Thursday, October 30 - Conserve India School

Today, Anita took me back to the factory and then to the Conserve India School and adjacent slum.

 

The school building and Anita standing at the gate.

 

Students in the school.

 

The students in the school seem quite well and are learning English along with many other subjects.  The school has been wired to receive electricity, but power is spotty.  Recently, a donor from the Netherlands provided funds to install solar panels, and they were just put in yesterday.

 

There is still some work to be done on them, but they should provide a stable power source for lighting and possibly to run computers (if the school can acquire some).

  

The school is in a slum.  Here is a view from the school roof to the living quarters next door.

Other shots of the slum.

 

Hundreds of millions live this way in India.  No running water, no toilet, no electricity.  The fields nearby serve as the restroom, which is particularly difficult and dangerous at night for the girls.  Most in the slum have not held a pen or a pencil, or a pair of scissors.  The kids do not have toys or games.  Conserve India seeks to provide job training, and so they must start with the very basics.  Interestingly, many have cell phones, but charging them is difficult.  Anita said in this slum, a local man charges 10-20 rupees (around 25 to 30 cents US) for people to charge their phones – very expensive for the people here.  Anita may be able to use the new solar panels to help with that. 

 

At least three times in the last twenty years, Anita has seen the slum destroyed and the people moved.  She has relocated the school a few times because of it.  The police came at night and loaded the people into trucks – sixty into a truck that should hold no more than twenty.  The people could only take what they could hold in their hands.  Children, the elderly, pregnant women, and all others were loaded up, taken to a field farther from the city, and dumped out.  The slum was leveled.  The people who had virtually nothing had even less to start over with. 

 

The slum is difficult to fathom.  Although I don’t know everything about the United States, I can’t believe anyone there today is born into a situation like the slum.  It reaches the depths of poverty and is overwhelming in its enormity.  It’s staggering, but I believe we should all seek to help in some way, no matter how small, and Conserve India is one way to do it.  Anita is putting together a list of items needed at the school.

 

On the ride back into Delhi, I continued to marvel at the population density.  Delhi is estimated to have about 30,000 people per square mile.  It’s similar to when a crowd gets out of a major sporting event, except it’s everywhere, all the time, on every main thoroughfare and every side street.  New York City is comparable, but it lacks the uncountable motorcycles, cows, carts, bicycles, and auto-rickshaws mixed in among the cars, busses, and trucks.  I didn’t manage to photograph it, but I saw five people on a single motorcycle today – three adults and two small children.  No helmets, no seatbelts, no car seats, nothing.  Then there’s the pollution.  Today’s paper said the air quality measured so poorly that people should not exercise outside.  Here are some photos from today’s commute.

 

Wednesday, October 29 - Taj Mahal

 

Yesterday, Anita told me they needed to work from their home office and that I should work at the hotel.  It was nice to have a day to work further on the Conserve India succession plan, and catch up on email and rest.  I also spent part of the day moving rooms due to ants in the bathroom and a leaky shower.

 

Today, they were going to work from home again, and Anita encouraged me to go sightseeing.  So, I booked a tour of the Taj Mahal.  A driver picked me up at the hotel at 6:00 a.m., and we started out into the early morning Delhi fog.  After a stop for gas, an unexplained stop in a neighborhood, and another twenty-minute stop only explained by “Okay, sir, paper check,” we were off into what I could only presume was the direction of Agra and the Taj Mahal.  At home in a familiar environment, I feel like I’m in control or at least I hold to that illusion.  But today, all I could think was “Ok God, I’m in your hands.”  They could take this clueless American anywhere.

 

We traveled for the next few hours through farmland mostly being worked by hand, with the occasional use of a tractor, donkey, cow, or camel.  I noticed the contrast in visibility from Colorado.

To illustrate, here is a typical Colorado sky.

 

And here is the Indian countryside.

 

I also noticed that many of the trucks have "horn please" painted on the back. Unlike in the US, apparently the polite thing to do is honk when you are passing someone. Mystery solved. 

We picked up my tour guide in Agra, and made our way through the traffic to the Taj Mahal. 

