Philosophy Behind Pranjal Rural Power:
Creation of quality education and employment opportunities in rural areas is a big need in India. Many initiatives by government and other organizations have happened. However the need is so huge that there is a lot of scope to make a difference in this area. The rapid economic development in the country is creating immense pressures on the rural populations as prices of essential commodities rise and the employment opportunities in agriculture and other traditional trades dwindle. People are forced to migrate to cities and most of the times they end up in slums living in sub-human conditions.
From an environmental angle the growth of cities which are based on western mode of industrial development is proving to be a disaster. The overall environmental damage is immense in such a model. The economic activities in the cities draw immense natural resources from rural and under-developed areas and typically gives back very little. Much of this usage of natural resources is in an unsustainable manner, meaning, after their consumption huge waste is produced much of which cannot be recycled and they pollute the atmosphere directly or indirectly. The glamour of economic development covers up the underlying environmental sacrilege and the site of the damage can be closer home or even hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
Rapid economic prosperity concentrated in a few pockets of cities or few developed countries actually leads to large scale poverty in the rural areas which are in the shadow regions of this economic development. As professor Mohammed Yunus says poverty doesn't happen on its own. It is created by such rapid economic developments in association with lopsided economic policies. Large scale poverty leads to under-nourishment, poor education, increased population growth and eventually feeds terrorist networks.
A different philosophical question is, while industrial development brings us many physical comforts, do the internal and more everlasting comforts like happiness in life, health of body and mind and peace and satisfaction levels increase? Are we enjoying being part of the nature around us? Isn't it better to look at ourselves as community dwellers who see life's fulfillment in the development of a healthy community that involves other human beings and also other life forms?
While the above philosophy leads to many different solutions and thought processes, at Pranjal Rural Power we picked the theme of quality education for the poor and quality employment generation in rural areas.
Pranjal's Objective:
"To empower a significant population of rural India by way of creating meaningful technical jobs".
Here empowerment means quality education with matching employment opportunities. Meaningful technical jobs puts the emphasis on environmental friendliness. Minimizing the damage to environment needs to be an important aspect of this process. This emphasis helps us to focus on development and adoption of sustainable technologies and lifestyles.
Tackling Education and Training:
Dr Mahant's approach has always been to give importance to students from rural areas and to impart them quality training in order to enable them to work on complex projects. This has been the philosophy of Karmic Design Centre in Manipal which has about 180 highly qualified VLSI design engineers working on projects for companies like Texas Instruments,
etc. In 2008, Dr Mahant started a new experiment with training 10th std students from rural areas, who could not afford further education. He started training them in VLSI design over a period of 3 years (VLSI is an acronym basically implying Integrated Circuit or electronic chip design). The goal was to enable them to work on complex projects in VLSI. This training centre was started in Nesargi with minimal investment by renting out old or discarded village houses and the same to conduct classes, setup computer labs and also provide accommodation to the students. Much of the renovation work was done by students themselves as part of their weekly work culture training. Reason for choosing Nesargi was simple. This is Mahant's ancestral village. Currently there are about 55 students undergoing training.The students are being selected through a network of school principals who were contacted by Dr BS Katkol from Bijapur Engineering college, Prof. B L Desai, Vice Principal, BVB College of Eng and Technology, Hubli, and Prof Kambalimath, HOD, Electronics Dept, BES College, Bagalkot. This is part of voluntary service from these professors. The students come from vill
ages which are as far away as kms from Belgaum city. The syllabus currently consists of basic science and maths and a deep study of analog design including MOSFETs, analog blocks, circuit design and layout design and finally overall personality development. Food, accommodation, medical facilities, family insurance and clothing are provided and a stipend of Rs 500 per month is given. The students don't have to pay any money upfront. They are expected to repay the training cost after getting a job and in small installments over a long period. The job is also guaranteed by Dr Mahant! The running cost of this centre is currently borne by Mahant himself.The idea with Pranjal Rural Power is to extend this training concept to other fields other than VLSI design and especially to domains related to environmental topics. One new course that was started in July 2010 is Solar Engineering with focus on thermal solar. For this purpose about 8 students were shifted from regular VLSI training into Solar Engineering.
Main pillar of this training centre is Dr Mahant. On weekends Ms Suman Patil visits Nesargi after travelling about 130 kms from Hubli. She stays over the weekend and takes classes on Maths and Science topics. Basavaraj Thambur, a VLSI engineer, handles layout training while Totappa Rudagi handles training in PCB and mechanical engineering. Koushalya Badiger helps with overall co-ordination and also in handling of labs. Ms Tasnim Mahantshetty occassionally handles classes in English. Harinath handles Basic Science, Solar Engineering and Indian Philosophy. There are a few others who handle classes once in a while.
Big Learning: The enthusiasm and motivation of these rural students is an amazing treasure for the nation
Open questions in this area:
1. How do we fund the training cost on an ongoing basis? It comes to about Rs 3500/- approx. per student per month. As long as the number of students are small and they get into high paying jobs immediately after training this becomes very easy to handle. However if we have to expand so that more students benefit from this initiative then initial funding becomes a problem. The options being discussed are:
* Find industry sponsors or entrepreneurs who would fund this initially and eventually hire the students into their companies. They would gain by being able to recruit highly motivated and skilled individuals from rural areas who should help them to increase their profit margins
-> Why would an existing company sponsor the training cost when today they can hire people at zero training cost? Will they pay for the quality and skill of people from Pranjal Rural Power?
