Man who is reviving the NAXALS

Swapnil Tewari : The man who reformed the lives of Naxalites, rescued troubled families, gave a marketing platform to endangered artisans and brought people from the brink of suicide.

His larger-than-life story will leave you more spellbound than any Bollywood movie script! 

Born as a dyslexic child, he had a difficult childhood. But things got worse when his father died in a car accident. Swapnil was just 13 and when he became suicidal and almost popped his mother’s sleeping pills.

“As I was about to take those pills, a thought struck me. I realised that all my heartbeats, my body parts – everything is alive. And they want me to live. Since that day, I decided to give a chance to happiness,” he recalls.

After finishing his graduation and MBA, Swapnil shifted from BOI to RBI. Having an urge to do something better with his life, Swapnil started a socio-creative venture for tribal artisans.

But a phone call completely changed his life. He called an artisan one day and the man’s daughter picked up his call and said, “Daddy is dead.” Before Swapnil could process this, the girl further added, “The Pradhan of the village takes mummy every night to his house and leaves her back in the morning. She keeps crying all day.” -

This is when he quit his job and went to Madhubani to locate the family. He brought them to Delhi having spent his savings and faced unspeakable trouble. He helped the family sustain by asking them to make art of Madhubani and helped them to market the paintings.

He started a company called Naked Colours in 2011 to support the struggling endangered tribal artisans of India and give them their share of credit.

He was just 23 when he first went to a Naxalite area as he was determined to bring a change in their community.

When he entered the Naxalite area, he was kidnapped and tortured for several days.

“Those guys would torture me for several hours and then go out. And while I was still there, I would teach their kids and spread awareness about hygiene among the ladies. I think they gradually started accepting me. They realised they have captivated a wrong man and finally freed me,” he recalls.

Swapnil came back to Delhi and started working on his new idea for women safety – The Pink Whistle Project. He has designed a whistle called Shakti which can be worn as a bracelet. In times of danger, one can press a button on the whistle, a 2 inch knife comes out of it which is sufficient to wound the attacker.

At 25, Swapnil was the youngest Social Entrepreneur in the world to be featured in Forbes magazine’s Changemaker list. He is currently working with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for AIDS prevention. His invention is an oral external contraceptive for HIV & STD prevention, and has reached Phase 2 of the challenge. 

Story on how Dr. Shahnaaz Teing risked it all to save young mothers!

On the morning of September 6, 2014, when Kashmir woke up to the biggest flood of the century.

When J&K witnessed a horrifying flood, several doctors and patients spent four days in a hospital without food, medical supplies and electricity. From operating without resources and delivering C-section babies, these doctors did everything they had to do to save the stranded flood victims.

Dr Teing found herself stuck with hundreds of patients and their attendants at Lal Ded. With the entire hospital plunged in darkness, there was mayhem everywhere.

Dr Teing encountered a pregnant woman admitted for her third delivery and had a low-lying placenta. She was bleeding profusely and needed immediate surgery to save her life and that of her child. But to perform the Caesarean section Dr Teing needed electricity – for giving anaesthesia, oxygen supply and the operation theatre lights. Besides this, she required at least seven units of blood and dressing material. Nothing was available.

Dr Teing created a makeshift operation theatre. The patient was administered spinal anaesthesia. if the spinal anaesthesia wore off mid-procedure, there was no general anaesthesia available to switch over to. Nonetheless, in the haze of natural light, she picked up the knife and went ahead. A healthy baby boy was delivered that day.

Eighteen staff members, including an eight months pregnant gynaecologist, 300 patients and 400 attendants were trapped in the hospital for four days. The patients and their attendants were hungry and the infants on ventilators and incubators, which run on electricity, were freezing in the cold and gasping for oxygen. Dr Teing distributed dextrose saline water for drinking among patients and their attendants.

When the incubators stopped functioning, she taught mothers of the sick neonates the technique of Kangaroo Mother Care and demonstrated how they could keep their infants warm by holding them tightly to their bodies.

Fortunately, on the evening of September 7, two local boys managed to come to them in a boat carrying candles and biscuits. Their arrival cheered up the hundreds stranded there. Dr Teing performed six deliveries in candlelight and six healthy babies were born.

Fortunately, by then, rescue teams got to them. Dr Teing was taken out of Lal Ded in a boat and she saw her husband searching for her among the rescued.

“As there was no power, I used my diesel generator to conduct surgeries. When the diesel ran out, I operated in torchlight. I pleaded with government officials and fuel dealers to provide diesel to no avail,” she shares.

A month down the line, the waters have receded from Srinagar, leaving death, destruction and disease in their wake. However, as long as there are courageous doctors like Teing, Ali and Farooq, patients can at least be assured of a fighting chance.

How Technology saved life

How did NASA technology help in saving lives during Nepal Earthquake!

