Actually to Kudala, a village of around 600 houses, 20 kms off Haveri town. Haveri is a small district bang in the center of Karnataka.
This map is coming in here because of a conversation I had with Diksha while I was on the bus to Haveri. She's like, where's Haveri? And I said north kinds... south of Hubli.... kind of north westish of Bangalore. And she's like.......you think I'm Columbus or what?
The purpose....It's an interesting story. A couple of months back when we had our first Entrepreneur Fund training program at Dharwad, Mallikarjun from this village happened to attend. And that's where things came together for him. The idea of identifying opportunity.
His village had a water based issue, with lots of people having joint aches and other health related problems. Water purification was never an option as the village gets a maximum of 3 to 4 hours of electricity a day and even that at unknown hours. He now saw possibilities.
With colleagues from SELCO, he did a water test, and sure enough they found the flouride content way above acceptable limits (three times higher), and then he started to see the impact of flourosis on many of the villagers there.
The idea now is to put up an RO water purification system run on solar energy, and that's what this visit was all about. It would be a pilot for us as well.
The need was clear.......... it was now about figuring out the how of it. And I was so happy to see that the entrepreneur was all there, he was starting to see the big picture already, talking of how we should make this a model project which can be replicated all over the district, as it's likely that water contamination is a much larger problem in the whole area. So while I got back at 4.30 this morning, I'm as pumped as him to get to work and get this project going.
And what's more, he is an astrologer, and is very popular in the nearby villages for his astrological readings, and he says his own stars predict tremendous growth for him in this phase, so he's in full on belief frame. That was an added interesting angle.
Some pictures from the visit to Kudala:
This is an electricity based water purification plant (called 'shudh ganga'). Visited three of these as a due diligence on product and technology.
Just a quintessential rural picture on the way to Kudala
These two little girls were just so cute
A walk around the village...kind of market survey if you will
Sujatha, this ones for you. It's after a long time that I saw the old kind of bullock carts, with even wooden wheels.
An urdu school in the village
Beyond work, the trip was about Davanagere Benne Dose and a visit to a 11th century temple too, all in a day.... another post on that :)
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