AshokaTECH goes to Chennai to discuss how to "Reach rural populations in India"
AshokaTECH goes to Chennai Sunday through Tuesday to meet with a group of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows to discuss how to reach the most isolated populations in rural India. We will be covering this event here on AshokaTECH, so stay tuned! Make sure to visit often and follow us on twitter @AshokaTech.
In the document above you can check out the details of the Fellows participating as well as short interviews with them about community needs and the role of social technology, like the following interview with Kalyan Paul: (you can also download the document by clicking here)
ASHOKA: What particular skills or techniques do you have that make you particularly good at what you do?
Kalyan: We have an immense capacity to learn from people at various levels, ranging from the grassroots in the Himalaya to the renewable energy office in Austria! Our other skill is an iota of patience to build upon the capacity of local youth and empower them with knowledge to operate as barefoot engineers at the grassroots. Without the creation of local artisans guilds, we would not have been able to spread the benefits of various appropriate technologies to hundreds of remote communities.
ASHOKA: What technologies had the greatest impact on your work and your clients in the last 5 years? How has the impact been different for you and your clients?
Kalyan: We have been involved with spreading the benefits of appropriate technology applications in various sectors within an over-arching holistic mountain development program, which is community-driven. Over the past five years, largely due to the efforts of the earlier ten years, we have been able to mainstream some of these appropriate technology applications in the following sectors, viz., drinking water, renewable energy, eco-restoration, sanitation and value addition to local farm produce.
ASHOKA: What are the areas of greatest inefficiency for you as a social entrepreneur serving rural populations? What are your areas of greatest efficiency?
Kalyan: The fact that it is so, so difficult to motivate young graduates from good universities to work as change makers in rural Himalaya. We cannot seem to make the life of a change maker sufficiently attractive for this generation. It is a failure on our part, after having been a change maker for thirty years in rural India. Our greatest efficiency, however, remains our commitment to work for the marginalized and poor and assist them in the process of improving the quality of their lives. We seem to be able to continue doing so and in the changed situation we also seem to be able to build upon a second line of leadership and change makers amongst the rural poor - but this takes a lot of time and slows down the pace of change, which is sometimes frustrating.
ASHOKA: How will rural India and rural populations be different in 5 or 10 years time? What impact will this have on your work?
Kalyan: Rural India is being hollowed-up with very low prices for farm produce for over forty years. So much so that there seems to be a large dose of cynicism establishing into the very hearts of farmers and the next generation does not care if they have to migrate to urban sweatshops, hundreds of miles away. Every third Indian is on the run today! However, even poor farmers are more than willing to share fifty percent of the cost of appropriate technologies which improve the quality of their lives. Social entrepreneurs would need to change strategies along with changing times, especially as the aspirations of the next generation of rural folks are changing and would change drastically, due to the hollowing-out of farming systems along with other ecosystem services.
