Tuesday, 13 February 2007Indian villages meet challenges of life with lionsYoung Leaders Programme: Gir Project
For many, living on the fringes of the last home of wild lions anywhere outside Africa is a dream come true and it may well be, but the villagers of Chitrod in deep rural India find it comes with special challenges.
Vilas Ben, centre, takes part in an exchange of ideas among women of Chitrod village and visiting executives from Hong Kong. Guide, interpreter and conservation expert Bitapi Sinha is seated right. Photo: Josephine YipTogether with business executives from Hong Kong and international corporations and local experts in various fields, the people of Chitrod worked in January to find solutions to the special set of circumstances that have conspired to keep them struggling to make ends meet. The result of a week’s intense co-operation was a plan, fully endorsed by the village head, that will help Chitrod realise its own dreams.
In a first, executives from the MTR Corporation, Hongkong Electric International, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, German quality and services company TUV Rheinland and Indian diversified group VS Dempo spent a week at Chitrod on the border of the Gir National Park and Sanctuary in Gujarat state, north-western India.
They all worked as part of the Young Leaders Programme (YLP), a unique start-up executive training scheme designed by the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT). Its methodology brings together the business skills of executives and the local knowledge of experts with the needs and dreams of villagers to bring about positive results with dignity.
For Bryan Cheung of the MTR Corporation, “the experience of working towards a common and sound business plan for the community was inspiring”.
His colleague Jeff Chan said, “The YLP gave me an invaluable opportunity to open my eyes to a developing society and poverty issues … [and] to the development needs of other people, and especially the contrast with business life in Hong Kong”.
Chandran Nair, GIFT’s founder and chief executive, said: “The complex interplay of issues within Gir park – from human-wildlife habitat conflict and rural poverty to finding positive and sustainable ways to develop – are essential to the ‘life-changing experience’ that is at the heart of the YLP concept. The participants saw for themselves how, despite the rhetoric about the positive impacts of globalisation, huge disparities exist and how decisions made in one part of the world can have real and significant effects in others and on a very local scale.”
In this, the YLP addresses critical leadership needs for future decision makers, influencing a fundamental shift in their understanding of business and its influences and impacts.
All set to make a difference: the team of Young Leaders Programme participants at Gir. Chandran Nair is standing third from the right
All set to make a difference: the team of Young Leaders Programme participants at Gir. Chandran Nair is standing third from the rightThe field project followed and built on an earlier YLP module that introduced the participants to examine issues in ways that are often omitted from management training courses and handbooks, but are critical to both everyday and long-term decision making. Leaders must understand the impacts of globalisation, issues of governance, business ethics, the role of civil society, corporate social responsibility, and diversity, among many others, to be effective in our global community. To Hongkong Electric’s Roger Yang, it is clear how beneficial the combination of both modules is: “A classroom or MBA course could not simulate this real-life learning situation.”
Gir was the second YLP project. In the first, executives worked with the villagers of Haitang Administrative Village in rural Yunnan province, China, in August 2006.
The executives who took part in the Gir project were joined by regional broadcaster StarTV, which filmed the project, and a strong contingent of some of the best and brightest from the University of Hong Kong’s and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, among them exchange students from the Mainland.
They came to realise the national park and its tourist draw are central to hopes of a sustainable future for Chitrod and its 2,000 inhabitants. Gir is the last home of the Asiatic lion, the only wild lions anywhere outside Africa. It is considered one of the most important protected areas in Asia. With hundreds of species of wildlife – including the Asiatic lion, leopards, deer and antelopes – flora, and insects, it is the focus of enormously important biological research and education. Its draws thousands of tourists each year – but few, if any, exercise their spending power in Chitrod.
Chitrod’s community of cattle-herders and farmers make do with about US$1 a day – some more, some less. Of late, they have found themselves caught in an ever-tightening snare focused on the fringes of Gir National Park: communities like Chitrod with the legal right to live within the sanctuary have come to rely on the finely balanced eco-system for drawing firewood, water and topsoil for farming, and grazing their cattle; lions, protected and with their numbers growing, are drawn to hunt – sometimes with tragic consequences. These practices are unsustainable, for both the park and the village.
No charity among equals
Local experts played an invaluable role in ensuring the project ran smoothly: they lay the groundwork and in the event helped with innumerable details as basic as interpretation. From the moment the process of field research and plan designing began, one thing was clear: “There is an energy that builds around the team, the local experts and the villagers. It says something of the programme, and that is that this is not about charity: the people of Chitrod are among equals,” Mr Nair said. “They all learn from each other, moving towards a common goal of building a plan and addressing basic needs and bring about a more equitable future.”How they will achieve this is laid out in the plan, which recommends a series of short-, medium-, and long-term goals. These include raising incomes through the establishment of a village co-operative that will provide a single, strong voice in all matters relating to village livelihood and develop new, sustainable avenues of earning revenue that will draw tourist custom. One suggestion is to turn into revenue-spinners exquisite handicrafts made by village women which traditionally they make for dowries. A key recommendation is the development of stall-feeding systems for cattle herds: this should reduce over-grazing that is damaging the ecological balance within the park; similarly with forest wood by encouraging the use of biogas, dung, and agricultural waste for fire. It is hoped that unshackling Chitrod from having to rely on Gir’s fragile resources will allow both to flourish.
Critically, Chitrod’s villagers must accept that the responsibility for key decisions and action rests with them, something that village head Bhau Bhai Bhura Bhai Parmar is confident they appreciate; on the flipside, the executives realise the value of thinking beyond the boardroom.
The MTR’s Paul Wong summed up how he saw Chitrod and Gir: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It showed me how people make do in ways that people in Hong Kong could hardly imagine, as we are so confined in our little society. The way I think changed substantially.”
The Gir Project took place at Chitrod Village and the Gir National Park and Sanctuary in January 2007.
Gir Project picture essay. (This is a large file and may take a little time to load.)
URL:
.jpg)
