Is targeting the poor alone always efficacious?

With my on and off involvement with centers close to social development, I find one attitude that may have to be changed for better efficacy of social initiatives. Let me have the first stab at defining the attitude.

"A social initiative will produce a better impact when it is targeted towards the economically poorer sections of the society. The richer the beneficiaries are, the lesser social impact it has.."

While in general this point has a validity, it has to be revisited for every specific case. Here is an example. A team of my friends and I conducted a science demo in a private school nearby. When I talked about this, "Don't you think your initiative would be more useful to students of government schools?" was one question that popped up universally. My answer is "In my case doing it in *this* private school is likely to have a higher social impact" . Why?

1. This private school doesn't have a lab infrastructure in spite of the students paying a nominal school fee (Rs. 200/- per month).

2. The students here do have a capability to read, listen to and understand English, Telugu and Hindi which provides us flexibility in our implementation. So, it gets easier for us to get more students to start "thinking and reasoning science" - a better success rate at our initiative. On the other hand, a government school on which we are working on the ability to grasp English is lesser providing us with challenges (lesser number of teachers from our office)

Much more importantly, access to better education sure is relatively much more difficult for the poor. However, schools that fall in the economic category of the one that we are working on also face problems faced by government schools (non-availability of teachers, labs etc.). In addition to that they also suffer the ignorance of NGOs that rush to help poor quality government schools. It is almost as if these students are paying Rs. 200/- per month to be ignored!

Thankfully, in our case, we need to ignite as many minds to think and reason (in science and others..). In our eyes, whether the students have the ability to pay Rs.200/- or not, if their inclination to reason is lacking, they are equally poor! Only the former is equipped with a skill (English language) that offers flexibility for us to make a better impact.

A society, apart from being categorized into economically richer and poorer, can also be categorized into rich and poor based on other criteria. And the economically richer need not be richer (or have better opportunity) in all the other categories. Social upliftment, one must remember, is not only the upliftment of the economically poorest, but the upliftment of the society as a whole.

Face-to-Face with Comat technologies

Cross-posted from ThinkChange-India

TC-I Fundwatch has recently reported a Rs. 60-crore investment by Omidyar Network and Unitus Equity Fund (UEF) on Comat technologies, a profitable social enterprise doing business with the rural poor.

The CEO of Comat technologies Sriram Raghavan recently talked to NASSCOM Emerge Blog and offered some good insights into Comat's success in becoming a profitable social business.

Sriram's answer to one question explains the business model of Comat technologies succinctly.

"Q. Your own business is built around the Rural Business Centres. What exactly are these?

SR: It is a very simple concept. The rural business centre is primarily an access point for rural citizens, where we use technology to deliver different kinds of services - only those that help improve the quality of life in villages. We don’t want to sell soaps and consumer goods.

I’ll give you two examples. Take government certificates such as birth, death, land and property related papers. If you have to get one from the taluk or the district office, you have to go to that particular office, wait in a long line and follow cumbersome processes. We deliver it to the village directly – it takes about five minutes for the same cost, i.e., Rs. 15 per certificate. This makes a very big difference to the rural consumer.

The other area we are in is education. There are teachers in rural areas, but the quality of education is very poor. Our centres bring live classes from best teachers in cities who broadcast their lessons online, much like the erstwhile UGC programmes. Except that here, we have two- way interaction and the students and teachers can speak to each other."

Sriram Raghavan also shared a few of his experiences with rural consumers that can come handy to a new social enterprise venturing into the villages.

"In a typical agrarian set up, income generation is a twice-a-year cycle – unlike in urban areas where we earn monthly salaries. It is important to bear this in mind as you have to position your product around this insight."

With a turnover of Rs.55 crore while improving the lives of about 10 million rural inhabitants, there should be little doubt about the success of this unique business model. But the best aspect about the venture is that it has identified one critical handicap of the Indian villages and working successfully towards eliminating it. Better said by the man himself.

"All these years, rural India has been isolated; they have been “informationally disabled”. It is now time for a change and we want to ensure that."

Profile - Amy Smith, MIT D-labs

Ms. Amy Smith is an instructor MIT's D-Lab which offers courses in Mechanical Engineering. But unlike the conventional engineering course or lab, Ms. Smith along with Ms. Bishwapriya Sanyal offer a course in which engineering students don't just learn the concepts of mechanical engineering, but go all the way to complete a product that addresses need of the under served communities of different parts of the world.

