Educationist Pratibha Pai (Founder, Project Chirag) And Sabah Vig (VP, Project Chirag) Talk About The Transformational Work Being Done By Rotary Club Of Bombay And Project Chirag In Rural Maharashtra
There is a forgotten Bharat with no electricity, one room and one shelter. It is probably 200-odd kms away from Mumbai and it only has a kerosene lamp as light. This is a sight seen in rural India where power remains unaffordable, inadequate or simply non-existent for around 200 million people. This is the Bharat that needs to catch up with the developed India.
Our villagers are trapped in a cocoon of poverty, illiteracy, ill-health and a regressive mindset that hinders progress.
The first village that we visited in 2010, Ujjaini, had such an effect on my team and me that it made us pledge to work towards this basic right of every Indian citizen to light. This is what has kept us all at Chirag moving ahead.
Our objective – solar energy which is available in abundance in the country is used a pivot around which rural transformation can take place by impacting homes, education, health, social security and livelihoods. But, at the same time, empowering villagers to make this change sustainable.
Our end goal is to see a positive change in development indicators. 200 million people in India have little to no access to electricity. More than 400 million don’t have access to clean drinking water. These are some alarming figures in the 21st century. Those below the poverty line are about 230 million with 84 million. Education seems elusive. It is to address these issues that we propose a 5-point transformational model for rural India using clean and green sources of energy to provide homes with lights, social security outdoors with streetlights, portable lanterns, solar and e-learning supports to school to bring about engaged learning, water for drinking and sanitation and solar for livelihood support.
With solar, our villagers are now free from the high costs of kerosene, wood or other oils as well as from the toxic fumes from these sources. Solar lights in their house have increased their productive hours significantly. Social security with streetlamps makes social interaction possible after the sunset, where otherwise, their day came to an end when the sun set.
Today, with solar lights outside their homes, they have a nice sense of community. With schools unable to afford the electricity bills, many of them have their meters cut and the classrooms have become uncomfortable with zero opportunity for e-learning. Schools with solar support have proven to us time and again that students feel more engaged, grow into confident youth and both attendance and enrolments see a rise to up to 25% year-on-year.
Filtered water and toilets are therefore now used resulting in improvement in overall health. The villagers can stay back home and move from subsistence monsoon-based farming to year-round multi-cropping thanks to solar irrigation. While we have seen the change at the grassroots, our journey has just begun. There are many more such interventions required, and we share with you a story of Savroli in Vikramgad Taluka.
Home to about 120 families with more than 600 villagers, Savroli has a Zilla Parishad school up to the 8th standard; they have only six teachers to cope with 260 students. Our dream is to make Savroli into a model village that also satisfies 12 of the 17 sustainable goals listed by the UN. A 10-kilo-watt solar system will help pull water from a perennial river enabling sustainable revival of the village economy and this is our model agricultural system.
With all-round support and training we aim to enable government schemes and gram deepaks who will be appointed to be the link between villagers and the government and they will earn a livelihood. It will be a new opportunity. Agri-training and drip irrigation will ensure more crop per drop.
A model integrated school with a mini grid to power the computer lab, digital connectivity. Solar cooking to strengthen the mid-day meal scheme, assembly hall built to enable community and student development, flagship Rotary Club of Bombay scholars – a scholarship to embrace and empower the girl child towards higher education.
The model water system – most houses have toilets under the government scheme and are awaiting continuous water supply. We have installed a nice filtration system that, along with water for sanitation, will help us make sanitation one of the bigger goals to be achieved.
We have also been in discussions to enable the school managing committee, the SHGs, farmer groups and we hope to enter into strategic partnerships to achieve our goal of sustainable rural development that will reduce inequalities and improve villagers while simultaneously reach the SDGs.
So, showcase the power and benevolence of Rotary Club of Bombay in the needy projects, be the solution to the problems at Savroli.
It has been seen the last nine villages that the villagers have given their own land and labour to help lay the pipelines.
Yes, in fact it is going to continue here, too. For the school construction, they have decided upon a village-Rotary partnership where they are doing Shramdaan, not only of laying pipelines. It is a barren forest land where the villagers are going to dig around four kms. If you monetise the work, it will come to almost Rs 2 lakh. They are going to share and contribute in whatever way they can in the construction of the community hall in the school. They are also going to contribute in whatever way they can to get the reti (sand) and stuff like that for the building. This has been designed after multiple meetings, charting out the paths from the river to the village, to the top of the hill, and we are keeping it in a tank there for the villages below the hill.
Along the way, we will water the fields and use gravity to take it down for another 14-15 kms. Villager buy-in is very important; the teachers, the school management committee are supportive and they have been holding meetings, trying to mobilise resources at their end.
We have also identified two-three youths to become our gram-deepaks. They will be the connection between the villagers and the government departments. So, there is uniqueness in the project. We have a list of people who are willing to give their lands, help in the system, put the tanks, the solar system, and they have already signed the documents saying they are okay to do so. There is excitement and buzz in the village; we are really looking forward to it.
President Shernaz: What is amazing is that last July we gave you the mandate for the gram panchayat and three-and-a-half villages and, by November, you have completed it all. When we went there, we saw it. It is unbelievable.
