News That Stays News

“O if they would give that diligence to the rooting out of vice… which they give unto vain questionings” March 18, 2013

Pakakala II is home to an aro plant.  Like most aro plants, it had a pump to bring up groundwater, a storage tank, and perhaps some calcium compound to promote the precipitation or aggregation.  It’s also got this big electrical thing.  But, no one we spoke to, within an hour and a half of Pakakala found that remarkable.  The people filling their  twenty liter tanks from the faucets beneath the black stone plaque (this aro plant dedicated by so and so on such and such a date), didn’t seem to find that remarkable.  The right to do that between seven and eight every morning for a month cost Rs. 80 instead of Rs. 75, but that seemed fair in the grand scheme of things.  That the right extended to filling water tanks in the evening if the faucets were available, but not to knowing when the faucets would be available, fazed no one.  The name of the company that had installed the beautiful reverse-osmosis water purifier did not ring a bell.

It was beautiful if you knew what you were looking at, which the operator and the operator’s son and I and my driver and my translator and, so far as we could discern, no one else did.  Provides clean water, probably prevents ailments for scores of families in Pakakala II, though not in Pakakala III because people don’t seem to be aware of any reason to travel that far to get the water.

Maybe that’s too cynical.  Water purifier or not, I was sick on the way out to Pakakala, three and a half hours from the nearest large city.  And, I couldn’t ask more questions while I was there because I would be sick on the way back, too.  After all, these guys were on businessweek’s list of top american [sic] social entrepreneurs of 2012.  They were on the MIT tech review’s 50 disruptive companies in the same year, for trying [sic] to make money on telemedicine clinics in rural Punjab.  Even before that, before their CEO moved to Delhi, when he was still dreaming of providing pre and postnatal care in Andra Pradesh, they had been recognized  by a joint venture of USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

It’s hard to be appreciate such things on a queasy stomach.  An experience that I’m glad one or two hundred people in Pakakala II have less often, right now.