The Spirit Of Ants

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The success of the bank led MDMSB to launch a business school, Mann Desi Udyogini, in December 2006 withHSBC. Chetna says it isn't an MBA school. "It is a school that will help poor women gain financial, marketing and electronic literacy to start their own businesses. The course material is in Marathi and the learners get a diploma at the end of it." Lately, considering that many women can't easily leave their homes, MDMSB plans to start a mobile business school—with the Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande Foundation in Karnataka. The mobile school will conduct two-day courses on several topics like, say, marketing yoghurt or how to increase the quality of milk.

business school, a rural bank, an artisans' collective are straightforward ideas, but there are many who have spun a revenue model around a seeming abstraction. Sample the case of Delhi-based Ashok Bharti who is building power cooperatives in slums. His complaint is that services like power and health are designed for the rich and middle classes—people at the bottom are left out. "We are trying to get slum-dwellers to pay up for the services they use. We have been telling electricity companies that we will guarantee them returns provided they regularise the connections. But surprisingly they aren't willing to do so." Maybe the internal economics of power utilities has something to do with this.

Ashok's Peoples' Electricity Cooperative works from Shalimar Bagh in the national capital. But he wants to target the 180 slums in the city. The electricity firms are offering franchisees to it; initially Ashok was reluctant to accept the terms because it meant keeping security deposits with the electricity firms. But now he has accepted it and plans to convert it into a cooperative model later. "We were against the franchisee system because we were only helping the companies make profits," says Ashok, who himself grew up in slums.

Similar to Ashok's initiative is that of Rahul Nainwal who runs iVolunteer, which runs volunteer centres where anybody can walk in and enrol themselves for a few hours of voluntary service. Programmes are conducted for college students during summer holidays, and for professionals like doctors, teachers and agro-management specialists who would typically take a sabbatical and go overseas. "The non-profit sector can never afford professionals...and people who want to volunteer don't know where to seek opportunities. We wanted to bridge this gap," says Rahul. PRIA founder-president Rajesh Tandon, who trains communities for better project implementation, stresses, "The voluntary sector can make an impact with limited resources only by being more organised."

Many social entrepreneurs have used ingenuity to tackle the vagaries of nature. In the Northeast, N.H. Ravindranath has developed an early warning network to predict flash floods. He has set up a committee with a core team and nearly 6,000 volunteers. He has identified 40 points on the banks of the Brahmaputra and its five tributaries in two districts where volunteers travel by boat to take regular readings of the water levels—each one of them with a mobile or walkie-talkie, a rain gauge, a water level gauge, a torch and, sometimes, a bicycle. Their inputs help the core team determine which villages may be hit by floods in the next few hours or days.

Ved Arya, an alumnus of iit Kanpur andIIM Ahmedabad, also has an unconventional pursuit like Ravindranath's. When the ex-tcs employee jumped into the social sector, Ved helped Bhils in south Rajasthan and cotton farmers in Wardha to set up irrigation systems. Later, in '97, he set up Srijan (Self-Reliant Initiatives through Joint Action) to partner with governments to implement development programmes, particularly helping communities revive traditional water bodies like tanks and canals. To ensure community participation, Ved has worked out a model where locals have to bear 30 per cent of the project costs.

At present, Srijan's work at the Samrat Ashok Sagar Dam in Vidisha district of Madhya Pradesh is being evaluated by the Institute of Rural Management. The project cost was around Rs 1.5 crore and it benefited 275 farmers while irrigating 1,000 hectares. Srijan works in nine districts across three states. Of late, it has partnered with corporates like ITC. "As a social entrepreneur," says Ved, "I am able to do something close to what I desire. And also realise the ability to do more..."

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