One of the Birla Group's distinctive projects is the development of model villages. Each of their main firms is working towards the complete conversion of several villages near the crops. Making a model village involves ensuring self-confidence in all elements, namely education, health care and family welfare, infrastructure, agriculture and management of the watershed, And working towards patterns of sustainable living. Basically, ensuring that their growth reaches a phase in which village committees assume full accountability and the teams of the Company become dispensable. MODEL VILLAGES VISION STATEMENT Till now, the Group has been able to transform 99 villages into model ones across India in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
70% of the inhabitants in these villages now live above the poverty line, compared to 90% below the poverty line, before the project began. It is a tremendous experience to see the evolving face of villages, from abject poverty to meeting life's necessities, from dependence to liberty, from backwardness to progress in more respects than one. Tens of thousands of villagers now seem confident, self-assured and glad to earn a sustainable living.
Developing of model villages in a phased manner underpins the strategy of the organisation. Fundamentally ensuring that development reaches a stage where village committees take over the complete responsibility. Of the 300 model villages that the Foundation is engaged in, 60 have already reached the level of model villages and most of these have reasonable sanitation facilities. Of these have attained 100% sanitation.
Building my own village:
Life is full of hardships? Oh, and that’s what makes us who we are today? So many quotes and knowledge points floating in the thin air around us. We sail through all of it, with a smile or sobbing and swimming in our own tears. Whatever be it, we reach the shore.
Taking up MBA as a career opportunity in a country like India where education belongs to the last level of hierarchy in Maslow’s need hierarchy was not just a need, a choice or a mandate; it was a mandate back two years ago when I first decided to take it up. No, it wasn’t planned since birth that one day ‘to climb up the corporate ladder’, it will be become a necessity. And fortunately, it didn’t become one even later. As quoted above, it was more of an understanding which I did with myself once I decided to enter a fortress full of 700 peeps who I assumed might have 70,000 faces. Introvert-ism is still a taboo, if I want to exaggerate my plight to some extent and I chose to not get over it but deal with it and change my life if not for any thing but for good.
One year into the forest with wild and wilder animals whose voice in the beginning would make my ears bleed, I think I have learnt to listen to them. The gap between their words and my hearing have found a road that connects each other. It wasn’t an easy journey. Every day going back into my shell, whitewashing my brain was a task. But now the process has become swift and relatively in my control.