Ideal Village Conference is setting up the process to make India a global powerhouse: Arjun Malhotra, Co-founder HCL

The 7th Edition of Ideal Village Conference is in Varanasi from November 11 to 13th. Organized Jointly by Stanford Ideal Village Project, WHEELS Global Foundation, Pan IIT-Alumni, CII, FIPA and Banaras Hindu University (Institute of Management Studies), India.

The annual Ideal Village Conferences at Stanford University since 2016 have served as a collaboration platform for diverse organizations to develop a holistic approach for improving rural lives.

Arjun Malhotra, Chairman, Magic Software Inc. & Co-Founder, HCL Tech is also a board member of Wheels Foundation.

At this conference titled "Rural Transformation for Sustainable Growth" eminent speakers and visionaries will address the necessity for collaborative governance.

In this interview, Malhotra shares his insights on the concept of Ideal Village and Rural empowerment. He applauds the efforts of people involved especially the NGOs that are working in the rural area. Young people with a very good qualification, and businesses have given up their careers at some point, and decided to come in and work in some of these remote areas. He says, “ We have a very good chance of making a real difference”.

Excerpts:

You have been an IT icon in India, how did you get involved in rural issues and development?

I traveled all over India selling computers, because the government policy at that time was to get industries to be set up in remote areas. So, if you had to sell to factories, you had to go to remote areas to talk to them and meet them. I got a firsthand idea of India is not one country, it is two specific countries, Urban and Rural, in a way I had to define it. When I stopped being active in running company, I tried to see how we could leverage technology to provide better outcomes to meet the underprivileged healthcare and an education, and that's really where I started, and that's really motivated me. 

Also, my mother was a doctor in preventive and social medicine, and she worked on the national malaria eradication program, public health, family planning, and other stuff. In my younger days I used to move around with her and there I got some exposure about those problems.I looked at tuberculosis and all these communicable diseases. This is what really brought me to start viously considering spending time and effort in this.

What are some of the initiatives you have been involved in for rural India, and what has been the impact?

There are number of initiatives, Wheels where a group of us in the US get together and try to leverage technology in water, health, energy, education, livelihood, and sustainability. That's what Wheels stands for. I've also worked with the Antara foundation, which addresses the issue of infant mortality, maternal health, and malnutrition. They started in Rajastan, and they're doing some amazing work, the Rajasthan government has now liked it so much that they've taken it over. 

We had started with a few districts in Madhya Pradesh, the MP Government is asking us to go to more districts. We expect one more state in the next few years. And then we expect the central government to make it a national program. It's a very interesting program, we're basically leveraging the infrastructure that already exists, and put process into it that that'll allow them to become far more effective and efficient in terms of providing the services better. We have the Asha, Anganwadi, and Auxiliary nurse, the 3 As, and we now getting them to work together in a more effective, efficient way, so that they can get stuff done. Then there's ParFi,and PAN IIT in action for India, where I'm on the board, where they do skilling program of women and men with a guarantee that they will place them in jobs after that, so it's somewhat unique selling proposition. They have signed a joint venture project with Jharkhand government, and that's been very successful. In fact, today, five other states, want to replicate that model in those states.

We are training a number of girls in nurse nursing for example in Jharkhand. Every girl in that nursing program was from a subsistence agricultural family, they're less than three acres of land, and it was lovely to see the motivation and all that have been done there.  

Finally, there's IIT’ans with the transformation of India, where we're looking at rejuvenating water bodies in every district, the Prime Minister has just come up with that scheme. We've been doing it for a while, we have that model, and again, it's a model, or other models I try and work with, I try to make them self sustaining, I try and make sure that the community gets involved in getting it done. 

it doesn't stop after you go away, the community carried on because they see the benefit of whatever is going on. So that's really, if you ask in a nutshell. 

Can you just tell me about the ideal village Conference, which is going to happen in university? How can industry get involved? And why should they support or sponsor the conference.

The Ideal Village Conferences is basically being set up to try and get a number of NGOs in India, none of them doing same kind of work, everyone learning from scratch how to work effectively. Now, one doesn't understand that in India, every state is different, every district is different, their social cultural differences that have to be kept in mind when you do work, in that district, or that block, or whatever. But the basics are something that can be shared. So just think of it and we can give everyone a platform and tell them what has worked and what hasn't worked, and have them not relearn the whole scratch, but learn from what has worked, and try and then adapt it and then look at the situation and make a difference, so that's number one. 

The second part of your question is why should industry get important? Industry is involved, whether they like it or not, you want your hinterland to become economically better off so that you get happier workers, you get more educated workers, you get more educated supervisors etc. Also, a lot of industry is dependent on water, clean water coming in, there are lots of things that industry has been working on, you want less problem in that area, and you want more and more people to be able to get jobs.

Industry has a major benefit from improving the quality of life of the people in their hinterland. I think they understand it, too, that's why we don't have to sell it to them, or use the word sell. Most of them know that they needed they want a way in which to make it happen what's efficient and effective. 

What is your vision for the National ideal village movement for rural transformation?

My vision was that we have a demographic dividend in India, we have younger people, and if we can educate them, and we can get them to get jobs and become self sufficient economically, I think we can become a global powerhouse and one of the largest economy in the world. I think those are all achieved if we can get our young people to become productive, and the only way to make them productive is to educate them, provide them in the basics, healthcare, food, security, energy, I think that's what the Ideal Village is trying to do is to try to set up processes that will enable that to happen in a quicker easier way in compared to if we don't do it and let things carry on.

How would you like corporate India, tech companies to support for this national movement?

I think there are multiple ways in which they can support, they can come in and give us a presentation of what they are doing, lot of companies have their own foundation and they are doing some very good work through those foundations in different areas, they can come in and participate with us, they can give us time, they can give us expertise. People who know how to do things, they can invest in getting some of these things done, they can help leverage. The government has a lot of infrastructure, it's not that they haven't done anything, it's just that that infrastructure is not as efficient and effective as it should be.

And so I think if you want to get a major change in this country, in India, you have to work at delivering that infrastructure. I think corporate can play a major role in telling us how to do that. 

We have to know, it's one thing to work at the rural level, but to get things done at the rural level, there are multiple layers, the panchayat, block and district, state. Now, people have infrastructure at all these level. You have to motivate the whole chain, if you want things to get done.