A Silent Revolution- The Journey Of The Srinivasan Services Trust

About the Book Revolutions by nature are sudden and dramatic but this one is different. It has crept up quietly, over two decades, and has left in its wake dignity, prosperity and hope.

A Silent Revolution tells the story of the Srinivasan Services Trust. What started out as the charity wing of a well-known business group quickly transformed into something quite different, evolving into a model of community development that is self-sustaining and empowering. Today, SST has helped transform thousands of Indian villages and touched millions of lives. It is a model that is easy to replicate.

This story is filled with unlikely twists and seemingly counter-intuitive decisions. Learn how building a boundary wall improves the health of children in a community and how a single drop of blood can make a difference to a woman's health. Discover how a well-crafted plan can be thrown off by a single dripping tap and find out what exactly is unleashed when you give people the opportunity to build up their own communities.

SST's model to transform attitudes and change communities empowers India's underserved - living in its villages, left out of the economic boom of the past few decades. This book comes at a time when Corporate Social Responsibility has the potential to help create a new India. It illustrates just how a pioneering, well-organized programme can change lives for the better.

About the Author SNIGDHA PARUPUDI was born and raised in Canada, then transplanted into a small town in south India, where she studied at the local government school.

The legacy of such an upbringing is a deep interest in displacement, urban life and inequality.

She is a gold medalist from Madras University and has experience working in the social sector. Her work has been published in Parabola, National Geographic Traveler, Open, The Indian Express, and The Hindu Business Line.

Snigdha lives in Chennai with her husband and two cats. This is her first book.

Foreword THE PRINCIPLES OF trust, quality and community empowerment have always been at the heart of all that we undertake at TVS Motor Company. It was these principles that underpinned the vision of my father T.S. Srinivasan, when he set up the Company's first rural plant in Hour in 1979. The widespread poverty and resultant deprivation of the community that he witnessed at Hour deeply disturbed my father.

While he dreamt of initiating from Hour, a two-wheeler revolution that he hoped would provide affordable mobility to all; he also fervently wished to provide an impetus for transformation in rural communities in the vicinity-in terms of equitable health, education and economic well-being.

The Srinivasan Services Trust (SST), founded in 1996, in honor of my father's vision, aims to realize his dream of equitable, participatory and sustainable development.

SST, the social service arm of TVS Motor Company, was set up with the aim of being a committed partner in the sustainable transformation of rural communities across India. The SST model is an inclusive one that includes multiple stakeholders.

In the drive to implement large-scale transformation, SST pro actively partners government agencies, at the state and district levels as well as like-minded corporate partners. It also strives to create local self-help groups within local communities that take ownership to be the change they want to see.

The aim is to empower communities from within, through a sustainable model of converting individual beneficiaries into community leaders. They, in turn, motivate and guide other members of the community to bring about equitable social and economic transformation in a. manner that will ensure sustainable holistic development.

The model envisaged is a truly democratic one, in that it is 'of the people, by the people and for the people: The focus is on developing self-sustenance in a manner that breaks the cycle of dependency on external donors. If the approach is participatory, the aim is to empower. And so a seed burgeons forth, developing grass roots up, to become a banyan tree that nurtures all beneath its embracing canopy.

From empowering women and farmers to establishing primary health centers, balwadis and anganwadis, veterinary clinics and support to rural schools to water conservation projects, SST's interventions have enabled these communities to own and steer their developmental progress, ensuring economic prosperity, societal harmony and overall prosperity.

It is highly satisfying to note that there is ample evidence in SST-supported villages, of a complete absence of domestic violence, of clean streets, affordable health care and educational facilities, adept water management projects and perceptible improvement in standards of living and prosperity indices.

Introduction THIS IS THE story of a silent revolution, one that has been unfolding in the villages of India for the past two decades. A revolution in which thousands of men and women living in some of India's most impoverished communities have found the strength within themselves to turn their lives around. It is a story of broken things being fixed, of people coming together, of lives being transformed.

This is the story of SST, the Srinivasan Services Trust, the social arm of the TVS Motor Company and Sundaram-Clayton.

Over the past 25 years, SST has evolved into an organization that approaches rural development in a radically different way.

SST partners with communities across five Indian states and works with a team of over 400 who live within the communities that they serve. SST works in deceptively simple ways, using counterintuitive interventions that result in remarkable transformations. Through years of learning, SST has discovered a unique model of community development that creates real, dynamic, replicable change.

SST's work is centered on two things-factories and temples. The factories are where TVS Motor Company's world-class vehicles come to life. The temples, ancient edifices that have been painstakingly renovated all over south India, continue to be the centre of rural life.

Today, within these villages, people are living to their full potential.

There is the quiet hum of things functioning as they should. People are working, saving and building homes for themselves that have solid walls and roofs that keep out the rain. They fill these homes with comforts. Running water, electricity, plastic chairs to sit on. The children of these communities are learning, bumper harvests are recorded and contented livestock doze peacefully in the shade. One good idea runs into the next. One positive change inspires ten more.

Laughing children teach their parents to wash their hands with soap.

Sun-burned men learn to cultivate organic crops. At night, their mothers learn to read.

There are parts of the SST story that seem too good to be true- they go so far against what we have come to believe is possible in this world. But this is no fairy tale; this is the story of a living, breathing revolution.

At the beginning of the SST journey, there were no heroes in capes seeking to change the world, no lofty mission statements. There was no belief or expectation that this would be anything very different from the charity wing of any family-run company. No one thought that thousands of villages would be transformed or that the lives of millions of people would be touched.

Even today, Venue Srinivasan, the Founder and Managing Trustee of SST, finds nothing very remarkable about the organization he has so lovingly nurtured. It IS the people in India's rural communities and their unlimited posterities that he finds so inspiring.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages