iit madras alumni
news 2005
"Bharat ki atma gaon main basthi hai"... Mahatma Gandhi (The soul of India lives in its villages). Many of us were born and brought up in the metropolitan cities of India. If we stop and think about how we get our food, clothing and other essentials, they all come from the villagers and farmers. Yet, most of us have never met a poor villager face to face. Their life and harsh realities become simple statistics. We as Indians first, second as IIT alumni, must play a key role in the rural development of India. President Kalam speaks of 4 kinds of rural connectivity in his Vision 2020. The PURA concept attempts to bring urban amenities to the rural India.
More: Article in Business Line
Prof. P.V Indiresan, a past Director of IITM, helped to set up a meeting on August 11th at the Rashtrapati Bhavan to meet President Kalam. I took that occasion to show our President examples of various rural projects initiated by IIT alumni. I requested President Kalam, as the Visitor of each IIT, to consider making these piece meal initiatives to be formally organized by the different IIT's.
The IIT Madras Alumni Association (IITMAA) in Chennai created an Alumni-Society Platform (ASP) in January 2005 to pool the alumni resources and provides a channel to focus on different initiatives for social projects. The first set of projects share a common theme - rural development. The 3 chosen projects are:
The first phase of these projects will consist of pilot projects in each selected area. During the first phase of this project in July-Dec 2005, we hope to complete these 3 projects and establish a process and methodology. It is hoped that future projects after Jan 2006, will attract a larger group of alumni engaged in more projects.
A brief description of the three projects follows.
Drinking water ponds close to or within a village are called 'Oorani's. In Tamil Nadu, we had thousands of such ooranis when the Chera, Chola, and Pandya kings ruled Tamil Nadu. With population explosion and severe depletion of the underground water supplies, such drinking water ponds have become receptacles for sewage and garbage. These ooranis provide year-long supply of drinking water.
The DHAN Foundation of Madurai had worked with a small IITM volunteer group in August - October of 2004 to help desilt and dredge a fairly large size oorani in Velayuthapuram in Tuticorin district: report in PDF (602 KB). Based on this successful collaboration with DHAN, we requested them to select a similar project in the Kanchipuram district in Tamil Nadu, close enough for the Chennai-based alumni to visit the project site.
DHAN has selected an oorani in the village of 'Salur' in the Thirukazhukundram block of Kanchipuram district. The project will cost around Rs. 4 lakhs and the villagers will invest a lakh of this amount in the form of labor. Such labor investment (also called 'shram dhan') makes the villagers own this project, take pride in it and help sustain and maintain this project.
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| Watershed project in Salur | Oorani site in Edayur |
On July 27, IITM alumni visited the watershed project site in Salur village (left picture) and the completed oorani site in Edayur village (right picture). Both sites are in Kanchipuram district near Chennai. The villagers conducted a 'puja' on Friday, August 19 and DHAN formally commenced this project. This project will take about 2 months to complete.
You may have heard of the TeNeT Lab in the IITM campus, where Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala and his team are working on low-cost methods to bring internet connectivity to India's villages. They have developed a WLL technology (Wireless in the Local Loop) to provide wireless Internet over a 30 km area using a 45 meter tower to broadcast these signals. N-Logue is a private sector company incubated by Prof. Jhunjhunwala and others to install these technologies.
Raj Varadarajan (1966 BTME) and 8 other IIT alumni, created a for-profit entity called 'Minvalai' to help install these village internet kiosks in the 539 villages of Thiruvallur district, the northern most district of Tamil Nadu, bordering on Andhra Pradesh. Of these 539 villages, kiosks have been established in 144 villages during the last year and a half. Raj informs us that 54 of these 144 installations have reached an activity level to sustain themselves and start repaying the loans.
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| Current kiosk owner explains the kiosk system to other women. | Raj Varadarajan (left) observing the kiosk operator. |
In this project, interested alumni will visit a few chosen kiosks, meet with
the operators and educate them to become better kiosk operators. Given the
IT skills of our younger alumni, this project will be an attractive one.
Funding requirements for this project is about Rs. 60,000 consisting of project stipends of Rs. 1000 per kiosk per month for 10 kiosks for 6 months.
More info: Article "A Day in the Life of a Village Kiosk Operator" written by Elizabeth Alexander (1987 BTMT).
We all know that villages do not have easy access to medical facilities. Even if you construct a clinic, we cannot find a suitable doctor to staff it. To solve this dilemma, the concept of a rural health worker has been created by Dr. Bala Subramaniam of Saragur (Mysore district) in Karnataka. Under this program, a village volunteer is selected, given 12-months of medical training relevant to the needs of the village and returns to the village.
I visited Saragur on August 4th and met Dr. Bala at his Swami Vivekananda Health Center. The training materials are currently available in English and Kannada languages. We cannot select a villager from Tamil Nadu at this time since the training material is not available in Tamil at this time. Dr. Bala emphasized that we must also select the village volunteer so that people in his village or the panchayat is willing to pay for his services when the volunteer returns to the village after the training.
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| Rural school with boarding facilities. | Dr. Bala Subramaniam (right) showing one of the labs in the medical center. |
Funding requirements for the first phase of this project are about Rs. 1 lakh.
Four volunteers - 2 male and 2 female - will be given a monthly stipend of Rs 4,000
(attend training in Saragur, plus some support payment for family) for 6 months.
More info: infraSys newsletter in PDF (248 KB)
You can follow the progress of these projects during the first phase. You can learn more about the realities of how people in our villages survive. You can prepare yourself to join the Phase 2 of this program starting in Jan 2006.
To join this Yahoo eGroup, send an email with your name and particulars
to this e-mail address:
iitmaa_alumnisocietyplatform-subscribe
yahoogroups.com, or
visit Yahoo eGroup:
iitmaa_alumnisocietyplatform
You can also contact Ram Krishnan (1967 BTME) and Raj Varadarajan (1966 BTME):
Ram Krishnan:
rkrishnan46yahoo.com
Raj Varadarajan:
raj_varadarajanyahoo.com
This report was filed by Ram Krishnan (1967 BTME) and Raj Varadarajan (1966 BTME), on August 20, 2005.