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Post our Prime Minister’s “build toilet” initiative, CSR programmes by many organisations are getting limited to constructing community / school toilets.
Narendra Modi has raised a very, very important issue for the country and that is making India Open Defecation Free by 2019. This is quite a tall claim and indeed a commendable mission. I certainly believe that he is focusing on the right thing as open defecation is a huge burden on the country in terms of health, sanitation and disease. Fifty percent of our population actually defecates in the open and this is absolutely unacceptable. Obviously, the only way to address open defecation is to build toilets, so the agenda and the thinking are perfectly in the right direction.
The Prime Minister wants to reach out to the private sector basically to get help to build toilets. But the corporates should not end up just building toilets.
Let me start with my own experience.
Long before the government thought about addressing open defecation issue, I embarked on a toilet project in 2005 in one of the villages called Huskur in the outskirts of Bangalore. This was a Biocon Foundation project; we decided to set up a community toilet block in Huskur village for men and women and till today it serves a very good purpose. We also realized that building a community toilet is not enough but maintaining it is going to be very crucial. We gave the management of the community toilet to the local people, paid them a salary to maintain the block. And we also realized that water was a big issue, and we ensured uninterrupted water supply.
Today that community toilet in fact is able to service not only the villagers but also over 5000 visitors coming in for the Ayappa temple festival nearby.
In 2006, the government had introduced a scheme of giving a subsidy of `1000- `2000 for building a toilet, though each toilet costs `10,000-12,000 to build. . However, we encouraged the panchayats to avail of the subsidy by supporting them with the rest of the amount. As I am the Honorary Consul for Ireland, we ensured around 800 individual toilets were built in Huskur with aid from the Irish government.
We made each household get involved in some activity or the other of building the toilets so that they could feel the ownership. We also taught the villagers how to use the toilets.
So, today if you go to Huskur village you will see the toilets still being used very well. The government has now increased the subsidy.
Now, personally I believe that the government should use CSR to basically catalyse or run pilots for these toilet projects. The government has to find a way to ensure that it motivates people to build individual toilets and encourages the private sector in coming up with very innovative designs and installing these toilets that are better than the conventional ones. That will ensure the better use of CSR money. Today, if you build conventional toilets, we know that the septic tank would not work after some time. CSR money could be used for building effluent treatment plants. It can be a public private partnership where the government provides the money to build the toilets and the private sector constructs sewage treatment plants and also makes sure all the sewage lines are properly connected to the treatment plants.
[box type=”shadow” ]In 2006, the government had introduced a scheme of giving a subsidy of `1000 to `2000 for building a toilet, though each toilet was costing `10,000– 12,000. However, we encouraged the panchayats to avail of the subsidy by supporting them with the rest of the amount.[/box]
This is an excellent suggestion.Talking of building toilets, some villages still resist having them…
Yes. Even in Huskur village once or twice we did find that people were covering the commode and using the toilet as an extra room. Later on, they realized their mistake when they saw other people were using it as toilet. We need to educate them, we have to tell people that open defecation can lead to diseases.
Bad waste management is also a health hazard…
When I look at the garbage which is lying outside, I wonder why educated people don’t understand that this is unhealthy for them. If you see a garbage heap in front of your house, don’t you understand you will get rats, flies, mosquitoes and things that are going to affect you directly by spreading diseases like dengue and typhoid? Today the biggest scare in Bangalore is the garbage not being collected. How will we get Swachh Bharat if people don’t have a basic sense of cleanliness? We are talking about educated, urban people.
Cities can be kept clean if right efforts are taken. I was in Rajasthan recently to attend a global meet. The Chief Minister has taken great pains to keep the city clean. Mechanised sweepers are being used to clean the roads and footpaths of Jaipur. Even a minister from Singapore appreciated the cleanliness and discipline he saw in Jaipur.
So it is all possible
It is possible. The Chief Minister said, “I hope we can maintain it like this now.We spent a month scrubbing our city clean. Can we keep our city like this?” And I said I didn’t think so, as I was driving to the venue and there was this guy on the scooter spitting pan on the road despite the fact that the road was looking so clean. I fired him, but he didn’t care. What I am saying is that unless the attitude of the average citizen is changed, no transformation can take place. I told the Prime Minister when he was bringing out Swachh Bharat initiative that the first thing we had to do in the country was to start an anti-litter policy. Anybody caught littering by throwing stuff on the street must be fined. But for that the government has to make dustbins available at walkable distances. There is nothing that prevents every shop owner from keeping dustbins outside his shop. Sadly, we don’t have that concept. You see cleanliness is a state of mind, it’s a habit, if you don’t have that habit you have to inculcate that and it takes a long time. You have to have an anti-litter policy; you have to have dust-bins; you have to make mandatory that every shop should have dustbins outside, and nobody should be throwing litter onto the streets.
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In Bangalore, as you said, the waste management is not going anywhere
It is because it is a mammoth task. We never bothered about it for the last 10 years. How can we fix a 10-year problem in one month?
We should not allow any organic waste to go outside the municipal ward, what goes outside the ward can only be bulk waste, e-waste, debris, inorganic waste and hazardous waste. Now if you can create dumping areas for each one of these, a lot of dry waste can be recycled. I helped the Karnataka government to prepare a debris disposal policy four years ago which has still not been rolled out. Why should debris be lying on the road or dumped on the side? There should be collection points for this and this should be recycled to make building materials. We need a good debris disposal policy and a dry waste management centre in the City. Today, we are failing because of lack of waste segregation. If you don’t have waste segregation you can’t do the dry waste disposal properly. This is applicable to electronic waste, furniture waste, hazardous and hospital waste too. A positive step in this direction was recently taken by the High Court, when a three-way waste segregation at source was made mandatory in Bengaluru with the 2Bin-1Bag model of segregating organic, recyclable and reject/sanitary waste.
