Joining ACO Children and meeting with Agriculture Scientists

Joining ACO Children in Schools:

That day was one of my busiest days after passing out of my MBA. It’s Friday the 18th. We started early morning at 4:30 AM from Hyderabad to Guntur. We picked up Sunil on the way and went. We really enjoyed the journey of nearly 300 Km with lot of hot discussions, nice visits (Ethipothala etc) and some playing. We reached Guntur by 11 AM and had a meeting with Mr. Siva Rami Reddy, head of Avagahana NGO, who head Loksatta, Guntur few years back and did more than 5000 programmes in his career of last 20 years.

The purpose of our trip is to join ACO Children in schools. (www.acoindia.org) As a board of director, the responsibility for Guntur, we gave to Mr. Siva Rami Reddy, who is doing a great job in Guntur. So, we met him and discussed about how to go ahead in joining the children. We met with the head of orphanage and few parents there and found about the schools where we are going to join the children.

We went to Naveena Vidhyalaya first to meet the principal and ask for some concession for the students that we are joining. We (I, Eswar and Sunil) explained the concept of ACO and made him understand why we started such an institution to help the poor children. He was so impressed with our organization and more with us (being so young and concerned about the needy children’s education) and told he will sponsor not only the 5 children that ACO adopted but all the 20 children that are about to join that school. We bowed to his humanity and responsiveness and thanked him for his consideration. We also asked him to be part of ACO and he is more than willing to join ACO and joined.

After that, we went to Kanna English Medium School (My friend Vishnu’s father’s school) and explained him the concept of ACO. We got amazing response from him and he was so happy to meet us. He is very energetic and showed us why it matters to provide education to children. He showed how much concessions he is giving to the children. He also gave us the reasoning for why it is difficult for them to fight corporate schools which charges very high for children and pay more for the teachers. So, we completely convinced to pay the complete fee, however we got Rs 1000/- concession, which we thought, we can educate on more poor child. However the boon he gave us is, he is going to give free education to 15 children whether they get sponsors or not. We felt very happy and he wanted to be part of ACO and he became integral part of ACO.

We wished all the children best wishes and went for the meeting with Agriculture scientists and officers.

Meeting with Agriculture Scientists and Agriculture officers in Guntur:

Its 6:15 PM and I reached Avagahana office. There are around 15 members waiting for me to speak on the model that I presented in United States on Agriculture. All of them are more than 60 at least, who worked in rural India all their life time. Their experience is almost double that of my age and most of them are in the field of agriculture. I was introduced as a young mind, who is striving to make the agriculture profitable and presented a model in University of California, Berkeley. I spoke about my model for around 45 min.

1. Automation - Reducing cost and increasing yield for the farmer. So, overall productivity goes up by using lean principles. We can double the productivity which is missing now because of lot of loopholes.

2. Creating a hub and spoke model, where each hub acts as an aggregation of supply from farmers and aggregation of demand for retailers and where there is a seamless supply and demand with high quality without any intermediary. So, farmers get more prices for their goods and retailers can buy at cheaper prices with assured quality from farmers.

3. Creating self employment Units and creating direct markets for them. Like Dairy Farms, Organic fertilizers, Chutneys and handmade things etc. it’s based on location and their expertise. This increases the income levels of the farmers and hence the way they live.

4. We can create huge retail outlets at each hub where farmers can sell their goods directly. Just like Wal-Mart concept. Because each hub connects around 50 villages and 2/3 towns. They get enough market. This provides farmers good prices and very cost effective for consumers with good quality.

Then, the scientists asked me many questions and few of them I was unable to answer and they suggested different methods. Also, they gave few suggestions of how to go ahead with pilot plan. They were very happy with us and asked us to go ahead with our plan. They told, they will provide 100% support all the time and they gave me a book as a token of appreciation. (Pedda Bala Siksha) The discussion happened almost for 3 hours with different points from different angles and provided me a very good direction for my business plan.