February 05, 2007
Transformative Change
So we took today to go out into the more rural areas around Hyderabad to look at the work going on in the villages. India has hundreds of thousands of villages and most are very primitive places. In a typical "small" village of 6,000 people, less than half of the houses have any sort of toilets or outhouses, the dirt roads are nearly impassable, and health clinics are generally 15 to 20 kilometers away. Unemployment runs very high and most families subsist on less than a dollar a day, the country's official poverty line.
We visited the village of Kandlakoyya, population 1,300, about an hour outside the city, to see the development efforts of the foundation started by Satyam's founder. At the education center, we were greeted by a row of kids who presented each of us with the rose. The richest man in the village, R.S. Raju, who made his fortune growing table grapes for the British grocery chain Tesco, showed us around with the foundation's head. The Byrraju Foundation "adopts" villages, then provides literacy training, plumbing, and things like water plants, education centers, clinics, a teacher and a nurse. In three cases, it's even opened a call center in villages to bring jobs and investment.
The education center was just incredible—each of the classes from the town's open air school come to it for a few hours each day to do play games, do arts and crafts, reading and writing exercises, and to play on the donated kid-proof computers. Since there's no reliable power, the computers are all run off batteries. The kids were so cute and it was obvious that this program was really giving them one of their first opportunities in life. The village itself was very primitive. Here's a photo of the fields nearby and here's one of the "store." I just can't get over how, once you get outside the high tech centers, so much of life in India is hardly different than it could have been 500 years ago.
Afterwards we toured the one-room health center and the water plant which is, for the first time, providing the village with safe drinking water. Each family comes daily to get a 12.5 liter jug. The water plant cost only $10,000 to set up and has been breaking even from its first month—even though a month's supply of water for a family costs just about a dollar.
I could write a ton on this visit but it really underscored for me the great opportunities here for transformative change. A $10,000 donation to a nonprofit in the U.S. would go almost nowhere—even if you gave it directly to one family it wouldn't make a transformative difference in a family. Here, though, pretty modest investments in this village will radically change the lives of everyone in the village. These kids have a future they never had before. Heck, the whole village has a future it never had before.
In the afternoon, we visited the Emergency Management Research Institute, another part of Satyam's founder's efforts. India has no 911 system or even a government-run ambulance service. If you were injured or needed medical attention you were pretty much on your own to get to the hospital unless you tracked down the number of a nearby hospital and got them to send out one their own ambulances, most of which have no life support systems. Beginning with the state around Hyderabad, EMRI is rolling out a unified emergency number (108) and setting up its own free ambulance system. So far they have 72 ambulances. Right now they're getting about 10,000 calls and in 18 months of operation have saved 6,500 lives—about one in ten medical calls they receive. They're also handling dispatching for police and fire, which have no central dispatching either.
Again, it's a transformative change: One number where anyone to call and get the help they need and, because the ambulances are pretty state-of-the-art, far more help than they ever could have before. The plan is to cover all of the state by May and all of India by 2010. The cost? 10 rupees per person per year or roughly a dollar annually per person—or, to put it another way, for less than what the U.S. is spending in 48 hours in Iraq, India could have a real emergency management system and save a conservative estimate of one million lives a year.
It's sad that the Indian government isn't up to providing these services like water, health clinics, and ambulances itself, but it's so great to see entrepreneurs stepping in to solve their nation's own problems.
Growing up, I've seen all those commercials about how for just a few pennies a day you can save some child in Africa or similarly impoverished countries, but it was just amazing to see that in full color today—and the village we visited is far better off than most since it's close enough to Hyderabad and linked by good enough roads that we could get there.
I was really moved by today. Technology is giving these Indians amazing opportunities for the future—and they've had so few for so long.
