteer for anyone interested. To extend any help - musical and non-musical, one can send an email at musicbasti@gmail.com with personal information and details of how they would like to volunteer or work.
"After talking to them and seeing if they can interact with kids, we accordingly set them up. Any form of volunteering requires commitment, even if it is a one-off thing and the interaction needs to be tailored to the age and interest of the kids," Gonsalves added.

In 2009, Music Basti hopes to conduct workshops in multiple locations in the city. Workshops were on till November 2008 conducted on a bi-monthly basis after which they were suspended for the winter - when many of the student volunteers had exams.
"We hope to conduct workshops at least three times a month in a location. It is a small project; any expansion will be gradual."
The reason is that all the volunteers are mostly college students or working individuals who are doing this part-time.
But the whole lot appears very optimistic and determined.
"It takes just two hours each week - there is no reason not to do it," Adheer said.
"We may not have the logistics to give each kid an instrument on which he can learn, but we do generate a lingering positive interest in a few children," Gonsalves added.

A Miracle in a thirsty Indian village

2009-01-28T15:45:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2009
Text: Shobha Warrier | Photograph Courtesy: Ram Krishnan
Article Link : Rediff News

It was Pongal with a difference for Ram Krishnan, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, who spent it in Vilathikulam, a village in Tamil Nadu.

Vilathikulam in Ramanathapuram district is one of the driest regions in the state. On an average, it receives only nine days of rainfall in a year.

But the parched village has seven million litres of water in three ponds today, thanks to Ram Krishnan's efforts.

His involvement with Vilathikulam started four years ago. Today, the villagers are like his family. In fact, he had invited many of them to the Pan IIT conference in Chennai in December and also arranged rural visits for the alumni, hoping to motivate some of them into working for the betterment of poor Indian villages.

Ram Krishnan, 62, migrated to the United States over 30 years ago and lives with his family in St Paul, Minnesota.
Like most IIT graduates, he opted for a well-paying job abroad after finishing his studies. But the severe water shortage in IIT-Madras forced him to realise the gravity of the problem. He was reminded of his childhood days when his mother had to wake up at 3 am everyday to collect the limited water supplied by the municipal corporation in Chennai.

Dr Sekhar Raghavan, a physics professor, started a door-to-door campaign in some residential areas in Chennai to popularise the concept of rainwater harvesting. He convinced over 500 homes, industries and charitable institutions to implement rainwater harvesting programmes.

When Ram Krishnan learnt of Dr Raghavan's efforts, he got in touch with the professor and the duo formed the Akash Ganga Trust, a citizens' action group comprising 10 persons who harvested rainwater in Chennai. Ram Krishnan, the president of the North America IIT Alumni Association, became the overseas coordinator of the project.
He invested Rs 4 lakh (Rs 400,000) to set up a model house called the Akash Ganga Rain Centre to create awareness about rain water harvesting.

Ram Krishnan admits that he didn't venture out to villages to spread awareness about rain water harvesting as there were no comfortable hotels for him to stay. But his attitude changed after he paid a visit to a village in Gujarat, which had been devastated by the January 26, 2001 earthquake. Ram Krishnan and many of his friends raised money to rebuild the village.

Four years ago, Ram Krishnan, along with 17 of his friends from US, went on a five-day trip to the Tamil Nadu countryside. After travelling through many dry villages, they realised that Ramanathapuram and Thoothukudi were the driest places in Tamil Nadu.
Ram Krishnan chose to start his work in Vilathikulam. "Everybody warned me that nothing grows in Vilathikulam. I was wasting my time there as it rains only nine days a year," he says.

Today, Vilathikulam has donned a new look. The villagers have collected 7 million litres of water in three ponds, which can be used for agricultural purposes, drinking as well as shared with three villages nearby.

Ram Krishnan plans to clean the water, collect in it 20 litre cans and ferry it to other villages in a bullock cart! Vilathikulam has sufficient water supply till the next monsoon.

Ram Krishnan has also started a community centre -- the Bharatiyar Community Centre -- for the villagers, where farmers are taught various things including organising health camps, Self Help Groups, improving agricultural production etc. IIT engineer-turned-farmer R Madhavan is helping him in this endeavour. At the centre, farmers also try out the methods adopted by Madhavan for first-hand knowledge of new agricultural methods.

Ram Krishnan visits Vilathikulam four times in a year to check on the work done by villagers. "It is worth a million dollars to see a smile on the face of a child or an old woman. When they welcome you, a total stranger, like a part of their family, you feel so happy," he adds on an emotional note.
Recalls Ram Krishnan, "On December 22, after the PAN IIT conference, we took a group of people to many villages including Madhavan's village. Madhavan's efforts touched one IITian's heart so much that he wrote to me. He wanted to help a village."

He urges the youth to "reach out and understand Indian villages."

"It is simple. You don't need a Tata or Birla to help a village, even one person can do that. We need many, many people to change the face of Indian villages. Youngsters do not have to wait till their hair turns grey," he says.

