Chennai: Leaving behind their lucrative jobs, a young chemical engineer and a lawyer have spent the last 10 months in the tribal villages of Kolli Hills, Namakkal district helping villagers. Manchester-educated Anirudh Prasadh has been helping with re-branding and packaging of millet products sold by local farmers while lawyer Gautam Jayasurya has been teaching young tribal children. In the process, both have also been learning.
After completing Masters in Chemical Engineering from the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, University of Manchester, the 26-year-old Anirudh returned to Mumbai and joined Hindustan DorrOliver on a national project. But soon he got fed up with needless delays in implementing the project due to funding issues.
This prompted him to think about the reasons for delay in implementation of the developmental and infrastructure projects in India. “I realised I was wasting my time. I quit the job and started looking for a fellowship to engage in developmental works. That search led to SBI Youth For India fellowship,” he said.
Leaving the comfort of the city to work among people of remote tribal hamlets in Kolli Hills in October last year, Anirudh has been involved in helping local farmers to market the traditional millet crop-based value added products and ensure they earn more profits.
The farmers were selling 15 products under the brand name "Kolli Hills Naturals Food" without much profit for years together due to bad packaging and unattractive stickers on the packets. The M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation established the millet value chain. "The first thing I did was to improve entire packaging of the products. A logo was designed for the products marketed through the Kolli Hills Agro Biodiversity Conservers Federation (KHABCoFED)," he said.
They also got the products tested in a lab to get details of their nutrient content. "We have introduced standing pouches with attractive stickers to make the product more appealing to the consumers," Anirudh said. Through his repackaging initiative he was able bring down the cost of packaging by 40-50 per cent. "This has helped the farmers to earn more profit. Also, the sale of products has gone up," he said.
Anirudh is also focusing on teaching farmers on how to market their products, maintain quality control and keeping their surrounding and machinery clear. "I am also working on preparing a manual on all these aspects for the farmers for their future use. As both I and MSSRF wants the farmers to become self reliant," he said. Gautam Jayasurya wants to get a firsthand experience of developmental activities and implementation of program before taking up civil service examination. A law graduate, he is emphasising on rural education focusing on primary and upper primary students.
Gautam has facilitated foreign faculty to teach English for the students through the Village Knowledge Centres run by MSSRF in Kolli Hills. "I contacted ANN Foundation in USA to help us with faculty in Tamil to teach English through Skype-based learning classes. I went to all the schools to enrol the students. We started with one class in VKC and it is now extended to three VKCs," he said.
The faculty comes from different places including Vienna, the US and UK. "They have been interacting with kids in a non-formal way. Kids are able to understand and learn better," he said. In an effort to empower the local community to continue its work on its own without intervention of NGOs, Gautam has organised training of community members. "We have completed training of the eight volunteers through NGO Pratham on teaching related methodology. They will go back to their villages to teach the kids on vocabulary, reading and writing," he said.
In the pipeline, there is a plan to install self learning literacy software developed by TCS in the computers in VKCs through which the people could learn without any external help. Effort taken to impart quality education has already started showing good signs of improvement among the kids. "Before commencing my work, we conducted a test on reading and writing to assess the standard of education.
We found the kids were lacking. They were neither able to read nor write properly. Now there is an improvement in their reading ability and they are able read English fluently," he said, pointing out that there was an increase in community participation after kids started coming to the VKCs."Parents are keen to know what their kids are up to in VKCs. They are visiting the centre and also making use of the facility to know about the government schemes, agriculture and weather," he said.
