Critics of some aid programs contend that merely supplying money and resources to destitute regions does not help them in the long term, and can even hurt, because it creates dependence on the part of the recipients. Not so with Dr. BP Agrawal’s solutions for bringing clean water and medical services to rural Indian villages, which won him and his program the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability, the organization announced on Wednesday morning.
His “River From The Sky” (Aakash Ganga) initiative continues to enable villagers to trap rain water on their rooftops and store it underground via pipes, providing an average of 10-12 liters of water per day to each resident of 40 villages, reaching approximately 10,000 villagers so far. The system also creates an economic incentive for villagers to sustain the program, not only by providing water, but by allowing them to rent out their rooftops to those with increased demand for water in order to generate income. Excess water is routed to a community tank that all of the villagers can access.
The second program “Clinics for Mass Care” (Arogya Ghar), equips rural Indian girls, who otherwise lack significant opportunity for advancement (in part because they spend much of their time carrying water), with inexpensive laptops connected to a variety of diagnostic devices. Carrying the entire unit in a shoulder bag, they travel door-to-door in villages asking if anyone is sick, receiving 25 cents for performing diagnostic tasks using instructions on the computers. This typically creates an income of about $100 per month, says Agarwal, while offering girls, whose career options are usually severely limited, valuable vocational training in the field of healthcare.
Dr. Agrawal himself grew up in rural Rajasthan, India. After heeding his parents’ instructions to study science, he eventually led R&D developments at several Fortune 100 companies, at one point completing an executive management program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He left the fast-track in 2003 to work on these programs, at his non-profit, Sustainable Innovations.
In the beginning, he says, he encountered fierce resistance from Indian officials who had been burned by previous efforts to send aid to rural villages.