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2009-01-22T06:20:00.000-08:00

India's first ISO Certified Police Station... Bharat Mata Ki Jai !!

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He made Chhattisgarh's right to know affordable

2009-01-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

Ejaz Kaiser
Raipur
Hindustan Times January 7th

OF THE 28 Indian states, Chhattisgarh, created only in 2000, has scored well on several counts of governance. So much so that then the ruling BJP govornment returned to power in the recent Assembly lections, political observers called it a vote for good governance. The real hero of good governance, however, in this tribal, impoverished state is the Right to Information Act (RTI), which is being used by ordinary citizens and activists to make the government accountable for its actions. And driving that transformation is Prateek Pandey Among Pandey's achievements is an expose of irregularities on part of the state's Public Service Commission in conducting its examination and evaluating candidates applying for jobs. The disclosures through the RTI Act, which translated into a petition before the court, forced the state to suspend commission chairman Ashok Darbari, its secretary Manohar Pandey and Examination Controller D.E Kashyap. The exam system was overhauled. Pandey has since been consultant to over 500 clients, helping some to write RTI applications and following up for others. He has trained over 1,600 government officials on the Act, organised 65 workshops for Civil Society Organisations and contributed to the national discourse on RTI. He has also founded a network of RTI activists, the Chhattisgarh Citizen's Initiative. The Act, he said, is promoting a culture of accountability and transparency in Chhattisgarh. "As elsewhere, the Act infused some fear among officials. We struggled on various fronts after the Act was implemented owing to hostile reactions from babus," he said. The first strong resistance Pandey met from officials was when he challenged the "suppressive" state order that discouraged the use of the Act the state started charging applicants Rs 100 per page for any query sought. When Pandey questioned the Rs 100-per-page diktat, he said officials gave him wrong information and misguided him. Dissatisfied with the answer, when Pandey approached the higher appellate authority for redressal, officials questioned his ability to understand the law. "Don't teach us rules," Pandey said he was told. He was relentless in his campaign though, and the state scrapped the Rs 100per-page order eight months after it was passed, making it affordable for people to benefit from what was meant to serve them. change@hindustantimes.com

Link : http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/Default.aspx?selpg=2803&BMode=100&selDt=01/08/2009

Young medicos offer succour toflood-hit Bihar

2009-01-07T01:50:00.000-08:00

Jaya Shroff BhalIa & Neha Bhayana
New Delhi/Mumbai, Hindustan Times

ON BEING denied permission to work in flood-rayaged Bihar last year, 18 young doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences took unpaid leave and joined many other volunteers, ensuring that the state survived the flood of diseases that followed the calamity. With no funds from the government or sponsors, the doctors - between 25 and 30 years - used their own money to travel and work in Bihan Many of them ventured to flood-ravaged parts where locals and senior doctors refused to go. "We were needed there. As a doctor, I knew of the dangers that lurk in flood waters, from cholera to jaun- dice and typhoid," said Dr Kumar Harsh, a cancer specialist, who spent a week in Bihar's Sapaul district. Someone, he felt, had to set an example, and his sentiment found echo among young doctors across the country Maharashtra alone accounted for 70 doctors, including nine from Mumbai's KEM Hospital. Dr Ravikant Singh, a second-year preventive and social medicine student at KEM, spent four months in the districts of Saharsa, Supaul and Madhepura - the worst hit by the floods that killed 530 people and displaced 33.56 lakh people. "I was scared of losing the year as we were officially allowed to go only for 15 days, but I stayed on. How could a doctor turn away?" said Singh. His classmate Dr Chan- drakant Patil died after being struck by lightning in Supaul, but he and the other doctors did not rush back to safety "I am glad help reached the flood-hit areas in time. If we had relied completely on the state government, we probably would have had not one but many epidemics," said Dr Harsh. With absolutely no help from the state or central government, these doctors set up health clinics in districts with non-existing health infrastructure. change@hindustantimes.com VOLUNTEER DOCTORS They took unpaid leave, spent their own money to travel and work in Bihar

Link : http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/ArticleImage.aspx?article=07_01_2009_008_005&mode=1

MBA topper's pushcart is full of vegetables - and a dream

2009-01-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Patna: It may come as a shock to many that after topping the elite Indian Institute of Management (IIM), he opted to sell vegetables on the rough streets of this city. But then Kaushalendra is a man on a mission.

He is not moving around with his loaded pushcart to earn a livelihood but to make his home state, Bihar, the vegetable hub of India.

Kaushalendra, who is in his late 20s, is an IIM-Ahmedabad graduate of the 2007 batch. He could, like his peers, have chosen to sit in the plush air-conditioned premises of a top MNC like his peers. But he is roughing it out instead.

"I am here to do something. It was my childhood dream to contribute to the development of rural Bihar," he told IANS.

"I have opted to make vegetables the new brand of Bihar," Kaushalendra, the native of a village in Nalanda, which happens to be the home district of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, told IANS.

Clad in a simple shirt and trousers, the bespectacled youth is popularly known as the "MBA sabziwalla" among his loyal customers, particularly women in the Kankarbagh colony, a middle class locality.

