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.

The deadline for The Tech Museum Awards is on Monday, March 24. Do you know of any worthy candidates from India?

The Tech Museum Awards is an international Awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

For example, D.R. Mehta was a 2007 Laureate who created an NGO in India to work with low-income disabled communities. His organization created “the Jaipur Foot,” a prosthetic limb which is now “being distributed for free to millions of people below the poverty line in sixteen countries, allowing them to join the ranks of the mobile and become productive citizens,” according to the Social Innovation Conversations website.

D.R. Mehta won the Equality Award, but there are other categories as well:

Awards are presented in five categories: Health, Education, Environment, Economic Development, and Equality. Five Laureates in each category are honored and one Laureate per category receives $50,000.

The criteria for nominations can be found here.

As mentioned in a previous post entitled, “Treating More than Diarrhea,” the condition of  India’s mentally and physically disabled population, in terms of the provision of basic amenities or medical services, is dismal.  As per official data, India has 21 million disabled people, but non-government agencies are less conservative in their estimate, and place the figure at 60 million.  Even though the rights of the disabled are protected by the Persons with Disabilities Act (1995), India lags behind in providing such services as, for example, wheelchair-friendly buildings.    

In an effort to ameliorate this problem, the Indian government has recently launched a groundbreaking national interactive disability web portal.  The site is named Punarbhava, which means “renewed being”, and has the aim of serving as an information/resource platform for people with disabilities, as well as those who work with them.  According to an article posted on Yahoo, the website features the following:

 The portal is categorized mainly into three segments: the first segment will be a National Disability Register that will give statistical information on the disabled population in India. The second segment of the portal covers the resources, which include available online courses, catalogues knowledge repository of audio, video and Braille files in Indian languages, books related to disability and news magazine. The third segment is proposed to have Grievance Redressal mechanism through Web Court. In future, this will redress the complaints related to Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, National Trust, and Rehabilitation Council of India . It also proposes to provide transaction assistance. 

Even though Puranbhava is only the first step, the provision of services through the government potentially has the effect of ushering in a more “inclusive” era of rights, services, and provisions for the disabled population.  The hope is that through official, government-sponsored programs, cultural and social norms regarding disabilities will also begin to change.

Today I’d like to introduce you to one of my heroes, Baba Amte. He died a few weeks ago on February 8th at the opus of his life, Anandavan. I was fortunate to visit him several times during my work in India, and have this short piece to share with you all.

Anandavan, meaning forest of bliss, was created by an amazing man named Baba Amte more than 60 years ago. He was a well-to-do lawyer who left his trade to work with organizing landless laborers and scavengers against the rampant oppression of his time. One day he was walking on the road and saw a man lying on the side of the road with worms eating out the sockets where his eyes once were. The man was a leper, completely outcast from Indian society, left to rot away in his miserable existence. When Baba saw him he ran away in fear. Later, he was so ashamed by how he reacted that he decided to do something for leprosy victims. He got a land grant from the government, on an old mining quarry- of barren and rocky land. Today due to the hard work of thousands of leprosy patients they have transformed that place into a utopia for sufferers of all types- leprosy patients, disabled people, unemployed people, dalits and tribals. At present about 5,000 people live there and it has achieved recognition as a town of its own right with its own gram panchayat.

Baba Amte has been awarded basically everything that the Indian government and the State of Maharashtra can give, as well as many international awards. This man rose above governmental glamour and mainstream recognition and stuck to his principles. He had no qualms about returning any of his awards in protest of government policies. Most famous of which, he returned the Padmabhushan to the Indian government in protest of the Narmada Dam project. In fact he was one of the first along with Medha Patkar to lead the opposition to the Narmada Dam.

On one of my trips to Anandavan, I was able to take a group of youth from the Adivasi village in which I was working. During our visit to Anandavan we were very fortunate to meet Baba on the road as he was being pushed on his rolling bed around the campus for his evening walk. For the past 50 years he and his wife have gone on a morning and evening walk together religiously.

I am not exaggerating when I say this place is amazing. It is based on the philosophy that the poor and dispossesed do not need charity, but everyone needs a chance to succeed. So everyone at Anandavan, regardless of physical disability, does work. Anandavan has an amazing way of finding each individual’s talent or strength and using it for the advantage of the whole group. Thus many leprosy patients who are missing limbs, fingers, or whatever are able to work making various things or farming or maintaining the town. In Anandavan self-reliance is the central organizing principle- they make their own clothing, their own transportation, their own furniture, houses, artwork. They grow most of their own food on 450 acres of farmland. They sell a lot of their food and handicrafts in cities and towns all over the area. They recycle plastic garbage and make it into new things such as pillow stuffing, cotton, and use it in making cement. They do practical research in alternative technologies that would be good for India, particularly in rural areas, and they use bio-gas plants to cook their food. Bio-gas basically means they trap the methane and other gases that escape from the toilets and convert it into cooking gas for the community kitchens. They use all of their cow dung and cow urine as fertilizer for their fields. Their cows are enormous because they feed them fortified feed. They have ingenious water management systems that are combined water sources, irrigation, and fishing ponds. They have designed their own underwater bamboo dams that are revolutionary. They practice organic farming and the list goes on and on. In short, it’s a mind blowing experiment that is fully managed by the disposed, the outcast and the rejected people from all over the country.

The reason I brought the boys from Yerendi, one of the villages I had been working in, to Anandavan was to give them exposure to new ideas that they can start in their village. Before going we had discussed some type of trip that their youth group could take to get an idea of what they could do for their village. We decided to go and see Anandavan because of the many opportunities and rural development projects they are doing there.

Baba Amte spoke about how “confidence must rest in your wrist”. I believed that by taking these youth to a place where the disabled were able to achieve so much, they would be inspired to return to their villages to make a change, to unite around a common purpose, and use innovative, low-cost solutions to advance their village.

Baba’s brand of social entrepreneurship was not vulnerable to the faddish culture and gimickry which is so prevalent in the field today. By focusing on basic issues of justice and human rights, rooted in the dignity of the human person, he was able to catalyze a movement that was highly innovative and appropriate for its environment. In the social entrepreneurship movement today, we would do well not to jump at every passing fad but focus intensely on what has worked in the past, and adapt it to the present-day context. Baba has given us a scalable model, if we have the courage and will to try.

For more information on Baba’s organization, the MKSS click here.

Here are links to articles addressing a variety of issues. All are from OneWorld South Asia:

• Half the world’s population will live in cities by the end of 2008
• Government schemes not reaching the disabled
• Avian influenza: Good job India, says FAO
• 9% for health and education still a distant dream