* Have provision for individuals or institutions to be able to donate funds to this initiative. We could also look at the approach being popularized by Prof Muhammed Yunus called Social Business model. In this model one can invest or donate money with a guarantee that they can withdraw the money after certain period. They don't get any interest instead they get to ensure that the money is being used for a social cause.
* Try obtaining grants from Government.
-> Is it easy to work with the government?
2. How do we hire talented teaching staff? Attracting people to take up teaching in regular institutes itself seems to be a big challenge. Attracting people to such initiatives might be a taller order as very few people might be ready to teach in a village like Nesargi.
3. How do we get an university affiliation to the training that is imparted here? It is interesting to note that due to absence of any well known certification authority of this course most parents don't prefer to send their kids to this training even though it is free from the parent's perspective! They think there is some cheating involved here! Working on a certification program needs to be done urgently.
4. Place of this training: Current mode of renting out village houses has worked very well till now. However we have already hit the limits and there are no more houses located conveniently to the present location to rent out. Hence expanding this is a problem. Discussions are on to look for alternate places to expand either in Nesargi or outside of Nesargi.
Employment Generation:
VLSI Design:
VLSI design services as part of Karmic Design Centre in Manipal has been operational since 2001. This centre is working towards further growth in VLSI domain.
Thermal Solar:
Main focus of Pranjal Rural Power would be on renewable energy generation and its applications and energy savings methodologies. In this step solar thermal is a very attractive area.
Solar water heaters are becoming main stream in the country and there are a number of players. Solar Photovoltaic domain has many companies involved and we were not sure what impact we can make here. Exploring other direct thermal applications of solar like solar cooking, solar crop dryers, etc looked attractive. One of the main advantages in this area is that the scope for indigenous manufacturing is very high. At the same time the challenge has been
to get acceptance from people since the existing solutions in these areas are either very expensive or are not very convenient.Without much deliberation we started off investigating solar steam generation with an aim to develop solar steam cooker for big kitchens like student hostel messes, community cooking, etc. Currently huge parabolic dishes are used and these cookers are very expensive. However by using the method of Fresnel mirrors and controlling them with electronics enables us to reduce the size and thereby cost of these systems. A number of experiments are being tried out to understand the different aspects of concentrating solar. This require
s precision mechanical engineering clubbed with precision stepper motor control. This project is currently ongoing.Meanwhile box type solar cookers are also being built to understand their performance and the difficulties involved with the same. Some innovations in order to make this type of cooker more appealing to a typical housewife are being tried out.
Embedded Systems:
Solar products and energy saving devices require embedded control systems. Hence a full fledged electronics embedded systems development centre is planned to be part of Pranjal Rural Power.
A few other areas in discussion are:
Agricultural Implements and tools to enhance the productivity of small farmers:
Spirulina Algae Cultivation:
Prof Vinay Hegde from PESIT college Bangalore has developed a new technique of cultivating an algae called Spirulina. This algae has some excellent properties as a food supplement. Consumption of Spirulina world-wide is growing and the market seems to be growing very fast. Prof Vinay Hegde has proposed to cultivate Spirulina on the lines of Milk Dairies. Pranjal Rural Power plans to collaborate to realize this dream so that the benefits of growth in this business reaches the rural households.
As part of Spirulina cultivation there is a plan to setup a simple biotechnlogy lab with basic facilities for testing and certification that can eventually help farmers assess their agriculture produce.
Water Purification:
Can we popularize the SODIS technique of water purification? This technique simply recommends keeping water in the sun for about 6-7 hours whereby most pathogens are killed by ultra violet radiation in the sun. (http://www.sodis.ch/)
Water Conservation devices:
Food processing:
Assessment of Employment Generation:
Except for VLSI design most of the options above are in their infancy stages. Spirulina project has a strong business plan to back it up. While in all other areas there doesn't exist any business plan. These are planned to be developed over the next few months.
Solar: Currently this is in research and product development stage. Coming up with a commercially viable proposition is still a long way to go. However the progress so far has been quite encouraging given the constraints that the work is going on. Lack of expertise is one major deficiency in this development. Since hiring experts in this area would cost money this has not been done. Hope is to find a suitable collaborator or partner to kick-start this as a business activity.
Pranjal Rural Power's Role:
The question that might be asked is what would be Pranjal's role with multiple domain areas being discussed for employment generation. Each of these domain areas would have its own training requirements. In such a case Pranjal Rural Power aims to do the following:
* Provide the guidelines for setting up the training centers and to periodically asses these centers to ensure quality is maintained
* Draft the syllabus and teaching methods for each domain after aligning with the respective domain experts
* Provide the initial support to entrepreneurs who share similar objectives and principles
* Be a business partner or a promoter in each of these domains
* Set quality standards and common business practices to ensure uniformly high quality of outputs across all domains
Big Open Questions:
1. How do we get more investment or funding into this venture so that the above objectives can be met?
The Dr Mahant's experiment in Nesargi demonstrates that a high quality training center can be run very successfully in a village at low infrastructure cost. The salient features of this model needs to be retained as Pranjal Rural Power expands.
2. Typically setting up a manufacturing center involves very high capital investment. Are there ideas to circumvent such huge capital investments and yet bring out successful products in the market?
3. How do we attract talented people to join this venture to realize the dream?
