Trip report from South India
Leadership is not a possession, it’s an action
~Tagline for Evadaithe Naakenti, a Telugu Movie
(Seen on billboards in the South)
Trip report:
My trip in the south was spent mostly visiting Microfinance Institutions… It was good from a work standpoint, I got to meet with a lot of the people and see work at several MFI’s that I’ve been wanting to visit.
I also had a lot of fun and saw a lot of India… My favorite thing about the trip (other than seeing people) was the food! I love South Indian food, and I figured that it would be best in the south… My trip totally validated that. I would usually eat a couple of dosas (12rs or $.26 each) a day, and usually an Andhra Meal (25rs or $.55)for lunch… Andhra meals are a couple of vegetables, sambar, rasam and rice, all you can eat.
Here’s a picture of one from Chennai - a little different than the ones in Hyderabad. The further south I went, the more likely that the meal would be served on a banana leaf.
I started my journey in Hyderabad, meeting with a few big MFI’s and visiting a smaller one. 3 other Indicorps fellows live in Hyderabad - Prem (My room and masti-partner from orientation), Sarita, and Priya, but Priya wasn’t in town. I ended up being able to spend a good amount of time with the other fellows when I was there, because my schedule wasn’t as packed as I thought it would be (had a couple of meetings cancelled).
We did some touristy stuff and had an overall really good time. I went on an unexpectedly romantic dinner with Prem on Valentines day (we didn’t expect the candlelight and roses at the restaurant). We went to Charminar, which is this gate in Hyderabad that you can go up in though it was closed - huge tourist attraction, and saw our other fellow Sheela who was in town for an NGO visit.
One NGO totally ditched me on a field visit, so armed with some extra time, Prem Sarita and I decided to go to Golconda, which is a fort right outside of Hyderbad. It was a wonderful couple of hours - quality time with my fellow fellows, great weather, and I love old forts (actually I love anything old and high up on a city). Prem wrote it up on his blog too.
Here are some pictures:
Me and Prembhai:
Me, Sarita, Prem, Golconda
After leaving Hyderabad (very sadly), I headed to Nellore, to spend the day with an NGO called IMM. IMM does development work for women in the district, mainly AIDS and Microfinance work. I had told them that I’d like to see some of their work and maybe meet some of the women in their SHG’s (Self Help Groups)… It ended up being that they had set up meetings with the leaders of all of their SHG groups, and the whole day spent travelling around the district, and I only got to spend like 10 minutes with each group. Each group was ridiculously thankful to me for spending time with them, and wanted pictures with me and some even gave me flowers! I think they were just happy to know that I was from the US and was in India spending time with them. I felt really weird about this. I also met with some HIV positive patients and handed out some medicine and daily supplies to them.
The scenery in the district was pretty cool - I got to see a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen before. Along the way, there were a lot of huts that look like this:
I took a look inside a couple of them - they were very very basic, and didnt seem like they would be able to withstand much. Some of them were huts that the farmers use when in the field, others were nomadic tribes that build small huts and move around - I met with some that grow watermelons during this season, sell them, and then move on to other business.
After Nellore, I went to Chennai for a couple of days… One of the NGO’s I visited was called DPG - the Development Promotion Group.
I visited a slum area of Chennai near the river where they work. They have similar issues to Ahmedabad in that they release water when the dam is in danger of breaking, and low-lying areas flood. DPG did some work (with government assistance) several years ago to get some government assistance to build housing in the slum. The best thing I saw that DPG did - one of the best SHG (Self Help Group) projects I’ve ever seen is this provision store that the SHG built with DPG’s assistance in the slum area as a cooperative. The slum area had a grocery store, but it was overpriced and didn’t have good quality produce and other stuff. DPG coordinated 5 of their SHG groups (total of 96 people, 4 female and 1 male group) and brought them together to discuss what could be done. They decided that they’d start their own provision store and buy from it. 5 different SHG groups each put in 10,000 rupees for a total of 50k in startup costs. DPG provided a moped and phone for them for free, but they pay for everything else. There is a guy that goes out and gets vegetables every morning on the moped. The store brings in 4-5000 rupees a day and they make a profit of 10% on that. They easily cover their costs and have made a total of about 3.25 lacs from their 50k investment 2 years ago, and they also have cheaper and better food and have provided a job in the village (the lady who works at the store makes 3,000 rupees a month). I really like this model of helping the people do something for themselves, and from what I heard about other projects DPG seems to be really good at it.
Here’s a streetshot of the slum:
The store:
After Chennai, I headed to Bangalore to visit a few other MFI’s. By this point I was starting to miss Ahmedabad! All of these cities in the south are nice, but much larger to get around… I took so many rickshaws everywhere because sometimes busses wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go. In Ahmedabad, I can take Popat (I’ve named my bike Popat) most places I want to go to. In Bangalore I had the problem that the rickshaws would refuse to take me where I wanted to go, so a couple of times it took me half an hour just to find a rickshaw that would go where I wanted and not charge me a crazy extra rate. Anyway, not much to report from the Bangalore trip - I spent most of my time there in meetings… I did see this really cool rickshaw though:
I couldn’t find the driver so I don’t know full details - but there are solar cells all over the thing. I’d find it hard to believe that it runs entirely on solar power… my guess is that you plug it into the wall at night and the solar power just helps to recharge. Very cool nonetheless… I wonder if it makes fiscal sense to unleash these all over the country… It’d be an awesome thing from a pollution standpoint, as I think rickshaws are a pretty big contributor to pollution in cities in India.
Happy belated Holi… will post pictures when I get them from Bidisha.
By the way, I’m on a trip in the north right now. I’ve been in Delhi and now I’m in Dehradun, which is incredibly cold (by incredibly cold I mean 50s in Farenheit, so it’s not nearly as cold as it is for many of my friends in the US)… Next stop is Lucknow then back to A’bad for workshop.