Hailing from a farmer family himself, he started his venture about 10 days ago.

After passing out of IIM-A, he did extensive fieldwork, meeting farmers, studying cultivation techniques and finally taking a bank loan of Rs.4 million to start the project.

"Till date the response has been better than expected," Kaushalendra said, well aware of the attention he attracts.

Unlike other vegetable vendors, he is minutely studying consumer behaviour as he goes along. "It is important for me to study consumer behaviour when they purchase vegetables from my pushcart to help prepare a blueprint of expansion," he said.

Kaushalendra recalled that after doing his MBA, he along with some of his friends and teachers from IIM-A developed a pushcart to make it easy for vendors to carry a vegetable load of up to 200 kg.

His pushcart is made of fibre with an attached weighing machine, is ice cooled to keep vegetables fresh for up to five days, and sold under the brand name of 'Samridhi'.

"Initially, there was only one pushcart for trial but now I have already ordered 50 more. It will go up in the next phase," he said.

He plans to take Samridhi, launched by his NGO Kaushalya Foundation, across the country and abroad within five years. His vegetables are priced slightly lower than those sold by other vendors.

"I am confident that all major players in the vegetable market, including Reliance Fresh, will purchase from us in the next five years," Kaushalendra said.

In a bid to establish direct links with vegetable growers or farmers, Kaushalendra has tied up with over 250 vegetable growers in different villages in Nalanda and Patna districts.

He has also tied up with the Agriculture Training and Management Agency (ATMA) to take his dream to vegetable producers in different parts of state.

Kaushalendra said Bihar has an enormous untapped potential for vegetables. The vegetables produced in fertile land near the Ganges river can mark a turnaround for the state if marketed properly.

"It will assure better returns to growers," believes Kaushalendra.

It was not east for him to take to his pushcart selling vegetables as his family members initially opposed the idea and wanted him to go for a job with a fat salary and perks.

But here he is today, dreaming big and chasing his dream too. IANS

Link : http://indiaedunews.net/In-Focus/July_2008/MBA_topper's_pushcart_is_full_of_vegetables_-_and_a_dream_4928/

All aboard the learning train

2009-01-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Alok Kumar, Hindustan Times
Email Author
Gaya (Bihar), January 06, 2009

Pramod, Pradeep and Santosh were all hawkers, selling groundnuts, gram or books on local trains in and around Gaya. They were illiterate and had no means of studying. All these boys are matriculates today. Pramod and Pradeep have their own book kiosks, while Santosh has started a sweet shop.
Another such person, Niranjan Prasad alias Ganauri, has landed a job as a peon at Magadh Gramin bank. Praveen Manjhi, who was a matriculate, had no job. He has now completed his intermediate course and hopes to become a teacher.

They are among the 700-odd children and adults of various age groups, who were either totally illiterate or had given up their studies mid-way owing to poverty and ignorance. Today, all of them are educated and look at the future with hope.
And, all this has been possible because of one man, Vishwanath Vishwakarma, a teacher by profession, presently on deputation at Jethian High School as Principal in-Charge.

His big idea: Start a mobile school to provide education to poor children on trains running between Gaya and Munger. He began his mission 17 years ago, in 1991.

Vishwakarma has developed his own syllabus, comprising 11 chapters, which take the kids through a journey to make them aware of the nation, their rights, dignity of labour and self-betterment.

He started training hawkers on the Gaya-Kiul section, at his own cost. His best companion is wife Sudha Kumari, a government employee at Hasua, who also extends financial assistance.

“It is education based on human values and the syllabus has nothing to do with traditional education,” he told Hindustan Times.

Vishwakarma teaches his students about human rights, how to get certificates about social status, claim welfare funds for below poverty line (BPL) people and manage a balanced diet.

It also teaches them 11 fundamental rights and basics of welfare schemes of the government and how they operate. The children and elders, once taught, carry the message forward.

Earlier, posted at Gaya Zila school as a teacher, he had to travel to Nawada in local trains. This provided him the opportunity “closely feel” the problems being faced by hawkers owing to ignorance of fundamental rights, government-sponsored welfare schemes and other facilities. The mission is not restricted to hawkers on trains only. Vishwakarma has started imparting training to those involved in stone-crushing and street children.

A team from National Open School (NOS), which visited Gaya to meet him, was so impressed, that it is now fashioning a similar course for indigent children in other states.

Vishwakarma is spreading his wings. He has formed an NGO, Vishwa Kala Manch, to take his mission forward. He has also been entrusted with the responsibility by Nawada district magistrate Yogendra Bhakt to look after the functioning of the 82 recently started Bal Shramik Vidyalayas.

Article Link : http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=a095cda5-97d2-4bf2-b62a-74d95d312c32

about

2009-01-06T05:51:00.001-08:00

its all about doing it yourself, and this page , i hope, is going to be somewhere i post all the articles which i think are describing people who have taken the first step and done things their way. this is the least i can do for them.

I would also like to request readers to join in and add articles that they find interesting.