Social entrepreneurism: A new perspective to development

Back in India I had always lived a very normal, comfortable, and unsophisticated life: Having fun with friends, going out with family for dinners and movies, working, studying, relaxing - the usual life anybody would have led. Just like everybody else, I would crib about the traffic jams and the broken roads and the smelly streets and the rampant corruption in India. Just like everybody else, I had taken all these things for granted, as well as the feeling that nothing could be done to change this. Then I moved to Canada for my PhD, and as before, I lived a very normal, comfortable, and unsophisticated life. The standards of living and the amenities available here were however very different. There were hardly any traffic jams or broken roads or smelly streets or rampant corruption to be seen in Canada, and I was very happy with all this. After spending about a year and a half in Canada, I went back home to India to visit my family and friends. The traffic jams and the broken roads and the smelly streets and the rampant corruption were still there, but what was new was a hope for change as well. Having hope for something is just a matter of perspective, and my perspective had changed. I was convinced that changing India was possible afterall. Here is how.

When I drove from Lucknow to Kanpur to visit my alma mater, this time I did not notice the traffic jams and the broken roads and the smelly streets, but I noticed the cellphone connectivity that was now available all along the highway.

When I wanted to find out about motorbike rental companies in Manali, I was very apprehensive about the difficulties I would have to face in getting all the information, but all my concerns turned out to be prejudiced and ill-founded. All that I had to do was to step out from home on to the road, walk into one of the large number of Internet cafes everywhere, search for rental companies on google and get some contact numbers, walk into an adjacent public phone booth of which there are many, and place a few calls. It was all so easy. I cannot imagine doing this in Canada where you cannot find Internet cafes, and once you do, you cannot find phonecards to make calls from phone booths.

When I drove from Manali to Leh on roads that had been roads once upon a time, I did not get frustrated with the bumpy ride and the dusty roads and black-smoke-spewing trucks, but I was amazed to see phone lines laid out at altitudes of more than 4000m on desolate dry barren rocky mountains.

People from India had done this. The same people who created wonders like the Taj Mahal, who made the Bhakra Nangal dam, who launched satellites into space, who constructed the highest roads at heights of 5600m, the same people who made oil rigs in the middle of the ocean had done this. The capability and potential for doing wonderful and amazing things was all there always. The hope was all there always. The optimism was there always. It was just a matter of realizing the obvious that I had missed so far.

Let me now give you a more immediate and very real example. Back at home, we and all our neighbors would collect the kitchen garbage each day in plastic bags and toss it over the wall into an adjacent empty plot of land. No questions asked. This had changed when I went back to India. The people from the colony now pooled in thirty rupees each and had hired a young boy who would pick up the garbage from all the homes each morning and dump it at a dumping station some couple of kilometers away.

For me, this one singular incident where the people themselves reasoned out a very practical solution for a communal cause, opened a whole big world in front of my eyes. The people of this huge slow lumbering nation had finally started thinking intelligently, rather than remain indifferent to things that they did not consider as their social responsibility. This, in my opinion, is a whole cultural change that is taking place right now all across the country, and it is certainly not localised to any particular community. I read about rain harvesting projects in Orissa, sewage treatment to produce electrical power in Rithala, water treatment to produce clean drinking water along the Ganges, and many more projects. I found that there are more than 25000 NGOs working on different things in India, which translates to a huge number of 42 NGOs per district on an average. Such, and many more things are happening already. And this is a social revolution that is not just taking place in India, but in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa; basically, all over the world because a critical mass of awareness among the educated section of society has been reached now in the 21st century. All that is needed is a vision to bring awareness to the masses and organize them towards a collaborative goal.

If you want to make a difference, now is the time to do it. Now is the time to give back to your country all that you can dream for it to achieve. And this is not difficult at all. You just need to do it. And there is no derth of good ideas for development. Ranging from education to health care, civic awareness, communication, power, small scale industries, there is no limit to the number of possibilities. And this is how you can make a difference easily.

