Adventures in Maharashtra: Rural Enterprise

While Delhi was interesting, it was pretty good to get out of the searing heat and get back to Bombay. I’d also been missing some of the Bombay specialties. Paav Bhaji and Sev Puri. Snacks to die for!!

 

I paid a last visit to the streets where I grew up and the old house that I spent my childhood in.

I also finally managed to catch up with my father’s old team at the Breach Candy Hospital, and was immediately reminded of the issues that India faces in it’s transition from old culture to better practices. Female infanticide is a huge issue in India, driven by girls not carrying the family name, being perceived as less useful in labour terms, and most importantly resulting in huge familial costs in dowry. Sex determination has been made illegal to prevent the abortion of female foetuses, but one wonders how many more baby girls suffer the fate of infanticide because of it.

 

Got to back to Bombay just in time to catch a train straight out to Sholapur. The team at SSP knew I wanted to get out into the field before I left and they very kindly arranged a whirlwind tour of some of the villages and women they work with in rural Maharashtra. To give you some idea of the size of India, Sholapur is in the same state as Bombay, but the train ride still took 8 hours overnight.

We left from Dadar station at about 10pm, and the platforms were crushed even at night. Most of the longer distance trains in India have air-conditioned sleeper class carriages, with drop down bunks, which are comfortable and spacious enough for a decent sleep. What’s extra cool is that they provide clean sheets, pillow cases and blankets in a sealed paper bag for every bunk. Loved it!

 

We travelled to villages near Usmanabad and Sholapur to talk to rural women that SSP has provided micro-loans to, and to learn how they’re using the money. While discussing knowledge sharing and local support, one of the things we realised that if things continued to progress for individuals, they would soon be competing against each other; which brings us to another element of design: Long-Termism in full-community economic improvement.

If individuals start working against each other it will undo many of the early stage benefits, so the design of funding and support must encourage and incentivise co-operative mechanisms, first on local scales and then regional scales.  

Rural village near Sholapur

  

While we were there we witness a really interesting phenomenon. Community group weddings. Multiple marriages at the same event. These save huge cost and also bring the community together. Even more interestingly, a Hindu function (wedding) and Muslim function (coming of age ceremony) were being held simultaneously on opposite sides of the street, with no discord whatsoever.

Micro-Enterprise
Micro-enterprises may not look like much to a generation used to malls and Gucci stores, but the picture below is of a full grain-based enterprise from machinery to storage.

We also visited a local hospital catering to a number of the surrounding villages. It was reasonably neat, but a far cry from the hospital you or I might imagine.  

From there we headed over to another village closer to Usmanabad. This time a strong muslim community, where many of the women face cultural restrictions, but still operate small enterprises. Interestingly in many of the cases, the men run the errands, and do the buying and taking of products to market. In essence, taking direction from their women, who own the enterprises. Micro-loans here are creating not just economic development, but also cultural change.

I then got my first look at the items sold by SSP’s retail arm, which provides access to socially responsible products. Sadly although these products have great value to the user, sometimes the design has not been thought through or tested properly, and often the pricing is completely out of range. The result is that products get used for purposes other than intended, or never make it their intended market at all.

Sakhi Retail and Products

       

I got back to Bombay just in time for a house-warming ceremony at my friend’s place, where I was staying. I tried to keep a low profile in the background because I had absolutely no clue about all that was transpiring around me. Still it was interesting and we got to eat some good sweets!

I did my bit to help with the moving in, mostly by inadvertently breaking everything that wasn’t properly set up. The Air Con for example. Fortunately this was all taken in the right spirit. Thank goodness for childhood friends!! Outside my window high up in Cuffe Parade, the view spanned the usual dichotomies of Indian life, with high rises on one side and massive slums on the other. It’s amazing how people living two such completely different lives, coexist so closely, and how such a huge example of hardship can be completely ignored by those who look down on it.

Before I left, I caught up one last time with all my school friends, and also squeezed in a few last goodbyes with all the different teams and projects I worked with. Apart from the SSP team, I managed to find some time for the guys at Teach 4 India, although the details of those workshops have blurred a bit now.

Ran a last workshop with the team at Arpan, which seemed to go down well, and it was great to see that they’re already applying the stuff we worked on.

Mostly though I was sad to say bye to the Bombay Ashoka crew, who hung out with me all the way through the Indian Adventures.

 

So to end the Indian Adventure, here’s a big thanks to all my old friends who looked after me, the Indian projects for accommodating me, and all the lovely new people I met and new friends I made along the way. Till the next time!!

Adventures in Delhi: Old Friends and New Realities

After a week in Hyderabad working with Gray Matters Capital, I headed to Delhi to meet up with the Ashoka team and an old friend I haven’t seen in nearly two decades. Nitin and his awesome wife put me up for the entire time I was in Delhi, which made a nice change from the hotel I’d been staying in previously. But the best part was catching up and finding that we still got on the same. Very cool.

We drank tea in tiny cups, Indian style, and I learnt all sorts of fascinating stuff about the construction industry.



