The Pauls- Kalyan and Anita, founders of the Pan Himalayan Grasroots Development Foundation, were busy with prior commitments when we landed at Ranikhet, so we had to wait a few days before we could meet them. It was an anxious wait for us, as we’d heard a lot about them and were really dying to meet them. Day 4 was the day we finally did, and what a session it turned out to be!

Our conversations with the Pauls were free wheeling, and covered a host of topics. One thing we were curious about was the story of how they started off. We’d heard an almost fairytale version involving them starting off working with unions in Delhi but running into the local mafia, and then spinning off a successful NGO which they were forced to quit at a moment they should have been savouring success, before finally starting off the enormously influential Grassroots. However the version of events we got from them was typically no-nonsense stuff. Kalyan simply said that the mentality in the seventies (when they graduated from engineering college) was different- people thought about the poor, rather than celebrate the rich as they do today. He felt getting into the developmental sector was not a particularly difficult decision. In fact even looking back, he didnt even think he had lost out on any ‘comforts’ or benefits an urban, corporate job would have provided.

We then spoke to them about the challenges they faced in starting off projects. Grassroots as an organisation has a stake in a number of local problems, ranging from community development to water crisis. This, and their style of operation- they initiate a project and when the involvement of the locals reaches a sustainable level, Grassroots pulls out, allowing the locals to take over- leads to grassroots launching new projects fairly frequently. Again however, they did not dwell on the struggles of the earlier days, instead focussing on how people who have reaped the benefits of a project, help convince others into taking it up at their village/region. They also spoke of how they expected to be more efficient everytime they started off a project that they’d implemented earlier, proactively looking to put to use earlier learnings.

Unavoidably, some of the local problems cropped up, and we got some interesting views on some of the issues. For example, telling us about the water crisis, Anita said that every summer there invariably was a severe water shortage, leading to often violent protests against the government. Surprisingly, she did not join in blaming the government, but felt that people being alert to their own environment and chipping in with community efforts was the key to the problem.

Later, we asked Kalyan about his view of the current generation, and got a scathing attack on people who join courses intended to train you to work in rural areas, but end up in the CSR wings of MNCs. He was also telling us that he was willing to pay people more to move to villages to work- a radical view for a person associated with the rural development sector, let alone the man who has to foot the bill- but still, was having trouble attracting talented people.

He rued the instinctive recoil of people when asked to work in rural areas, and indeed, talking with him for hours in his comfortable little office overlooking the Himalayas, it was hard to understand why anyone would hesitate to work there.