My article on Solapur

I wrote an article for the Six Degrees  News website. Six Degrees is an international development news website that focusses on grassroots reports. My article was about a government programme called Jal Yukt Shivar in Maharashtra. Here it is:  

http://www.sixdegreesnews.org/drought-management-successes-in-solapur-india/

I’m excited about having done this. I’ve not been officially ‘published’ for a while now, if at all, though I guess there were opportunities at Arghyam that I’ve passed up due to other work. Six Degrees is founded by a friend, Binayak Das, so it didn’t require pitching from my side, and I didn’t get paid for it. 

Whatever I do (if I do anything at all!) in the next phase of my life, I hope writing will be a part of it. This blog has been a source of great fulfilment but time to grow beyond it. And it would be good to be able to generate some income from writing. 

I learnt some practicalities about journalism on the trip. One was the difficulty of really evaluating the success of a programme or initiative from a visit. Though I have a background in the water sector, I’m a generalist and not technically trained, so it was hard to really gauge. And for a large scale programme like this, unless you visit lots of locations, you can’t conclude anything with any degree of confidence. Your ideas about this will be appreciated. 

Anyway, on the visit to Solapur in Maharashtra, based on which I wrote the article, I had the opportunity to meet the current District Collector. It happened quite easily, after a couple of phone calls, which was quite surprising. At Arghyam, it was really painful getting meetings with IAS officers. He was a very cordial and a nice person. However the really interesting bit was about the previous Collector, Tukaram Munde. He really seems to be a larger-than-life person who managed to achieve spectacular results. I have some sense of administration from work at Arghyam, and this chap in my opinion is off the charts. The District Collector (or Commissioner as he is called in some districts) has a really difficult job. There’s just too much stuff, too many subjects to work on. There are around 30 government departments/programmes that he is the head for. The DC of Sholapur told me there are literally hundreds of committees that he  chairs. Then there is the lack of good quality and quantity of HR to work with, including corrupt people. And unlike the private sector, you can't fire people easily. There are many restrictions and rules to getting work done, much less flexibility than in the private sector. There is the political system to be managed, which could be quite formidable. And in the first place, many of the programmes are ill-designed and ‘dead-on-arrival’. So I’d say, as far as serious impact is concerned, the DC is also for the most part, ‘dead-on-arrival’. However, Mr. Mundhe somehow managed to crack the system and actually get it to deliver. For the life of me, I cannot visualise how he did it. He is now head of Navi Mumbai district and making waves there too. A man to watch (and you can watch some of his exploits by searching on the web). 

Back to the trip again. There is a ‘power’ element in the field trip portion of visits like these , the government staff down the line from the DC are very deferential. At the same time I also got the sense that they thought I did not understand the stuff, and were patronising. I also find it tiring to meet a large number of people in a short span - my comfort level certainly is in meeting fewer people and developing stronger connections with them. 

I wonder where Jalyukt Shivar is going. There seem to be many issues with the scheme, much more so in other districts. But it also seems to have huge potential from the Solapur experience. This programme seems to have the tantalising potential to be the ‘Holy Grail’ for water security in drought-affected districts. But many a slip between the cup and the lip. At the same time some other large scale success stories are emerging from other districts like Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. Is there a trend here ? In the past, it was always about NGO models and touting them, but there were very few examples of successes at scale. Are we entering a tipping point where we get more and and more successes at scale. I fervently hope so. 

An interesting side point is that Solapur district has 2 products with the GI (Geographical Indication) tag, Maldandi jowar and Sangoli pomogranate. Here is a full list of GI tagged products in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Geographical_Indications_in_India 

It seems this idea is taking off in India.

Some more photos from the trip below:

Check dams storing water

Compartment bunds under construction

Dry open wells that are now recharged with water

A farm pond

Local farmer

Information on blood donation (with a focus on Bangalore)

In the hustle of daily life, can we make time for the humanistic activity of blood donation. Like voting, its a duty of every citizen. 

Here are some resources that help in donating and receiving blood. If you can add to the information here to make it more comprehensive and useful, please leave a comment 

For finding blood when someone is is need:

1.) Call this number 94800 44444 where they know the blood availability situation at blood banks in most areas of Karnataka and can tell you if there is a nearby bank that can supply your need. 