Delhi is an absolutely Massive city. I was working in South Delhi and staying in East Delhi. The journey averaged out at over an hour, and trying to get rickshaws to cover that distance was pretty much impossible, and frankly in 47 degrees wasn’t really desirable either! Fortunately India has fantastic radio taxi services, that are fully SMS responsive. You have to see it to believe the efficiency.

As a city it’s a little like Rome in that it is littered with ancient buildings, forts, and monuments. Visiting these are dead cheap for locals but hugely expensive for foreigners. There are also plenty of markets in Delhi, from traditional ones like Sarojini market, and the new shopping squares like the Defence Colony market.

 

While in Delhi I made a trip to Mount Abu in Rajasthan to visit another school friend, who is the Prince of Bikaner. I wasn’t really expecting his home to be a Palace, but I made the most of it!

 

On the way there, I got a glimpse of how simply copying designs from one environment and forcing it onto others rarely works. The new highways are mirror copies of western systems with huge dividers in the middle and exits every so many miles. This totally disregards the fact that unlike western environments people live along the highways and are never going to travel miles in the wrong direction simply to come back to a spot on the other side of the road. It also ignores the fact that these roads won’t simply be catering for high speed car traffic. Animals typically do what they want anyway, and low-tech machines (like bullocks carts,handcarts and human traffic) have no side lane. So these roads are actually a nightmare of dual sets of two way traffic, rather than the smooth autobahns they probably set out to be.




I got the tour of Delhi and visited the Purana Qila, Rashtrapathi Bhavan, Connaught Square and the original Wimpy’s where I had my first ever foreign fast food as a 14 year old. While out sight-seeing I realised that the mobile phone has not just opened up communications to the masses, but also photography and creativity, which is pretty amazing. People who could never have dreamed of film cameras have moved straight to digital photography, and are making the most of it.

 

Indian cities are strange dichotomies of the Blade-Runner kind. Very hi-tech and very low-tech co-exist in immediate proximity. The mirror glass of futuristic constructions reflect the dark bases of dilapidated shanty towns that surround them, and gleaming Mercedes S-Classes stream past sweating men pushing loaded hand-carts in the same streams of traffic. Millennial malls are built by labourers using hand-turned concrete mixers, and New York Delis sit side by side with pan wallahs.

 

Unlike Bombay, Delhi has vast Chawls, which are sort of like multi-storey slums. They reminded me of Favelas, although these are higher and more densely packed together.

 

Nitin also introduced me to two of the greatest inventions ever. The electronic mosquito racket and Chaat masala. (see below) The latter I knew of, but hadn’t really fully appreciated until this trip. Makes pretty much anything taste fabulous!

 

Towards the end, thanks to my friend Elenice, who was down from Brazil, I actually made it to Agra. Heat notwithstanding, the Taj Mahal was as stunning as I remember, and the Agra Red Fort was a revelation. A photographers dream come true. All angles and colours and variations. 16 examples of great architecture on the same site.

Taj Mahal
     

Red Fort


While in Delhi I spent most of my time with the Ashoka team, working on how to practically implement the concept of Confluences, but I also worked on a few other projects.

• AVPN

While looking at some of the things that AVPN are trying to achieve, I stripped out another Blueprint Model based on the work I did for Gray Matters Capital. This is a model for changing large-scale embedded systems / sectors.

1. Trigger Change
2. Develop ecosystem
3. Build Movement
4. Increase Reach

Below is the real example developed for AVPN to generate massive improvement and scalability for the non-profit sector in India. This is the same model being applied by Gray Matter Capital to improving quality of education in India, and frankly is a model that can be applied anywhere.

• Ashoka
  The Ashoka team in India was going through a massive restructure and a transition to another operating model, so I ended up spending most of my time sharing the ideas and planning developed in Bombay and Bangalore. From the news I hear, the transition has been difficult, but I had fun hanging out with the team in Delhi.

• The YP Foundation (Youth Parliament)
  I randomly met Ishita in the Ashoka office, who is a key person in a youth led organisation called Youth Parliament. They were struggling with organisational stability, so we looked at governance and how to restructure to ensure knowledge transfer and improved fluidity of decision-making in an environment with continually changing members.
• Music Basti
  This is a young organisation providing education through music workshops for children at risk. We discussed the challenges of managing funder pressures and organisational development, especially without deep experience or commercial skills.
• Khemka Foundation
  This foundation wanted to play a key role in the development of Social Enterprise in India, and was looking for offline, event based ways of bringing different players and thinking together. Unfortunately while the goal was valid, neither the financial nor resource commitment really suggested that the primary donors were serious.
• ZMQ
  This is one of the most amazing organisations you probably haven’t heard of. It is a ‘technology for development’ company and has built mobile applications to address social issues ranging from health to education and has impacted almost 30m people in critical environments around the world, and is run by two brothers, Hilmi and Subhi Qureishi. Their challenges were primarily around scaling and resourcing, so we looked at open source models and potentially setting up the first OpenSource ‘technology for development’ platform, using crowd-sourcing to scale their applications on to new platforms.