Today while browsing DVP website, I discovered most of the fellows were Indians and they were working on projects closely related to India. The reason is simple; on one hand, India has the best pool of technologists, but on the other hand, a large portion of India remains under-developed and lacks basic infrastructure. As our economy is growing, it is also widening the divide between rich and poor. We have partitioned India in two different worlds; a confident and developing urban India, and a poor apprehensive rural India. And therefore, transforming rural India is the greatest challenge that India faces today.
Having spent my childhood in a small town of Madhya Pradesh, I have seen both the worlds. I know quite a few people who earn less than 1000 Rs (~20$) a month. I still remember an incident, when I saw a person crying in sabzi -mandi (vegetable market) when he couldn’t sell any of his vegetable because of the rains. Fifty-sixty rupees was a big sum for him (which he would have made after selling all of his vegetables!) and perhaps loosing it meant a day or two without food. (But I must also mention, you should see the sense of joy a villager gets after selling all the vegetables, a feeling which we city-waalas can’t even relate to. )
If India wants to grow as an economic superpower, rural India needs to transform as well and for that we need social entrepreneurs and disruptive innovation. To quote Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, “Only through education, participation, a measure of consensus, and the widespread perception by individual people that they have a personal stakes in the outcome can lasting and satisfying change can be accomplished”
