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