Better Use Water!!

Train travels have always excited me for the very element of surprise. One can never imagine what you can come across on these journeys. In the good old days when there wasn’t enough facility available to fly to places in short durations, these wagons used to carry people of sorts - all embarking on their own trips, yet connecting on the journey.

For me one such journey was really memorable. While boarding the train from New Delhi, an old lady occupied the berth next to mine. While the train started pulling out of the station, we greeted each other and the conversation started. At her age, it was amazing to find out that she is a solo traveller who has covered high altitude peaks in the Himalayas like Mount Kailash, Om Parvat and likes all by herself including other geographies of India – like the rainwater forests in Assam. For a 73-year-old, one would imagine the definition of the ultimate life is one of peace and comfort. Prabha Gogate however, is an ardent traveller and a very enthusiastic person. But what was more interesting that I found later in our conversation was that while many only talk about it, how sincerely conscious she was about leading her life in a healthy and sustainable manner, not only for herself, but for the community as well.  

India is facing a water crisis and by 2025 it is estimated that India's population will be suffering from severe water scarcity. When the whole world is posting updates on Facebook and sharing articles on how to save water, Prabha is one of those few who have been practicing better utilization of water, and saving it for over a decade now.  She prefers to recycle water.  She shared with me how she has been making use of Grey water treatment in her colony.

Greywater is commonly defined as wastewater generated from bathroom, laundry and kitchen. Greywater treatment process varies from simple devices that divert greywater for direct application such as irrigation to complex systems involving sedimentation tanks, filters, bioreactors, pumps and disinfection systems. While rainwater harvesting and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) are water conservation measures, reuse of water is an important undeveloped technology. Reuse of water is important because it restricts water demand and reduces stress on treatment system. Specifically, greywater recycle augments existing water use efficiency.

The amount and quality of greywater will in part determine how it can be reused. Irrigation and toilet flushing are two common uses, but nearly any non-contact use is a possibility. Toilet flushing can be done either by direct bucketing or by pumping treated greywater to an overhead tank connected by suitable piping to the toilets. Floor cleaning, gardening, car washing and construction are some other areas where this water can be used judiciously.

The treated greywater can also be used for irrigating agricultural crops and turfs and for maintaining decorative fountains or landscape impoundments. Agricultural irrigation using greywater to support crop production is a well-established practice in arid and semiarid regions. This is the area where Prabha concentrated her efforts.

She started a recycling project in her Salunke Vihar building, where she collects kitchen wastewater from eight flats, accumulating the water into a 500-litre capacity tank in the building's backyard. She has combined the pipes of eight households together, so that the kitchen waste collects directly into the tank. The water is then treated with a chemical, which acts as a strong clearing agent and kills the water-borne germs effectively. One pack of the chemical every three months is enough for her tank's capacity.      

             

The processed water is then fed to varieties of plants maintained by Gogate in her garden - from Arabian banana and chikoo trees to magnificent floras like the jeevanjot, hibiscus, snow tub, madhavi champa and night-flowering jasmines. It was her love for plants and gardening that moved her to begin the project in the first place. The water is treated properly, so it doesn't even produce bad odour.

But paths of altruism are never smooth and success stories are incomplete without difficulties. Some of her neighbours , she says, were unsupportive and often mocked her initiative. They complained about foul smell, mosquitoes and charged her for using clean water for the plants. They completely refused to believe that she recycled the kitchen waste generated from their households. Nevertheless, Gogate handled the difficulties and the criticisms coming her way with patience and gentleness. Her hard work eventually found appreciation though. Many people visit her every morning for tulsi leaves or some fruits and she never lets them down.

In water scarce developing countries, greywater reuse in schools, hospitals and government institutions is proving to be an essential alternate water resource to fresh ground, surface or rainwater supplies.

Measured Steps To Social Impact

The 18^th December, 2014 tweet chat by Doers’ Labs focused on identifying the main steps to measuring social impact, and the finer points of each step.  But the first question that organizations often ask themselves is, “why is measurement important?”  One participant in the tweet chat posed this  question provocatively, asking whether measurement is really important for for-profit social enterprises or only to donors and impact investors.  There are many reasons that measurement is important, for both for-profit social enterprises and non-profit organizations.  The reasons offered during the chat were concentrated on the importance of measurement to testing an organization’s assumptions of what it needs to do to reach its goals (create impact), and consequently providing the basis for short and long-term decision-making.

The main steps to measuring social impact are formulating: 1) a logic model, 2) assumptions, 3) indicators and 4) tools.  A logic model defines the end goal (impact) that an organization wants to create, its intermediate goals (outcomes) and links them to what it does through a chain of results.  While an organization’s end goal should be less flexible than its activities, often unfortunately it’s the other way around.

The assumptions in your logic model are what an organization’s measurement system should test.  These assumptions will often lead an organization to the questions it wants its measurement system to answer.  It is good practice to also identify the decisions that will follow from answering each question, for an organization to ensure that its measurement system is providing data that will be used. 

All too many times discussions of measurement begin with indicators.  However, organizations that hesitate to state impacts that are difficult to measure forget that what you can measure evolves over time.  An organization may choose to start by measuring outcomes, and as its knowledge and resources increase include impacts at a later stage.  Nevertheless, it is important that the logic model articulates a complete chain of results, to keep the organization headed in the right direction.

In addition, indicators are only one part of a measurement system, and are only useful in so far as they help an organization answer the questions that it identified in the previous step.  The tweet chat included a conversation on how rubrics can be used to turn qualitative data into quantitative indicators, to measure phenomena like social autonomy and empowerment.  However, the greatest power of qualitative data is probably in its ability to help an organization understand why change has or has not happened.  The usefulness of indicators is limited to understanding whether change has happened or not.  Therefore, identifying questions that go beyond indicators is critical.          

