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April - 2002 - issue > Sam Pitroda Column
The Institution of Development
Monday, April 1, 2002
There are probably over 50,000 NGOs in India. Most work in rural areas and essentially focus on health, education, water, and environmental issues, with some that focus on consumer advocacy, womens’ rights, legal issues and so on.

These organizations get funding in part from the government, but substantially from private donations. I am going to talk about three organizations in particular that are examples of how NGOs can impact India.

Sewa Rural
Sewa Rural is located in Jhagadia in the Bharuch district in Gujarat. It was started by a husband and wife doctor team from New York in the early 1970s — Dr. Anil and Dr. Lata Desai.

They had been in the Indian army services and had a desire to go back and help India. So after having been to New York and made a fair amount of money they decided to pack up lock stock and barrel and go back to India in search of something interesting to do in Gujarat. They came across a small run-down hospital in Jhagadia.

About 20 to 25 different villages around Jhagadia had no health services of any kind. Government programs really did not reach there, because no qualified doctor would go there. So they collected donations from friends and relatives and took over the building and started the hospital. They basically relaocated from New York City to this small tribal area. It was a big shock to all that they could do this and be happy with it.

The initial focus was on a simple one-hospital organization. In five years they were known throughout the area to a point where the government of Gujarat decided to pull out of the health programs in these villages and turn them over to Anil and Lata. Finally the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) gave them an award of $150,000 (which was a lot of money at the time) for dedicated services to a rural community in India.

Now they run several hospitals in that area. They provide immunization to children. They even perform surgery. Once I was there and the electricity went off and the doctor continued with surgery by torchlight.

They train paramedical workers from the area, who go out into remote areas to deliver babies or immunize children. They even have a pharmacy that offers low cost medicine. Their entire life has been devoted to rural health programs in Gujarat.

To me this is a classic example of someone with a commitment to rural development in India. In the summer, several doctors from Chicago and New York, go to Jhagadia to donate time. And some of the children of U.S. doctors go for summer internship programs.

I encourage siliconindia readers to visit, and have Anil and Lata Desai show them what has been done, what can be done, the constraints and what it takes to achieve something like this. It’s about how you take that conversation that you normally have with friends that “I am going to do something in India” — and convert it into action.

Tilonia
The second example is Tilonia, which is a small town in a rural poor desert area of Rajasthan. Over a period of 30 years Bunker Roy has set up a very modern NGO for overall rural development called “Barefoot College.”

Bunker’s work covers education, drinking water, income generation, electricity and power. He organizes handicrafts and has set up shops to sell his goods in Delhi, and even on the Internet — leather goods, blankets, pillow covers etc. The rural women work and create goods that are sold to give them a livelihood.

The idea was to make Tilonia self-sufficient. For night schools you needed solar-powered lights, because electricity is never available in rural areas. A water pump had to be installed, and so on and so forth. It’s an ideal example of a village which is self sufficient — humming, working, and clean.

The problem is that a lot of these things have not been multiplied because they heavily depend on an individual’s personality, leadership and skills. These are not cookie cutters. If they were, India would be somewhere else today, because you could take the Tilonia model and the Jhagadia model and multiply it in ten thousand villages and areas. We have not been able to institutionalize it.

TARAhaat.com
The third foundation is called Development Alternatives, located in Delhi and founded by Ashok Khosla in 1983. He has started a new activity which is linked with his foundation but it is sort of on the border of an NGO and a for profit enterprise, called TaraHAAT.com.

The idea is to create an enterprise out of a development alternative and NGO, which is focused on sustainable rural development in India. TaraHAAT.com uses the franchise-based business model to bring computer and Internet technology to rural regions and attempts to create revenue streams using this technology that lead to a financially viable and self-sustaining franchise operation. The venture has developed software and it is in the early stages of development. The business plan is to get e-commerce involved in demand generation, transaction processing and fulfillment of the goods and services that villages need. The organization web-site — www.tarahaat.com — explains, “For a few rupees, the citizen can use a computer at a TARAdhaba to find out the crop prices at a faraway mandi, print out a map of her land or find a bridegroom for his daughter.”

The objective is to balance economic and social objectives to uplift rural India through easy access to relevant local and global information, and bring the Internet to rural communities.

When you open the web-site you will see items like “Health,” “Jobs,” “Livelihood,” “Governance,” “Law,” “Astrology” and “Bus Services.”

Multiplying The Model
This is the link that I was talking about in terms of multiplying the model. The first two examples show how successful these initiatives could be, but they remain a success in isolation. The third example says you take a development agency like Ashok Khosla’s and then create a business model and do a franchising operation. So people get jobs and make a living out of it and you multiply.

You can’t just leave it to a few isolated shining examples of success, because success in India — in a village of five or ten thousand — doesn’t mean a thing when you have 650,000 villages to deal with.

Let’s take Sewa Rural’s model. If that model is documented properly, saying how you go into an area, take a run-down hospital and re-build it, and if that training is given to 50 other doctors, then these 50 other doctors can go and take over fifty hospitals.

In India we don’t spend enough time setting up processes. We immediately want the product. In the U.S., processes are set up so that the mediocre can function.

We have to ask large non-resident India organizations like the American Association of the Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) for example, ‘What have you done?’ I’m sure they have donated money, I’m sure some people have gone and visited. But the questions that need to be asked are: Is there an institutional format? Does AAPI have ties with 100 rural hospitals where they can send one doctor every year for a month? It’s the process that becomes the key.

Sam Pitroda is chairman and CEO of WorldTel. He has been a founder of several companies in Europe and North America and the first chairman of India’s Telecom Commission. To exchange ideas with him, write to pitroda@corp.siliconindia.com.

This article is based on a telephone conversation with Mr. Pitroda.
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