Event Coverage: TEDx Connaught Place

On a Saturday afternoon with a chill breeze blowing, an audience of 100 people gathered out side the American Center in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi to get inspired by heavy dose of ‘ideas’ that 8 social entrepreneurs, artists and professionals have successfully employed in their work.

Derived from the history of TED, a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” that holds two annual conferences in Long Beach and Palm Springs (United States) and a global conference in Edinburgh UK, TEDTalks and independently organized TEDx programs have featured inspiring and dynamic talks by social leaders, innovators, artists and activists from all age groups and diverse backgrounds. TEDx programs were initiated at various independent levels to recreate the spirit of TED’s mission by giving local communities, organizations and individuals the platform to present their unique ideas that have worked and that can be sustained and replicated in other contexts.

"I have a dream!" (Source: https://www.facebook.com/tedxconnaughtplace)

Lydia Barazza, Cultural Affairs Officer at American Center, kickstarted the program on a high note pressing the audience to be a lively and interactive one that respond with resounding cheer and applause to quotable lines like “I have a dream” (from Martin Luther King’s famous speech) made by the speakers of the day.

With the bar raised to great expectations, Piyush Tewari walked up as the first speaker of the program. Tewari is the Founder & President of SaveLIFE Foundation , a non-profit, non-governmental organization focused on improving road safety and emergency care globally. He shared that by the end of this program, 80 people would have lost their lives in road accidents and that there are 20 people dying in road accidents every hour.

He further went on to reflect that in cases of road accidents, a victim is least likely to receive any help because of the phenomenon of bystander effect, where responsibility becomes diffused in a big crowd and no particular person becomes/feels accountable, and the legal system in India.

He is currently working to launch India’s largest road accident first-response service involving Police and community first-responders. The 160 police stations in New Delhi alone have nominated 50-60 first responders who will be trained in basic trauma care and management. He has also established a national call center that will work in tandem with the first responders informing them of accident site locations and nearest hospitals and police stations. Interestingly, he added, the total cost of setting up this entire system is less than running one ambulance in a year.

Ishita Khanna may have made a ‘trippy’ entrance on stage but once steady, took the audience on a virtual trip to her first love and second home – Spiti Valley. Ishita is one of the co-founders of Ecosphere, a social enterprise working in the high altitude cold desert valley of Spiti and the neighbouring regions of Lahaul and Kinnaur linking conservation concerns to local economies. 

Spiti has an extremely dry and rough terrain with round the year bitter cold climatic conditions and agriculture is the main occupation. Ishita has been working towards programs of sustainable livelihood for the local community and on conserving nature with green houses, solar passive houses (that absorb more sun heat and retain it longer hence cutting down the usage of fuel), power grid systems, cultural and environmental education.  She also shared the success of her responsible tourism program where she gives the traveller a choice to travel responsibly and by this process, has made tourism profitable for the local people. Many volunteers have also given back to the place by lending hands and their skills to Ecosphere projects.

Her key lessons from her entrepreneurship journey has been:

• You can’t change the world but you can change yourself.
• Money is only the means to the end and we should never make it the end and hence, be enslaved to it.

Ajay Chaturvedi, Founder of Harva, opened his talk stating how most people give to charity via CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). He says, ”In most cases, its like I’ll give you something and you hold my company logo/banner in your heart for the next 2 months”.

Ajay shared his passion and strong belief in the potential of rural villages self generating produce and sustaining development for itself minus the intrusion of globalization to aid it. In his story, he shared that seeing the lack of trust from farmers in Haryana to adopt his ideas in farming and micro financing, he approached the homemakers and successfully set up an all women BPO unit in the villages after training them in computer skills. These women run the Harva digital huts, which connect the farmers with farm information desks and the huts are located from the villages with electricity generated by cow dung of the surrounding farmland.

Ajay is a firm believer in Socio-Capitalist business models for inclusive growth where you help the fishermen by giving him the tools, making the pond and then buying the fish from him.

The 4^th speakers of the late afternoon session was Tania James, who is currently a Full Bright Fellow, based in New Delhi.  Author of Atlas of Unknowns, she’s been published in noted literature reviews like Boston Review, One Story Magazine and Granta Magazine, to name a few.

She came prepared with a beautiful piece that she wrote exclusively for her TEDx talk. It read of her childhood memories of participating in the National Spelling Bee competition in United States of America, where she was born and brought up.  She shared the devastation she felt at failing to spell a word at the preliminary round and was sure couldn’t cut it as a writer at age 14.

The New York Times, in their review of Atlas of Unknowns wrote, “James writes with poise, sly humor, and an acuity both cultural and sensuous.” No disagreements to this.