A unique suitcase-sized device that can detect human heartbeats and breathing patterns of survivors buried even 30 feet below crushed rock, revolutionized the search and rescue operations in Nepal.

“In Nepal’s village of Chautara, NASA's FINDER prototypes discovered four men who had been trapped under collapsed buildings. The men had been buried beneath as much as 10 feet of debris for several days.”

Nepal is still reeling from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck near Kathmandu on April 25, 2015. The quake has flattened three quarters of the city’s buildings and killed thousands of people. The village of Chatuara was no different; over ninety percent of its homes destroyed, rendering hundreds homeless. Rescue teams from around the world, including India are continuing to provide medical assistance, food, water and other essential items.

Using space age technology, American rescuers were able to locate and rescue four men buried alive under a collapsed building in the village of Chautara in Nepal. They used a device that could detect the heartbeat or breathing of the men who were buried under the rubble.

The prototype device, soon to be commercialized, is named FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response).

Originally, FINDER was developed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), USA, as part of their Deep Space Network program to monitor the movements of their spacecraft flying millions of miles away.

How does it work?

About the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, this state-of-the-art portable heartbeat detector device uses low power radar microwaves, about one-thousandth of a cell-phone’s output, to scan for survivors trapped under rubble.

It’s sensitive enough to discern the difference between a human heartbeat and that of an animal, as well as someone who’s conscious versus one who’s unconscious, which can influence how search-and-rescue workers decide to dig the person out. And it can provide feedback in less than a minute, which is important when there are lives on the line.

Just like a RADAR that tracks airplanes, FINDER emits a signal and waits for that signal to bounce back. The longer the signal takes to come back, the farther away the body is.
Best of all, the unit is small and lightweight, making it optimal for any sort of disaster scenario.
NASA scientists have now added a new feature to the prototype – a ‘locator’ – a kind of a GPS device that can help in precisely locating survivors.

Though FINDER was put to the test in various disaster simulations, this is the first time the technology has managed to save lives in a real-world emergency.

Hand Washing Device Just at Rs. 35/-

The man who made a Hand Washing device and saved lives in just Rs.35!

Dr.Pawankumar Gulabrao Patil was one of the seven students selected for a two-year fellowship programme at Nirman’s SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health), in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra. The programme encourages students to work in areas affecting rural communities and being a physician, Dr. Pawan chose to work in the health sector.

When Dr. Pawan found out about the unhygienic living conditions in Gadchiroli, Maharasthra, he created a hand-washing device in just Rs.35 that has been saving the lives of the villagers.

Living in the community, he realised that there were several diseases persisting in the village, those that could be prevented by merely drinking clean water or paying more attention to cleanliness. He promptly did a study that revealed that of the 64 families living in the village, only six families used soap for washing hands.

The fact that diarrhea was the second largest contributor to infant mortality made him easily diagnose, prevent and treat many children dying from it. An act as simple as washing hands could save so many lives!
It was at this juncture, he heard about the Tippy Tap concept introduced in New Zealand. The idea simply involved a few sticks, a string and a soap to set up a low-cost hand-washing device.

For Dr. Pawan, the first challenge came in the design itself. When he first installed the device, goats would eat the soap and the kids were getting their pants soiled and so on. For six months, he solved the design issues one by one. And then, Nirmal, the robust Indian washing device, was born.
The next bigger challenge lay in getting the villagers to actually use this device. He smiles, “It is not that they did not have soaps, they had everything from Lux to Santoor. But for them, soaps were for beautification and not to remove dirt,” he says.

He took up his Nirmal device and with the help of school children, he set it up in the primary school of Kudakwahi village. This ensured that the kids had a sense of ownership towards the device. In a way, he says the kids co-developed the device with their suggestions to improve the design.

At a cost of 35 rupees, Pawan set up the community’s first hand washing device (with soap being the only recurrent cost). But this would not suffice. For sustained usage of the device, he knew that behavioral change was necessary.

In order to bring a permanent behavioural change, he initiated games such as Frisbee and engaged them with interactive songs that had conveyed a message against uncleanliness and negative effects of tobacco. He has now set up 83 Nirmal devices in 16 villages across Maharastra,

ISRO Bags the Space Pioneer Award

The Space Pioneer Award for the year 2015 was presented to Indian Space Research Organization during the 34th Annual International Space Development Conference held at Toronto in Canada. 

Here's why we think it is the most amazing space mission in the world and undoubtedly deserved the merit. 

1. The Mangalyaan mission cost India 450 crores which is even cheaper than an eight-lane bridge in Mumbai and extremely cheaper than the movie Gravity. Ergo, making it the most cost-effective inter-planetary space mission ever.

2. In real terms, when distributed over the population of 1.2 billion, every Indian has contributed Rs.4 per towards the mission.

