Building Social Ventures for Seva Mandir, Rajasthan, India

सेवा मन्दिर, उदैपुर, राजस्थान



The 'Building Social Venture' course in INSEAD culminated with a trip to a village in Rajasthan to actually work on a consulting assignment with a local NGO Seva Mandir.
An eye opening experience for some of us, it was a shameful reminder that even after 61 years of independence we still had villages barely 150kms away from our cities which were without running water, rudimentary electricity and proper sanitation.
Our village, about 150kms from Udaipur and about 20kms from the closest post office at Falacia was predominantly based on farming but the produce was so low that most of it went into subsistence and about two third of the villagers were also migrant workers who went to the cities for work for some portion of the year.
We were there to provide an analysis and recommendations to Seva Mandir, but the week long trip turned out to be more of an eye opener for many of us.
Having grown up in India and been fortunate to ride the economic ,it pains me to see that while we have super high growth on paper, we are still not developed and unless wealth and development percolate to the lowest layers of society, our rise to power will never be sustainable.
My immediate plan is to talk to my sponsor and conduct some fund raiser to install a water pump in the village which is really needed for proper irrigation.