A chance to make a REAL difference

Some of you may already know of the excellent work being done by Parama Karuna-ji near Puri in Orissa.   Although I have never met her, I have spoken to her on the phone and I do get periodic updates on the various initiatives that she and her colleagues are involved with, for the welfare of the rural poor in the region. A few weeks ago, Parama Karuna-ji sent an email asking for assistance on a very unusual project.

This was not your usual request for “donation” but a request for volunteers.  I asked for more information and this (below) is what I learnt. But before that, a brief introduction to her work – in her own words (emphasis mine):

Dear Friends, Namaskar and Hari Om!

First of all I want to thank all those who replied to my appeal.

It is very important for all of us to get practically involved in direct work with the “masses” in Bharata, especially with the rural people, villagers, farmers, as well as small town people. There is a too large gap between the intellectual Hindu activists that are found on internet and even among NRIs or Urban Indians on one side, and the rural masses on the other side.  The “rural masses” or “masses of ordinary people” is a definition that includes also the lower and middle classes of residents of small towns in Bharata, including Jagannatha Puri, but it includes also a vast majority of Indian citizens who live in medium-size cities but rarely access a computer or internet, and – more importantly – have very little access to the proper information and communication.

…There is practically no communication or understanding between these “masses” and the intellectuals/ activists, or even the political activists who work in India.

The work I am doing is aimed at bridging this gap – and I am doing it by permanently residing in a rural area in Orissa while moving in Internet every day (as much as allowed by our lousy phone connections) and by passing information and understanding from one “river bank” to the other.

Now, a little history (about one such initiative to “bridge the gap”). In the backdrop are villages in the neighbourhood of the Ashram where farmers routinely suffer due to lack of sufficient water for irrigation.

Please read on…

The farmers told me that they are paying a fortune to the local Municipality to get irrigation water once a year, and still the supply is not dependable, and it is not prolonged in time as they would need, as the Municipality supply only works for a few days until all the rice fields are watered once, then it stops. This means that the farmers remain unable to get good crops of grains (sometimes the weather is hotter and the rice suffers for lack of water), or to grow anything else (to become self-sufficient locally) because the irrigation required for other crops cannot come in the form of a flood for 7 days a year.

The first step to help the farmers improve their quality of life and become free from the centralised market monoculture logic, was then to empower them with free water for irrigation.

A mechanical wind pump is the answer: extremely simple, will work with ANY WIND SPEED, operating even 24 hours a day without noise, without pollution and without consuming any fuel.

The next challenge was to build such a pump. 

We found a truck-body mechanic in Puri who put the prototype together (see photos below) on the basis of the drawings attached (see photos below), and although the alignment of the pulleys was wrong and the fan blades were not as per our request, the prototype worked well enough to amaze and interest the villagers we invited for the first demonstration.

Once we get one running model of mechanical wind pump working for demonstration to the villagers, we are planning to collect funds to construct and install these mechanical wind pumps to encourage farmers to cooperate together, and mostly for field irrigation purposes – as the ancient Mesopotamian people already did 7000 years ago.

All this wider vision must have given wrong ideas to the truck-body mechanic because in the end, when we discussed about building a model that was twice as big as the prototype, he demanded an absurd amount of money just because “we could afford it”.

For these people, the concept that someone would be willing to go out and help others inherently implies an unlimited amount of funds and an unlimited amount of foolishness (or huge interests at political or financial level).

It goes without saying, that we dropped the guy.

The Challenge

We do not have unlimited amounts of funds…We are not financed by Government – neither by the Indian Government, nor by any foreign Government or Agency (or whatever). We are not financed by any group or movement.

The only financial support for our project is my personal income coming from publications, translation works, and small donations of my students, the contributions of people who appreciate our work and participate to our Courses and Seminars.

So although we do a lot of things, we still do them on a “shoe-string budget”, and certainly we want to encourage the “masses” to utilise solutions that are within their financial reach – inspiring their sense of responsibility and self-reliance in “helping themselves” rather than depending on handouts (with all the negative implications).

(We had hoped)…to start by installing and operating one mechanical wind pump in our farm and ashram, to fill the large water tank on the roof and from there, to irrigate our 7-acre farm as a demonstration model to propose to the surrounding villages.

Simultaneously, I wanted to utilise the energy of the water falling from the water tank, down a 3 floors height (about 70 feet) channeled through a fall pipe, to operate a truck-size dynamo and battery and make sufficient electricity to run our computers – maybe less than 300 Watts.

Our Ashram does not consume much electricity and we don’t want to consume more –people are encouraged go to sleep early and get up early so we don’t use many light bulbs, and I have designed the rooms in such a way that sufficient circulation of fresh air is facilitated, so we do not use many fans.

Also, the large but shallow water tank on the roof (covering the entire roof surface although less than 2 feet high) and the straw roof verandas keep the rooms cool without AC or lots of fans. THIS is village-level technology.

How can you help

…What I am looking for, is a person with an average mechanical brain who is willing to put 3 pulleys and some wire ropes together and keep the work on the platform of seva/karma yoga consciousness.

I was (and still am) hoping that among all the Hindu/Vedic activists I could find someone who could afford a few days of “vacation” to a pilgrimage place, to engage in some practical seva.

I am hoping that there will be sufficient enthusiasm in Karuna-ji’s ideas to help these people “…improve the quality of (their) life through sustainable development and technology”.

Might there be someone you know, someone young enough and enthusiastic enough (and also a little mechanically-inclined) who can help in this project?

The task is to get the mechanical windpump demonstration project into implementation at a reasonable cost. There are diagrams and a small-scale (working) prototype that needs to be improved. There are also several other rural technology projects that need help.

Karuna-ji has generously offered to host anyone who was willing to take out the time and make the journey to the ashram…This could be a wonderful (and a very unusual but enormously satisfying) internship opportunity for some of our young engineering students.

Pl. do give this a thought and circulate widely anongst your friends and acquaintances to see if someone may be interested in helping her out.

To my mind, this is REAL “sewa” and far more powerful than just writing a cheque (although that helps too).

Please feel free to write directly to Parama Karuna-ji with offers of help and any other assistance. The contact email address is: paramakaruna AT rediffmail.com OR xparamakaruna AT yahoo.com

P.S. The Ashram is about 12 kms from the famous Jagannatha Puri temple (Sri Mandir) in Orissa.

Disclaimer: I have made a modest contribution to Parama Karuna-ji’s school in the past.

Some photographs of the prototype and drawings (I have more of these and am happy to email them to anyone who is interested):

 

   

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