HIGH on the Uttarakhand mountains, a group of networking engineers are hunched over Google Maps on their computer monitors. They are looking for an appropriate site to position a rural internet broadband system that will pipe banking services to customers in the state’s Tehri Garhwal region.
“This is very difficult terrain and we had to make site visits, rent land for solar powered relays on the top of some mountains and hire local labour to weld small masts and carry them to the relay sites,” says Jim Forster, an American entrepreneur, who is building low-cost broadband connectivity in the hills of northern India. Forster is a former Cisco professional who came to India in 2006 as a networking engineer. During one of his trips to Dharamshala, he met a non-profit initiative called Air Jaldi, and became a quick convert to the idea of rural broadband. Two years later, he quit Cisco and returned to India leading the move to turn Air Jaldi into a for-profit business that has just launched a commercial broadband service for consumers in areas such as the Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, Mussoorie and Uttarakhand.
“Rural does not imply poor; rural people have motor bikes, cars, trucks. If we can supply good, affordable internet access then they will also have some number of PC’s,” says Forster who has invested several hundreds of thousand dollars into the venture that is now being launched as airjaldi.net. “We are looking for additional angel investment of up to $500,000 to $1 million by the end of the year,” he added.
Elsewhere in Tamil Nadu, DripTech, a start-up founded by Stanford graduate, Peter Frykman tested a drip irrigation system across 15 farms over five months. Following the pilot, the company has started marketing the product in China where there is a potential market of 300 million customers, according to Frykman. DripTech has raised over $ 1 million from angel investors to get the product off the ground. “We needed $50,000 to fund 6 months of operations and our initial pilot study in India, which I raised from a successful entrepreneur, Scott Petry,” says Frykman who travels to India every eight to ten weeks.
Opportunity across sectors
LISTED amongst the Most Intriguing Product Start-ups by Business Week, DripTech has notched up sales of 200 irrigation systems in China since its launch this year. “It can be challenging for certain people to accept that foreigners could gain expertise and insight into the needs of rural farmers in India,” says Frykman who believes his biggest challenge will be in building a distributed local manufacturing system that will make it possible to reduce costs.
Forster and Frykman are a new brand entrants into India’s burgeoning entrepreneurial landscape. Lured by the country’s economic boom, a number of expatriate entrepreneurs are flocking to India to set up new businesses ranging from rural broadband, solar lighting and drip irrigation systems to incubators that nurture very small enterprises and consulting firms. These professionals are tapping into segments that offer an inherent “India” advantage - untapped rural markets and a talented workforce. “Overseas entrepreneurs are looking for a warmer climate to try out new things as the economic climate in the US has not yet recovered and the buzz about India as an entrepreneurial destination is pretty good,” says Rishikesha T Krishnan, professor of corporate strategy and Jamuna Raghavan chair professor of entrepreneurship, IIM-Bangalore. “China and India are seen as the next big opportunity and while China and to some extent Brazil are not open economies, India is seen as a place that supports good entrepreneurship,” he added.
A unique combination of factors has helped support this perception of India. Skilled human capital with colleges such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and Management and technology companies with combined revenues in excess of $10 billion; A strong flow of capital and a well developed legal system; the opportunity to try out new challenges and take them to other emerging markets.
In contrast, physical infrastructure is poor specifically in sectors such as lighting and power, healthcare, roads, irrigation and rural data communication, all of which offer opportunities for skilled entrepreneurs to build on. Industry watchers estimate that nearly 90 % of Indians live within 40km of fiber optics, owned or operated by telecom companies, including BSNL, Airtel and Reliance Communications, but large numbers do not have access to broadband communication at speeds of 256kbps. “The fiber backbone supports pretty good internet access at very low prices in all the tier 1, 2, and even tier 3 cities but all of those technologies have issues in the rural areas,” says Forster, who finds progressive licensing policies for internet service providers, a huge boost in building a rural broadband business.
Sam Goldman, founder of D.Light , a start-up that has raised venture capital from a clutch of investors such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Nexus Venture, is cracking a similar challenge like Forster. “India and Indians are entrepreneurial and there is hunger for new business but there isn’t a mature distribution system to serve rural markets,” says Goldman who grew up in India and completed his high school here. But it wasn’t until he graduated from Stanford, did a stint with the Peace Corps in Africa that the idea of building a business for social good took concrete shape. He came to India in 2008 and started a company that would offer affordable lighting solutions to rural and low income consumers. It helped that the idea got picked up by the Draper Fisher Jurvetson-Cisco Business Plan competition.
“There is a definitely mature ecosystem for young start-ups here with almost all investor such as DFJ and Acumen having an office here,” says Goldman who has since leaned on investor networks to build his team of 80 people of whom 35 are in India. The rest are spread across East Africa, Hong Kong and China where D.Light also sells its products. “India is a highly competitive market and it took us nearly three years to get the right product and price mix here,” says Goldman who feels building products for India has made it easier to enter other emerging markets.
Fighting for a share of the solar pie is another expat entrepreneur, John Howard a former consultant at McKinsey & Co who quit his post at the firm’s Seattle Office for the rough and tumble of business in rural India. Earlier this year, his firm Duron Energy, started sales of solar powered plug and play devices for lighting and battery recharges in villages across Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh with sale of few thousand units until now. Howard, a graduate from the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, discovered that he wanted to sell affordable power solutions to Indian villagers during a fun-trip to the country some four years ago, and launched his company Duron Energy in 2008. The start-up was incubated by Bill Gross, founder of Idealabs and a Caltech graduate himself and has received investments from Solgenix LLC and David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust, a family trust .
“Our big breakthrough has been in tying up financing for customers with banks such as Kashi Gomti Grameen Bank,” says Howard who has in place a system where customers can pay as little as 100 a month for a solar light priced at 6,000. “We are actually displacing the 100 a family pays for kerosene every month,” says Howard.
It is innovation of this sort that will be needed to take-off in the Indian market according to IIM-B’s Krishnan who reckons long term staying power and constant innovation will be the twin tests for expat entrepreneurs in India. In fact, staying power is something that Freeman Murray lists as his calling card as he builds a technology incubator for very young start-ups in Bangalore. Upstart.in set up by him in partnership with Satish Dharmaraj, a VC from Silicon Valley-based Red Point Ventures, supports half-a-dozen tech start-ups in the city.
Murray, who worked with tech major Sun Microsystems in the early 90’s before he quit to set up his own company with a friend Pavni Diwanji, found a profitable exit from it in 2000. “After that I got into angel investing,” he says and found himself in India looking for interesting ideas in areas such as voice over internet and IPTV.
