When Simran Grover got a job with US-based offshore oilfield company J Ray McDermott at its Dubai operations, he was more than ecstatic. A six-digit salary was enough to keep this IIT-Delhi graduate happy. But after just two years, Grover was craving something different. The glitz of Dubai and the fat paycheque no longer held his interest. In 2010, he was back in India, learning, exploring and working in villages.
“What you do here (in villages) gives you first-hand access to knowledge. I am more at peace working in rural areas,” says Grover, now the technology officer at Boond, a social enterprise providing solar energy products and solutions in rural India. His salary is one-tenth what it was at McDermott, but his happiness is many times over. He is in no hurry to leave Udaipur, in south Rajasthan, where he is content lighting up village homes.
Like Grover, many young Indians are increasingly opting to work in rural areas, happily leaving behind their big-city origins. Among them is Parveen Shaikh, who gave up a lucrative law practice in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, and moved to Ahmedabad to work as the national coordinator for SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association).
As one of the few civil lawyers in Aurangabad, Shaikh used to be flooded with land-related complaints from the surrounding villages. “I couldn’t take up all cases due to paucity of time. The entire day I’d wait in court for matters to come up. The process was too slow. It was then that I decided to do something for development in rural areas to better utilise my time and help more people,” she says.
The starting point for both Grover and Shaikh happened to be the State Bank of India Youth for India (SBI YFI) one-year fellowship programme, which allows them to partner with non-governmental organisations for grassroots development. A friend had tipped Grover off about the programme, while Shaikh found out about it in a newspaper.
Shaikh chose the predominantly tribal district of Dang, near Navsari, in Gujarat for her work. Despite growing abundant ragi, the area witnessed severe malnutrition among women and children. “They were more interested in selling the crop than consuming it. We worked with them, taught them kitchen gardening as well as healthy food recipes. I sensitised them about their legal rights and that was, for me, the beginning of working with women,” she says.
Not stopping with the fellowship, she went on to work with the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore. “After that, I took up a job in SEWA,” she says.
Explaining why SBI launched the fellowship for young professionals, Geeta Verghese, Deputy General Manager (corporate social responsibility), says, “Their parents put them through an engineering course; they get into MNCs and are in a stream totally cut off from what is happening to 70 per cent of India’s population. We help them take a break and work with people in rural areas.”
And often, that decision has proved life-changing for the professionals. “Nearly half of them have opted not to go back to the corporate world. They took up jobs in the rural development sector or turned social entrepreneurs,” she says.
Satyanand Mukund had been working for almost a decade at Tata Consultancy Services when it suddenly hit him that he didn’t actually need all the money he was earning. “During the fellowship, I understood that you don’t need much money to live. The programme gave me the confidence to follow my heart,” he says. He now works full time at the AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress), informing migrant construction workers about insurance and other Government schemes available to them.
Goodbye, rat race
So what exactly is spurring youngsters with degrees from premier institutions to take up work in rural areas? The motivation ranges from personal satisfaction to the desire for change at the grassroots level and a need for learning beyond what is taught in the sanitised classrooms of big universities.
“At some point, you get tired of the rat race and ask yourself: ‘For whom am I doing all this?’ And is there any new learning in what I have been doing?” says Pradeep Lokhande, founder of Rural Relations, a Pune-based rural consumer relations organisation. These questions inspire many young professionals to give back to society by using their talent and contacts to benefit the masses, he adds.
It certainly prompted Chetan Gautham to give up his job at the Lakewood Development Corporation in the US and return to India in 2010. “My stomach was full, but my brain was not. I had food and enough money, but I was restless and not satisfied with what I was doing there (in the US),” says Gautham, currently a Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellow working in the town of Paderu, a Naxal-affected area in the Vishakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh.
His move to the US in 2006, after his BE in urban regional planning from Hyderabad’s Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, had opened his eyes to the different realities there. “I saw the involvement of locals in decision-making, something that was unheard of in the Indian setting. People there knew exactly what they were voting for and their rights. I wondered why this was not so in India. That’s when I decided to come back and work in rural areas,” he says.
Roughing it
The decision to stay back in the hinterland is certainly not an easy one for the city-bred youngsters, especially when it comes to dealing with the daily infrastructural challenges. “Sometimes, even having a toilet with water is a luxury,” says Gautham.
Grover lists the absence of adequate infrastructure, reliable transportation and logistics as major challenges, especially for those building from scratch. His solar lighting start-up works with families below the poverty line. “In south Rajasthan, where houses are far apart and the terrain is harsh, finding good marketing channels is a big challenge,” he says.
As solar is inherently a costly technology, the initial investment (about ₹14,000 for a two-bedroom house) is huge for those below the poverty line. To help them find financial assistance, the organisation has tied up with microfinance institutions such as the Grameen Bank. As there are not enough banking options in rural areas, finding financial assistance remains a big challenge, says Grover.
As a woman, Shaikh has had to contend with other kinds of challenges too. “The first question would be on my marriage. Why was I unmarried?,” she says. The lack of convenient modes of transport, too, made it hard for her.
Moreover, getting all the women together for any discussion or demonstration proved next to impossible. “They work both at home and in the fields. Each one finishes at different times. In fact, I discovered that weddings in the villages were the best place to catch them all together,” she quips. And convincing rural women was certainly no easy task, as she found out. “They are bombarded with information from various NGOs as well as TV. They want someone to help them sift through and answer all their questions,” she says.
Staying motivated
Compared to a corporate job, work in rural areas depends greatly on inter-personal relationships and grassroots knowledge, and can hardly be accomplished seated at an office desk. “That we are changing the perspectives of many people — whether that of a family towards solar lighting, or those of bankers towards lending to the poor — is a really big motivator,” says Grover.
For Mukund, the motivation stems from a belief that he is fighting for a cause — to help workers get their due. “I have always had Leftist views,” he says. Gautham, meanwhile, is assisting the district collector in implementing an Integrated Action Plan (IAP) in Paderu to deploy ₹200-500 crore towards providing roads, drinking water and skills training programmes. Although he earns about one-fifth of what his US job fetched him, what keeps him going are the smiles on the faces of the people who come to him every Monday for grievance redressal.
“I wanted to learn about and remove the urban-rural community divide. My intention was to learn rather than write a blog. So there was no way I would back out despite difficulties,” he says.