The facility is run by Sankalp Foundation sankalpfoundation.org  and Comprehensive Trauma Consortium 

2.) Check the following donor databases: 

http://friends2support.org  

http://blooddonors.in/ 

For donating blood:

1.) See the useful primer at Citizen Matters http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/blood-donation-faq-guide on eligibility to donate etc. 

2.) Register at the same databases above 

http://friends2support.org 

http://blooddonors.in/ 

3.) This Google map view shows some of the blood banks in Bangalore, and can help you find one near you

https://www.google.co.in/maps/search/blood+bank/@12.9505056,77.5763924,13z?hl=en 

4.) Serial blood donor Rudresh Kalyani (www.facebooks.com/rudresh.kalyani) says its very simple to donate, nearly every area of Bangalore has a hospital and/or a blood bank that accepts blood. 

5.)From a quick web search I could find only one hospital that had a webpage for those who want to donate blood at the hospital:

Vydehi (http://www.vims.ac.in/healthcare/blood-bank.html) 

General information about blood donation:

India still has a blood shortage, though hearteningly it seems to be quickly coming down (from 17% in 2013-14 to 9% in 2016). However there is a lot of variation geographically - some areas have an excess and some areas have a severe deficiency. Of course rural areas have a much bigger problem than urban areas. The law says that paid blood donations are not allowed, but in practice this still seems to happen. Some articles:

http://www.indiaspend.com/cover-story/why-india-needs-35-tankers-of-blood-89887

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health-news/India-facing-a-blood-shortage-of-3-million-units/articleshow/36492006.cms

http://www.sankalpindia.net 

Fundamentals of healthcare policy

Basically copied from Prof. M. Ramesh's excellent slides on the topic :

Health Care is a “private” good which markets can provide efficiently in a technical sense. Free competition among providers and insurers would ensure that prices are as low and quality as high as possible. Households would get the services they want and can afford and society would benefit from highest quality and lowest prices

Yet there are many features that make health care an atypical private good : 

Many public goods features

Information Asymmetries  

make estimation of quality, costs and benefits difficult

allow opportunity for supplier-induced demand

Moral hazard

Adverse selection by consumers, users and providers

Those least able to afford health care have the largest demand for it. 

Possibility of “catastrophic” health care expenses

Nearly impossible to save for all health care contingencies

As a result, market allocation of health care would lead to

Higher costs and prices

Poorer quality (except for the frills that consumers can see)

Inequity (because access related to income)

Technically, government can address the above failings :

Directly provide health care with public goods features

Pay for or provide the necessary health care to those who cannot afford it

Adopt measures to limit the market participants’ ability to exploit information advantage

Eg. Require transparency in pricing and outcomes

Regulate adverse selection

Adjust provider payment and financing mechanisms to reduce moral hazard

However, there are practical limitations to govt intervention:

Limited financial resources

Incomplete information on consumer and producer behaviour and the different medical options

Lack of analytical capacity to understand needs of the sector

Lack of administrative capacity to implement policy

Lack of political capacity to deal with conflicting demands of various stake-holders (Consumers, physicians, managers, insurers, healthy, etc )

Considering the potential and limitations of both markets and governments, an effective health care system requires health policy that employs extensive role for both to offset each others disadvantages

An optimal health care market is characterized by:

Competition among providers to attract. But competition over value rather than frills. 

Limitations on providers freedom to prescribe and charge, so that they do not take advantage of patients’ ignorance

Limitations on insurers’ freedom to select risk or set premium, so as to prevent cream skimming or passing on of costs to consumers or government

Limitations on consumers, so as to minimize moral hazard

Establish risk pooling to ensure redistribution of resources from more healthy and wealthy to less healthy and wealthy. 