He began by investing in start-ups that topped the iAccelerator Business Plan Competition run by the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad putting in about 5 lakh in 10 companies. upstart.in now has a corpus of $ 100,000. “I am looking to raise more capital to support very early stage technology and in the meantime I am providing physical space that mimics hightech incubators in the US that young companies can use,” says Murray who has set up Jaaga, an open format structure that provides internet communications and defined work areas for entrepreneurs looking for an ecosystem in which to build new tech businesses. As the Indian economy expands there will clearly be more such expats who will dive into the world of Indian business. “I remember an early Cisco customer talking about how they would “get one million people on the broadband internet, and at the time, I was amazed at their vision and audacity. Now one million customers in the US is nothing, but I believe we could get 1-10 million people in rural India online, that would be a great accomplishment,” says Forster.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Why Indian Managers Succeed Overseas? - R Gopalkrishnan
Indians are rightly jubilant with the overseas success of their compatriots, for example, when Nitin Nohria was appointed Dean of Harvard Business School (HBS); or earlier, when Subra Suresh became Dean of MIT or when Arun Sarin and Vikram Pandit rose to the top of their companies. The positive emotion often has a trace of India Rising.
The achievers are humble about their success. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen nonchalantly says, “It is not a big deal, because America is an egalitarian and meritocratic environment.” HBS’ Nitin Nohria gives credit to IIT. Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi modestly says, “I am a mother first and then a CEO.”
Do India-born managers possess something distinctive? Do they achieve more success abroad than other immigrants? It is tempting to think so and, indeed, there are many views. One view is that Indian managers are no different from similarly-educated managers from elsewhere. Another is that Indians have always done well overseas, but media coverage has brought visibility and celebration.
A third view is reflected in a recent book, The India way: How India’s top business leaders are revolutionalizing management, in which Wharton professors Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh and Michael Useem identify four distinctive Indian practices: holistic engagement with employees, improvisation and adaptability, creative value propositions and broad mission and purpose.
Whichever may be correct, the upbringing of India-born managers quite unintentionally prepares them for a good chance of success overseas. As author Sanjaya Baru wrote in March this year in Careers 360, “Stories of extreme hardship, braving impossible odds and innumerable sacrifices, abound in the lives of nearly 90% of the students in the country.
But among them, some perform exceptionally well. Their academic laurels are so brilliant, that at times their CV looks intimidating. And each one acknowledges that it’s the right education that made them what they are today.” India-born managers are products of four unique circumstances.
Competitive education: IIT/IIM effect
Thanks to subsidies, higher education is accessible to middle-class people. When viewed with the cultural propensity to acquire degrees, this fact results in an avalanche of several thousand applying for every college seat. Higher education is crushingly competitive. Bright Indian children who do not get into IIT effortlessly secure admission into an Ivy League College! In the US, this has repositioned IIT as a genius factory, and IIT alumni promote this assiduously.
The graduates of India’s institutions have been psychologically autoclaved through high-pressure competition. They emerge with insatiate ambition that vastly exceeds their intellectual or financial resources. This stretch between resource and unreasonable ambition is significant: recall the late Prof C KPrahalad, “It is essential for top management to set out an aspiration that creates, by design, a chasm between ambition and resources.” The Indian system creates in many graduates a chasm between aspiration and resource, but quite unintentionally.
Accelerated learning
Life for the student is a struggle in India compared to elsewhere: commuting in chaotic cities, inadequate privacy and lebensraum to study at home, facilities for sports and libraries, and a crushing burden of exams. Almost every student has faced early setbacks: inadequate marks in exams, a lost college admission or a limited job choice. Chance plays too important a role in the Indian student’s life, making it quite stressful, hence youngsters just have to learn to face setbacks early on. They learn to be persistent and to fight with a never-say-die attitude.
Research indicates that extraordinary setbacks accelerate personal learning. Duke Corporate Education board member Judy Rosenblum wrote in 2009 in the Financial Times, “In order for people to develop as professionals, they need to be immersed in problems. A problem provides the opportunity to grapple with and test one’s ability to adapt.”
Although family and peer pressure are high, they also provide the required support to handle the stress. Fortunately, the influence of parents is prolonged and significant. Sir Winston Churchill told the English people, “Never give in, never, never, never, never” for the war years. The Indian student practices this all through life. Success is not just about being ambitious, it is about overcoming adversity.
Hard work plus creativity
It is not that other nationalities are lazy. It is just that overcoming shortcomings of infrastructure requires Indians to expend energy that could otherwise have been productively deployed. The educated youngster is forced to develop the traits of hard work like east Asians who naturally derive it from their Confucian ethos.
But there is a difference: the Indian has a low aptitude for repetitive tasks. The Indian will try to do the repetitive task differently and creatively: in short, he works hard and creatively, a brilliant combination. The serious student works and sweats as if on an academic treadmill and business executives do the same in their workplace.
Indians’ propensity for hard work was grudgingly acknowledged by Abraham Pinkusewitz while explaining how the Gujaratis managed to capture 70% of the diamond trade in the Antwerp market, “Indians succeed because business is all they have in their lives. If needed, they will work 24 hours per day.”
Young Indians have also to adapt to challenges arising from diversity, which is quite different from, for example, the Chinese: learning several Indian languages, adapting to school systems while transferring with parents, and coping with variable teaching quality.
Howard Gardner, Harvard academic on Cognition and Education, points out, “The only reliable way to determining whether understanding has truly been achieved is to pose a new question or puzzle on in which individuals have not been coached and to see how they fare.” Indian students are wired to work very hard, with passion and creatively.
Thinking in English
Where else in the world would a temple be constructed for Goddess English? On October 25, 2010, the birthday of Babington Macaulay, such a temple will be inaugurated in Uttar Pradesh. English is being installed as a deity there so that those who pray to her can be blessed with progress.
Uniquely, Indian managers think in English, the test being that they use English to express fine points. Many don’t comprehend the nuances of a vernacular paper. The manager’s professional education has almost certainly been in English, case studies have been Anglo-American, language proficiency has played an important role in success and socialisation, and the language of business is English. As a result, the Indian manager abroad is quite analytical, linear-thinking , and articulate in his intellectual skills. She hits the ground running in any overseas employment.
Unintended consequence
These four circumstances produce a sufficient number of highly-competitive , creative and competent students! Followed by a career in a relatively-orderly work environment with process-orientation in the west, the career manager goes Boom, Boom. She becomes productive early on because of lower frictional losses and obstacles.
Many, many Indians are successful abroad, not just the few that the media write about. I know from my Unilever experience that Indians are prized as much in India as in Peru, Poland and the Philippines.
