Drishtee is providing a range of needed services in rural India, including water for consumption and livelihoods.
October 2007: In Saurath we meet Satyan’s uncle, Mamaji, as young in spirit as the seventeen year old at the computer kiosk. In his sixties, Mamaji isa handsome man with white closely cropped hair. He is charged with running the Drishtee office in Saurath, overseeing the experiments and encouraging the community. The night before, more than 100 people came together to discuss the healthcare project and other plans forimprovement. While the majority still want to see more free services, Mamaji felt there was some movement among a few who understood the power of building systems that might cost something small but would have some chance of reliability and consistent quality – two things these parts have never experienced from government efforts or services.
Dr. Hamilton, a sixty-something public health doctor who spent his career working as a doctor in rural villages for WHO and other government agencies, describes for us the approach of Drishtee’s health program: “Drishtee holds about ten camps per week in nearby villages. People pay 40 rupees – $1 for four consultations and a month of follow-up healthcare; they are prescribed medicines when needed. The hope is to provide health services where there is no permanent doctor.” Because government camps have been provided to people for free, there is a serious wariness about Drishtee’s pay-per-use model. Drishtee hopes to compete on the basis of quality of care and reliability, two areas where the government scores are abysmally low; but first the organization needs to demonstrate the value they add – not an easy task amidst such skepticism, but as more people come and are healed, the more demand will increase.
Mamaji also oversees Drishtee’s gasifier in Saurath, a simple energy producer that uses chopped bamboo for fuel and can provide enough electricity for the VAT Satellite connection while also being able to support the village with affordable energy. Of the 1,300 households in the village, only about 300 have a connection to the main grid. Thegasifier will charge 6 rupees per unit of electricity, which is more expensive than the government grid rate (4.5 rp), but the power will be more reliable, of better quality, and will not require the 500-600rupee deposit required for initial access to the grid. The gasifier is ready to go, but has laid idle for months due to a court action taken by a small group of locals who said the machine was “too noisy” and not right for the village. “The poor want this to work so that they finally can have some hope for light in the nights,” Satyan sighed, “but the rich already have generators, so why would they want something like this, except that it is important for the overall community.”
Walking down a path towards to village alongside unending fields of emerald green, we pass a beautiful woman with dark brown skin wearing a fire red sari standing by a column of her little house while her young daughter, dressed in forest green with her hair pulled into a neat bun, fanned a one-year old baby. We ask if we could talk to her and she smiled shyly, offering for Ann and I to join her on the porch and sit on a low wooden table.
The woman’s husband welcomes us with a grin and wants to help us understand what we have come to question. “Do you know of Drishtee?” we ask. “Yes,” he answers, “they are the ones who will bring light to this area.” We ask if this is his first priority and he says that it is, pointing to the sky and telling us we can’t believe how dark it gets in Saurath when day is over. “You can’t see your hand.” For twelve hours a day, he and his family have to sit in darkness, unable to work more, to read, even to see one another except by the light of a small flame. When I’ve spent even just one or two nights in a village without electricity, I have felt oppressed by the darkness after the first romantic half hour of trying to read by candlelight. I could not imagine this occurring every evening of my life.
We ask him about the Drishtee health camps and healthcare in general, whether he thinks it a good idea to have a system where you could pay for better healthcare. “We need money before we need healthcare,” he says. The monsoons have destroyed the crops and the villagers are now expecting nine months of drought. “How will we earn money? I do very physical work every day, so I don’t get sick. I don’t need healthcare except in the years where God decides I need a challenge and then it is too expensive. But maybe this year, I will be lucky.”
We ask whether his daughter had delivered her baby at home or in the hospital, and whether she had seen a doctor while pregnant. “Women don’t visit doctors until they are giving birth,” the farmer tells us.“Then we go to the doctor.” He took her by rickshaw, about a half hour or so away to the nearest clinic, and she had had a normal, healthy birth though it was her first visit to a doctor. The cost: 5,000 rupees, or about $120. The farmer had had to take out a loan to cover it, and this time he admits that he wishes there could be a better way than hoping for health and going into debt when the gods give you something else.
Creating markets where none exists takes time and money. We are in the early stages of experimenting with what builds trust, what gets traction in terms of demand, and what is merely a distraction. But approaching the villages in ways that catalyze a sense of hopefulness and encourage self-reliance are critical. Now it is up to Satyan and Drishtee to determine over time what works and what doesn’t, recognizing that this will take years to grow.