PP Ramesh Narayan: I would love to talk about the villagers. I have seen the overall transformation and one thing that I have always felt is, I don’t like tokenism. But here is a scheme where we ensure overall transformation. It starts with using solar to lift the water, hygiene, sanitation, education, livelihoods and about a year-and-a-half ago, all of us saw those heart-breaking scenes of daily wagers walking back home; here is a case where one has to actually ask oneself why were they in the first place? They were here on the account of the fact that the entire village economy is on its knees and efforts like these have made the village economy and all these people own the lands. Now even if that can be halted in our villages, I think the Rotary Club of Bombay must have done amazing service. Finally, I have gone to Savroli myself, I think it is a needy village and the exciting part is that the teachers in the school are so motivated, they inspired me to say that the 25000 that is asked for, at least I will give a lot more than that. So, I think the opportunity to actually help out is huge. Before Chirag had made this whole thing, I had asked the school children to identify four girls and I had said that I will take care of their transportation to the higher school and ensure that they get educated at least.
Yes, so, Ramesh had asked the teacher about the school’s problems. The teacher said that they have upto 8th class, and although the girls are motivated to study further, but they have to be water warriors and help their mothers, or at the farms and the school is about 506 kms away. So, that entails hiring a village auto and the parents feel that that money is sadly not worth investing on the girl child.
We found two girls who fought the system and the mindset and managed to complete their 12th standard. Now these three girls are desperate to join the Wada school, Jijamata School of Nursing and for the ST girls, and the fee is around Rs 3.5 lakh for one year and we asked them why they wanted to do this nursing course.
They said ‘we have seen how our parents have suffered and how much they have sacrificed for us to be able to study. We want to change the situation and we want to get hired by the primary health care centres but there aren’t enough qualified people and there are two kinds of courses – auxiliary nursing course of 2 years and general nursing course of 3 years.’
So, I asked, ‘why are you not going for a two-year course’? She said, ‘You know madam, I want to be helping general surgery, I don’t want to be just a mid-wife’. It made my heart feel so warm to think that there is someone who wants to bring change. So, if you wish, Rotary Club of Bombay can support girls like them.
QUESTIONS
You started your journey in 2004, how many villages have you covered so far?
We are currently at 444 villages and 120000 people, we did 69 villages in December and post-Rotary Club of Bombay, 11 states. We are working in a big way in Maharashtra but we are also working in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Other states, we go as per our donor requirements. We do have partners like in TN where we are working with the forest department; in Gujarat we are in Bannerghatta and Baroda regions, depending on our donors.
What is the total cultivable area of two villages and what is the area you propose to bring under cultivation?
So, the system has the capacity to cultivate 40 acres of land, 40 farmers will be involved in the first fold; the number goes multi-fold. Over time, you should be able to see around 60-acre land in cultivation. The village of Savroli has about 200 acres of cultivable land and 6 acres is cultivated right now from the little water available. Laying the pipe and taking it further becomes expensive; out of the 200 acres we are targeting 40 acres as a start and it will grow back to 60 and probably in phase 2, we take it forward. It will all be regular irrigation, however, as the farmers can avail of the drip irrigation scheme by the government. They will be able to take more land under cultivation because the amount of water required by them will decrease.
How do you facilitate increasing their livelihoods apart from agricultural income?
We are looking at the Gram Deepaks as volunteers to link the government with the villagers, other than that we are looking at the self-help groups and we are still in talks with them. We are inviting SHGs; there are almost 130 people who work for MNREGA and Wednesday is their weekly off, so, we are hoping to get them and enhance them. We get a lot of youth on the project. We have a young girl from Bombay International School who comes with her mother, over the last days she has been able to do a crowd sourcing of play school gadgets and toys and she is coming back to us next week to hand it over to the Anganwadis.
When we built a solar cooker there, we aimed to give opportunity to the women to cook on the solar cooker and they will get a livelihood opportunity. As of now, post monsoons, there are only three farmers who cultivate less than one acre with a little water; but they are growing gavar, mirchi, bhindi and corn and I was quite happy. It pays Rs 20 a kilo, it takes a day to get 10 kgs of gavar for which the farmers hires= someone to pluck them and that costs Rs 250 a day but the produce only gives him Rs 200 for 10kg.
They are earning more by cropping more. We are helping the farmer farm. We gave them fruit trees, and with that too they are earning. Savroli has some resorts and that also can be seen as a resource in near future. We are happy and open to ideas. Chirag has a lot of on-ground support to maintain and sustain these projects.
What are you doing on the health front?
Unfortunately, this village doesn’t have a Primary Health Care centre, we are helping the ASHA workers. They travel 8 kms for PHC. On the health front just by giving them safe drinking water and saving them hours of up-down hilly terrain, their bodies are in better shape, they are eating healthy. So, we found the health parameters improving. We are trying to change the mind-set of the villagers, making education exciting, supporting higher-school education and thus stopping child marriage. We saw a 7th standard girl married and pregnant and that breaks your heart. In the ICDS centres, we are giving them solar support, drinking water, weighing scales and solar cookers for making nutritious snacks for the children 0-6 years. Overall, the direct impact is in terms of drinking water and good food.