In a four-part course, the students start out ( in the "Design" part)learning about specific sectors of development that need to be addressed and the appropriate technology that can be applied. The second ("Development") part, is a combination of

• lecture, which talks about various aspects of design like affordability, sustainability, design for manufacture and assembly,

• Labs that offer experience on fundamentals like welding, circuit-boad design, CAD etc

• Case studies and field trips to understand the needs of the people to who this product will eventually be useful
• design review discussions to present and refine ideas of the product
  

The third ("Dissemination") part of the course focuses on brain-storming ideas to make the product that conceived by part-two to be "ready to roll", which includes making the product scalable, affordable and marketable. The fourth part executes what was conceived in part three.

In the process, her team has been successful in providing local solutions for local yet, problems local to a specific region as against trying to find a generic "one-size-fits-all" solution. The best example for this is offered by the following video of her presentation outlining a method of using sugarcane waste and biomass to produce a clean and efficient fuel thus providing a solution to the worst killer of children under five - household cooking smoke, but also to make the fuel at home using the abundant agricultural waste (this avoids cutting trees and cuts down on expenses in buying fuel) Truely amazing...and this is just one of the projects in MIT D-labs.

Laptop for school kids

A recent post in ThinkChange India made me squander much of my work time into this post. But what the hell!

When the news comes out, it sure does come out in bulk! :) This is not the only laptop for education story I came across within the last week. Here is Classmate from Intel and ICT's research initiative on a computer for Rs. 400. This sure seems to be another emerging trend that will change the future forever. But is it for good or for the worse? Here is my take.

Positives:
1. The three laptop initiatives put together, laptop should reach the bottom of the pyramid faster. I have my doubts about XO and classmate, but if ICT's initiative is a success, Rs.400 laptop should be affordable to anyone who is rich enough to afford school books.

2. "meant for education", probably means that it allows parents worried about the darker side of the internet such as adult content to breathe easy.

3. About "expensive laptops vs. reading, writing", I think reading and writing wouldn't suffer a loss that can't be compensated by improved creativity, skill and understanding that current book-oriented education suffers from.

Negatives:
The idea of bringing technology right into classroom sounds amazing, but I wonder if this initiative is taken because of a clearly identified necessity in the academia that such laptops can address (looking at it from the govt's perspective rather than OLPC or ADAG). It is one thing to use a laptop for an academic purpose and it is another to modify the academia for using a laptop! Currently, I don't see any resource that talks about this. So, while I don't see this as a definite negative, I doubt if the state cares enough to architect an educational model that includes the laptop to serve its purpose rather than model itself for using the laptop.

Another concern is, cheaper laptops is likely to translate into more laptops, quicker obsolescence and more wastes...and that with already bad waste management system and a proven slow and reactive (as against proactive) government, the future of waste management doesn't look too good. But, this may be the catalyst that pushes the govt. to do something about wastes.

On the whole, I find that the negatives such a improving the curriculum, waste management are a few things that have to be done regardless of the"laptop for education", but a computer with the purpose of making education entertaining, creative and productive would be a big leap forward at best and a small leap forward at its worst. So, Go laptop!

Mr. Role model IAS

The offshoot of the fast growing economy and getting-rich-fast middle class is not only the fast increasing consumerism, but also fast increasing social consciousness among the young-and-the-restless. Consequently, the government apathy and corruption seems to dominate the hot debate, be it in the media or overtea.

But are all those in the government corrupt? Or all of them callous towards their duty? Over the last few month I have come across some surprising encounters that demonstrated extra ordinary commitment public interest amongst a few bureaucrats (IAS officers) who, in their flesh and blood, walk the surface of India (this is a partial lift-off from Einstein's famous mention about Bapuji).

Here is quick mention of three of them

Mr. M.N. Vijaykumar, IAS (Bangalore, Karnataka)
He has been a crusader against corruption among his colleagues and politicians in the state of Karnataka for the past 25 years. He had once tried to introduce a transparent systems by which files related to public works are freely available online at http://bngregcommr.freespaces.com/ (link broken), but three days before the site became operational, he got transferred with immediate effect. That was just one of the six-times he was transferred for either blowing the whistle or trying to make the system more transparent. His wife maintains a frequently updated blog in which she claims harrassment and threats by his own higher-ups and attempts on his life. She also has a forum for people to participate.

Dr. Santhosh Babu, IAS (Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu)
He has made news for his success in bringing school kids to where they belong - school!. In his back2school program he partners with Sarva Shikha Abiyan and AID India, uses computer technology to track kids who don't show up for school, and send a Village Volunteer force (VVF) track them down, find out the reason (usually the necessity to work), solve their respective problems and bring the kids back to school.

To show the scale and effectiveness of this program, let me provide two quotes from Business Standard here

"The effort involves a 10,000-Village Volunteer Force (VVF) consisting of child volunteers, panchayat presidents and headmasters of the 1,700-odd schools in the district."