3. Mangalyaan will observe the environment of Mars and look for various elements like methane (marsh gas), which is a possible indicator of life. It will also look for Deuterium-Hydroden ratio and other neutral constants.

4. The orbiter weighs 1,350-kg, which is even less than the weight of an average sports utility vehicle.

5. The manufacturing of Mangalyaan took 15 months while NASA took five years to complete MAVEN.

6. Mangalyaan is the first spacecraft to be launched outside the Earth’s sphere of influence by ISRO in its entire history of 44 years.

7. ISRO will be the fourth space agency in the world.

8. Considering that Mars is about 670 million kilometers from the Earth, the cost of the ride works out to about Rs.6.7 per kilometre – cheaper than what even autorickshaws charge anywhere in India!

Thus, India has truly excelled as the pioneer of astronomy In all achievable ways.
Read more: http://bit.ly/1uGFIZW

When India and Pakistan had dinner together

How a simple dinner helped bridge ties between India and Pakistan!

Meet Eric Maddox : The man who introduced the virtual dinner project to solve conflicts between two rival countries. 
Maddox, a documentary film maker, came to India for a little break a few months ago, but unable to put work aside, or resist the urge to facilitate connections wherever he travels, he quickly found opportunities towork on the project with local partners.

He recently organized a virtual dinner between citizens from Bangalore, India and Islamabad, Pakistan and had them discuss critical issues of politics and society on a lighter note. By cleverly merging the two agents, Maddox is trying to resolve the complex issues by getting the participants to break bread over the internet in order to encourage camaraderie and understanding.

Imagine a dinner table that starts in one country and extends into another.

The start
The idea first came to Maddox when he was making a documentary film in Palestine and Israel. He realized that while the larger audience will understand the conflict, the people actually involved in the conflict might not be able to see both sides of the issue.

How it works?

A typical virtual dinner consists of two parts. The first part requires the guests to discuss the recent and most prevalent news of the respective countries. The discussion is moderated and the guests are selected from various universities, NGOs and media centres.

Each community is given a topic by the other one and both the teams are expected to go out on the streets, ask the questions from general public and make a small film for the next dinner, which is organized after two weeks. By this time, both the teams are ready with the short films comprising of interesting responses from the people of one country for another.

The documentaries are later uploaded on the official website and Vimeo to make them accessible to everyone.

The challenges

The biggest challenge is to be sustainable. The lack of funds was a big obstacle which Maddox had to fight in the initial days and still does at times. The project, which requires extensive travel, runs with the help of various grants and donations. Another challenge came with the language barrier which resolved by trying to get people who spoke English and is trying to resolve the problem by providing subtitles in the movie.

As this unique dinner project takes off, it gives a way to clear the misunderstandings between the two nations without resorting to the shellings and threats that seem to be the order of the day. With the success of the India-Pakistan we can’t wait to know about Maddox’s next dinner plans. 

The Dream of a Caste less India

The story of three men who are fighting for a caste-less society in India.

Gopinath, Haran Suba and Kishore are the three doting fathers who have decided to free their children from the century-old caste system by simply not choosing to fill a small box in the admission form. 

T. Gopinath is a creative media professional who rejects the doctrines of caste system. He narrates how he stood by his belief during the admission of his six-year old son as he recalls it like it happened yesterday,

“We had just filled the admission form when the lady in charge returned it with a smile, ‘Sir, you have, by mistake, given NA in the caste column. Please check it.’ I replied, ‘No, I didn’t forget it. I don’t know what caste he is.’ She shook her head and said that I need to fill something. ‘If you don’t give a caste then your child will not get any Government benefits slotted for that caste.’ I laughed, ‘He is my child and not the government’s, so I trust I can take care of his future.’ His admission was sealed and hopefully, a new path has been set for my next generation, all thanks to my supportive wife.”

Haran Suba, a 35-year old father with a UGC NET in hand, took the decision of keeping his seven-year-old daughter Surekha out of the caste equation. He knocked the doors of several colleges, only to be turned down by minorities who preferred candidates from their own religion.

When questioned about societal inequality, he says, “In fact, even people from the so-called lower castes treat certain sub-castes within their community as secondary citizens. It is just pathetic.”
He believes that for equality to prevail one has to remove caste-based oppression of every kind.

Haran Suba currently runs his own firm ‘Hello Talent’ academy that encourages extra-curricular activities in children.

Another freethinker is Mr. P. Kishore, a Chennai-based software professional whose origins made him a firm believer of social equality.
“My parents come from different castes and religions and yet that never was a problem at home. I have watched them lead a peaceful life. Social equality is possible; we just need to remove our resistance to change.” -

When asked about his opinion as a father, he says, “My daughter Shauna will not have a caste and I know she needs to compete under the open category without any quota, but so be it. I believe the next generation will change for the better.”

While reservation may be needed till caste-based discrimination is fully erased, these men have taken a small step towards a bigger dream – a society that discriminates none.