Tag Archives: NGOs in India

Rising Bharat Swadeshi News Feed: October 26th 2020

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  1. This techie quit his job to educate the children of drought-affected farmers in Maharashtra

Key points:

  1. Ashok Deshmane established the NGO Snehwan to educate and provide for farmers’ children in and around the Marathwada region for free of cost. Today, he supports over 50 kids in pursuing their dreams.
  2. Ashok Deshmane was born in Parbhani — a quaint district located in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. Having grown up amidst parched and unfertilised lands with hardly any rainfall, he knew the struggles of sustaining in a drought.  Ashok did not have a very pleasant childhood. For his family — whose main source of livelihood was farming — obtaining three square meals a day in itself used to be a challenge. In fact, they were unable to earn enough due to severe water scarcity in the region. After doing a few odd jobs and burning the candle at both ends, Ashok managed to fund his higher education.
  3. As years passed by, the young man realised that things had not changed. Poverty, inaccessibility to education and healthcare, dry spells, and farmer suicides were still plaguing people. According to an RTI document, over 15,000 farmers lost their lives to suicide in Maharashtra between 2013 and 2018.  Ashok was appalled when he found out about this dire situation. He wanted to improve the lives of the residents of his hometown and bring about a transformation. For this reason, he quit his well-paying job as a software engineer at Mphasis and started working towards his plan.  In 2015, the 30-year-old established a non-governmental organisation called Snehwan to educate and provide for farmers’ children for free of cost. With the help of his personal savings and some financial aid from his friends, he got the kids enrolled at good schools and also rented out a space to accommodate them.

(Your Story, 26 October 2020) News Link

  • Investment in Bharat by other countries
  1. [Funding alert] BASIC Home Loan raises $500K in seed round from Picus Capital

Key points:

  1. With support from Picus Capital’s funds and ecosystem, the Gurugram-based startup’s focus will be on changing the way Bharat (India) finances its affordable homes.
  2. BASIC Home Loan, a Gurugram-based startup developing a platform for automating home loans for middle and low-income households in India, has raised a $500,000 Seed round from Picus Capital, a Germany-based early-stage technology investment firm.

(Your Story, 26 October 2020) News Link

  • Startup in Bharat by Bhartiya
  1. [RAISE 2020] How this Bengaluru-based startup is modernising agriculture through IoT and AI

Key points:

  1. Founded in 2019, GramworkX has built an IoT and AI-enabled smart farm resource management tool that helps farmers to monitor micro-climatic conditions of their farms, quantify irrigation and with irrigation prediction so that they can take accurate, proactive and preventive decisions.
  2. Tapping into the market, GramworkX was founded in 2019 to bring “predictability to farming”. This Bengaluru-based startup helps in precision farming by integrating field data, weather patterns, and crop information to drive agronomic advice to farmers.
  3. Founded by K A Gopalakrishnan and Supriya Ananthakrishnan, GramworkX has built an IoT and AI-enabled smart farm resource management tool that helps farmers by monitoring micro-climatic conditions of their farms, quantifying irrigation, and irrigation prediction so that they can take accurate, proactive and preventive decisions.  “Our solution helps in yield improvement, providing analytical insights into water consumption patterns across fields and soil types ultimately enabling data-based decision support systems for farmer and farming organisations,” says Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, GramworkX.

(Your Story, 26 October 2020) News Link

  • This digital payments startup is digitising rural India by converting kiranas into banks

Key points:

  1. Ahmedabad-based startup Easy Pay has onboarded 500,000 retailers on their platform and its app Paisa Nikal has served more than 35 million people in rural India.
  2. n his journeys, he understood why Indians relied on the corner store owner for credit, and how these stores can help people open a bank account, deposit and withdraw. This is what Nilay wished to replicate with his Ahmedabad-based startup Easy Pay. The startup’s app Paisa Nikal connects both small stores and their consumers through banking services, thereby ushering a new way to look at the future of banking.
  3. “At Easy Pay, we aim to offer additional revenues to the Kiranas and help in digitising them,” says Nilay Patel, Founder of Easy Pay.
  4. “To handle this scale, we needed a reliable and scalable technology platform, and this is where we rely on AWS. Before migrating to AWS Cloud, the Easy Pay/Paisa Nikal application was hosted in a data centre. A transaction on the app would take more than 35 seconds and now takes less than five seconds, due to us deploying over 12 AWS services to achieve high availability, security, and scalability. We use Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancers, and Amazon Aurora. Using AWS, Paisa Nikal can scale its infrastructure in less than two minutes, where previously it took three days to pick up a single server” says Nilay.