 

 

Monkeys on the roadside

The Taj was truly magnificent and worthy of being one of the wonders of the world.  My guide informed me that it was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died during the birth of their 14th child.  It took 20,000 workers 22 years to build it.  Frankly, that seemed fast to me.  It is made entirely of marble with precious stones inlaid into it.  Here are some photos:

 

 

After the Taj, the tour continued with some unsolicited stops at local merchants.   I learned more about how the Taj was built from the descendants of its workers.

 

 

Somewhat begrudgingly, I spent more than I had planned on some souvenirs knowing that I had paid way too much.  But, I felt better after a nice lunch.  The next pictures are for my daughter Sydney, who always asks me what I eat when I travel. 

 After lunch "mint"

 

 

We took some quick stops at the Red Fort and “Baby Taj,” and then I was ready to head back to Delhi. 

 

Red Fort

 

 

 

As we entered the city, I notice a girl walking in traffic at a stoplight.  She looked about 11 years old, the same age as my oldest daughter.  She wandered blankly from car to car to beg, and seemed almost too weak to raise her arm to tap on the glass.  I was no longer concerned with how much I had spent on souvenirs. 

 

 

 

Monday, October 27 - The Factory

Monday started early for me as I woke up at 2:00 am after a 5-hour nap. I stayed in bed until 3:30 and then decided it was time to get up.  I noticed the honking horns outside had quieted, but it was short-lived and by 4:00 am they resumed their chatter.  I spent the next few hours calling home, working out in the gym, and having breakfast.  At 9:30, Anita and Shalabh, the husband and wife team who run Conserve India, picked me up for the commute to their factory. 

The factory is west of Delhi in the neighboring state of Haryana. Surprisingly, when we crossed out of the city limits and into Haryana, the landscape became almost instantly rural, with farms all around us.  Anita quickly pointed out, however, that much of the land had been sold and would be developed into residential high rises and industrial parks.  She continued by saying that the Conserve India factory was  the first in the area, but had been joined by 70 others in the last four years. 

We arrived at the factory after an hour-long commute and Anita and Shalabh showed me an amazing array of handbags, wallets, laptop and iPad cases, and household furniture made out of waste products including plastic bags, seatbelts, tire tubes, discarded army canvas, and more. They explained how they train and pay a fair wage to "ragpickers" to collect the waste, and train the factory workers to work with each type of material. The proceeds from the sale of the products are used to support the Conserve India school attended by 100 children in the slum.  Anita does all of the product design work and leads the social projects, while Shalabh oversees finance, sales, and production. 

As we toured the factory, Anita explained that their goal is to help the people in the slum who have no education or technical or "soft skills."  The school is meant to be a launching pad for kids to enter the government schools and the factory a training ground for other skilled jobs. 

After the tour, we talked about the projects they would like my help with. They involve developing a succession plan that Anita and Shalabh can implement over the next several years as they contemplate retirement, and thinking through how to accelerate the growth of the business.  After sitting in on a meeting with a potential product buyer and having a wonderful home-cooked lunch, I was able to work on a succession plan framework.

As the sun set, we headed back into the city. This time the trip took two hours and was filled with what I now know are called "auto-rickshaws" (see the green and yellow carts in yesterday's post), motor scooters darting and diving in an out of traffic as if the other vehicles were stationary, and busses, trucks, and bicycles. Of course, all were honking incessantly (except the bicycles).  In an effort to save time, at one point we turned off onto a frontage road more suited to a four-wheel drive dirt track, which Shalabh referred to as "the road less traveled."  All the while, our driver maneuvered expertly through the maze as calmly as if on a Sunday afternoon drive in the country. 

Some pictures from the day are below.  

Anita and some of her creations:

Outside the factory

Arrival

I arrived in Dehli safe and sound today. Some first impressions include haze and humidity - it feels like New York on a July day - and busy streets for a Sunday.  The drivers have a different concept of "defensible space" and lane lines seem to be optional. In fact, there appears to be a strategy involved in straddling the line for long stretches. These taxis are everywhere, along with lots of motorcycles usually occupied by two people, and honking is a form of conversation:

Another shot from the drive in:

Now it's time for dinner and some rest.