Jan 5 - We had previously been allotted groups under several verticals based on our area of interest like Health, Agriculture, Energy, Tourism, Education, ICT, Manufacturing etc. The groups had separate intro sessions to the Biz Gyan Tree - business plan competition with facts and figures. We were expected to come up with a plan for a Social entrepreneurship for Deoria district of UP, it's most backward and home to Jagriti Sewa Sansthan, the parent org of TJY.
The plan would be assessed based on innovation, feasibility, scalability, replicability, inclusiveness and the use of technology. My Group of twenty plus myself and another facilitator Ms.Natasha Mistry was on Health, we met up at 4 PM and continued discussions till 9. We discussed the problems, various possible solutions, decided on my suggestion and tweaked it further. We also had to choose a CEO - Rashmi a medical student from Nagpur was chosen, and teams like HR and finance...
Jan 6 - We were woken up to the sound of drums at 5.30 AM and were rushed to Barpar village, Deoria near Gorakhpur the hometown of Mr.Shashank Mani. We were given a traditional welcome with elephants, garlands and wild dancing :) The temperature we were told was at 9 degree C! After breakfast we sat down in groups under a giant pandal with lots of villages gathering for the event. Some of them were allotted to us to provide insights to fine tune our plans further. One and a half hours later we had to make a presentation to some of the core team members and the villagers.
My team's plan to reduce maternal mortality was through the company 'Super Dai'. Our plan was to train a dai for every 2-3 villages on safe and hygienic delivery practices, maternal education etc and link them with doctors for anticipated complicated pregnancies. Our plan was aimed at providing accessible delivery options in a district with too few doctors. It worked on a cross subsidy model providing cheap delivery options to those who couldn't afford and premium options to those who could.
One of our teams spent too much time chatting and planning and which almost threatened to derail our entire presentation but we somehow managed to pull through as a group in the end :)
We were anticipating a top 3 finish among the 20 and we made it to second place! We were beaten by a group on Tourism, who additional to the award stipend to the winning teams, to further develop the plan at Deoria in the month of Feb also were promised some gifts by the Tatas. After later lunch we all reached the station in the late evening tired and exhausted... tomorrow New Delhi and more cold await!
PS: I'll update the blog with some pictures later
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