Kalyan Akkipeddi Engineer with an MBA Degree Is Now Building a Model Village (Tekulodu ) in Andhra Pradesh :- he entered a tribal belt – from the west extreme of Kutch, through central India, all the way to Sundarbans in the east. Kalyan travelled in this region for eight months, a period he calls the most inspiring time of his life. In this tribal belt he found some communities living in complete happiness – they literally had no complaints about life. It was then that an idea struck him – instead of spending energy on eradicating poverty, why were people not working on creating abundance?
Kalyan came down to his native place – Anantpur district of Andhra Pradesh. Here, he travelled around 166 villages and finally chose Tekulodu village as the one where he would live and start working.
Kalyan decided that he would eat at a different house each day and provide an extra set of hands for whatever that family did for a living. During dinner with a different family every night, he would open his questionnaire and document the financial health of the family members. In about 100 days, he had worked with all 100 families in the village.
Through his conversations with the villagers during this time, he got a good understanding of the financial matters of the village. Finally, Kalyan chose one family that was earning just Rs. 6,500 per annum, and started working with them. The idea was to stabilise their earnings through farming. And in about eight months' time, Kalyan, the farmer, and the farmer's wife, turned an uncultivable piece of land into a productive patch, with no external help. Today, the family earns Rs. 14,000 a month.
They generate their own electricity from a handmade wind turbine that was made using an open source design, and live happily in an eco-friendly shelter.
But everybody had to earn that right by demonstrating their commitment through shram-daan for six months, in which time they dug eight ponds on absolutely barren land.
"We were an object of ridicule in the village because instead of farming we were digging ponds. But on the last day of making stone walls around the ponds, the clouds broke and it rained. All the ponds filled up and we became a tourist spot in the village," smiles Kalyan.
Today, the village is energy self-reliant, WiFi enabled, and has a consistent source of water. Members of ProtoVillage grow their own food as much as possible. The residents built an eco-friendly visitors' centre, in which they currently reside. They will soon start building their respective homes. Energy generation happens with the help of a solar plant and a wind turbine at the moment. Soon, a biogas plant will be added to the system. Kalyan identifies experts who are willing to share their knowledge with the villagers.
Kalyan, who has been living without a job since 2008, has simplified his life so much that he doesn't need much in terms of finances he says.
ProtoVillage should be ready for demonstration to the outside world by August 2017.
You can contact Kalyan by writing to him at kalyanakkipeddi@gmail.com .
full article in the link below
http://www.thebetterindia.com/39964/protovillage-by-kalyan-akkipeddi-andhra-pradesh/
Posted by: Ravi Narasimhan <ravi.narasimhan.in@gmail.com>
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