(Your Story, 26 October 2020) News Link

  1. उत्तर प्रदेश: शिक्षक ने शुरू की पार्ट टाइम खेती, सालाना टर्नओवर हुआ 1 करोड़ रूपये

Key points:

  1. पिछले एक दशक से अधिक समय से उत्तर प्रदेश के एक स्कूल में बच्चों को पढ़ा रहे अमरेंद्र सिंह को जब खेती करने की इच्छा हुई तो उन्होंने सबसे पहले खेती के गुर सीखे और फिर पारंपरिक खेती की जगह फल और सब्जी की खेती के क्षेत्र में कदम रख दिया। आज वह खेती से लाखों रुपये कमा रहे हैं और साथ में स्कूल की नौकरी भी कर रहे हैं।
  2. इन सालों में इस प्रगतिशील किसान ने 60 एकड़ भूमि में खेती बढ़ा दी है, जिसमें से 30 एकड़ उनकी खुद की जमीन है, 20 एकड़ जमीन लीज पर है और उन्होंने हाल ही में 10 एकड़ जमीन खरीदी है। इन खेतों में वह धनिया, लहसुन और मक्का की खेती करते हैं।
  3. अमरेंद्र ने बताया, “30 एकड़ भूमि का इस्तेमाल वह सब्जियों और फलों को उगाने के लिए करते हैं, जबकि शेष आधी भूमि का इस्तेमाल गन्ना, गेहूँ और अनाज उगाने के लिए किया जाता है। कुल जमीन में वह एक साल में 1 करोड़ रुपये का कारोबार करते हैं और हर साल 30 लाख रुपये का मुनाफा कमाते हैं।”

(The Better India, 26 October 2020) News Link

Accountability of NGOs, Apex court’s decision to discipline the sector

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The Supreme Court’s directive to the Government to audit nearly 30 lakh non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will certainly come as a major crackdown on the misuse of public funds by these organisations. The apex court’s intervention, though delayed, is welcome. To simplify matters, it will be better if all political parties come together to help the Government streamline the erring NGOs. Had the Government taken the step to audit the NGOs, it would have been branded as a curtailer of liberal values. However, now with the Supreme Court’s order, opposition parties must keep their bias aside and in the nation’s interest ensure that the honest taxpayer’s money does not go down the drain anymore. The apex court’s order is also unprecedented because, perhaps, this is for the first time that action against erring NGOs has been ordered.

Earlier, certain NGOs were just in the blacklist of the Government. Moreover, this order will also serve as an ultimatum to these organisations and will, hopefully, discipline a large number of NGOs/voluntary organisations that have been misusing public funds for decades. A status report submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the court said that some of the States did not have sufficient laws to make the NGOs transparent with regard to their financial dealings. This is indeed shocking. All States must have adequate regulatory mechanisms to keep track of the money issued to the NGOs. When these Governments have allowed them to use public funds, there should have been time-bound audit systems in place to assess the same. Since there have been enough gaps in the public audit system, the NGOs/voluntary agencies have taken  Government departments and Ministries for a ride. And also, some of the dubious elements have quietly got into the system and in the name of opening such agencies, they have siphoned huge funds from the Government exchequer. But the question is: Why did successive Governments allow NGOs which did not even file annual tax returns for so long, remain off the hook? It is not an issue that has just come up under the current NDA regime; it has deep roots in the past. The Modi Government cannot be faulted for acting now.

When the court intervened, it came to light that the General Financial Rules 2005 mandate a regulatory mechanism for NGOs and voluntary organisations. If this is so, then Union Governments should have put in place sufficient checks and balances to prevent the misuse of public funds from the start. If such steps had been taken, problem would not have assumed the proportion that it has. But now, as the court has ordered the Government to criminally prosecute some of the NGOs who have cooked their books or have been involved in misappropriation of funds, the ‘better late than never’ principle can be hailed. As the court has asked the Government to frame guidelines for the accreditation of the NGOs in time for the next hearing, it will put enough pressure on the departments and Ministries concerned to set the ball in motion. We need to salute the action taken by the court. It’s also a wake-up call to the public also to monitor the activities of the NGOs, just as the NGOs monitor the Government’s functioning.

Courtesy: The Pioneer