'Man'ager of the Masses

He hurtles down the pot-holed roads on a fat bike and heads turn. He baritones into a microphone and an auditorium full of women reacts with delight. He flashes a grin and people fall all over themselves to do his bidding. He is young and dashing. Pop singer? Macho man? Casanova? Corporate honcho?

Meet Gaurav Joshi. The dirt roads that he races down are that of Indore in Madhya Pradesh. The women are the slum-dwellers of the small city. And he is the Programme Officer at the NGO, the curiously abbreviated CECOEDECON, which works with women in slums. And Gaurav barely has time to stop and take stock of the waves of admiration and compliance in his wake as he zooms from one task to another errand.

And he works in a State where nearly 40 per cent of the urban population, comprising six million people, lives below the poverty line. A whopping 2.4 million people live in slums, a figure that even officials admit is far below the actual statistics. The Human Development Index ranks Madhya Pradesh as 28th in India, way down the table. About 40 per cent of Indore's population lives in slums and half the children in the slums are born at home.

Gaurav is a social worker by profession. An M Phil in Social Work from Delhi University, he came back to his hometown to work with a slum health project. His area of operations is about 50 slums spread across the rapidly growing city. His constituency: about 3000 women who work variously as maids, labourers, rag pickers and sanitation staff. His mandate: To ensure that the women organize themselves and implement a calendar of ante-natal care and immunization for pregnant women and their children. His brief: Ensure the cooperation among the women goes beyond health and disentangles the myriad problems they face living in such degraded conditions.

What’s so special about him? “Nothing special! Except that I am in a profession that is yet to be recognized as one. I think that is what we need now, people taking up social project management as a serious, academic discipline and training. That’d make implementation of development schemes so much more efficacious,” he says. And isn’t politics another such avenue? “Yes, that too, though I am not thinking about it right now.”

People are the driving force behind Gaurav Joshi. “Whatever I do, I want to work with people. They inspire me, they motivate me. I am exhilarated when I am with people,” he says. As it is evident from his unbounded enthusiasm and the willing participation of the women in the mammoth urban health event he is anchoring. The exhaustion darkening his face cannot dampen his spirits as he implores the gathering to do just one more slogan.

“I try to be as sincere as possible in my work. It seems futile to even have projects like this unless we put in some dedicated efforts to make it happen. It is all scientific, plugging gaps, identifying strengths and shoring up leaders. And then they, the people, will take care of it.”

It is a heartening imagery that Gaurav features in. A growing city in India, slums waking up to better infrastructure, supportive, aware men, confident, smart women, happy, healthy children who may yet see the black of a board in some school soon.

Sheer drive, unerring instincts, ability to build up rapport with and crack the toughest of nuts, hardened in the miserable slum scenario, steely grit sheathed in petals! And an unadulterated, streamlined, spiral-bound dream for tomorrow!

– Meet Gaurav Joshi, the ultra savvy, true-blue, ivy league professional in a social worker’s khadi wrapping. All set to change things wherever he is. He is, indeed, worth writing a blog about.