GDL - Piramal Foundation » Interns

Bagar Live!

stephaniesearles — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:31:48 +0000

For the past month, I have been working on creating a website for Bagar, a way to bring the identity of this lively town to the worldwide web. I have spent my days walking around the village, taking pictures and also talking to as many people as possible about the culture and history of this town. The other day, I spent (a very warm) morning walking around talking with Manalal Ji, a retired army veteran from Bagar who told me about some of Bagar’s history and interesting sites. Together with my partner Anurag Dutta, the technological backbone of the website, we have been able to begin to create a virtual space for Bagar at www.bagar.org. Now, the site features information for citizens, visitors, and volunteers. There is an article about the history of Bagar as well as a list of frequently asked questions about the town and a photo gallery. Coming soon will be a directory for schools and businesses in Bagar as well as lots of other resources and information. Keep checking for updates!

One of the goals of this website is to attract tourists to the town. This will allow people to experience just how great Bagar has become and will also help boost the economy here. Also, www.bagar.org is a great resource for volunteers who are considering coming to work at GDL. Within the next few weeks, certain projects will have their own pages on the site and will easily be able to make updates based on their latest achievements and accomplishments.

Tell everyone you know about www.bagar.org and take a look yourself at what is soon to become the best website for any rural town in the world!

An experiment in trust

rahulreddy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:02:31 +0000

Despite one month of living and working in a new place and interacting in a language and culture I had only a passing familiarity with, I have not yet taken the time to write about my experience. Friends have encouraged me to write both about my time in Bagar and about specific successes and disappointments. My work at the Bagar Employment Exchange has definitely provided much material to write about as we have had a string of successes recently. Yet it was not until a group discussion last weekend that I really felt the impulse to write. Despite being such a seemingly simple concept, it was this idea of “trust” and its role in development that finally pushed me to write. So much of what one reads in development literature and encounters in a developing country such as institutional problems, lack of rule of law, public goods becoming de-facto privatized, etc. boils down to a lack of trust. And, in my experience thus far, this lack of trust is so widespread that personal relationships are needed to get anything done, business can become a painful ordeal, and one must always be on the offensive when dealing with others as written rules may not be respected. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma that one lives each and every time they interact with others and it perpetuates itself each time someone gets burned. Yet I’m also hopeful because once a process begins to be understood, alternatives can be imagined. What is my vision of a developed India? It’s one where trust exists between people and in public institutions and norms. It is of a broad, increased level of public trust rather than the intensely personal relationships I’ve encountered thus far that seem to trump any attempts to create trust beyond the individual. So let us see. My whole time here, everything I do, every person I meet on behalf of BEX, GDL, and the Piramal Foundation, is an experiment with trust. I’m looking forward to what it brings.

Good luck Football Campers!

Ashish — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:13:56 +0000

As part of it’s community leadership effort, GDL interns Akshay Singh and Anurag Dutta started a football training camp for the Bagar Youth this summer. The goal was to impart football skills, and also to impart equally valuable teamwork and leadership skills. The ultimate goal is to excite youth about coming together through sport, and leading this effort every year.

The football camp, along with some of the GDL interns this summer, entered an open tournament being held in Bagar, and have achieved great success. The football camp team has been the sole representative for Bagar, and it’s progress is starting to create a buzz in the community. Here’s an article in the local newspaper featuring their performance:

The Newspaper: (click to enlarge)

The Article: (click to enlarge)

Good luck on the upcoming matches Team Bagar!

A take on Leaders

Rachit Chandra — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:05:30 +0000

A few of my friends [and fellow Interns ] are running a Summer Camp for 11th and 12th graders at Bagar [soon, I would not need to hyperlink Bagar to the Wiki article, @ Steph ]. In much of urban India, summer camps are a fad. There are camps for all sort of activities, the funniest I have heard is a Summer Camp to complete summer assignments doled out by schools!

But, here in heart of rural Rajasthan, a summer camp makes a lot of sense. Supplementing the school education, Neeraj, Abhishodh and Antara are introducing the summer camp kids to computers, functional English and trying to inculcate leadership in them. Last week, the Summer Camp team wanted me to talk about Leadership.

Turning up an hour late made me look like the unpunctual lazy sloth that I am. But, the audience I got was way better than any of my expectations. Due to lack of any preparation, I started with polling names of leaders from them. Indira Gandhi (from the Camp’s only girl. Women need to be empowered here. More on that later, some other day), Netaji, Bhagat Singh, Laluji, Saurav Ganguly, Ronaldo (!) and our very own Ashish Gupta. I was surprised to not find any business leaders in the list especially this being in the famed Shekhawati region.