These facts about the Indian manager ignore the harsh reality that many do not make it through the obstacle race. This has unfortunate social consequences. But for those that do, the probability of success abroad improves a lot. A concurrent trend is that foreign business leaders are joining Indian companies: Carl-Peter Forster in Tata Motors, Marten Pieters at Vodafone Essar, Wolfgang Prock-Schauer at Jet Airways and Raymond Bickson at Indian Hotels.
In short, Indian managers are rapidly globalising, and that must be a good thing for the future.
(The author is executive director at Tata Sons. Views are personal.)
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Why-Indian-managers-succeed-overseas/articleshow/6018548.cms
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Shale Gas transforms Geopolitics, Energy
For decades, India has kowtowed to Gulf countries, notably Iran. With large shale gas deposits and new technology to extract it, India can afford to act tough, says Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar.
THE Indian government remains asleep to the revolutionary potential of shale gas, which promises to revolutionise both the world energy scene and global geopolitics. Russia, Iran and Opec are going to be greatly weakened, while the US, Europe and China will be greatly strengthened. India can be a major beneficiary.
First, shale is a common sedimentary rock found in most countries, so shale gas can hugely reduce the dependence of most countries (including India) on imported energy. Second, the geopolitical clout of major gas exporters — Russia, Iran, Algeria, Bolivia — will fall dramatically. Third, some countries may start converting their transport fleets into gas-based ones, hitting the demand for and prices of petrol and diesel. Fourth, converting gas into oil will become economic.
Shale has long been known to contain natural gas, but this was not worth extracting with conventional technology. Now a new technology, ‘fracking', plus horizontal drilling, have greatly increased shale gas productivity, so extraction is now viable at $3-4/mmbtu. The new technology has been pioneered in the US so successfully that the US has overtaken Russia as the world's biggest gas producer. US gas reserves have increased from 30 years consumption to 100 years consumption. Port terminals to import LNG (liquefied natural gas) into the US will instead export LNG to Japan.
The US dream of energy independence remains fanciful, but its dependence can indeed fall dramatically. Historically, the price of gas was linked to that of oil: gas cost one-sixth to oneseventh the price of oil. That equation has been smashed in the US, where oil costs $72/barrel but gas costs one-eighteenth as much ($4/mmbtu).
Poland and Ukraine, totally dependent on Russian gas, are rushing to find shale gas and free themselves from Moscow. Georgia, another Russian dependent, also seeks energy freedom. Russia has an iron grip on its ‘near abroad', countries that used to be part of the USSR. But that grip will loosen dramatically if shale gas is found in large quantities in Eastern Europe.
Many Western European countries are rushing to acquire shale gas technology. Exxon Mobil is the front-runner in European exploration, but Shell is following suit. This dismays Algeria, a major supplier to Western Europe, which wants to create a gas cartel like Opec. The chances of this are zero. Indeed, LNG facilities created in the Persian Gulf to supply the US are becoming redundant, so supplies will have to be dumped on Europe and Asia. India must take advantage of this.
Gazprom, the Russian gas monopolist, admits that it has been forced to delink 15% of its supplies from the price of oil, and instead accept links to spot gas prices at trading hubs like Louisiana's Henry Hub, which sets the US benchmark price. Holland has a gas hub at Zeebrugge and Britain at National Balancing Point, and a new hub is coming up in Germany. At these hubs the spot price is determined by the interaction of multiple buyers and sellers, replacing the old prices linked to oil. The Financial Timesreports that half the gas contracts in Western Europe are now linked to spot prices.
PETROCHINA estimates that China may have 45,000 billion cubic metres of shale gas, more than Russia's proven conventional gas reserves. China used to be an oil exporter but in recent decades has become a major importer of oil and LNG. Chinese demand helped push oil to $150/barrel in 2008. In the next 10 years, shale gas may significantly reduce China's import demand. World oil prices may keep rising for another five years, but could plateau or fall after that. China is also exploiting its coal-bed methane reserves of 170 billion cubic metres.
Gas can readily substitute fuel oil in industry and power generation, and kerosene in cooking. But the bulk of oil consumption is in transport. Compressed natural gas (CNG) is powering buses and three-wheelers in Delhi and other cities. However, setting up CNG facilities across countries and converting vehicles to run on CNG remains a major challenge. It may never happen in the US. Authoritarian China, however, will surely push through such a change. This may be phased over a decade or more, but the price impact will start showing up earlier.
India has large shale deposits, with good prospects in the Gangetic plain, Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat. Tamil Nadu, Andhra and the north-east. India must get cracking on seismic surveys followed by allotment of exploratory blocks. Companies should be able to acquire blocks any time based on a predetermined revenue-sharing formula. Mukesh Ambani will probably be the first to start exploration, but others will follow quickly, including Anil Ambani (who is already in unconventional gas through coal-bed methane).
Large shale gas discoveries should embolden India to convert transport fleets in all cities from petrol and diesel to CNG. That will reduce not only energy dependence but pollution too.
Reliance has considered converting some KG gas into oil. Now that gas has become cheap relative to oil, it should go ahead. Other refiners — Essar, IOC, BPCL and HPCL — should consider this option too.
For decades India has kowtowed to Gulf countries, notably Iran. It can now afford to act much tougher. Iran supported Pakistan in Indo-Pak wars, and blasted India for Pokharan-II, and demanded that India sign the NPT. Iran nationalised the Rostam and Raksh oilfields in which the ONGC had a stake. It reneged on a contract to supply cheap LNG top India after Ahmedinejad came to power. Despite this India has been deferential to this potentially powerful energy supplier.
That must now change. India must tell all Gulf producers that it will pay gas prices linked not to oil but to the Henry Hub price. The best starting point is not Iran but Qatar, which has just completed a gigantic expansion to become the world's largest LNG supplier. This is now in surplus. Qatar wants $10/ mmbtu. India must offer just $4. Once Qatar gives way, so will other LNG exporters, including Australia.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/Shale-gas-transforms-geopolitics-energy/articleshow/6001231.cms
Monday, May 31, 2010
Patient Revolution -- Chhattisgarh Health Care
A band of 60,000 voluntary healthcare workers were trained to counsel villagers and confront errant government doctors. The untold story of how they improved healthcare for 18 million people in the state, writes M Rajshekhar The word ‘Mitanin’ was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend
IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in the early throes of childbirth to the local primary health centre, is an uncommon sight. For Savitri Sahu, the woman who responded to the family’s late-night distress call and hailed the tractor, it was just another day at work. Now, Sahu didn’t just happen to be around. She was deliberately positioned there by the state under a voluntary healthcare worker program called Mitanin. Simply put, this is an institutionalised ‘good Samaritan’ program. Only the samaritans also double up as fierce activists. Mitanins like Sahu are trained by the government to respond to citizens’ demand and get healthcare from the state as a matter of right. The baby was born that very night. Yet another baby born in a clinic…one more small victory for the Chhattisgarh government. The state has managed to increase clinical births as opposed to the traditional home births from 10% to 38% since 2000. And, yet another statistic to prove that the Mitanin program is indeed taking the state’s healthcare services to the masses.