Reduce out of pocket health expenditure 

Costs affordable to the society as a whole, rather than the govt. Considers TOTAL (and not public) health expenditures

A good health policy is one that sets out appropriate incentives :

Incentivize providers to improve quality while containing cost

Incentivize users to moderate consumption

Co-insurance or deductible (subject to a stop-loss)

Encourage users to use primary care facilities

Incentivize insurers to get better deal from providers on behalf of their members 

Instead of passing on costs to users or the government

Such an optimal health policy requires a strong governance structure characterized by

firm government stewardship

Functioning markets, where possible

Kilikili

I had a very nice 'Eureka' moment recently. On Rainbow FM (the AIR FM channel?) there was a programme "Folks with Different Strokes" (?). It featured a lady whose child had a mental disability and how she and her husband coped with it and went on to found an NGO "KiliKili", to create playspaces for children with disabilities. The lady was simply fantastic. One could see that she had beautifully come to terms with the difficulty of having and raising a differently-abled child, and there was great spirit and strength and no bitterness whatsoever visible. The host was fantastic too, asking good questions, interjecting when needed, generally sensitive and soft-spoken. From the way the interview went, she seemed to have done a horrific amount of preparation. How wasteful and old-fashioned! To actually do research before going on air. Kudos to this hostess, whose name wasn't mentioned on air. The interviewee was Kavitha Krishnamoorthy and the organisation she co-founded can be found at www.kilikili.org .

The icing on the cake for me was a small personal connection through Chitra Vishwanath of Biome Solutions (www.biome-solutions.com), the redoubtable environmental architect who was mentioned on air as having worked with this group to design playgrounds that are usable by all kinds of children.

So - this was one of the best programmes I've heard on air (both TV and radio) in India. Truly an example of what TV and radio could be at its best. Not that these media should only show inspirational true stories, but the current fare on offer is mostly uninspired without depth or substance. The programme compared well with the best I've heard on radio in the US.

"Folks with different strokes" airs every alternate Saturday between 6 and 8 pm.

========
I was delighted to see the following comment on this post from Rashmi Shetty :

Hi VK,
I was directed to your blog by a friend. You sure write well.I am Rashmi Shetty, the hostess of Folks with different strokes. Thank you for the feedback:-)
From the second saturday of May this year, Folks with different strokes has changed to INSPIRE .It is on air from 7p.m- 8p.m every alternate saturday. 
On reading your feedback thought I'd give you the update.
Thanks again.

Rework The World

I went to the Rework the World conference, www.reworktheworld.org in early June, representing Arghyam. The conference was in Leksand, a lakeside resort a few hours north of Stockholm. The conference was a very good experience. The next and last edition of the conference , which is one of a series is going to be held in Alexandria , Egypt in 2012 and I heartily recommend that to any young person, though needless to say, it would be quite expensive.

As luck would have it, my passport was quite close to expiring and I needed to get it renewed. I had a difficult time getting the renewal done ; worth its own blog post!

I flew out of Delhi and back to Delhi which make the overall trip more strenuous.

The event was on youth and social entrepreneurship. It was co-organised by two interesting groups the Yes Foundation (one of whose key people is an Indian American, Poonam Ahluwalia), and the Tallberg Foundation, a wellknown think-tank in Sweden. The trip expenses were sponsored by the organisers which was really nice of them, though I think they were hoping I would play a more active role than I did.

From Stockholm Airport, I drove down to the conference location by car with Thomas Bjelkeman-Petersson of Akvo.org, who's visited us in India a few times. It was a great drive through open sparsely populated countryside. A very welcome break from the crush and the dirt of Bangalore and India which gets to me.

There was a huge amount of infectious energy in the gathering ; so many people, especially youth (1500+), all trying to make the world a better place, all over the world.

Lots of particulars that bear a passing comment but maybe in a later post.

Some videos below:
1.) The Max hamburger chain in Sweden now tracks the carbon footprint of each kind of burger and lets you know !



2.) There was a lot of great music at the event:

From a recent trip to Timbaktu, more on Mutyalappa's work as Sarpanch of Mushtikovela village, supported by NPO Asha for Education, www.ashanet.org

From a Water Portal event this weekend

Timbaktu photos

From my recent visit there

TimbaktuKalpavalliJan09

New video

My video skills are improving:





I was at Timbaktu last weekend and recorded a meeting that took place regarding a local issue that they've been having. Timbaktu and the local community have been painstakingly regenerating and taking care of some of the barren land back to a forested state. An outside windmill company has now come in and wants to put windmills on that land.

