ACTIVIST, BY DESIGN
As a seven-year-old in the slums of Mumbai, Attarwala had to carry a bucket of water with her to the public toilet every morning. The thin handle hurt her fingers and a lot of water would spill before she arrived. That made her wonder if there was anything she could do to make the process less annoying. The next day, she cut open and used an empty oil container instead—it had a better handle—and found that the water didn’t spill. “After seeing that the new container worked far better, my neighbours began borrowing it. That’s when I realised I could do something even with limited resources,” she says.
Today, she has a law degree and diploma in design. But that was not the initial plan. “My family wanted me to get married as soon as I hit puberty,” she says. “As a teenager, it was difficult for me to convince my father that education was a better choice.” But her efforts paid off. Since 2018, she has headed the product design team at Zoomcar—a self-drive car rental start-up in Bengaluru—and has gained extensive experience in product design in a number of sectors, including fin-tech, e-commerce and education. She has also been a guest lecturer at international design conferences. “I solve user experience problems through empathy and design thinking,” she says.
Social work has also always been a part of her life. “We were taught to treat everyone with respect,” she says. “This helped develop a sense of empathy. We were taught to share food, even when we had little.” As a social activist, she works in the fields of sanitation and education.
Two of her sanitation initiatives have already been recognised by the UN. “My family supports education for children from weaker backgrounds in our village and slums. I want to start an NGO soon to take this work forward at a larger scale,” she says.
“It takes perseverance and patience to achieve something that involves changing people’s mindsets,” she continues. “You have to keep doing it every day. It gets easier, but you have to keep at it. Courage is the main ingredient.” She offers the example of education, saying that many people believe that since their elders never went to school, there is no need to do so. “One must practise and not preach if they are looking to make an impact.” And the example she has set has helped. She says she feels humbled when people from her village tell her that their daughters want to study and ask for her advice on what to do. “It moves me because [until they called], I did not see that change was actually taking place,” she says. ■
—Shelly Anand
“ONE MUST PRACTISE AND NOT PREACH IF THEY ARE LOOKING TO MAKE AN IMPACT IN THEIR OWN LIVES AND THE LIVES OF OTHERS”
When torrential rains wreaked havoc on the city of Patna last September-October, Pratyaya Amrit, principal secretary, Bihar energy department and state disaster management department, would get out at 5 am. Dressed in T-shirt and shorts and armed with an umbrella, he would be on NDRF boats to personally oversee the evacuation of the trapped people. In one week, the state disaster management department rescued more than 62,000 people from their water-logged houses in Patna’s low-lying areas.
Having excelled in whichever department he has helmed, this 1991 batch IAS officer has come to be known as the turnaround man of Bihar. On central deputation in New Delhi, Amrit was called to the state in 2006 to revive the sinking Bihar State Bridge Construction Corporation. Not only did Amrit improve the bridge-building efficiency of the corporation, it also went from being a bankrupt entity to donating Rs 20 crore to the chief minister’s relief fund in 2008-09 and 2009-10.
His next assignment was at the state’s road construction department where again he scripted a turnaround. In 2011, he was chosen as the only officer in the individual category for the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration.
Impressed with his stint in the roads department, Nitish Kumar brought him to the state’s energy division. Again, Amrit rose to the task admirably, repairing or replacing 30,000 transformers and adding new transmission lines to deliver electricity to villages where defunct wires were being used as clothes lines. From 12,565 villages in Bihar which had electricity in 2005, power reached every home across the state, including in all its 39,073 villages, by October 2018, three months before the target Amrit had set for his department. For a state where even urban areas, including Patna, had to make do with 8-10 hours of electricity a day, today, even in the villages electricity is available for 18 hours a day whereas cities get electricity 24x7.
In all of this, Amrit is guided only by one belief: “Doing what others expect of you is never good enough. I do what I expect of myself. That often makes all the difference.”
He is also the man behind the state government’s initiative to adopt homeless kids and provide them more than the customary monetary assistance, and is responsible for the construction of a state-of-the-art cricket stadium in Patna, where national tournaments are being held. ■
“DOING WHAT OTHERS EXPECT OF YOU IS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH. I DO WHAT I EXPECT OF MYSELF”