CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE

Unheralded crusaders who have heeded the call of their conscience to bring about a change in the lives of others

“It always seems impossible until it is done.”

—Nelson Mandela

Pathikrit Saha, 26, a food delivery executive in Kolkata, was boarding a local train when a seven-year-old boy tugged at his trousers, asking for money. Irritated, he slapped him. Full of remorse over what he had done, Pathikrit returned the next day, with sweets for the boy and his friends at the railway station. While his gesture made the children happy at that point, they were back to begging the next day. Determined to do something to change their lives, Pathikrit set up an informal school for children at the station. That was four years ago. Within a year, 39 of his students were enrolled in government schools, keeping them away from the platforms, and bringing hope to their families. Pathikrit’s makeshift school is now housed in a building in the neighbourhood and the number of street children coming to his classes keeps growing.

Negotiating Mumbai’s railway stations, Virali Modi, 28, encountered a rather different challenge than the one Pathikrit confronted. Paralysed from waist down since the age of 15 because of an infection, she required the assistance of three porters to carry her to berth every time she boarded the train or had to get off. None of the stations she frequented in India had facilities for the physically challenged. Three years ago, Virali began writing blogs narrating her plight and received a tremendous response. Encouraged, she filed an online petition to the Union ministry for railways asking for makeshift ramps at stations. When that elicited no action, Virali started the hashtag #MyTrainToo on social media that finally saw railway officials wake up to the plight of physically challenged passengers. In the past year, eight railway stations in the country have provided portable ramps for the disabled; the coming year should see many more taking action too. Meanwhile, Virali has moved to her next campaign—#FlyWithDignity—to ensure that security personnel at airports behave appropriately with special needs passengers.

Thousands of miles away in Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, 53-year-old Nirmal Chandel faced a tragedy that brought its own challenges. She was widowed at 23 and confined to the dark corners of her in-laws’ house. Despairing, she even contem

plated ending her life once. But out of the depths of her depression came a calling and determination urging her to take charge of her life. She left home and found work as an accountant in an NGO. While there, she met many widowed women who were deprived of their basic rights, financial security and the property left by their husbands. Their plight inspired her to set up the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan (ENSS), where like-minded women gathered to fight for their rights. Taking out peaceful marches where they sometimes walked 45-odd kilometres, hundreds of thousands of women prevailed upon the government to take action. As a result, some 400,000 widowed, divorced or abandoned women can now avail of benefits such as health insurance, social security and ration cards. These women are also given preferential appointments in the government’s midday meal scheme. Today, the ENSS has over 16,000 members in the state alone and Nirmal, whose movement has spread to other states, heads the Rashtriya ENSS that boasts over 135,000 members.

Pathikrit, Virali and Nirmal are members of a growing army of crusaders whose energy and commitment to social change are sparking a quiet revolution across the country and making a difference to millions of people. As the American anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Unlike corporate honchos, who are lauded for their ability to grow their business rapidly and rated by the size of the profits they can give their shareholders, these champions of change remain largely unsung and unheralded. Mukesh Ambani can rightfully be proud that Reliance Industries, the country’s largest conglomerate with an income of Rs 3.86 lakh crore that he heads, has close to 200,000 employees apart from the hundreds of thousands of people who earn a livelihood working in ancillary industries linked to the group. Similarly, a medium-sized company like The Titan Company, which is among the world’s largest watchmakers with an annual turnover of Rs 19,252 crore and 8,000 employees, has earned its place as a corporate icon.

However, on what scale will you measure the work of 70-year-old Lakhimi Baruah, a bank employee, who having read about a women’s cooperative bank for the underprivileged in Surat decided to set up one in her home state Assam? After eight long years of paper work, the RBI gave her permission to set up a bank in 1998 with a corpus of Rs 8.45 lakh. Starting with 1,500 shareholders whose income was below the poverty line, the bank today has a working capital of Rs 14 crore and serves 43,000 customers, most of them illiterate. Yet, their non-performing assets are less than 4 per cent of the total loans. Why does Lakhimi operate in relative obscurity even though her work impacts a quarter million people, while corporate honchos are idolised as heroes?

In 2017, a Harvard Business Review report, based on a 10-year study titled the CEO-Genome Project, identified four characteristics that make CEOs shine. These were their abilities to be decisive, successfully engage stakeholders, adjust to rapidly changing environments and operate with a clearly-articulated long-term vision. Read the 44 profiles of change-makers that india today has put together in the following pages to celebrate its 44th year of publication and you will find that they have exhibited these qualities in ample measure, and possibly more. The work they do has a far greater impact on society than many of the suit-boot CEOs that hog the country’s attention and limelight. Yet seldom are they given the recognition they deserve.

That’s because they do not actively seek notice from society or consider money as their reward. For Rubina Mazhar, 56, founder and CEO of SAFA, an NGO that runs 14 skilling projects in Hyderabad, training in the process over 3,000 Muslim youth and women a year, it was the call of her conscience—to use her education and her privileges to give something back to her community. Similarly, Bipin Dhare, 30, an IIT Kharagpur graduate decided to quit his job in Singapore so that he could do something more “meaningful”. He set up a school for tribal children in the remote Majuli Island in Assam three years ago, which now has 240 students and 21 teachers. The joy on the faces of the students and the gratitude of their families is reward enough for Dhare. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the famed Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, perhaps, knows this—“Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”

Through their personal feats, these unsung heroes inspire us to go forth and make the difference our hearts always wanted to but our minds built walls of resistance against. ■

THE WORK THESE PEOPLE DO HAS A FAR GREATER SOCIAL IMPACT THAN SUIT-BOOT CEOs. YET THEY REMAIN UNHERALDED. BECAUSE MONEY OR ACCLAIM ISN’T THEIR REWARD