What will you do to your village?

Information about 49,000 villages, free computers to 20,000 schools, libraries in 35,000 villages, receives 300 postcards daily and gives replies to the same… Pradeep Lokhande is running a special system for the rural India. He is trying to bridge the differences between the living standards of the cities and villages through his organization – Rural Relations.

The strength of Hyderabad is Information Technology. Ahmedabad is known for its industries. Pune is world of BioTech… Everyone in the country knows which city is famous for what. So, there is no lack of information about such cities for businessmen who want to invest and people searching for jobs. Likewise, a remote village in Nizamabad District or tribal villages in Srikakulam or the lakhs of villages in India might have some special feature. If such information is made available to the outside world, an investor might search for a business opportunity, a voluntary organization might adopt the village or it could come to the visibility of Corporate Tycoons like Tata who can change the face of the village. For this reason, Pune based social activist Pradeep, founded the Rural Relations. He is trying to gather the information of every small village and putting them on the Internet, thereby opening the doors for development of the villages.

After doing a Commerce Degree, Pradeep worked as a Marketing Manager for many years. One day, he attended a seminar where he came to know about the increasing opportunities in village market. Being born in a village ‘Vaai’ near Pune, he wanted to live life by becoming part of development of villages and decided to quit his job. Pradeep though that information like crops grown in villages, things made, major occupation of the villagers, etc . could be sold to companies for some money and villagers can get better employment opportunities through those companies. So, he first wrote postcards to hundreds of villages in Maharashtra including – village heads, post masters and teachers, asking details like the crops grown, students, population, employment, etc. But nobody responded. So, he himself went to those villages and gathered the information by explaining his thoughts to the villagers. With those villagers help, he got information about the surrounding villages through postcards. After gathering information of about 1,000 villages, he decided to sell this information to Tata Company. But he could only get Rs. 25,000 for his months of effort. As there was not even such response from other companies, he sold the information cheaply to Tata Company.

Based on the information from Pradeep, Tata Company selected few villages and made the farmers grow tea leaves. As a result, there was improvement in the financial position of those farmers. Pradeep received hundreds of postcards from the villagers as a token of thankfulness. He felt happy that the farmers could benefit from him even though he lost money in the process. With that enthusiasm, he took the role of a social entrepreneur and wrote thousands of letters to villages for their information explaining about his thoughts and achievements. He himself went to hundreds of villages to start researching about the conditions. The response to his letters kept on increasing day by day. He started receiving responses from village heads, teachers and educated villagers. With this information, he started a website – ‘Village WikY’. Ha made available the complete information of around 12000 villages belonging to the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Bihar. New villages are getting added daily into the website. In this process, Pradeep went to over 5,000 villages to study the conditions. He posted and received over one lakh letters with the villagers. He receives more than 150 letters daily to his compound. Thereby, giving him the title ‘Postcard Man of India’.

Pradeep developed several programmes for development during his travel to the villages. He started project ‘Gyan Key’ and with the help of donors he was able to establish libraries in over 3,000 villages for the students studying in those villages. He donated computers freely to over 20,000 schools in villages, thereby making computer education accessible to the students. More than one lakh schools have been benefitted from this project. Through his project ‘Village Developers’, Pradeep gave training to the village youth who can directly showcase the specialties of their village to the business organizations thereby, giving responsibility to the village youth to increase employment chances in their village. He is looking forward to gather information of 85,000 villages in the next 5 years, thereby, completely changing the face of those villages. If you would like to share information about your village, go to ‘ruralrelations.com’.