There was widespread agreement during the tweet chat that unless an organization goes through the steps above, it is unlikely to be able to design effective tools to collect data.  However, once an organization goes through the above steps, there are technologies available to help it design and administer tools to collect data.  Uniphore, Social Cops and Vera Solutions were some of the companies mentioned during the tweet chat who enable organizations to collect, visualize and disseminate data.  Finally, it was suggested that the “next practice” for organizations that have robust measurement systems would be to use this data to create social impact models much as is done in the field of economics. 

Importance of Fair work place?

If I narrate you story of an interview where the candidate negotiated hard for incremental compensation and higher incentive, what would be your first impression? What would be your assumption of this candidate’s gender, nature and working style? Or consider yourself on the panel of promotion board and you have to make a choice between a man and a pregnant woman, who would be your preferred candidate for promotion? These situations are not hypothetical neither uncommon, we witness many such events in a day-to-day working life. A recent survey undertaken, by International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) states, around two in five men in India – nearly 40.7% held rigid and discriminatory gender views. This segment believes women to be inferior. 

Now don’t be very worried if your answers in both the above situations were ‘male’. These are the result of the unconscious biases that we all have, which have been deep-rooted through our culture, people at homes, educational institutions and now workplaces. Everyone has biases... but this statement should not make you complacent, and let you justify in accepting it as a norm and continuing to live with it. It is important that you become more aware of these biases and be ready to challenge them in self as well as in others.

Our workforce demographics are changing, and as per one of the reports on gender mix in education in India, almost 47% of the total graduates, 48% of engineers, and 40% of MBAs are women. However, as per Oxfam’s report this year, India ranks second lowest in the Group of 20 (G20) economies when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. It is above only Saudi Arabia, a country that does not even allow its women to drive.

This depressing figure doesn’t culminate just here, as per World Economic Forum (WEF) report from last year, India ranked 124 out of 136 nations in a tally comparing women’s economic participation. Embarrassingly, all the BRICS nations rank much higher than India. The 12 countries below India include countries riven by political instability, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Syria.

Observing all these startling, yet real data points, one is forced to ponder over reasons which are resulting in leaking pipeline, inhibiting women from establishing their position at the workplace and exploiting their own potential. Whilst, there are several social and economic factors that play an important role in augmenting or deteriorating progression and advancement of women. The environ of a workplace and the prevailing biases have an equal vital role to play in attracting, retaining, engaging and promoting women.

With the new Company’s Act coming into being, organizations are certainly forming policies, setting up internal committees but most seem to only tick the compliance, focused on ensuring how ‘men don’t get into trouble’ and how organizations can insulate themselves from potential complaints and negative publicity. However, this psyche in corporate India needs to change and they need to take up challenging programs for sensitizing employees about gender stereotypes and their unconscious biases that intercept in capitalizing advantages of diverse workforce and achieving greater participation of women at workplaces.

With more and more women acquiring higher education, and entering the workplace, it is imperative that organizations are well prepared to accept and include women and leverage their strength for collective advantages of people and business. Instead of teaching men or prescribing suggestive appropriate actions or conversations to them we need to make them understand the impact of their biases and insensitivities. They need to realize that sensitivity is not by exceptions, it is an expectation. The business case and imperatives of having more women in organizations have been illustrated several times in various reports, surveys, seminars and forums but now we need to take ‘affirmative actions’. We need to weed out the unconscious biases and preconceived notions about gender. We need to show respect and dignity as professionals. We need to appreciate and be conscious of people’s background, preferences, appearance, and ancestry.  The power of inclusion and specially gender is such that it can increase India’s GDP by more than a quarter if it can match male and female employment rates (according to a report by consulting firm Booz & Co.)

Translating the "Corporate Social Responsibilty" mandate on ground

While going through the CSR reporting in India, Survey Report 2013 by KPMG I stumbled upon a heading ‘Regulation drives reporting‘. This seems so true in the common scenario. The natural human behaviour is to react to a situation than to respond knowing fully well that it is the response that is going to achieve positive result vis-a-vis reaction. Can a CSR report generated out of reaction mitigate the risks that companies face due to social and environmental impact? I read an article where the writer had been asked to recommend 7 short reports (under 20 pages). We love reports which spare us the jargon and reflect the real picture.

 Why report at all? Yes its required due to the new section 135 in Companies Act but it’s just a part of the existing Financial Report and one can do the to the point reporting to meet the legal requirement. The companies worldwide have been doing CSR reporting without any legal binding simply because it enhances the returns from their CSR efforts. The impact of a CSR project can be enhanced if it is reviewed periodically by stakeholders. To do that we need to have a CSR policy that envisages active stakeholders’ engagement. The new CSR regulation also envisages the companies to initiate the process by creating a committee which puts together a well thought CSR strategy. In words of Sun Tzu, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”  The corporate sector has realised that along with traditional functions like marketing, branding, R&D etc., CSR is also a viable component of their overall business objective. The current reporting as is observed in the CSR Reporting Survey by KPMG 2013 merely indicates that the company is performing its social responsibility. There is a room for improvement so that CSR projects provide substantial benefits to all stakeholders and the business. It’s a win-win situation where the CSR can enhance impact for the society and profits for the business.

At present the reporting is higher of the positives and low of the negatives. Generally, the financial statements indicate the inflows and outflows and net result. Similarly the CSR reports should be made to reflect the efforts versus impact. Currently he CSR projects by the businesses are standalone activities without any linkages to the value chain of the business and fail to indicate the impact of the business on the social and environmental issues. To sum up the CSR reporting should use lessons from the financial reporting to develop a CSR reporting system to inform the stakeholders and yield better connect.