This birth was very different from typical deliveries in much of rural India. The family’s decision to take the mother to the hospital itself was a breakthrough. The doctor and support staff being present at that time of the night was another achievement. In fact, 500 of the 717 public health centres in Chhattisgarh now work 24X7. Next, the mother breast fed her baby within two hours of the birth to ensure that the baby gets colostrum, the first liquid that comes out as a mother begins breast feeding. Age-old custom in Chhattisgarh holds this as unhealthy, and also rules that mother and newborn should not be given water for the 24 hours after delivery. Mitanins like Sahu played an instrumental role in making all three happen.
For urban dwellers, even poorer ones, such births are hardly a miracle. But in the tribal-dominated Chhattisgarh, pockets of which have once seen almost one out of every five infants die, this birth is nothing short of a healthcare revolution. Infant mortality in the state is down from 95 per 1000 in 2000 to 44 per 1000 in 2009.
This revolution, which has impacted 18 million people in the state, has been possible only because both patients and doctors are now more responsive to health issues. The patient is willing to go to the health centre. And the doctor, unlike elsewhere, is actually available at the centre.
And the credit for making patients and doctors more responsive goes to Mitanins like Sahu. — there are 60,000 of them in the state. The word Mitanin was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend.
Each Mitanin has been trained by the government to perform two roles. First, work with villagers to bring about a behaviourial change and train them in preventive health practices. Second, play an activist role in helping villagers demand healthcare as nothing less than a fundamental right.
For example, feedback passed by the Mitanins back to the trainers has helped crack down on errant doctors. In fact, some criticise Mitanins for taking the activism a bit too far. Sahu says she and other Mitanins make it a point to be present when the PDS shop is giving out rations to ensure that all households get their full 35 kgs. Some bureaucrats are complaining, but this could also be seen as evidence that the Mitanin approach is working.
There is a reason the nation should take note of Chhatisgarh’s healthcare army. At a time when debate is raging on whether the Indian state can deliver social services well, the Mitanin programme illustrates that, with a little reform, the state can indeed deliver.
This is why two successive chief ministers have ignored political differences to back the Mitanin program. Former Congress chief minister Ajit Jogi started it 18 months before the state election of 2003. When he saw that the initial pilots were working, he wanted it steamrolled all across the state. But Jogi lost and the BJP’s Raman Singh took over. Worried that the BJP might discontinue what was a Congress programme, Shukla and T Sunderaraman, who had joined to head the SHRC, sought and got an appointment with the new CM to build a case to continue the program. Raman Singh interrupted the session mid way to say that Mitanin was working extremely well in the villages. He knew that it was doing a lot of good work. The program has since got his full backing.
ALOK Shukla remembers how horrifying the numbers were. Ninety five out of every 1000 children born in Chhattisgarh were dying — the second highest in all India. This was in 2000, when Shukla was the state’s health secretary. He has since become India’s deputy election commissioner. Sitting in his office at Nirvachan Sadan, he recalls that diarrhoea, malaria, leprosy and tuberculosis were huge problems. Ten of its 16 districts did not have a district hospital. The state had 146 blocks but just 114 community health centers (there should be one in each block). Its 3,818 health sub-centres, each with one auxillary nurse and midwife had to cover 18 million people across 54,000 hamlets.
Worse, the existing infrastructure was not fully used. For one, the clinics rarely had doctors or medical supplies. Two, as one of the villagers in Sarguja, a district in northern Chhattisgarh, said: “Villagers were apprehensive of the hospital. We did not know where to go, whom to talk to.” Three in Chhattisgarh, much of the state’s population lives in scattered forested habitations. Health workers found it hard to reach the villages, and villagers found it difficult to access the health centres.
These, says Shukla, are the larger realities of public health delivery. The treatment of diseases takes precedence over pre vention of diseases. And there is a strong urban bias: the availability of doctors, health infrastructure drop as one moves from cities to villages.
Now, community health workers are not a new concept. But, till Mitanin came along most such initiatives flopped.
In the first approach, doctors moved from cities to the hinterland to create an alternative to the public health system. They set up hospitals and trained locals to offer simple healthcare in their villages. These models, like the one started by Raj and Mabelle Arole in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, delivered very good results. For instance, between 1972 and 1992, the Aroles brought infant mortality down from 176/1000 to 20/1000. But such models, built around the charisma of their founders, have struggled to scale up. After all these years, Jamkhed covers only 60 villages directly, and 300 indirectly. Chhattisgargh has 20,000 villages.
Then, the health bureaucracy has been running its own CHW experiments to extend curative healthcare by grooming locals into quasi-paramedics and by getting them to bring more complicated cases to clinics. For instance, Madhya Pradesh’s Jan Swasthya Rakshak programme, launched in the nineties, trained local men at primary health centres for six months. The programme bombed. Most of the training was curative, creating an incentive for the men to make money from patients. They rapidly became quacks.
Mitanin chose a middle path. It was decided that only women could be Mitanins. They would be chosen at a hamlet level. Since hamlets are more homogenous than villages, this would reduce the likelihood of the Mitanin not entering the house of an upper/lower caste. To ensure local elite didn’t capture these positions, the women would not be paid for their work — having one woman per hamlet (about 40-60 households) also ensured the workload would not eat into her livelihood. To emphasise the public health role of the Mitanin, curative would play second fiddle to preventive and promotive healthcare. And the Mitanin would be selected by the community, not the health bureaucracy.
It was also decided to keep the Mitanin program out of the purview of the health department. A technical support group called SHRC, State Health Resource Centre, was set up instead. This accentuated the activist aspect
of the Mitanin and enabled her to challenge the government healthcare machinery. There was another reason for this. The Mitanin initiative called for skills the health department lacked — mobilising communities before choosing mitanins, collaborating with civil society groups for training, etc.
In May 2002, the first Mitanin pilot began in 14 of Chhattisgarh’s 146 blocks. This was scaled up to 40 more blocks in July 2003. By June 2004, there was a Mitanin in every one of Chhattisgarh’s all 54,000 hamlets.
