Ideal Village is a movement by large set of people coming together with a common purpose: Suresh Shenoy, President, WHEELS Global Foundation

One of the largest conference of Rural Transformation, is back for another year. The seventh edition of ​Ideal Village Conference annual event ​will take​ place at the Banaras Hindu University, at Varanasi ​on November 11, 12 and 13, 2022​ , and will address the theme of Rural Transformation for Sustainable Growth.

People in rural areas lack access to the necessities of life, such as clean water, sustainable livelihoods, healthcare, education, and energy. Due to the Covid epidemic, local disputes, supply chain disruptions, and inflation, their situation is unfortunately getting worse.  The conference is jointly organised by Stanford Ideal Village Project, WHEELS Global Foundation, Pan IIT-Alumni, CII, FIPA and Banaras Hindu University (Institute of Management Studies), India.

As the president of the non-profit WHEELS Global Foundation (WGF), Suresh V. Shenoy sits on the board and offers insightful counsel and guidance for the organization's operations. As a trusted advisor to WGF, Suresh Shenoy has continued to devote his time and talents to the Capital IIT and Pan IIT Alumni groups.

In an interview he shares more details about the conference. Excerpts:

DQ: Please elaborate on the concept of Ideal Village and the role of WHEELS foundation in it.

Suresh Shenoy: I am president of WHEELS Global foundation and I was involved from the founding of the organization and Wheels was formed in response to a challenge from president Abdul Kalam at a PAN IIT conference on how the alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology can help solve the big problems of the world and in a subsequent meeting we agreed to focus on what we think are the biggest problems which is water, health, energy, education, rural livelihoods, and sustainability which is the acronym for WHEELS. Then as we started doing projects like just for water or just for healthcare and so on we also realized that in rural transformation and development they are all very interrelated you cannot have good health without clean water in order to have clean water you need energy. 

People need to be educated and we took an approach of a more holistic integrated manner for Rural Development which is looking at the whole picture in terms of what is available locally what needs to be augmented and we adopted a process called SMART, which looks at the strengths of a region we think about measurable outcomes, apply solutions as appropriate to that region. 

We try to come up with solutions that are repeatable and then use technology to scale it so that's what SMART stands for and we adopted a bunch of villages, seven villages in the Aravali district of Gujarat as a pilot project and we learned a lot of lessons.

Later on we found out that Stanford University had something very similar called ideal Village and their Concepts were very similar to what WHEELS was doing, so we decided to join hands and do things collaboratively and the first Ideal Village Conference was conducted by Stanford.

We used to have and we still do have WHEELS conferences but we decided that we are going to do it jointly so whereas uh ideal Village takes a similar look Wheels has focused primarily on the technology aspects of it

DQ: Can you throw some light on the key outcomes which you expect from the Ideal Village Conference?

Suresh: We've been around since 2006 and we are formerly Incorporated in 2013 and they've done a lot of projects which are very impactful projects, but when we sat back and thought about  how have we impacted you the rural areas in India and how can we scale it also struck us that in 25 years India will be a 100 years since Independence so what is India going to look like in 100 years and we also looked at the demographic and we said that more than 850 million people in India live in villages which are you know which are about 30 to 40 percent of the population is under the age of 30.

For India to really transform into a world economic power it cannot happen without rural transformation without giving more attention to rural development and so we we decided that you know one of the main outcomes from this conference has to be raising awareness and start a movement where all the NGOs, Industry, and Government are focused on how technology can be applied for rural transformation and this is not rocket science we're not trying to do something out of the ordinary the technology applications but it's something as simple as knowing how to replenish water you know emptying water aquifers in the in the regional areas it might be as simple as helping farmers to apply better technology and better methods and processes for improving you know agricultural output it might be using Robotics and Solar energy to dry vegetables or better storage so our key outcome from this conference that we hope is raised to raise awareness and start a movement so that we are all working in the same direction we are all pulling the cart in the same direction if you will industry Academia NGOs and Government. 

That can only be done through collaboration what some of my colleagues in WHEELS called collaborative governance so that people talk to each other people collaborate and work in the same direction so that's the number one outcome that we hope to achieve secondly the IITs have been the premier institutions in India and are now getting recognized worldwide as a tremendous source of manpower from India and there's a lot of technology that is being developed at these IITs so we want to also help our the academic institutions in India to start adopting local regional colleges and start to mentor them so that this technology can kind of diffuse from the research and development laboratories to the field so one of the key outcomes we are looking at is how these iits and other major institutions of learning can adopt. Regional institutes so for example in the WHEELS ecosystem are working with another organization called sobus who is setting up a center of excellence at the SRI vital engineering and Research Institute in bhandarpur which is a regional College in Maharashtra and IIT Bombay through the siddhara program at IIT Bombay we are trying to see if we can help Mentor them and bring in technologies that can be applied in the rural areas we are also doing similar work in shamlaji college in Aravali District so we want other universities and colleges like Banaras Hindu University and even the medical institutions to start looking at ways in which they can adopt regional colleges, regional institutions to bring the technology bring the modern concepts for providing services and transforming lives in villages so IIT also has a group called PANIT reach for India PARFI and there's a gentleman by the name of Kalyan chakravarthy who will be speaking at our conference and he has done some phenomenal work in Jharkhand which is highly successful for skills development for health care for education and so on. 

So learn from them, learn from people who are doing things, who have been doing things for a long time and figure out how we can scale that operation so that's one of the major outcomes that we are looking for then of course last but not least all this takes money and not one NGO or even the Government cannot do it all by itself so we are all relying on each other, we want to make sure that some of the policies and processes that are being adopted by the Government for how CSR money can be applied how the foreign currency transactions can be smoothly and verifiably you know received in India so the FCRA regulations but some of those policies and procedures have to be in place so that people can collaborate they can receive money for social impact projects .there are a lot of venture capital companies now that are focused on social Enterprises that is a very important aspect of rural transformation what we have learned is that without an economic interest of local peoples where they can actually make a living out of it you know the projects can die over time. We want to make sure that there is a sense of entrepreneurship at the center and at the core of all work that we do so these are all some of the outcomes that we hope we can convey during the conference so we are all on the same page and what are the opportunities for and the challenges for these NGOs who are going to connect with Ideal Village.

It is phenomenal beyond imagination so as I said the the population in the rural parts of India is over 850 million people right that is more than North America and Europe combined and the population is very young so we are talking about developing a market that has the potential of having a consumer base which is larger than Europe and America combined so from the industry perspective this is a neglected segment people have really focused on major urban areas.

DQ: Could you share more about the conference and any insight? 

Suresh:  This conference is a beginning right and it's a movement by definition is a group of people or a large set of people coming together with a common purpose so what we are hoping by launching this movement at this conference is to

continue that movement for the next 25 years you know at least till India becomes 100 years old and hopefully we can all turn back and look at this conference as the time when this whole movement started okay so in 2023 we are hosting the similar conference here in Washington DC, I'm in Washington DC and the problems are not uncommon even in the United States we have similar issues so it's not just about India it is about the United States as well and perhaps the rest of the world we have speakers from Africa and other places also coming to the conference so we hope that this is the first of many and this movement will continue where industry, government NGOs, Academia will come together on an annual basis alternating the United States and India and perhaps other countries also and one of the foreign dreams we have is to create a platform such as the Indian instrument development ID for example where all these NGOs and Government officials etc can meet periodically periodically to share ideas to share best practices where students, NGOs can come and practice the implementation and learn about the implementation of specific types of solutions.