I was particularly happy at how the photo+music sections at the beginning and the end came out. In fact I'm a bit surprised how easy it is to evoke a certain mood or emotion in this way.

Timbaktu contd.

Okay, there are a lot of specifics on Timbaktu that I can write about, thought I would do so. Firstly, I uploaded the full set of photos onto despoki.net:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu.html

Kolattam: The TC workers all get together monthly to talk about their work and their plans for the next month. At this time they do a traditional dance called Kolattam. All collective members must learn and take part. It was amazing watching them do the dance which is a very fluid and sensuous one. I guess its not that different from Dandiya. It has clear parallels in the corporate world in bonding and teambuilding exercises, though those are not nearly as graceful ! The collective members are all ages and all personality types and to see them all blend together and become part of the dance was striking. Especially for the more retiring or introverted types, the dance would be a real opportunity to come out and be part of the group. There is a quicktime movie of the dance I took:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/timbaktu/DSCN0452.MOV

The structure of the collective: They are all employees and get paid. They are geographically spread out and work with people in 3 mandals, but the energy comes from the central location where they meet monthly and where some of the folks like, and a school, guesthouse and other infrastructure is there. TC was founded by a couple Bablu and Mary Ganguly and the structure would seem to have some tension between democratic particapation and the will of the founders who obviously are held in high regard. The members of TC are organized into fairly formal groups of people who are focussed on specific activities, like schools, self-help groups, irrigation .

Monthly meetings: They call these the panchayathi meetings, I suppose one can see them as a virtual village and so these are the virtual panchayat meetings. They give their reports their quite professional and there is animated discussion. These meetings are spread over 1.5 days, Friday evening through most of Sunday. The meetings are quite creatively structured, besides the Kolattam mentioned above, they show a movie on Friday nights using a LCD projector and DVD/VCD kind of things. They use modern audio-visual equipment effectively, and they have a bunch of laptops. During the weekend I was there, they were showing a movie presumably off the web about an organic produce market in Peru, kind-of to sensitise the collective members of the importance of organic farming as well as to show that they are other people doing this stuff around the world. There are many women members so I wonder how these women feel about TC and how they make it fit into their other lives with husband and chidren. The budget of TC is about a crore and most of it is donations from individuals and aid agencies. The decision-making can be somewhat informal -- someone will say after some amount of discussion on a topic "Ok, so shall we go ahead and do this ?" and if there are no 'nays' the decision is deemed to have been taken. I would think that this would lead to domination by the more outspoken aggresive types, or the founders and early members.

Timbaktu organic: This is an interesting offshoot from Timbaktu, a bunch of people are working on getting farmers to go organic and on the marketing of the organic produce. They are quite gung-ho and have made some progress, at this point they have been able to sell as much as they are making and the constraints are on the supply side. We talked a little about millets. There is an interesting story here which I have read a little bit about in the past. Millets is a collective term for a variety of grains that grow in dry climates and are more nutritious and balanced than rice or wheat. Due to the focus on rice and wheat during the green revolution, the millets got neglected and comparitively little cultivation happens. Eating more millets is a great win-win situation for everybody as these are not resource intensive crops (little water needed) and could help poor farmers a lot. There are several varieties with english names and names in the local languages: ragi, korra, foxtail millet are some I found out. You can replace rice with millets in normal Indian meals, and you can make idli , upma etc with millets. Co-incidentally, my wife bought ragi vermicelli recently in Bangalore and it was quite okay.
Eat more millets !!!!!

The people at TC: There seem to be two types of people. One is highly educated urban IIT or engineer types who have 'dropped out' of the mainstream and ended up at Timbuktu. The founders fall into this category. The school is run by one person who is a PhD in energy systems from IIT B. The organic farming is done by an engineer from Mysore and a MBA type. They are all extremely pleasant people and in some cases, highly thoughtful and moral folks who have though through their values and settled on their current way of life. The other type of people are very local types who often don't know english and have done a degree in a local college and ended up here while looking for employment. They came across as fairly confident and capable and pleasant, and I think they enjoy the work a lot and have gained a lot in personal growth from it.
I talked some with the founders and they were more or less what I would have thought of them. One interesting thing is that, for various reasons, they ended up sending their children to Rishi Valley for education instead of educating them locally. They said that Rishi Valley was pretty good but the usual children who went their were pretty rich and that caused their son some trouble in adjusting.

