It's the cost of bribes that keeps the poor in the dark, says 'the man who returned home'

The face of the original crusader -the one who returned home to 'light a bulb' Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi speaking at the last meeting

An engineering graduate from one of India.s best institutions . IIT, Bombay; a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland; the future is his to write; the world at his feet.

Yet, what does this young man do? He throws away a brilliant future in the West, returns to India and busies himself with all the little things that trouble the poorest of the poor.

Does the man sound familiar to you? Does his story remind you of the main protagonist Mohan Bhargav in the Hindi film Swades?

It is indeed him - Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi, the original template from which the makers of the film chiselled out the character that Shah Rukh Khan essayed on the silver screen. The man who, in a little place called Bilgaon, worked with the local people to set up an alternate energy project wherein they trapped the energy of a waterfall and lit up the village.

Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi, who was the guest speaker at the last meeting, was born in Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh and has been working intimately in the field of .non-destructive . development. He founded the Association for India.s Development (AID) in 1991 to bring together volunteers wanting to give back to their country of origin.

AID now has 50 chapters in India, the USA and Australia and is working at the grassroots level in 18 Indian states. It is a group of creative patriotic students, NRIs, skilled professionals working to understand the causes rather than the symptoms of poverty. Many of them have returned to India and are working directly with issues such as health, education, displacement and so on.

Dr. Ravi himself worked on issues like rural electrification, dams and development, right to information, anti-corruption, the NREG scheme and so on, and even led a campaign of scientists and engineers from around the world who challenged the engineers of the Sardar Sarovar project dam and their exaggeratedclaims, and succeeded in saving lakhs of villagers from submergence without rehabilitation.

Addressing the subject "Integrated Development of Rural India", he divided his talk into three sections: (1) the challenge of taking electricity to huts with mud walls and thatched roofs; (2) changing the procedure for cooking rice in villages; and (3) offering a simple new perspective to the virtues of mean sea level vis-à- vis reservoir height level.

Dr. Ravi said that even though most villages in the plains already had electricity supplied through the grid, the wires from the electricity poles only went into some of the houses. A closer look revealed that the wires went into houses made of bricks and with tiles on the roof, not to those with mud walls and thatched roofs.

From this he concluded that perhaps those living inside mud walls with thatched roofs could not afford the electricity charges. On an impulse he decided to look at the electricity bills of those who used grid power. He found that the average bill was for the consumption of about 20 units, costing Rs. 30 to Rs. 40 per month.

Surely a labourer earning daily wages could afford to pay Rs. 40 a month for electricity? Normally, a villager earned Rs. 50 to Rs. 70 perday. Even if he worked for just 100 days a year, he could easily pay an electricity bill of Rs. 40 per month.

On delving into the issue even further, he learnt that those who did not have electricity were using kerosene oil, a fossil fuel - the same raw material used by the thermal generator of electricity! But whereas the generator produced electricity in a very efficient manner, the kerosene lamp did the same job very inefficiently and yielded far less light.

Digging even deeper, he observed that the villagers used three litres of kerosene every month, at a cost of Rs. 11 per litre; it was purchased through a ration shop and not in the open market where it was priced at Rs. 20 to Rs. 25 per litre.

Soon, things became clear -the person using an oil lamp was spending Rs. 33 every month on kerosene, whereas the person connected to the grid was paying an electricity bill of Rs. 30 to Rs. 40 per month.

Clearly, Dr. Ravi found, it was not poverty that was responsible for the persons living within mud walls and with thatched huts not having electricity - it was their inability to pay a bribe of Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 1,500 for a new connection as demanded by the staff of the electricity department.

"That is the bottleneck; this is why most of the country is still living in darkness. It has nothing to do with not being able to pay the bill, because they are burning kerosene oil which is less efficient and costs more money"

Answering questions, not ducking them. Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi with President Dr. Rumi Jehangir and First Lady Pervin Jehangir at the last meeting

Sadly, taking electricity to such "unreached" households was one of the last priorities of the government of India. Its first priority was increasing the generation of electricity, not distributing the resource evenly to all people.

"Corruption happens in darkness. When you switch on the light, you begin to see that nobody is corrupt. In many cases, corruption occurs because nobody is asking questions. The moment you start asking, when you take 20 applications from the village to the electricity office and report to the anti-corruption bureau, you see the government officers back-pedalling.

"In our case, they said as long as you are giving us the list of poor people, we will accept (applications) without taking a bribe... In this way, starting with 20, we have given about 700 electricity connections, ensuring that no bribe is given. People pay for the other things, such as the meter (in Andhra Pradesh it used to cost Rs. 350; but now the rate was down to Rs. 150)"

First Lady Pervin Jehangir, who introduced the guest speaker at the last meeting, is seen with Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi seated to her right

As an aside, Dr. Ravi said that loans could be availed of for buying an electricity meter - not for paying bribes.

This was the kind of work that was actually needed to be done in India. The country needed people with sensitivity to sit down with the villagers, understand their problems and then come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, most of the development work that he had seen was being done by NGOs funded by outside agencies, whether Indian or foreign; and sadly, most of their social workers had lost their creativity. They were just writing proposals to get grants and usually it was the funding agency that told them what to do and how to do it.

