Ronnie Screwvala’s Big Plan for Rural India

By Arti Megha Bahree     http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/03/ronnie-screwvalas-big-plan-for-rural-india/ Apr 3, 2013

Swades Foundation  Ronnie Screwvala.

On a recent day, about 120 men sat on chairs in rows in a community hall in Matunga, a Mumbai suburb. All migrants, they had left their villages in the districts of Ratnagiri and Raigad in western Maharahstra in search of jobs as there weren’t any at home. Most of them were now working in Mumbai in a myriad of jobs including waiting tables and in the mailrooms of companies to running their own small businesses.

The men had gathered to attend a meeting organized by the Swades Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has been set up Walt Disney Co. India’s Managing Director Ronnie Screwvala, and which is run by his wife Zarina Mehta, the managing trustee of the nonprofit.

Swades, the men were told, was undertaking various initiatives in their or neighboring villages to help get access to water and sanitation, healthcare and education. Swades hopes that if these basic facilities are available in these villages, these migrants could be lured back to their villages to set up businesses locally or take up agriculture.

This is key to Mr. Screwvala’s plan to boost the economy of rural India.“If India is looking to become one of the top three economies globally, can we actually achieve that without the 600 million people who live in rural India,” said Mr. Screwvala, who co-founded UTV Software Communications Ltd. and sold it to Walt Disney last year. “Rural India lives in a different time warp and will continue to do so…. Unless we fix rural India, we can’t be a rocking economy.”

Mr. Screwvala’s plan is to provide, by December 2017, one million people with access to clean water and sanitation, education, healthcare services and better agricultural practices in the roughly 1,800 villages in the districts of Ratnagiri and Raigad in rural Maharashtra.

The plan requires about $120 million, half of which will be funded by him and his family, and the rest through donors, he says. Mr. Screwvala is one of a handful of Indians who are starting to open up their wallets for philanthropic causes. In 2011 Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Chief Executive Warren Buffett met with Indian business leaders in New Delhi to encourage them to join them in their effort to donate their wealth to charity. So far tycoon Azim Premji, the founder and chairman of Wipro Ltd, is the only one in India who has signed up to their Giving Pledge initiative. But philanthropy is a growing trend. In its annual India Philanthropy Report last year, consulting firm Bain & Co. Inc. found that India’s rich increased their contributions from 2.3% of household income in 2010 to 3.1% in 2011. Bain says its research has found that these philanthropists would likely increase their donations in the years ahead.

Thousands of villagers across the country move to big cities every year because there aren’t any proper health and education facilities in their villages, limited means of earning a living, no easy access to clean drinking water or sanitation.

The pattern followed by these villagers is the same as that of immigrants the world over—it’s usually the working age men who first go to the land of opportunity and once they find jobs, they start bringing over family members one at a time.

The trend is widely prevalent in the villages that Swades is currently working in. It’s common for many villages to have old people or wives and little children as their only residents as most of the men are in the cities of Mumbai and Pune, working mostly in a myriad of low skilled jobs, often living in pitiful conditions on their meager salaries.

Mr. Screwvala says most of the villagers would not leave if they lead comfortable lives and had opportunities for economic growth in their own backyards.

But instead of only handing out cash to lay a pipe to bring water to a village or build toilets in homes, Swades also works with different government agencies that often already have funds to address the needs and problems of the villagers but may not be aware of what is required.

Swades believes that once these basic requirements are met, then villagers can focus on building a local economy whether by setting up small businesses or by adopting smarter agricultural practices that would give them higher yields.

Mr. Screwvala says he came up with this focused plan after several years of philanthropy in Maharashtra. He set up his nonprofit foundation in 1990 and named it the Society to Heal, Aid, Restore, Educate. It started out by training mentally challenged young adults to recycle old newspapers and cloth pieces and convert them into items for like photo frames, pen stands, gift bags.

In the last decade it expanded into doing rainwater harvesting, building toilets in homes and training farmers how to plant a second crop to enhance their incomes. It changed its name to Swades last summer when it came up with this plan.

Swades is taking this message to the villages it works in as well as to the migrants in Mumbai through monthly town hall-style meetings that it hosts.

It’s not clear if Mr. Screwvala will succeed. So far a handful of migrants have gone back to their villages and taken up farming. For most, the bright lights of Mumbai are still a better option.  (Follow  Megha at India Real Time on Twitter @mbahree and @IndiaRealTime.)