There is a constant stream of visitors of various sorts to the place. While we were there, there were a couple of people from Oxfam Australia, which funds the group. There was a european woman who was teaching the children arts and crafts. There were a couple of young scientist types who were putting together some maths syllabus/ computer education kind of stuff. There was also a prof from IIT Bombay with some of his students who were trying to set up a VoiP over wireless setup to connect the full campus. Whew !

They showed a video about their work in water issues and tank management , restoration of traditional water harvesting structures blah blah. I found it very interesting and important work.

Creating a firebreak: You intentionally burn a strip of land clean, so that in case there is a real fire, it cannot jump the strip of land and you are safe on the other side.
Shramdaan: Once a month the group works together to do some improvement works. Here they are laying mud on the road to smoothen out bumps.

1.) Kid of one of the workers
2.) Guesthouse where we stayed. Really cool place.

View from the terrace of the school
Strange rock formation that lines most of the hills in the area. Nobody was able to explain to us how these formed. The local story is that you can follow the trail of these rocks and they lead to Tirupati !

Timbaktu

I had another exciting weekend. This is getting to be a habit. May it continue !!

I went to Timbaktu Collective last weekend with Santosh, a friend at work. There's more info about Timbaktu at www.timbaktu.org. At high level its a non-profit group, not necessarily that different from others, but among the very good ones. Here are some things about it:

They work in areas like land restoration, womens empowerment, children etc. There was a very interesting presentation about how they worked with the government on regulating the water release from a local dam in a way as to maximise benefit based on the farmers agreeing as a community where the water should go. I don't know if you find that interesting, but I do. One of the key issues going forward in water, will be to get agreement from stakeholders on how to use the limited amounts of water available.

I saw a forest fire upclose while I was there !! There was one in the hills a couple of kilometers away from Timbaktu. It was a pretty awesome spectacle.

The architecture and construction were great and I'd love to be there, from that point of view.

This visit for me culminates several strands that have started over the past few years. I first heard of TC way back when I was in the US on some mailing list and was very intrigued by the name. Later I bought this *great* book called Bapu Kuti about alternative development models and there was stuff there about Timbuktu. Still later when I was doing the RIN project http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/RIN_project.html

I talked to Shambhu Prasad who is associated with TC, and encouraged me to visit there. And finally the founders of TC were featured on the cover of a weekly newsmagazine here in India (The Week). So finally I did go there so and its great to complete that loop. Yesterday after returning, I went back to read the Bapu Kuti article again and it was fascinating to correlate what was written about the people to what I had just seen in person.

TC operates as a 'virtual' panchayat of all its full-time members. They meet once a month and give reports and come out with to-do items and make decisions. Its pretty interesting structure and has some of the useful elements of corporate working in it. Its mostly funded by donations at the current time though, which is not so sustainable.

The setting is gorgeous (in its way). Its in the barren hills of Anantapur and is surrounded on 3 sides by hills. I liked the scenery very much. And I'm more and more struck by feeling the truth about the cliches of going back to nature etc. The break from city life is refreshing and stronger than refreshing, I feel it causes some change in you.

Before I left I had contracted a cold, and I wasn't able to take appropriate care there due to the circumstances. I had severe earache one night and since then I have had a persistent ringing in the ear. I am quite concerned about this, I think it may be permanent. I've heard about this in the past, the medical term is tinnutis (probably got the spelling wrong).

The founders of TC, Bablu and Mary are pretty striking people. Their background is really interesting and you would find it interesting but I won't blog about it much. He is Bengali, she is Keralite, they both learnt the local language and settled in AP. Bablu in particular is a great bear of a man and radiates energy. There were several other remarkable people there.