"Using software aptly named, back2school, developed by Chennai-based Arbiter, the district administration monitors each schoolgoing child daily. And the results are showing: 8,000 of the 8,867 school dropouts are back in school."

And this is just one of the slew of his educational initiatives such as Ariviyal Anandam (Joy of science) program provides science kits and trains teachers to use them to teach children in about 10 districts of Krishnagiri, and Padippum Inikkum ("Education is interesting too") initiative to use trained volunteers of AID India and SSA help teachers and students to improve the reading ability of the kids by way personal attention and in-class demonstration.

Dr. Kushal Pathak, IAS India Post
A medical doctor by education and an avid web-developer by hobby he has harnessed his passion and profession to create not just one, but two useful platforms for the general public who may need help on social issues and issues related to handling the government.

bighelpers.org is a forum of citizens to help his/her fellow citizens on any problems he/she may face, from drinking problem, getting a ration card or filing a police complaint.

He has also created another web-portal dedicated to Right to information in which he has comprehensive information database and discussion forum for procedural and legal aspects exclusive RTI.

India has a lot of people and limited available resources. This leads to competition and inevitably forces people to bend or break the rules for survival. Given that, it is easy for anyone (not just a government official) with a secure job to step down from his/her ideological stance and settle for an easier way of earning his/her life (by way of corruption or simply shunning responsibility). In this scenario, the live example provided by these three extraordinary gentlemen (and I am sure a numerous others unknown to the general public) upholds the faith that good governance and justice do have place outside the law books and among the society. It is just a matter of will.

Full credits to where it is due.

Bridging gap between academia and industry - One step closer?

I remember the days from undergraduate college when I would attend the computer lab session once a week, sit in front of a dying black-and-white computer monitor with nothing but MS-DOS and copying FORTRAN program from the "observation notebook".

I also remember that right after college, I used to go to TULEC - A TATA Infotech computer education center which charged Rs.40000/- for its software courses.

Looking back I can't but wonder if the courses that were offered to me in TULEC should ideally be part of my college curriculum. After all, all the software companies needed the skill and the century or so old University of Madras still had syllabus that was also probably as old and badly needed upgradation anyway. Couldn't the former push the latter for its own good? It seems the stakeholders, the companies and the government have finally turned that corner. FINALLY!

Addressing the Fifth annual NASSCOM HR Summit 2008 in Chennai (July 3-4), Dr. Chandramouli, IT Secretary of Tamil Nadu said that 'IT finishing schools' that "would act as a pre-employment training centre to hone the skills of both engineering and non-engineering students to make them readily employable" [The Hindu - July 4] would start functioning within a month's time. In this is public-private partnership training center would be up and running in all the districts of Tamil Nadu. Each centre would have about 25 computers and students will go through a 3-month training program designed and conducted by the participating companies.

An ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu (ICTACT) is also setup for training the faculty, apparently to allow the cutting-edge industry knowledge to percolate into classrooms directly.

Prima facie, the stakeholders (mainly the government) are serious about this initiative, given that the ICTACT is autonomous, with board of directors represented by the state government, academic and industry (it would be good to know who they are) and a research and training headquarters would be set up in Chennai.[ Business Standard - July 4]

But the scary part is, a search on ICTACT in Google or Tamil Nadu's IT department website comes up with nothing. I guess one has to wait just a little longer to see the bridge across the abyss that separates the academia and the industry, but hopefully only a little longer.

Hitting the Road:Teaching module - Draft 1

Idea generated for schools so far

• Teach kids to make their own notebooks.
• Teach kids to make chalk piece

How does this help?

• non-availability of free notebooks @ govt schools
• Relevant vocational training
• potential means to earn

• Teach kids of appropriate age about technologies related to clean energy like solar energy
• How tap solar energy
• How the market is growing etc

How does this help?

• creating experts in a market of demand for the future
• All the soft-skills appreciated in a corporate environment
• committing to a task of reasonable difficulty and completing it on time
  
• being regular with work taken up and establishing proper communication about updates/possible delays

How does this help?

• time-management, probably study better while being good at extra-curricular
• develops proper attitude and work-ethics and improves job-prospects
• Safety
• Basic fire-safety
• First-aid and emergency response
• Details of phone numbers, addresses of hospitals in vicinity.
  

How does this help?

• Duhh......!
• Community activity
• Some kind of an activity that sensitized them

• Community activity
• Some kind of an activity that sensitized them to importance of sanitation, public health, environment etc.
  

Access to notebooks at govenment schools

I was in conversation with an active member of India Sudar, an NGO working on the education for students from the lower-economic section of the society.