"The need of the hour is human resources, not money. We need people who can address these exacting challenges"

Taking his thesis further, Dr. Ravi said it was difficult to leave the city and go to the villages. But once there, it was not very difficult to sit with the people, to hear their problems, to think over them and to come up withsolutions to their problems. In fact, this was the natural way of doing things.

However, it was a complete waste of human resources and creativity if a person visiting a village to work in only one field of work did not look deeper or beyond his/her brief. Such a uni-focused approach did not yield optimum results.

Dr. Ravi said when his wife Aravindam was working on malnutrition among children she heard that the aanganwadi in one particular village was completely non-functional. (Aanganwadis are part of the government'.s supposed concern for pregnant women and children in the age group 0 to 5 years.) The money and the grain that it was receiving from the government were being siphoned away.

In such a situation, one could turn one's face away from the problem, saying,"we are only working in the area of malnourishment, not the functioning of aanganwadis"

But his wife did not turn away. Instead, she called a village meeting and all the women who flocked to it shed their inhibitions (and the fear of speaking against the powerful and the corrupt) and gave vent to their frustration. Soon, a letter was addressed to the Collector -it was signed by 60 (mostly pregnant) women within a day.

Next day, the Sarpanch and the panches called Aravindam and the others and said the problem could be sorted out amicably without resorting to accusations and counter-accusations. Finally, a week's time was given for the purpose of correcting the aanganwadi programme. And it was done.

Turning to the second part of his talk, Dr. Ravi said that the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the International Committee for Global Climate Change had brought the issues of global warming, greenhouse gases and so on, into focus. This was on his mind, too, and he had started working in this area.

Realising that villagers could not afford to buy solar heating systems or other devices, he surfed the net, when he came upon an exciting idea -a "hay box" to cook rice.

Normally, rice was cooked by bringing it to a boil in water, reducing it to simmer and then allowing it to cook for another 15 minutes. But rural women, who used firewood instead of LPG gas, used far more water to cook rice because they were afraid the rice would burn.

As a result, they ended up using more firewood (which was scarce in the first place) and with a gooey dish that was usually unpalatable and often shared with the domestic animals.

Dr. Ravi learnt, while reading about the"hay box", that the vessel with rice could be removed from the flame the moment it started boiling. There was no need to reduce the flame to simmer or to cook it for another 15 minutes. Instead, the rice could be removed the moment it started boiling and placed inside an insulated vessel so that the heat did not escape and the rice was cooked.

"You can try it in your home, with a hot box or a thermocol box; put the rice in a thermos vessel or a hot box, cover it and keep it for half an hour to 40 minutes; it will get cooked"

The best insulating material in the village was hay and it came free. Dr. Ravi said he took a cardboard box where available or a bamboo basket (costing Rs. 10 to Rs. 15), packed some hay into it and converted it into a sort of cask.

While conducting this experiment in a village in Andhra Pradesh, he asked the women to start cooking rice with less water. When it started boiling, he told them to take it away from the flame and place the vessel inside the box or basket filled with hay. This was then covered and a weight placed on it -and, hey, presto, the rice was done in 40 minutes!

Thanks to this adaptation, the women found that they used less firewood and, because they removed the rice from the flame once it started boiling, they could use the flame to cook another dish. Secondly, the rice tasted better and was no longer a gooey dish. Third, it saved the women a lot of time.

But more than anything else, this approach was a help in reducing greenhouse gases - considering that rice was the staple in South India.

"The ideas are there, the challenges are there, and they are exciting, but somehow we are not connecting things to solve the problems. We need more people to do this work"

Dr. Ravi then turned to the Sardar Sarovar dam. He first visited the Narmada valley in 1998-99 along with Medha Patkar. Since he was an engineer, many villagers approached him and said that the government surveys were wrong. But it was up to him to show in what way these surveys were wrong.

Although the Sardar Sarovar dam was in Gujarat, its submergence zone extended several hundred km. behind the dam, in Maharashtra and in Madhya Pradesh. The width of the reservoir being 1.6 km. by 100 to 200 km. long, the submergence area was indeed huge.

The government had done its own surveys and provided the official data about which houses would be submerged and at which level. The villagers suspected something amiss. They believed that more houses would be submerged than the government claimed. But they just didn't know how to challenge the data.

Once Medha told him to look into the issue, Dr. Ravi started by asking himself, "Whom do I trust? Do I have faith in what the government is saying, or what the villagers and the people involved in the environmental movement are saying?"

The river Narmada is like a giant swimming pool - a 40 - km.-long pool : Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi

Thank you for your outstanding talk. President Dr. Rumi Jehangir presents a memento to Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi at the last meeting

While talking with the villagers, it emerged that many of them used the heavy rains and the consequent floods of 1979 as a yardstick. According to local folklore, when the waters of the Narmada rose, the flood waters entered several villages. Some of the older people recalled vividly that the waters rose to particular heights, which they described equally vividly.