This pursuit of scale has resulted in heated debates. For instance, in the programme’s emphasis on scaling up, purists feel the CHW model has been diluted. Arole, the co-founder of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed, feels Mitanin has struggled to find enough good trainers, and that the women have not been monitored regularly. “At Jamkhed,” he said, “women speak most freely in the evenings and the evaluators spend a night in the village. On the other hand, at Mitanin, the trainers visit once every two weeks and most of the time goes into collecting data.”
SUNDARARAMAN joined SHRC in October 2002, with a unique set of qualifications: he was a doctor, he had helped scale up the total literacy mission, and was known for his attention to details, all useful skills for someone who had to train lots of women about healthcare. “As one scales up,” he says, “there is a loss of motivated leadership. There is greater transmission loss in training. Also lost is the tradition of working with the local community.”
“So, what are the priniciples for reducing transmission loss? You have high voltage at the starting point, a clear channel for transmission, step-up boosters at different points, and you have to measure transmission at different points,” he adds.
He did two things. First, he reconceptualised some aspects of the programme. For instance, the women would be trained every four months for as long as the programme ran (the Jan Swasthya Rakshaks had been trained only for the first six months). To ensure trainers and managers did not forget the ground realities, it was decided that only people living at a block level would be hired to supervise the Mitanins, and that trainers would double as field coordinators. Second, he laid down elaborate, standardised processes for everything — selection, training, on-the-job support, skill development, motivation, supply of drugs, monitoring learning outcomes, the spirit of the programme.
On the whole, SHRC was the high-voltage starting point, churning out training programmes, monitoring implementation, etc. The adherence to processes reduced transmission loss. The multiple trainings were the step-up boosters. A set of process indicators (visits to newborns, number of village meetings held, etc) were used to measure transmission. (Sundararaman moved to Delhi to head the National Health Systems Resource Centre, a technical body advising the National Rural Health Mission, in 2007.)
Take training. SHRC had created books on child health, maternal health, etc. Trainers had to go through these line by line with the Mitanins. Says Sundararaman. “You are not allowed to give a speech on the book even if you can give a better speech. Whatever happens, the minimum gets conveyed.”
Or take the spirit of the programme. That was communicated through songs and kalajathas (skits) — an idea that came from their use by people movements to build and retain a sense of mutual solidarity. The songs, written in workshops by Chhattisgarhi folk singers and writers, paint a popular image of the Mitanin in the local idiom — ‘Sukh mein sabei saath, dukh mein Mitan’.
ONCE training began, Mitanins were told to refer patients to the government clinics. In the early days, villagers who went there found the clinics locked. The Mitanins reported these failed trips to trainers who passed the information on to block medical officers. Slowly, the doctors began coming on time. Similarly, the Mitanins also gradually forced the ANMs to adhere to their prescribed work schedules.
It is hard to quantify the precise contribution of Mitanin to indices like child mortality — there are too many other variables around poverty and disease at work. But the dramatic improvements in childcare practices and improvements in healthcare delivery by the state can be traced back to Mitanin’s emphasis on preventive care and activism.
That said, the rate of improvement in health indices is slowing. This suggests that the low-hanging improvement have been made. The question is whether a health programme can improve the state’s health numbers on its own. Says Arole, “Health is also about ensuring nutrition, clean water, a healthy local environment and education. We need to have a good implementation of all these programmes.” Mitanin on its own is not a panacea.
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=ETNEW&BaseHref=ETM/2010/06/01&PageLabel=14&EntityId=Ar01400&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T
IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in the early throes of childbirth to the local primary health centre, is an uncommon sight. For Savitri Sahu, the woman who responded to the family’s late-night distress call and hailed the tractor, it was just another day at work. Now, Sahu didn’t just happen to be around. She was deliberately positioned there by the state under a voluntary healthcare worker program called Mitanin. Simply put, this is an institutionalised ‘good Samaritan’ program. Only the samaritans also double up as fierce activists. Mitanins like Sahu are trained by the government to respond to citizens’ demand and get healthcare from the state as a matter of right. The baby was born that very night. Yet another baby born in a clinic…one more small victory for the Chhattisgarh government. The state has managed to increase clinical births as opposed to the traditional home births from 10% to 38% since 2000. And, yet another statistic to prove that the Mitanin program is indeed taking the state’s healthcare services to the masses.
This birth was very different from typical deliveries in much of rural India. The family’s decision to take the mother to the hospital itself was a breakthrough. The doctor and support staff being present at that time of the night was another achievement. In fact, 500 of the 717 public health centres in Chhattisgarh now work 24X7. Next, the mother breast fed her baby within two hours of the birth to ensure that the baby gets colostrum, the first liquid that comes out as a mother begins breast feeding. Age-old custom in Chhattisgarh holds this as unhealthy, and also rules that mother and newborn should not be given water for the 24 hours after delivery. Mitanins like Sahu played an instrumental role in making all three happen.
For urban dwellers, even poorer ones, such births are hardly a miracle. But in the tribal-dominated Chhattisgarh, pockets of which have once seen almost one out of every five infants die, this birth is nothing short of a healthcare revolution. Infant mortality in the state is down from 95 per 1000 in 2000 to 44 per 1000 in 2009.
This revolution, which has impacted 18 million people in the state, has been possible only because both patients and doctors are now more responsive to health issues. The patient is willing to go to the health centre. And the doctor, unlike elsewhere, is actually available at the centre.
Each Mitanin has been trained by the government to perform two roles. First, work with villagers to bring about a behaviourial change and train them in preventive health practices. Second, play an activist role in helping villagers demand healthcare as nothing less than a fundamental right.
For example, feedback passed by the Mitanins back to the trainers has helped crack down on errant doctors. In fact, some criticise Mitanins for taking the activism a bit too far. Sahu says she and other Mitanins make it a point to be present when the PDS shop is giving out rations to ensure that all households get their full 35 kgs. Some bureaucrats are complaining, but this could also be seen as evidence that the Mitanin approach is working.
There is a reason the nation should take note of Chhatisgarh’s healthcare army. At a time when debate is raging on whether the Indian state can deliver social services well, the Mitanin programme illustrates that, with a little reform, the state can indeed deliver.
This is why two successive chief ministers have ignored political differences to back the Mitanin program. Former Congress chief minister Ajit Jogi started it 18 months before the state election of 2003. When he saw that the initial pilots were working, he wanted it steamrolled all across the state. But Jogi lost and the BJP’s Raman Singh took over. Worried that the BJP might discontinue what was a Congress programme, Shukla and T Sunderaraman, who had joined to head the SHRC, sought and got an appointment with the new CM to build a case to continue the program. Raman Singh interrupted the session mid way to say that Mitanin was working extremely well in the villages. He knew that it was doing a lot of good work. The program has since got his full backing.
