SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

Meet Deepak Saha, who could have been an IAS officer but shunned the life of comfort to transform 40 villages in his home state Bihar.

The semi-plateau terrain at the Bihar-Jharkhand border was a virgin experiment bowl for Deepak Saha, where not even a blade of grass grew. Today, this region has everything - right from well irrigated green lush fields, mango gardens, schools for kids, safe drinking water for all, vocational training centres for women-churning out a new breed of women entrepreneurs, successful models of women's self-help groups and health centres in every village.

Today, in this entire region, not a single soul lives below the poverty line and sex ratio has been completely reversed in favour of girl children.

It all started in 1990, when Deepak cracked the civil service exams. But instead of taking up a Government job, he chose to return back to Bhagalpur to join Jaiprabha, the NGO being run by his mother. After 18 years of long journey, today he looks back with contentment.

"The motto that our organisation has is towards self-reliance. So we don't want the population to be dependent on what we are doing for them, but they should become self-reliant so that they are able to fend for themselves, so that once we are redundant, once we phase out of this area, they should be able to look after all this. People's participation is important," he says.

Today, Deepak runs 13 pre-schools, where dance and songs are the medium of teaching. After teaching at the school, he joins the mothers of the children for the weekly Self Help Group meetings. It's this initiative, which has had maximum impact on the lives and earnings of families. For the first time, females of this area can walk out of their houses and start their own ventures from the petty loans they take from their Self Help Groups. In this way, they are able to contribute to family income. Today, they walk tall and proud.

"It was almost seen as an economic enterprise. We didn't just want it to be some women gathering together and starting some small manufacturing unit or a small business enterprise. We started social engineering through these groups, to empower them. They started dressing better, had their own money and they had their own investments. They could take loans. We linked them up," explains Deepak.

Irrigation had been another stress area for this nearly barren plateau region. The answers came in the form of deep bore wells, de-silting of natural water bodies using satellite imageries and building check dam and using lift irrigation for farming.

Eighteen years of experimentation and consistent efforts has yielded desired results in this region.

·       Over 131 deep bore wells and hand-pumps introduced by Jaiprabha provide safe drinking water to 100 per cent of the population of the region

·       There has been not a single maternity death in the past three years.

·       Education in these villages is almost 100 per cent.

Smiles on the faces of the children and the women cycling fearlessly in this Naxal-infested area are just few reflections of how one intervention has made a world of difference for people of this region.