Bangladesh. Yunus says: all citizens have equal rights. All Bangladeshis, and no discrimination.
We need ‘agency’ to succeed. We need to collectivize to have ‘agency’ – will, abilities, space. For women, competencies are within. Will comes from innate commitment for doing right things, rightly, reinforced by ‘nurturing’ DNA, unusually high resilience, stamina. Easily triggerable. Tough nut is ‘space’. This needs to be seized, again and again. Performance – role models, champions – helps. Doing more, better, differently, women take charge, steer us through livelihoods, enterprises, collectives, organizations, teams, lives, destinies. Can we offer relevant useful support, more, for this?
In Anand Gurukulam, it was an engagement 24×7. In 19 months at IRMA, we invested the first intense 10,000 hrs. Second 10,000+ hrs with Dr Kurien, Dr Aneja, Tushar and their senior first line of masters in Dairy Board, and IRMA on the non-student side, over the next 36 months. Returned later to invest a third 10,000+ hrs. In commons’ world and IRMA. Many masters, many blessings, many insights, and many astras. Robert Chambers, Tom Carter, Ramareddy, Sasi et al. Initiated into multiple-team works, nested, tiered collectives, leading, integrating, scaling, systems, lateral thinking, policy, et al; living values – hope, faith, promise, love, and coexistence. K nurtured us to be brief, direct. A4 decisions. Trying more democracy, if democracy fails. Equity at any cost.
Operation Flood (milk), Goldenflow (oilseeds). Monetizing commodity aid – canola, rapeseed oil – for investing in collectives. Market intervention operation, maintaining the prices of edible oils – groundnut and mustard – so that the prices remain within the price bands. Building infrastructure for cooperatives at village society, union, federation levels, and at national levels; cleaning up trading practices in oils, oilseeds including no.2 purchases, sales; value-chains; supply-chain(s) from procuring from the farm till the processing, packaging, retailing; moving to retail from loose oils; moving from weight sales to volume sales; Bhavnagar vegetable oil products processes – systems study; DHARA brand oils; reforming futures and forward markets; managing information, market intelligence helped MIO. A mere Rs.500 crore loss as investment in MIO gave a Rs.10,000+ Crore benefit to farmers and consumers across India.
Operations with Advocacy: Writing, Press; ‘influence’ notes; Hindustan Oilseeds Growers’ Association, HOGA; Shetkari Sanghatana’s Sharad Joshi; Cooperative Initiative Panel – K with Mohan Dharia and LC Jain; Brains Trust feeding Planning Commission; National Oilseeds Policy Analysis; ISRO, Remote Sensing based modelling with 46 parameters – National Oilseeds Kharif, Rabi Estimates within 1% error, eating peanuts, visiting mustard fields, every km, ground truthing, seeing India deeply across length and breadth. Teaching managing information et al. Participating in admissions.
K’s remark one day ‘no one was saying’ triggered that we were not ready and not matured enough for third-fourth level vicarious satisfaction. We wanted to go to the cutting edge. Around this time, my roommate TS Rajan succumbed to an accident across the road. We needed a break. Marriage was finalized too. We moved to the next Gurukulam – Tribal Communities, to invest the next 10,000+ hrs. Immediately after this, I had to move back to Anand Gurukulam, into Commons’ world, and invest a third 10,000+ hrs. For visualizing, realizing possibilities. Can we? Useful, relevant? Scale, systems?
Yes, we can. If we coexist, if we are in sync in flowing. In N? samnidhiyoga for 7L.
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