ALOK Shukla remembers how horrifying the numbers were. Ninety five out of every 1000 children born in Chhattisgarh were dying — the second highest in all India. This was in 2000, when Shukla was the state’s health secretary. He has since become India’s deputy election commissioner. Sitting in his office at Nirvachan Sadan, he recalls that diarrhoea, malaria, leprosy and tuberculosis were huge problems. Ten of its 16 districts did not have a district hospital. The state had 146 blocks but just 114 community health centers (there should be one in each block). Its 3,818 health sub-centres, each with one auxillary nurse and midwife had to cover 18 million people across 54,000 hamlets.
Worse, the existing infrastructure was not fully used. For one, the clinics rarely had doctors or medical supplies. Two, as one of the villagers in Sarguja, a district in northern Chhattisgarh, said: “Villagers were apprehensive of the hospital. We did not know where to go, whom to talk to.” Three in Chhattisgarh, much of the state’s population lives in scattered forested habitations. Health workers found it hard to reach the villages, and villagers found it difficult to access the health centres.
These, says Shukla, are the larger realities of public health delivery. The treatment of diseases takes precedence over pre vention of diseases. And there is a strong urban bias: the availability of doctors, health infrastructure drop as one moves from cities to villages.
Now, community health workers are not a new concept. But, till Mitanin came along most such initiatives flopped.
In the first approach, doctors moved from cities to the hinterland to create an alternative to the public health system. They set up hospitals and trained locals to offer simple healthcare in their villages. These models, like the one started by Raj and Mabelle Arole in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, delivered very good results. For instance, between 1972 and 1992, the Aroles brought infant mortality down from 176/1000 to 20/1000. But such models, built around the charisma of their founders, have struggled to scale up. After all these years, Jamkhed covers only 60 villages directly, and 300 indirectly. Chhattisgargh has 20,000 villages.
Then, the health bureaucracy has been running its own CHW experiments to extend curative healthcare by grooming locals into quasi-paramedics and by getting them to bring more complicated cases to clinics. For instance, Madhya Pradesh’s Jan Swasthya Rakshak programme, launched in the nineties, trained local men at primary health centres for six months. The programme bombed. Most of the training was curative, creating an incentive for the men to make money from patients. They rapidly became quacks.
Mitanin chose a middle path. It was decided that only women could be Mitanins. They would be chosen at a hamlet level. Since hamlets are more homogenous than villages, this would reduce the likelihood of the Mitanin not entering the house of an upper/lower caste. To ensure local elite didn’t capture these positions, the women would not be paid for their work — having one woman per hamlet (about 40-60 households) also ensured the workload would not eat into her livelihood. To emphasise the public health role of the Mitanin, curative would play second fiddle to preventive and promotive healthcare. And the Mitanin would be selected by the community, not the health bureaucracy.
It was also decided to keep the Mitanin program out of the purview of the health department. A technical support group called SHRC, State Health Resource Centre, was set up instead. This accentuated the activist aspect
of the Mitanin and enabled her to challenge the government healthcare machinery. There was another reason for this. The Mitanin initiative called for skills the health department lacked — mobilising communities before choosing mitanins, collaborating with civil society groups for training, etc.
In May 2002, the first Mitanin pilot began in 14 of Chhattisgarh’s 146 blocks. This was scaled up to 40 more blocks in July 2003. By June 2004, there was a Mitanin in every one of Chhattisgarh’s all 54,000 hamlets.
This pursuit of scale has resulted in heated debates. For instance, in the programme’s emphasis on scaling up, purists feel the CHW model has been diluted. Arole, the co-founder of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed, feels Mitanin has struggled to find enough good trainers, and that the women have not been monitored regularly. “At Jamkhed,” he said, “women speak most freely in the evenings and the evaluators spend a night in the village. On the other hand, at Mitanin, the trainers visit once every two weeks and most of the time goes into collecting data.”
SUNDARARAMAN joined SHRC in October 2002, with a unique set of qualifications: he was a doctor, he had helped scale up the total literacy mission, and was known for his attention to details, all useful skills for someone who had to train lots of women about healthcare. “As one scales up,” he says, “there is a loss of motivated leadership. There is greater transmission loss in training. Also lost is the tradition of working with the local community.”
“So, what are the priniciples for reducing transmission loss? You have high voltage at the starting point, a clear channel for transmission, step-up boosters at different points, and you have to measure transmission at different points,” he adds.
He did two things. First, he reconceptualised some aspects of the programme. For instance, the women would be trained every four months for as long as the programme ran (the Jan Swasthya Rakshaks had been trained only for the first six months). To ensure trainers and managers did not forget the ground realities, it was decided that only people living at a block level would be hired to supervise the Mitanins, and that trainers would double as field coordinators. Second, he laid down elaborate, standardised processes for everything — selection, training, on-the-job support, skill development, motivation, supply of drugs, monitoring learning outcomes, the spirit of the programme.
On the whole, SHRC was the high-voltage starting point, churning out training programmes, monitoring implementation, etc. The adherence to processes reduced transmission loss. The multiple trainings were the step-up boosters. A set of process indicators (visits to newborns, number of village meetings held, etc) were used to measure transmission. (Sundararaman moved to Delhi to head the National Health Systems Resource Centre, a technical body advising the National Rural Health Mission, in 2007.)
Take training. SHRC had created books on child health, maternal health, etc. Trainers had to go through these line by line with the Mitanins. Says Sundararaman. “You are not allowed to give a speech on the book even if you can give a better speech. Whatever happens, the minimum gets conveyed.”
Or take the spirit of the programme. That was communicated through songs and kalajathas (skits) — an idea that came from their use by people movements to build and retain a sense of mutual solidarity. The songs, written in workshops by Chhattisgarhi folk singers and writers, paint a popular image of the Mitanin in the local idiom — ‘Sukh mein sabei saath, dukh mein Mitan’.
ONCE training began, Mitanins were told to refer patients to the government clinics. In the early days, villagers who went there found the clinics locked. The Mitanins reported these failed trips to trainers who passed the information on to block medical officers. Slowly, the doctors began coming on time. Similarly, the Mitanins also gradually forced the ANMs to adhere to their prescribed work schedules.
It is hard to quantify the precise contribution of Mitanin to indices like child mortality — there are too many other variables around poverty and disease at work. But the dramatic improvements in childcare practices and improvements in healthcare delivery by the state can be traced back to Mitanin’s emphasis on preventive care and activism.