One man said that the path between two houses was submerged; another said that the garbage from another village was washed in and deposited at a particular height in his village-and it remained there because it did not belong to his village.

Clearly, the villagers had, over the years, developed their own system of measuring the height of the Narmada. What they wanted to convey was their fear that since the waters had risen to alarming heights before the dam was built, it was possible that the waters would rise to even greater heights once the dam came up

Against this, the government surveys said that the waters would rise to heights that were lower than they had risen at the time of the floods of 1979. And it was this that was not acceptable to the people.

Dr. Ravi took out his instruments and went about making all sorts of measurements. But he soon realised that he had to start with what were called "government benchmarks"

Another point he noted was that most civil engineers measured height from mean sea level. But there was no sea around the Narmada valley. As for the villagers, they were measuring height from the Narmada river.

Stumped for an alternative, Dr. Ravi said, he started with the government benchmark of measurement according to the mean sea level. In the course of the day, he met some engineers working for the government who laughed at him, pointing out that he was starting from their point of reference, hence he would end up doing nothing.

It was then that a new realisation hit him - the Narmada was like a giant swimming pool! For, once the river was dammed and the water stopped, then at that height all the water was also flat because water always remained horizontal to the ground. It rose only when the riverbed rose over the dam level.

Since the horizontal portion was about 40 km. long, the Narmada was like a 40-km.long swimming pool. Once this became clear, all that remained to be done was measuring the height from the river, comparing it with the government data -and then proving the inconsistency.

"And that is what we did. Once we got the idea, we forgot about the mean sea level, we reduced it to a simple problem of measuring height at the place where the river was horizontal, and then we could show discrepancies in the government data.

"We presented the data to the Chief Minister, at time Mr. Digvijay Singh, who was himself an engineer. He immediately understood the import of that."

Further, the government was using some American software which projected the height during floods -both with a dam and without a dam. But he was able to show that there were discrepancies in these projections because the original data was about 100-year-old worse-case levels.

Dr. Ravi said working on the Sardar Sarovar had convinced him that most of the "movements" in India, whether the environmental movement or grassroots activists, were doing highly scientific work and there was a need to have faith in them.

He then switched on a slide show (with the theme song from the film Swades playing in the background), stating that the Narmada valley was swades for the people who had been displaced from there; his swades was not about NRIs displaced from India but the tribals displaced from the Narmada valley wanting to return to the valley.

After the presentation, Dr. Ravi took questions from the floor. However, he bunched them together and answered them at one go.

To a query on the incidence of corruption, he said the Right to Information Act (RTI) was proving to be a very potent tool, one that could be used to telling effect against corruption. Earlier, it was only MPs or MLAs who could ask questions of the government, now every citizen could do so. And the government was obliged to answer within 30 days; in cases of emergency, even within 24 to 48 hours.

Moreover, the Act also had penalty clauses, so that in case information was not given, then the officers concerned could be penalised and made to pay hefty fines which would be deducted from their salaries. Bureaucrats were now beginning to fear the Act.

Giving an example of the RTI.s working, Dr. Ravi said if a person did not get a ration card on time, he or she could file an RTI application asking for details, such as the status of all applications received on the same day as he or she had applied for a ration card. This would force the department concerned to show its hand.

."Somebody who has bribed might have got his card; but now if you are asking the status of all applications that were received on that day and why did some people get their cards while others did not, then the question would arise: Why not? So now the government has to respond to this question"

Dr. Ravi revealed that his group had devised a "zero-rupee note" with the slogan, "I promise neither to take nor to give" (an allusion to the giving and taking of bribes). He was hopeful that this would soon gain currency and help in the fight against corruption.

Finally, Dr. Ravi said that he was rather disheartened with the attitude of people at large.

"One of the drawbacks of educated people is that they are not bothered about the rest and, as if that is not enough, they somehow seem to have reposed faith in the wrong things -they don't seem to have faith in people' s movements, in grassroots movements, in the environmental and other movements in the country.

"These movements are not thorns or impediments in the path of development. On the contrary, they are responsible for quality work. There is no need to be cynical about them or to dismiss them as people or organisations that are merely romanticising rural or tribal life.

"People like Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Michael, Swati, Ajay Kumar, Sandeep Pandey and so on are extremely rational, extremely logical, highly committed, highly educated people who are actually giving information about what is happening to the tribals, dalits and others who don't reach the TV sets, who don't appear in the ads while cricket matches or movies are shown"

Appealing against the tendency to "kill the messenge", he said it was necessary to understand the messenger and the message and to then do something about it. Also, to have faith.... Sometimes, distasteful language was used for the grassroots movements; and vice versa. However, if India was to develop and the fruits of development were to reach everybody, then it was necessary to have faith in the activists and their movements.

He concluded by pointing out that in the Supreme Court of India, one could only plead in English and Hindi. How could people speaking Marathi or tribal languages approach the Supreme Court which processed information only in English?"These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked and that is where people like us are required," he added.

The vote of thanks was proposed by Bipin Kapadia.