Being such a vast and diverse country, India is at a very unique position at the moment. Not only is there a need to develop the urban and suburban areas of the country in terms of better hygiene and more schools, but there are also parts of the country that remain completely untouched by any kind of infrastructural development. In my opinion, the two most important things needed for economic progress are communication and electrical power. A lot of other essentials like drinking water, roads, hospitals, industries, schools, everything follow right after if the basic infrastructure is available. Low cost communication has been sufficiently researched and is ready for deployment even today. All that is needed is a coordinated effort to deploy this in the rural areas. Similarly, power generation through compost decomposition and biogas, solar power, wind power, are all very much possible even today. Once the ball is set rolling in these areas, one thing will automatically lead to another and will transform the entire landscape. If power is available in sufficient abundance, it can lead to the growth of industries. Industries will spur the need to develop a road and transport infrastructure. This will mobilize the population to bring in awareness and new ideas. Schools will follow. Hospitals will follow. And all this will transform the entire landscape.

So, let us see what is needed to go about all this. Motivated and visionary people? I think there are plenty of people who really want to do something for the country. Employees? Definitely there are lots of them. Money? Jeffery Sachs, economic advisor to the UNO, and author of the famous text 'The End of Poverty', advocates that the rich nations of the world should come forth with more funds for the developing countries. It will be wonderful if that happens, but there is another alternative as well through which we will not have to beg the capitalist rich nations of the world for money. And that is social entrepreneurism.

This means that all these development projects should be done in a profitable and sustainable manner, just like a business, by generating cash flow and creating employment for the very same people who will benefit from the infrastructure. If you have played games like Monopoly or Age of Empires or Sim City, you must be already knowing this. If you have a farm you start to grow grain in it and earn money. You use the money to hire more people and start a bread factory. You use the profits from the factory to buy more land and a tractor as well. The starting point is to erect that farm, and once you have it generate revenue, you need a vision to keep growing and keep going. Another example is the PCO revolution spear headed by Sam Pitroda. The reason why it succeeded was that the PCO owners running the business had an incentive to keep the PCOs functioning because they got a minor cut from each phone call that was made from the PCO. In the same way, all development efforts for the people must be economically self-sustaining and must involve the masses.

There are organizations like Ashoka which promote social entrepreneurs to pursue developmental projects. Waste Concern is an organization based out of Dhaka, Bangladesh that employs ragpickers to pick rotting trash from the streets and dump it at a composting plant which generates biogases for electrical power and cheap fertilizer for the farms. Barefoot College in Tilonia, India serves over 125000 people with rainharvested water, medical facilities, post office, Internet access and trains unemployed youth to be doctors, engineers, and architects. Development Alternatives from Delhi and Aurolab from Madurai in India innovate on technological and medical products to make them more affordable. I will write in detail about them, in subsequent blogs.

However, the vision I am advocating goes beyond that. Even if you do not have the skills or the knowledge or the circumstances to become a social entrepreneur, you can still do a lot. Many others have the necessary skills but not the vision - you can help them overcome the inertia in starting something. The key is to enable the right people to do the right thing. Even if you are a computer science researcher, you can try to create an environment for other researchers to work on low cost power generation projects. If you are a college professor, you can put together teams of students to work on weekend projects in nearby villages for teaching young children how to read and write. If you are a housewife, you can initiate the media to draw public attention to the poor state of roads in your area.

Another way in which you can support such social activities is by providing financial help. This means that if you start a profitable business, you should keep some profits for yourself, but channel the rest towards humanitarian development activities. It is the same vision of socialism formed in the 20th century in Russia, but it is not about changing the political system in India. It is about true socialism at the grassroot level, functioning in an autonomous manner, without any compulsion, just your own conscience, for your country. Somebody said that the key to sustainable capitalism is reasonable profits as opposed to maximizing profits. Out here, I am not trying to initiate a debate of socialism against capitalism, but I am just putting forth a reasonable and logical proposition that you will hopefully recognize as your moral and social responsibility. If you own a hotel, give some profits to the organizations that are trying to make a difference. If you are working, or running a movie rental store, or a coffee shop, or a cable network, anything, share your returns with the people who probably need it more than you do.

In the next few days I will write more about practical roadmaps and projects being pursued in different countries that uphold the vision of social entrepreneurism. If you have any ideas/pointers/comments or are just enthusiastic about contributing somehow, then do get in touch.