I came to know from him that while the government provides textbooks and uniforms for free, they don't have the capability provide notebooks. This unsurprisingly turns out to be a severe limitation to learning. When inquired, the government officials respond,

"Even the government has limited resources. To offset our limitations we have empowered the school's headmasters and senior teachers to partner local NGOs and philanthropists to receive the relevant aid".

Makes sense doesn't it? But I think, and the India Sudar member agrees, that this is not a sustainable model. So, what do we have? Even when ills like hunger and child-labor are removed from poor kids' way to the school, the good work is undone by the absence of guaranteed access to something as trivial as notebooks. I think this is a good idea for social entrepreneurship. Notebooks are available everywhere. Can be made from recycled paper too! Making notebooks is a good small-scale business. All it needs is an entrepreneurial idea that takes care of the economics and connects the demand and supply. Are you aware of any already existing models? (not donation of notebooks of course). Do you have any idea yourself?

Why private education is supply-driven? And why is none talking?

It is a known fact that access to education for the people in the lower economic strata is a big problem. But at least it has got considerable visibility is partially addressed by NGOs and social entrepreneurs. But how about education for the middle class? Indian middle class gives great importance for education. This demand for the so-called quality education makes running a private school a lucrative business. Currently, private education is heavily supply-driven (schools), and the demand (parents) has very less say.

For example,
- Fees are high and increasing. And the donation, the need for which the school explain.
- Parents have very limited say on curriculum or the method of teaching they would prefer.
- one-dimensional education system (academics and rote-learning..bad/no sports program or arts program like learning music etc).

A few schools like DPS are exceptions at least in terms of quality of infrastructure. But it is still not a participatory model which includes parents. For example, I came to know from one of the parents (my aunt) that DPS doesn't even allow parents to enter the school premises during regular hours. Parents can't contact teachers at any time other than the scheduled parent-teacher meetings. In schools like DAV, an important selection criterion for kindergarten kids is the educational qualification of parents. What is the reasoning behind such rules? Why discriminate against a child for the ostensible fault of his/her parents?

I have never heard of a school that advertises "We provide a complete package of education, not only academics, but also community & environmental awareness and sports program." Nor can parents ask a school principal "Can you please tell me why your school is better than the rest?". But come to think of it, isn't that how it is supposed to be? After all, education is our constitutional right. Besides we are paying the schools, not the other way round.

Part of the problem lies with the parents. They liken teachers to medical doctors and assume that teachers know the best about the needs of their kids and they themselves are ignorant about it. However, the change in their mentality would be of little use if the absolute power of the schools doesn't change.

Currently, this absolute power is a problem precisely because because no one, especially parents, is considering it as a problem, let alone do anything about it! No one seems to be talking about it. I think that is where the change should begin.

The Wonders of Physics

Remember those days at school? Understanding how things work was an option as against a necessity. To put it correctly, it was relegated to being an option because of another necessity. Scoring! I remember my teacher standing under the blackboard and actually telling us "If yo u don't understand, Memorize!". That clearly defined the priority for us. To make things worse, we had a live example in the rank-holder. Irrespective of his/her understanding of the subject, he/she universally memorizes. Besides, we are left at the mercy of diagrams in science books that leave much to our ability to imagine, and the lab experiments that don't relate to what we study in the classroom to understand. In many ways, understanding was not even an option. Further still, which other subject apart from, may be, mathematics had any content to be understood?

English, Tamil: A bunch of poems to be memorized. For prose, the answers to the questions were always a couple of paragraphs..and some grammar to be remembered. Done!
Social studies: Memorize! Its a collection of stories, dates and names anyway.
Science was cat-on-the-wall. Some you understand, some you don't. But never mind. Go the social studies way!

Such an attitude bothered me even as a kid though I didn't know what to do to understand other than read the book again. Honestly, I really didn't think about how "understanding" is really going to help me in the future! I never had a future beyond the upcoming exam then! :) Looking back, the worst feeling I have is, I didn't even realize that science can actually be understood deeply.

Now, after reaching a stage when all those years of "darkness" won't matter anymore, (not to mention the lamenting so far...) it is still gratifying to know that someone is working to bring science in its natural form right to the people who needed it the most. Kids!

"The Wonders of Physics" is a series of demonstrations on various concepts of classical physics like light, sound, pressure, heat. The credit for this initiative goes to Professor Clint Sprott of The University of Wisconsin-Madisson. The videos taped during his demonstrations buffers for free online! You don't really need to have a kid who is struggling with understanding science to watch these videos! You can wash your sins that you were forced to commit in your school days even now. Its never too late! :)