Everyday we read in the newspaper that the rich philanthropists around the world are adding a few more billions for social upliftment in the developing countries. It’s wonderful. Yet the cynic in me keeps shouting out, “But if there is so much money, why am I not seeing a change in the lives around me? For instance, the slum near the place I live, is still the same, 18 years after I came to Bangalore, and so many years since Government and Philanthropists have been pumping in money into various activities of development – not sure where, but not definitely here.
I often have the privilege of meeting elite groups of philanthropists, almost always backed up by the ‘Desis’ who boldly proclaim in a heavy American accent that their ‘Dils’ (hearts) are still ‘Hindustani’ (Indian) and want to do something for their beloved country, who have yet another idea of investing multi million dollars into the development sector in India. I play to them my tune of “Bridging the Participation Divide”, which I with two good friends of mine in the social sector, have been passionately discussing and putting new flesh every time we meet or talk about it. These philanthropists listen with interest, over cups of beer in some of the premium clubs and hotels of Bangalore. They even appreciate, my passion, and my decision to leave corporate life for this bold dream. Yet to my surprise, they always share with me that they were not quite worried about having a couple of millions (and dollars, I mean), wasted, for the sake of an idea. After all, unless you take risks, where are the rewards? I humbly remind them that similar experiments have failed earlier and there may be some learnings from those. But in all these conversations, I realize that my definition of failure was coming from my middle class upbringing where every rupee was considered important, and that did not connect to these great people whose level of charity was in millions of dollars, and their wastage margin far outweighed my savings target!
Nevertheless, I am still convinced that unless I see change in the lives of the people around me, be it in the slums, or be it in the rural villages around Karnataka, or even in the lives of the children in some of the schools in Bangalore itself, these millions do not mean anything to me. To a beggar on MG Road, what difference does the Metro make unless he gets better prospects of revenue? To a child on the street, what difference does any development agenda make unless there is better prospects of filling his hungry stomach everyday? To a child in the rural village of Karnataka, what difference does technology make unless it takes him and his friends to new levels of knowledge and dreams about the future?
It is in this context that the passion about ‘Bridging the Participation Divide’ makes a lot of sense. What good is technology, if it is to be worshipped from a distance? What good is a computer in a village, if it only further increases the awe about computers? What good is high bandwidth or higher processing power if it only increases the ‘digital divide’?
Unless we make technology a friend to these people who we try to ‘improve’, unless we take the pains to go through the long route of building companionship with technology, the body will reject it like a thorn in the flesh. Those who love the patronizing approach of introducing technology will soon lament how these ‘poor Indians’ do not want to learn and compete in the ‘global marketplace’. A few years later, another philanthropist will come into the scene, repeat the same mistakes, waste a few more millions of dollars, and by then one more Manjunath, who grew up in the slum would be struggling to get his daughter married and would be pleading desperately with the local money lender.
With the advent of cloud in the market place, bridging the participation divide is an important theme to explore. Any technology company or philanthropist who wants to invest money in the social sector or in the Bottom of the Pyramid market will do good to invest a very small portion of this money into doing this grassroot research. This will involve introducing technology and solutions in an absolutely non-intrusive way, monitoring it in a zero-overhead fashion, gathering data to be put into an observation model which gets iterated week over week of the experiment, new shows get added to the yatra of participation, and the model enriches. The data gathered will also be experimented on the various cloud mechanisms available, be it IaaS or PaaS or SaaS, and will also try out very optimal communication mechanisms and protocols, some of which may even be a combination of machines and humans, in line with leading edge work getting done on lightweight data representation methods, and see one after the other, cloud solutions coming to be of relevance for this rural crowd. The cloud stays meaningless to the villager unless it rains on them – rains opportunities, rains connections, rains wealth.
As this train moves on, technology will become a friend, a friend who is helpful, a friend who also tells your good things to others in the rest of the world. The technology will make the rural teacher of Karnataka now a global resource to teach physics in a very unique way. This technology will make certain practices in that small village in Karnataka known to another corner in America or Africa, to that unknown child whom the ‘development millions’ has not touched yet.
The scenarios applied will vary from sector to sector, be it education or be it telemedicine. The fundamental approach will be a mindset which looks at the target population as the customer, and will be treated like a true customer anywhere in the world. The philosophy will be one of respect to the customer in that rural village, respect to his friends, respects to his community, respect to the various practices which are time honoured in his place, and then introducing technology as a friend to power the strengths they already have, to broadbase the best practices, to lead to evolution of new practices. Technology will be another manure to their fertile land, fertile in their own indigenous ways.
A little more patience, a little more humility, and we can truly impact that neighbour of ours, that slum around us, that village around us. The learning models which come out of that will be rich and reusable. The spread of the impact will be viral. In that mela, the person who sowed the seed will be forgotten. The reapers rejoice. The harvesters revel. The sower moves on, quietly, to the next global village.
This is what ‘Bridging the Participation Divide’ is all about, and what PrismTree is trying to evangelize with the corporate sector and philanthropists. Contact me at jacobcv@prismtree.com if you think this unique value proposition of ‘diligent focus on the strategic value of building a sustainable community using technology as an effective support and optimization resource’, makes sense to you as a philanthropist, as a corporation. You can fund the initiative for a sector relevant to you, and with a few more players who can fund, we can make this yatra very exciting – cloud on top, and rain on your back.
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