Drishtee
Building Economic Opportunity in Saurath, Bihar
by Jacqueline Novogratz
October 2007: It’s an eight hour drive from Patna, the capital of Bihar, to Saurath, the village of about six thousand where Satyan Mishra, founder of Drishtee, grew up and where we have come to see some of his latest experiments. On these roads in Bihar, India’s poorest state, we make the final two-hour leg of our journey a 20 mph crawl, but the scenery is beautiful, and time passes quickly. Finally, we turn off into the Drishtee compound, which is actually the home in which Satyan grew up. His memories of a simpler life in the village color his vision of what might be possible. Doing something for Saurath to strengthen the spirit of the community and encourage young people not to leave the villages is at the core of who Satyan is.
Wearing a blue shirt and faded jeans, Satyan speaks with his usual passion about changing the way services are delivered to the rural poor. “Look,” he said, “there are 650,000 villages in India and services reach only about a third of them, if that many. If India is to thrive, we must find a way to address rural poverty, not just in the sense of giving money but in terms of really empowering people.”
Beleaguered by the failure of government to do anything but keep villagers living in poverty, Satyan’s vision for lifting up this village is focused on four key areas. He wants to provide capital through microfinance; provide a more prevention-oriented healthcare program; open access to markets (as he’s been doing through Drishteehaat, an online service to market and sell locally-made crafts internationally); and, finally, build jobs and economic opportunity through the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) units.
I open my computer to take notes and Satyan smiles and tells me I can use my wireless here. In one of the poorest places on earth, where there are more bullock carts than cars on the roads and where most people live without electricity, sure enough, the New York Times’ home page appears on my screen. Drishtee paid $1,500 to tap into the satellite and then pays another $200 a month to provide connectivity to its twenty kiosks in the area.
The wireless is there for Satyan’s vision of establishing decentralized Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) units across rural India. The idea is to decentralize outsourcing of services to create jobs in the rural areas and provide real value so that those jobs might last. Satyan reasons that the lower cost of labor in rural areas combined with a distribution system will enable Drishtee to avoid the expensive infrastructure investment that the major players must absorb. The employees, managed by pre-screened Drishtee kiosk owners, will receive higher wages than their urban counterparts, since Drishtee plans to pass on the savings from its lower cost, more flexible infrastructure.
Satyan invites us into the office where we find six young men sitting behind computers working on inputting the back-end data entry for a bank that is digitizing its customer records. One of the most inspiring people I meet here is a seventeen year-old boy who has been hanging around Satyan and taught himself computers – so well that he shares with us the website he’s created. Though too young to work officially for the BPO, he spends much of his time teaching other young people to work on computers. He says that he intends to join Satyan’s workforce, and in the meantime he attends school, all the while dreaming of doing something important. All that separates this kid in jeans and a t-shirt from all kids the world over is opportunity – and letting even this one spark go to waste takes shine away from us all.
While just a start, Satyan is hopeful that the BPO model will be a unique example of job creation in a very rural area, and a way of challenging the deeply ingrained attitude in the region that education is not worthwhile because there are no job options other than farming. “We have to change this attitude,” says Satyan. “Creating at least some good jobs in the village to which they can aspire is a start. Having role models who stay in the village is part of it, too. People need to believe that they can change their lives or nothing will change regardless of how much you give them.”