That said, the rate of improvement in health indices is slowing. This suggests that the low-hanging improvement have been made. The question is whether a health programme can improve the state’s health numbers on its own. Says Arole, “Health is also about ensuring nutrition, clean water, a healthy local environment and education. We need to have a good implementation of all these programmes.” Mitanin on its own is not a panacea.
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=ETNEW&BaseHref=ETM/2010/06/01&PageLabel=14&EntityId=Ar01400&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Hindu - "Panel sees male dominance behind banking crisis"
Macho culture has been blamed for the banking collapse, leading to the argument that boards need more women to prevent reckless decision-making.
There is a view that the banking crisis that sent Western economies tumbling two years ago may not have happened at all, or would have been less severe, if there had been more women at the top in the banking sector — the argument being that women are more cautious and risk averse and, therefore, more likely than men to challenge the sort of practices that caused the crisis.
Until now, this theory had been pushed mostly by women campaigners while men tended to snigger. But now even men seem to agree. A male-dominated parliamentary committee (13 men and one woman — an ironic comment on Westminster's own attitude to gender diversity) has blamed a macho culture and “potentially dangerous group think” for the collapse of several leading British banks arguing that boards need more women to prevent reckless decision-making.
In a report, highlighting the acute dearth of women at the top in Britain's financial sector, the Treasury Select Committee says that the prevailing male-driven high-risk mindset is not conducive to good “corporate governance”.
“Diversity at the top is one way to challenge potentially dangerous ‘group think',” it says citing some eye-popping statistics to underline deep-seated sexism in the City, London's famous global financial hub.
The committee found that gender-based wage disparity was the worst in the financial sector with full-time women workers earning 55 per cent less than their full-time male colleagues. The pay gap for bonuses and performance related pay was even higher at 80 per cent.
The MPs were scathing about the huge under-representation of women at the board level, especially in the FTSE-listed companies, with women executive directors accounting for only between one to two per cent in the 300-odd top firms. They noted that the number of women on FTSE-100 bank boards actually declined from 13 per cent in 2004 to nine per cent in 2009.
Testifying before the committee, Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman accused financial institutions of operating on the basis of an “old boy's network”.
“Too many British boardrooms are still no-go areas for women,” she said prompting the panel to warn City bosses that if they failed to act voluntarily to make boardrooms more diverse and inclusive the government might be forced to step in.
“We believe the lack of diversity on the boards of many, if not most, of our major financial institutions may have made effective challenge and scrutiny of executive decisions less effective,” it said implicitly acknowledging the view that if there had been more women in positions that offered them a chance to “challenge” and “scrutinise” decisions taken by their male colleagues the crisis may have been averted.
However, its chairman John McFall, a senior Labour MP, sought to soften the blow saying: “We are not saying that had women been in charge, the crisis wouldn't have happened, but we are highlighting the fact that women are poorly represented in the financial sector, particularly at senior level.”
Women's groups such as Women for Boards and the City Women's Network believe that positive discrimination, including women's quotas, are the only way to break the male monopoly of boardrooms.
“The City is a bastion of power, traditional male power, and they want to keep women out,” Sasha Roskoff of the women's rights group Object told one newspaper.
Sexist City
The City has always been notoriously sexist and it is reflected in the high number of sex-discrimination cases brought by women against their employers. Most top banks and financial institutions are said to be reluctant to hire women except as tokenism; and those who manage to sneak in anyway face humiliation on daily basis, according to anecdotal evidence. A former investment banker, who left her job in disgust, says that obscene comments, pornographic screen-savers and lewd gestures are common and when women complain they are advised to “learn to manage”.
“Over and over again I wasn't taken seriously,” she said in a newspaper interview claiming that her male colleagues refused to work with her and she was repeatedly overlooked for promotion. During a recruitment drive at one bank, a senior executive was reportedly heard saying that he wanted a “slim blonde”.
And it is not just the City where sexism is rife. Here is what Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, has to say about British Parliament: “We supposedly have ‘The Mother of all Parliaments', and yet we're 69th in the world for the percentage of women we have as part of that Parliament. Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates have more women in their parliaments. If we keep accruing women to Parliament at the same rate we are doing now, it would take 200 years to have equal representation. That's the same amount of time it would take a snail to walk the Great Wall of China.”
And, as we head for the press, the BBC is embroiled in another of those seasonal controversies about “sexism” at the Beebs after the editor of its flagship Today programme, Ceri Thomas, said that he did not have many women presenters on his staff because it was an “incredibly difficult place to work” for which they were not suited.
“The skill set that you need to work on the Today programme and the hide that you need, the thickness of it, is something else,” he said sparking a furious reaction from his female colleagues and listeners who pointed out that his remarks confirmed that the BBC was still largely male and middle-class — not to mention, of course, white and an Old Boys' network.
Oof!
http://www.thehindu.com/2010/04/07/stories/2010040754091100.htm
There is a view that the banking crisis that sent Western economies tumbling two years ago may not have happened at all, or would have been less severe, if there had been more women at the top in the banking sector — the argument being that women are more cautious and risk averse and, therefore, more likely than men to challenge the sort of practices that caused the crisis.
Until now, this theory had been pushed mostly by women campaigners while men tended to snigger. But now even men seem to agree. A male-dominated parliamentary committee (13 men and one woman — an ironic comment on Westminster's own attitude to gender diversity) has blamed a macho culture and “potentially dangerous group think” for the collapse of several leading British banks arguing that boards need more women to prevent reckless decision-making.
In a report, highlighting the acute dearth of women at the top in Britain's financial sector, the Treasury Select Committee says that the prevailing male-driven high-risk mindset is not conducive to good “corporate governance”.
“Diversity at the top is one way to challenge potentially dangerous ‘group think',” it says citing some eye-popping statistics to underline deep-seated sexism in the City, London's famous global financial hub.
The committee found that gender-based wage disparity was the worst in the financial sector with full-time women workers earning 55 per cent less than their full-time male colleagues. The pay gap for bonuses and performance related pay was even higher at 80 per cent.
The MPs were scathing about the huge under-representation of women at the board level, especially in the FTSE-listed companies, with women executive directors accounting for only between one to two per cent in the 300-odd top firms. They noted that the number of women on FTSE-100 bank boards actually declined from 13 per cent in 2004 to nine per cent in 2009.
Testifying before the committee, Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman accused financial institutions of operating on the basis of an “old boy's network”.
“Too many British boardrooms are still no-go areas for women,” she said prompting the panel to warn City bosses that if they failed to act voluntarily to make boardrooms more diverse and inclusive the government might be forced to step in.