But, when these 17-18 year olds started listing down qualities of these leaders, I realized why we came down to Bagar. For the 8 of us from Pilani, this place has no novelty attached to it. We live in rural India, [albeit with better internet ] for ten painfully long months each year. Not going home, not interning in India’s leading nuclear reactor at Kalpakkam with Murthy, not working on India’s manned space flight at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center with Pandey… All those regrets vanished for that one hour.

I have had long discussions about leaders with my city friends. Every time, every single time, it is about communication skills, being good at people management, having a great vision yada, yada (and yes at times, when I have had the trademark fights with a certain opinionated individual named Vineet Pandey, I was the one harping on communication skills). But, these kids, they started with honesty. Somebody pointed out the difference to me between honesty and truthfulness too! And they too think leaders should be straightforward. Not very practical as popular opinion might concur, but I finally found somebody who thinks that leaders can be straightforward and don’t need to use guile

Meet the Interns

Rachit Chandra — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:21:29 +0000

As Preeti posted a few days back, GDL is currently hosting a lot of interns from UPenn, BITS Pilani (Pilani and Goa campuses), Tufts etc.. The flurry of activities is thrilling and interesting. Before I start updating you about the projects we , the interns are working on, let me post what a few interns had to say about themselves!

Manisha Thapa : I am Manisha Thapa. I am from Nepal. I am pursuing my Bachelor’s degree from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. At GDL, I will be working on the Bagar Drinking Water Initiative. I will mostly be looking at the marketing schemes and promotion opportunities for Mridul water (soon to be Sarvajal) through interaction with the consumers, prospective entrepreneurs, government bodies and other stakeholders. By the end of the internship I hope to be able to produce all necessary marketing tools for the initiative. I also hope to be able to learn more about the local culture and get to know the people at GDL and the Bagar community better.

Anurag Dutta : I am currently an undergraduate student in Computer Science at BITS Pilani.My passions include photography, music and graphic designing. My designs can be accessed here.I currently post to the following blogs:
Through the Foliage, Befuddled songs. At GDL, this summer I am working on setting up a sports league for the youth of Bagar to foster a spirit of sportsmanship and further community leadership.

Zainab Kakal : I am studying Social Entrepreneurship at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai .I am currently working at Source For Change (SFC), the rural BPO and aims to learn as well as create value for SFC. Born and brought up in Mumbai, I love to explore new ground and ask questions.

Antara Sarkar:I am in my final year at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS, PIlani). I am working on the Summer Camp that is going to be started here so as to teach English, Computer and Leadership Skills to students in 11th and 12th standard in Bagar. We hope that this camp will give them an extra edge and help them become aware and make most of the opportunities available in India, particularly to get better employment.

Stephanie Searles : I am from America and I study at the University of Pennsylvania. At GDL, I am working with Radhika on building a website for Bagar both for its residents and also to help put Bagar on the map for tourists. I hope to ultimately create a cyber area that brings together many aspects of Bagar and attracts tourists to the village. The site will also contain hyperlinks to help citizens get more information about other GDL projects and where to find help on learning English, finding jobs, and other such subjects.

HM Akshaya : My name is Akshaya. I have just completed my second year at the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (Pilani) where I am pursuing my degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. This summer as a part of the Practice School Program at college I am here at GDL to provide my services and hopefully contribute to the change here at Bagar. When I got here and looked around the conditions did look testing and tough but two days into Bagar and I feel like a fish in water and looking forward to work every day. I m going to be working here on a Career Handbook for BEI which is to be later distributed to 9^th- 12^th graders in and around here to help them out with their career decisions. I ‘m also going to be scouting for possible contacts for the BEX (Bagar Employment Exchange), where aspirants could be placed. I hope this visit is productive and I become a part of the change.

And to sum it up,its time to introduce myself. For starters I am Rachit Chandra, 19, highly confused about life. I am studying to be a n engineer at BITS Pilani and have fallen in love with the small quaint little town of Pilani. My other loves include technology, entrepreneurship and gadgets. Sounds geekish? Well, when I am not catching feeds on Google Reader or blogging at Rach 100% Sach I enjoy going on very low budget trips with my friends, camping under the stars, discussing love-life-philosophy – politics-religion over endless cups of chai and watching Westerns. Here, in Bagar, I am working with the rural BPO, Source For Change. Working on a social start-up is an experience that fits perfectly in my long term plans. And empowering rural women to take control of their fate is such a huge motivation. So here, I am in the middle of nowhere. Hoping to do my little bit. Signing off from Bagar, yours truly