Do not 'Donate' money to the poor.

After researching on the effectiveness of 'Donations'& 'Subsidies', I have come to a conclusion: Giving away money to poor is less effective than 'making them self sufficient'.

Basically it is same as what we already know. 'Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime'.

Subsidies/Donations reduce the 'receivers' self esteem and make them feel forever dependent.

Nobel peace prize winner Yunus's concept of 'Microfinance' is one good way to reduce poverty and bring about stability in the world.

A leveraged concept to MF is 'micro-lending', wherein people like us can 'guarantee' loans to people who do not have co-laterals. Surprisingly; all statistics prove that 'The poor almost always pay-back'. The money you provide is used to guarantee loans to poor, who then setup a business and repay the loan back. After the repayment period you can choose to get your money back or loan to someone else.

So it is like 'Re-using' the same Rupee over and over again to help multiple people come out of poverty.

My personal favourite organizations are http://www.unitedprosperity.org/ and http://rangde.org/ .

Do spend some time to guarantee a loan to help someone break the poverty cycle and become self sufficient. And you would be surprised most people need very little amounts to start a small business.

Becoming a CTO.

Chief Technology Officer. That's what i had wanted to become for a long time.
Finally, have decided to pursue Technology in a form which will be of direct help to the Country.

Our objective is to adopt Clusters of Villages across the country, possibly BPL families in places without electricity and water, And research on existing models available across the world to bring about improvements in

1. Agriculture yields
2. Microfinance
3. Setting up small scale industry hubs
4. Education
5. Health

This is actually so simple. There are tonnes of literature on good work being done by Grameen like companies, and with detailed instructions as how they do it.

Having being in IT for 12 years, have seen closely how productivity and yields improve when people adapt best practices of ITIL/PMP/ISO etc.

Same way we can help these people to improve the farm yields and efficiency of small businesses.

Currently am undergoing a formal training from EDI-DSE (http://www.ediindia.org/doc/DSE.pdf), and will spend a year working on the theory part of various models. Then we will start experimenting and tuning the framework. This will be a long road with lots of experiments and learning's. But we are confident we will succeed as we have done in all the previous projects & Endeavours.

Enjoy Life...