More and more NRIs are returning to the city, leaving their lucrative jobs abroad, only to become social entrepreneurs to find permanent solution for social problems.
In one of the movies of Shahrukh Khan, Swades, he portrays the character of a young scientist Mohan Bhargava who leaves his million dollar job and returns to his country to help the poor. To solve the power related problems in one of the villages, he enlists the support of a few hundred men and guides them through the building of a reservoir beneath a perennial spring on a nearby hill.
Buying turbines and other equipment with his money, he sets up a small hydro-electric power plant that would solve the problem of irregular electricity and make the village self-sufficient.
The movie rightly depicts the stories of many NRIs who has been joining the bandwagon of social entrepreneurs in the country to serve the needy and downtrodden.
Couple of years ago, inspired by Dr Anji Reddy, chairman of Dr Reddy Labs, Sudesh Menon, co-founder of Waterlife, came back to India, and joined hands with the NGO of Anji Reddy to provide proper drinking water to the people of rural India.
Perturbed by a UN finding that India ranked 120 out 122 nations on potable water quality, Menon toured the countryside and launched pioneering water purification systems. They charge `3-5 for 20 litres of drinking water across 1,500 villages in six states.
“When we started this model, we were ridiculed by everybody – government and bureaucracy. They said village people will never pay for water. But we proved all of them wrong," said Menon. "Our next target is urban slums.”
It’s not only the NRI, but students, businessmen and people from all walks of life too are showing keen interest in becoming social entrepreneurs. Akram Feroze, a young social entrepreneur from Hyderabad says, “Social entrepreneurship is all about generating entrepreneurial ideas to solve the problems of the society. For doing that one has to be sensitive to the society to understand its problems.
Social entrepreneurship is completely different from philanthropy where it solves the problem partially whereas in this field one has to constantly look for long-term solutions.” Mr Feroze is presently on a Cycle Yatra and is touring different parts of India to mobilize people on theatre arts.
So how is the picture of social entrepreneurship in Hyderabad? M Subhash Chandra of Centre for Action Research and People’s Development (CARPED), a Hyderabad-based NGO working on child rights for the last two decades in Andhra Pradesh says, “More and more people are becoming aware of the societal problems and coming to help the needy.
They are working on environment related problems, education, child rights, human rights, issues of farmers and many. The good part is more and more NRIs too are actively taking part in such activities.”
Mr Chandra further said that they were providing financial assistance to these social entrepreneurs by giving them fellowships. He says, “We are providing internal fellowships to all the volunteers who are working on forest development and forest management issues.”
So whatever, it may be whether is environment related, education or social related problems, more and more people are joining hands to resolve the problems and working for a better India.