However, we also need to build waste management capability in the BBMC. Currently, it has no bandwidth, no understanding, no competence to deal with the waste management process effectively.
And then you must also have the political will to ensure proper waste management.
Biocon has been doing tremendous service in the areas of health and education…
We are looking at leveraging technology to address the huge healthcare challenge India has. India has had a very interesting model for healthcare. The system insisted on having a primary healthcare centre which actually then got connected to secondary and tertiary healthcare centres. We have a large number of primary healthcare centres, a few secondary healthcare centres and tertiary healthcare centres. This is a good model. But since MBBS doctors are reluctant to go to rural India, you are stuck with a very malfunctioning system. So far, what we have suggested is to use primary health centres as diagnostic e-healthcare centres. This way, we can use even semi-skilled people to operate simple diagnostic equipment that can capture high end data. This is what we are trying to set up. We created centres called e-Laj that means diagnosis through electronic collation of health parameters. We have kept easy-to-use tools and devices using biometrics to ensure patients’ identity is unique. So, this can finally be linked to Adhar cards too. Basic check-ups are done to create baseline data of the patients.
Then you have another set of diagnostic equipment in the same set-up like blood chemistry etc ; if you take one drop of blood you can do about 100 tests. If you suddenly see blood glucose is very high, and if you know this person is diabetic then we measure other things about that person and create a medical record and refer to a specialist-doctor in the tertiary care hospital or a district hospital. The patient is advised telephonically to begin with. We have started five of these centres in Karnataka and two in Rajasthan.
Our approach has to be so simple that we should be able to use semiskilled people to operate the diagnostic tools, but the back-end should be very sophisticated. All the data we get should be analysed accurately.
We started a program Arogya Raksha Yojana, a health insurance programme and are connected to a large number of hospitals. We do a very interesting oral cancer detection screening, where almost 6000 patients were screened in the last year itself. Using Asha workers, we have basically developed some interesting software which you can load on any phone and take an image of the mouth to check for lesions that can be potentially malignant.
Population and community based screening conducted with the help of mobile technology is cost effective compared to hospital based screening. The data collected during the screening process is uploaded to a server, and is reviewed by a doctor from a remote location. The prescribed treatment is then sent back to the health worker’s phone and she conveys this to the patient. Also, in order to develop a strategy for monitoring undernourished children, Biocon Foundation uses mobile phone technology.
Biocon Foundation won the WHOPublic Health Champion Award for managing chronic conditions in 2015. The foundation was conferred with NASSCOM certificate of Appreciation for Mobile Early Detection and Prevention of Oral Cancer Screening program in 2015.
Starting as a brewer to the most successful entrepreneur, what have been your learnings?
First and foremost, entrepreneurship is about taking an idea to the market. So as an entrepreneur we need to get a good business idea. Then the whole thing is about how you execute that business idea into a workable module. That is what entrepreneurship is all about and you should be excited about doing that. So if people are excited about taking that business idea to the market then you are a good entrepreneur, because you need to be passionate to succeed. I had absolutely no business experience when I started Biocon in 1978, but I had a great business idea. I wanted to use biotechnology to develop products, and these products were going to be very interesting, very unique, and very different and I knew where these products could be used. Initially, I started with enzymes and I was very familiar with enzymes because I studied brewing science which was all about enzymes. I decided to begin with developing enzymes which nobody had thought of at that time. The biggest challenge was to convince people to use enzymes because they had never used enzymes in their processes and to convince them to change from chemical process to enzymatic process was a big challenge. It happened, but not as fast as I wanted it to happen. I thought everyone would love my idea, I would be able to succeed very fast but that was not the case. As an entrepreneur, the biggest challenge is to translate the business idea into commercial success and for that to happen you have to have the backing from the customers. You have to position the product in the market in such a way that people believe that this is a very interesting product. It took almost 3-4 years before I could get people to buy my product. The other challenges were getting people work for me and getting banks to lend money to me!
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First and foremost, entrepreneurship is about taking an idea to the market. So as an entrepreneur we need to get a good business idea. Then the whole thing is about how you execute that business idea into a workable module. That is what entrepreneurship is all about and you should be excite
d about doing that. So if people are excited about taking that business idea to the market then you are a good entrepreneur, because you need to be passionate to succeed. I had absolutely no business experience when I started Biocon in 1978, but I had a great business idea. I wanted to use biotechnology to develop products, and these products were going to be very interesting, very unique, and very different and I knew where these products could be used. Initially, I started with enzymes and I was very familiar with enzymes because I studied brewing science which was all about enzymes. I decided to begin with developing enzymes which nobody had thought of at that time. The biggest challenge was to convince people to use enzymes because they had never used enzymes in their processes and to convince them to change from chemical process to enzymatic process was a big challenge. It happened, but not as fast as I wanted it to happen. I thought everyone would love my idea, I would be able to succeed very fast but that was not the case. As an entrepreneur, the biggest challenge is to translate the business idea into commercial success and for that to happen you have to have the backing from the customers. You have to position the product in the market in such a way that people believe that this is a very interesting product. It took almost 3-4 years before I could get people to buy my product. The other challenges were getting people work for me and getting banks to lend money to me!
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