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Namaskar from Rajasthan!
As some of you may know, I’ve been in Rajasthan for the past 15 months, as part of a two-year service fellowship with Indicorps. As the website aptly states: Indicorps provides structured opportunities for committed youth to participate in India's development. Towards this goal, Indicorps strives to provide transformational service experiences that encourage people of Indian origin to engage fully in the process of change, explore their capacity to affect change, strengthen their leadership potential, and take active steps to contribute to the world around them.
To date there have been more than 100 Indicorps fellows from across the globe, who have come for one-year stints in rural and urban locations to work on projects that range from designing a sanitation van and outreach program to finding ways to address healthcare in rural India.
During my fellowship year I have been working towards starting the Grassroots Development Laboratory (GDL). GDL, a collaboration between Indicorps and the Piramal Foundation, is based in the town of Bagar in the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan. Our mandate here is to find replicable local solutions to India’s most pressing development challenges. This mandate is relates to the name of the project: Grassroots implies that we work on issues from the bottom-up – with community participation. Development implies that we don’t believe in charity; we are only working towards permanent and sustainable change. Laboratory implies we have an environment here that promotes experimenting with innovative solutions that address local problems, but that can have relevance beyond the boundaries of our town.
In the first year that we were here, we experimented with small interventions in four broad areas: health, education, livelihood and technology utilization. Under the technology sector, I set up a computer lab and started a practical-learning focused class for high school students, with an aim to spur more excitement and knowledge about the practical application of computers. While the class was successful in many ways, it was difficult to quantify that success, especially if measuring progress towards a ‘development goal’. One intangible yet extremely crucial aspect that we did achieve was in building trust with the community – building trust required us to prove ourselves over time, and that is one thing at which we have been quite successful.
Realizing that I wanted to work towards a concrete development problem, I decided to address the prevalent issue of unemployment and underemployment through an industry-relevant vocational computer training program. After contacting employers and recruiters, I was surprised to find that the majority of entry-level computer based job opportunities were for data-entry operators, your garden-variety Word, Excel, Internet folks. There are training centers for these at every nukkad (corner) in every town, so why were recruiters having difficulty finding people? Turns out a lot of job applicants come armed with certificates from training centers, but with very little practical proficiency on a computer.
This is a situation common across many fields here. India has a vast amount of raw material, but very little finished product: a billion people, and yet a talent shortage. I had finally found my purpose: I was going to find a way for the newly educated rural youth to stake their claim in the burgeoning job opportunities in the urban centers of India.
I have now started these classes, and currently have two batches of students of roughly ten students each, ranging from 17 year olds, just out of high school to 38 year olds realizing they need to be computer literate for any job. In the remaining nine months, there are still quite a few things left to do. I have to create a curriculum in Hindi that is easily replicable, I have to find and prepare a teacher to train the students after I’m gone. In general, the majority of our activities at GDL are now employment focused e.g. a Rural BPO operated by women, retail and hospitality training classes and spoken English classes. All of us are currently involved in setting up a formal vocational training institute that will continue on beyond us.
The most rewarding part of all of this for me has been coming together with six incredibly dedicated people to give birth to an organization, infusing it with our values and nurturing it so that it may continue our work long after we are gone.
One of the things that everybody asks me is why I came here. There were many reasons: while I really liked my job (and my job liked me), I guess in some sense I was looking for something with a higher purpose beyond making livelihood for myself. There was also a longing to go back and figure out my identity as an Indian. A lot of it was due to recent immersion in all things Indian: my involvement with MMNA/RAYS, working in the IT field (which has a lot of Indians), my family’s heavy involvement in the Hindu/Indian community in their town, and a general belief while growing up in always giving back.
Taking the plunge to come here was the easy part: the question I find myself asking is what keeps me here after all these months? I have been working here for no money for the past 15 months, way outside of my comfort zone, but somewhere down the line I realize that when I talk about what I do, I am actually passionate about it – my voice rises, my hands are animated, and I can talk forever about it, because there is a higher calling to my ‘job’. I like the fact that I am here working with some dedicated young people who are actually doing something about what they believe in. I also now realize that I’m here because I want to be proud of who I am, of being Indian. I want to be able to one day point to a better India and proudly proclaim that I played a direct part in it.
Or perhaps, since being in India, I have realized that I will always have to do ‘maatha pacchi’ in life; I might as well do it for something that I care about.
For those of you who have always wanted to return to India, to experience it and define it on your own terms, for those of you who have always had strong beliefs and ideas on how to develop the country, I whole-heartedly recommend coming to India, through Indicorps or the many other avenues now available. Many have asked me if I would have been better off making more money and sending it back instead. I now know the answer is a definite no. India does not need your money, India needs you. It needs people with the ideas, the passion and dedication to apply themselves towards producing results and making a concrete change.
The question then simply is, what are you willing to do for change?
Ashish Gupta
http://www.gdl.org.in/