In talking with Mary, I found out that one of their problems currently is keeping up with the documentation and reporting required by their donors. I suggested that I might help them out for some time with that, and they responded very favourably. More about that soon ! I did spent some time their continuing to think about what I should do after quitting the job and I am converging towards spending some time doing odd jobs and volunteer work. I would enjoy this immensely as I would get to work with many diferent people and do many different interesting things. And I would be looking around for what to do on a permanent basis. There are already several things that I am seeing, including TC, which I could usefully do.

Okay, I'm punting for now on all the big questions I brought up in the previous post. I'm just going to post for a while and see how it goes. I *would* prefer that the blog is at despoki.net, but currently I'm too tempted by the simplicity of custom blog sites like this one.

Okay here's some of the threads of my thinking. There are many ideas crowding my mind, and not much clarity about what's the right thing to do.
-- Srikanth (http://www.egovernments.org/) thinks I would work for a role in his group. The job is based in Delhi.
--Paul (http://www.rinovations.org/) invited me to go to Chennai for a couple of days and check them out.
--I want to visit Timbuktu (http://www.timbuktu.org/), but I don't think I will get any specific ideas about what to do from that trip.
--I have been in contact with an old IIT acquaintance who went off the beaten path a while back and will visit soon. It should be very interesting seeing someone from my background doing stuff like organic farming. I may post our mail thread .. (privacy invasion question).
--I was reading a magazine article on rationing, PDS (public distribution system) etc. and it struck me like a ton of bricks, which it does from time to time: shouldn't the basic immediate focus simply be to *provide enough food for everyone who needs it by any means possible*. It is such a huge failing of society that this doesn't happen.
-- Pratham (http://www.pratham.org/) and their Bangalore chapter Akshara (http://www.akshara.org/) do very good work. Pratham is notable as they have managed to scale significantly. They also seem to have another strength of innovation, they say that they have evolved a methodology to get children reading in about 6 weeks. And do that at a cost of Rs 100/- per child (this is important because the learning levels in government and possibly even private schools is pretty bad). Its pretty exciting
--Priya is interested in getting into the animation industry and in doing some background reading, its seems to be an area that is poised to take off. There is some temptation for me to ride that wave myself :-). There are other things that I can do in software that would be quite interesting. I'm of course looking to do something alternative, but once you decide to do that, the advantages of staying mainstream start showing up very clearly :-)

--Biodiesel. Less said the better. But one comment is the divergence between doing something nice like biodiesel that could also pay off significantly monetarily, versus doing something in NGO space where money won't be there. Its a difficult choice. Not that there are opportunities and people queing up for me in either area, but nonetheless. I am in 'first principles' mode right now and want to pretend that anything is possible.

I'm stabilizing a bit at work, earlier in the year, I was spending upto 90% of the workday brooding about these things :-).

I've agreed in principle to have a baby :-) Less said the better.

Leeeets gooooooooooooo !!!!!!!

All right !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Today Jan 20th, I let the guys in my group know that I am planning to leave Juniper. Now that this is official, I can start this blog, which is to be about the next phase in my life.

For a while now I have been fantasizing about stepping off the beaten path and doing something that is not governed by the usual parameters. These for me have been: keeping up with peers in terms of money made and position achieved, having financial security. Not that there has not been genuine work done and satisfaction for what was achieved. However the pull to do the same work but in the context of service has been strong. So now I step off (as many many have done before me) and the excitement is big.

There has been a lot of thinking that has gone into this decision (more than required, since I brood too much instead of acting). Recapitulating all that would be boring, so hopefully the context will seep into the blogging over the course of time.

One question is: how often do I commit to keep this blog updated ? On a chronologically regular basis or event-driven ? What kind of stuff will go in here ? How honest do I commit to being. This is important to settle so that I have a goal to keep myself honest, else very possibly blogging will peter out. Some reflection on the purpose of the blog and what I am trying to achieve with it needs to happen before settling on something. The next entry in the blog should settle these questions then (or atleast make the first working pass). Actually using blogspot is an experiment, since the previous blog was on despoki.net. One disadvantage of using blogspot is diffusing my online presence, which would otherwise be at one location. Again need to decide on this.

Okay enough for now and happy blogging !