Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Amitabha Sadangi -- Creating Wealth through Water

Amitabha Sadangi, a post-graduate in labour and social welfare, comes from a farming family in Orissa. They have seen what water paucity means and how it affects the life of people. Because of scarcity of water they were able to sow only one crop a year and as a result could never meet their basic needs of life.

Amitabha sold news papers to fund his education. Once he was done with his post-graduation, he knew what he wanted to do. He started Internation Development Enterprise (IDE) in 1984 to provide affordable products to rural families to tackle water scarcity problems.

IDE developed Treadle pumps and drip irrigation kits, suitable for rural areas. Treadle pump costs only Rs 500 and can draw water from 25 feet. Treadle pumps are very cheap when compared with diesel pumps. IDE has sold over 750K treadle pumps and helped many families meet the basic needs of their lives.

Drip irrigation kits developed by IDE are also very cheap compared to other commercial products. IDE kits are available for 5-7K per acre as compared with 50K per acre for other kits. In many cases the return on investment for rural families are as good as three times. Drip irrigation also reduces the water requirement for irrigation be less than half.

Amitabha, early in life, understood the value water can create for the society and he is working hard to create that value.

What we need to ask ourselves is when there are many who need water and are dying because non-availability of water, can we be careless in our usage?