Pramada Menon, Gender & Queer Rights Activist, was the “fire starter” speaker post the coffee break. Challenging the notion of what is ‘normal’ and ‘common place’, she reiterates as she often does in humorous tones and tales that people need to stop characterizing and classifying people’s sexual identities as ‘unnatural’, ‘abnormal’ or ‘weird’.

She shared a recent incident in the Law Faculty of Delhi University where while conducting a workshop, a student spoke up and said how homosexuals were all sick people and that “people like her” needed to “get help” in a center that is set up to “cure” homosexuals. She also goes on to share the many redundant or absurd questions she’s often bombarded with like, “how does a lesbian look like?”

The main challenge with her line of work, as she posited, was the low level of priority given to all matters of sex, gender and sexuality. “They tell me that why are you worried about sex when there are so many dying of hunger and there is so much poverty? Well, poor people are still having sex, hence, the population of the country”, she wittily quipped.

She closed with two remarkable statements that will take much time for many to still fully comprehend or adapt to.

“Everything is normal. Everything is natural”

“Identity is not a straightjacket. Every individual is so much more than one identity”.

Swati Sahni, a Senior Consultant to the Ministry of Human Resource Development on Right to Education, spoke on the challenges and possibilities of reforming child education in India. To elucidate that, she shared the images of a classroom setting in rural Rajasthan where a lesson on ‘Thailand’ using keywords like spa, resort, beaches etc. and the children looked blank faced; a school in Uttar Pradesh where the toilets were locked and hence resulted in a high drop rate among adolescent girls and a teachers’ workshop on ‘Motivation’ in session where the facilitator simply showed a PowerPoint presentation on ‘Interactive Modules’ and expected the teacher to apply ‘child centered’ approaches to learning in classrooms.

According to Swati, the two problems that education in India is facing is the centralization of development and the ‘First Boy Syndrome’. By the first, she means that education needs to be delivered understanding the cultural context and the local worlds of both the teacher and the students. Relevance being the key word, the same students in the classroom in Rajasthan could name about 100 trees growing in and around their village. Similarly, teaching modules created at the center are often not relevant or personally valued by teachers on the ground, especially in the interiors, if the methods are not animatedly delivered to them.

By the second, she was referring to what Dr. Amartya Sen quoted as a problem in educaton in India in response to a puzzled person who believed the sharpest minds in IT and software in the silicon valley came from the same education system. She demonstrated the issue with a picture of a class in session where the teacher was paying attention to only the first benchers of the class. These first benchers will typically go on to join the IITs or IIMs and get placed in high packaged salary jobs. But what happens to the rest of them in class? The frontbenchers constitute the 5% who will perpetually perform but it is the 95% that need individual attention and upliftment. Essentially, we need to start acknowledging our ‘Average Joe’s’ and not just the toppers, the fad that has been from time memorial.

Anoj Vishwanathan, co-founder of Milaap, opened his talk with a statement that holds in much truth and generality for most of us. The man running an organization that creates micro financing and lending opportunities for local communities and grassroots entrepreneurs said, “The moment we think of the poor, we start adding adjectives to them. The lazy poor, the handicapped poor, the dirty poor or the helpless poor. But these adjectives are common to people in middle or upper classes as well”.

Anoj showed many examples of Government or foreign aid built systems that do not function on ground or have major loopholes within like the case of a rural couple, who could either choose between having a toilet at home or a television set with DTC connection.

Some of the exemplary ideas that Anoj shared were:

Building ownership among the community beneficiaries that helps them to become part of the change process (in terms of giving their own time to volunteer) that they would further sustain on their own as opposed to charity given in a top down manner.

As an individual donor, it is important to build a personal connection with the cause in order to ensure that while you give you know, where and how your money is being utilized for the proposed welfare. Further, the mediating agency  needs to be honest and transparent with failed attempts and implementation issues with the donor which, in turn, only reassures the donor to give the same or more around the next time.

Highly achieved yet humble to go on as the last speaker of the evening, Osama Manzar is the founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation, spearheading the mission to overcome the information barrier between India’s rural sector with the rest of the world.

He classified the difference between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ stating India as a country although extremely knowledgeable but very poorly informed. He said that there are 33 million NGOs in the country but 80% do not have a website.

On a similar note with Ajay Chaturvedi, Osama remarked that India has assets but the issues of those assets not being converted into financial returns.

Osama openly offered to build a free website domain and maintainance, even including hardware inputs, to any NGO, panchayat or school that they identify in need that is in need of. 

Osama is also the Chairman of the Manthan Award South Asia for “Digital Inclusion for Development”, the first of its kind that chooses the best e-content practices in India and South Asia and has accumulated more than 2500 best e-content practices till date.

For more information on TEDx Connaught Place and to stay tuned on the event videos, visit www.tedxconnaughtplace.com.

*All images (except the ones that are sourced) are copyrighted to Halabol Technologies Pvt Ltd.