Changing Lives

The earth was damp. The market was busy, The farms were buzzing with activity. The rains that year had been good, and everyone seemed to have a spring in their feet, a renewed purpose in their lives. Making my way to the little town of Netrang in the south Gujarat district of Bharuch in India, there was a sense of hope in the air. An area dominated by the 'adivasis' or 'scheduled tribes' (as they are referred to in the Indian Constitution - the indigenous people), they lived on the margins, their lives steeped in poverty, yet a community that was so full of life and resilience. 

It was September 1985. I was actually going to meet my close friend Shankar. It was almost 5 months since I had seen him. I was bored in my job in Mumbai. And it was time to head off and have some fun and just 'chill'. 

Shankar greeted me with his characteristic charming smile. He was (and is) always someone who is full of excitement and enthusiasm - but that day he was particularly excited. I thought it was because I had arrived, and while that may well have contributed to that, he was excited to check the progress of the social forestry and minor irrigation projects that his organisation had been implementing, with which he had been closely associated. And with good rains, there was hope of an early success. 

"It was not easy, initially, as people had to trust us. And winning their trust was always going to be difficult as we are city bred outsiders and very young too", he explained. He was only 22 and his team leader was just a year or two older. Most of the dozen odd team members were in their early to mid twenties. But I had not come to see the projects - I had come to see him and spend time with him. But to my chagrin, he said, "Let us go to the villages and I will show you what we have been doing". 

Succumbing partly to his enthusiasm, I hopped on to his motorbike, and set out to see 'the work'. He kept talking about how they had been working with the local communities, pointing excitedly to the various villages they worked in as we passed them. 

After an hour or so, we came to a village, to be greeted very warmly by the local community. They were very pleased with the rains. They were growing trees to arrest the decline of green cover. The saplings were doing very well and looked healthy. They had a local management team in place to keep an eye on the plantation, keep the accounts and generally get the community engaged. They had a long term plan. After 10 years or so, some of these trees could be sold, but in the interim, there would be fodder, some firewood and seeds available. Some employment had also been generated and a community so short of cash had some money going around. They could now dream of a better future for their children !

The story in the next village was not so different. Here, there was a minor irrigation project which was to arrest the flow of water through a simple construction, which would then enable the local farmers to irrigate their crops for the first time and get a better return.

As a 22-year old myself, I watched in fascination at what I was witnessing. Of course I could see what the trees and the irrigation could do, but I had learnt some key lessons from Shankar without he probably having realised it. These were :

* The power of trust - When there is trust, you can move mountains. There is a book by Stephen Covey on 'The Speed of Trust' which I read many years later. That is so true. As an outsider and as a  youngster, Shankar had built trust with the local communities in a matter of just 6 months. It had to come from his personal style and engagement, and a genuine empathy

* Enthusiasm is infectious - It is so easy to identify challenges, less so, to identify opportunities. Here was a great example of how enthusiasm based on belief in what would work was being translated to generate enthusiasm across different stakeholder. As a naturally enthusiastic person, Shankar could demonstrate that very effectively

In all this though, there was a much deeper lesson, which probably even Shankar did not realise at that time - that we all have the power to change something, and that is, Change Lives ! That realisation has stayed with me always and is so core to my self belief.