“We believe the lack of diversity on the boards of many, if not most, of our major financial institutions may have made effective challenge and scrutiny of executive decisions less effective,” it said implicitly acknowledging the view that if there had been more women in positions that offered them a chance to “challenge” and “scrutinise” decisions taken by their male colleagues the crisis may have been averted.
However, its chairman John McFall, a senior Labour MP, sought to soften the blow saying: “We are not saying that had women been in charge, the crisis wouldn't have happened, but we are highlighting the fact that women are poorly represented in the financial sector, particularly at senior level.”
Women's groups such as Women for Boards and the City Women's Network believe that positive discrimination, including women's quotas, are the only way to break the male monopoly of boardrooms.
“The City is a bastion of power, traditional male power, and they want to keep women out,” Sasha Roskoff of the women's rights group Object told one newspaper.
Sexist City
The City has always been notoriously sexist and it is reflected in the high number of sex-discrimination cases brought by women against their employers. Most top banks and financial institutions are said to be reluctant to hire women except as tokenism; and those who manage to sneak in anyway face humiliation on daily basis, according to anecdotal evidence. A former investment banker, who left her job in disgust, says that obscene comments, pornographic screen-savers and lewd gestures are common and when women complain they are advised to “learn to manage”.
“Over and over again I wasn't taken seriously,” she said in a newspaper interview claiming that her male colleagues refused to work with her and she was repeatedly overlooked for promotion. During a recruitment drive at one bank, a senior executive was reportedly heard saying that he wanted a “slim blonde”.
And it is not just the City where sexism is rife. Here is what Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, has to say about British Parliament: “We supposedly have ‘The Mother of all Parliaments', and yet we're 69th in the world for the percentage of women we have as part of that Parliament. Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates have more women in their parliaments. If we keep accruing women to Parliament at the same rate we are doing now, it would take 200 years to have equal representation. That's the same amount of time it would take a snail to walk the Great Wall of China.”
And, as we head for the press, the BBC is embroiled in another of those seasonal controversies about “sexism” at the Beebs after the editor of its flagship Today programme, Ceri Thomas, said that he did not have many women presenters on his staff because it was an “incredibly difficult place to work” for which they were not suited.
“The skill set that you need to work on the Today programme and the hide that you need, the thickness of it, is something else,” he said sparking a furious reaction from his female colleagues and listeners who pointed out that his remarks confirmed that the BBC was still largely male and middle-class — not to mention, of course, white and an Old Boys' network.
Oof!
http://www.thehindu.com/2010/04/07/stories/2010040754091100.htm
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Goans dig deep to stay afloat
As lawmakers in mineral-rich Goa hotly debate the uncontrolled mining in the state's rural landscape, residents of a village near Panaji have changed their occupation from farmers to truck owners or mine workers to survive and thrive in the new scenario.
Tucked in the hillocks, the village, Soliem in North Goa's Sattari taluka, is home to 300-odd members of the `Gawade' community. This population from the economically weaker section had tilled their lands since ages.
"The offers (from mining firms) were tempting so we could not resist them. Anyway, farming had become an unviable proportion for us," Rama Gawade, in his 50s, said.
Soliem is amongst the many locales which have changed their profile from agro (mainly paddy) to mining economy. The village, surrounded by mines, is rich in iron ore, which is exported to several countries, including China.
Walk through the village, and cluster of houses and the noise of trucks attract your attention.
"The villagers are no longer farmers. Earlier almost all were dependent on farming to eke out their living. Now, they are truck owners or work on the mines," Ankush Gaonkar, the local sarpanch (village head), said.
"The village houses three mines. We have heard that permission for three more mining leases is pending with the government. At such a pace, entire village will have to be shifted," Sham Sakhalkar, a local, said.
The road connecting the village to the nearest town is dotted with heaps of mining rejects, many of which have turned into mini hillocks. The cashew plantation is disappearing and the paddy fields are getting barren with no one to till them.
It was not an easy task for the mining firms to percolate into the lives of the Gawda community listed among the `other backward classes'.
"There were initial protests. Around 100-odd people were detained when they resisted the truck moment in their village," Hanumant Parab, an anti-mining activist, said.
But nothing happened after that as the protests died down soon and it was business as usual, he said.
The mining biggies, including Sesa Goa, Chowgules and Keny Mines, have set their plants in and around Soliem with hundreds of trucks ferrying the ore from here to barges, which is later shifted to bigger ships.
Even though Soliem residents have given up their green lands to the mining firms, the people residing downstream Chirewal locality raised a banner of protest as the silt started accumulating in their betel-nut farms.
Memorandums were submitted to the Agriculture...
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/goansdigdeeptostayafloat/598642/
Tucked in the hillocks, the village, Soliem in North Goa's Sattari taluka, is home to 300-odd members of the `Gawade' community. This population from the economically weaker section had tilled their lands since ages.
"The offers (from mining firms) were tempting so we could not resist them. Anyway, farming had become an unviable proportion for us," Rama Gawade, in his 50s, said.
Soliem is amongst the many locales which have changed their profile from agro (mainly paddy) to mining economy. The village, surrounded by mines, is rich in iron ore, which is exported to several countries, including China.
Walk through the village, and cluster of houses and the noise of trucks attract your attention.
"The villagers are no longer farmers. Earlier almost all were dependent on farming to eke out their living. Now, they are truck owners or work on the mines," Ankush Gaonkar, the local sarpanch (village head), said.
"The village houses three mines. We have heard that permission for three more mining leases is pending with the government. At such a pace, entire village will have to be shifted," Sham Sakhalkar, a local, said.
The road connecting the village to the nearest town is dotted with heaps of mining rejects, many of which have turned into mini hillocks. The cashew plantation is disappearing and the paddy fields are getting barren with no one to till them.
It was not an easy task for the mining firms to percolate into the lives of the Gawda community listed among the `other backward classes'.
"There were initial protests. Around 100-odd people were detained when they resisted the truck moment in their village," Hanumant Parab, an anti-mining activist, said.
But nothing happened after that as the protests died down soon and it was business as usual, he said.
The mining biggies, including Sesa Goa, Chowgules and Keny Mines, have set their plants in and around Soliem with hundreds of trucks ferrying the ore from here to barges, which is later shifted to bigger ships.
Even though Soliem residents have given up their green lands to the mining firms, the people residing downstream Chirewal locality raised a banner of protest as the silt started accumulating in their betel-nut farms.
Memorandums were submitted to the Agriculture...
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/goansdigdeeptostayafloat/598642/
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