DID YOU KNOW Mumbai's tiffin delivery network has notched the Six Sigma rating-just one error in six million transactions.

What do global giants like General Electric and Motorola have in common with a humble tiffin delivery network that delivers lunch boxes to citizens in Mumbai each day? For starters, they reside in the rarefied stratosphere of a Six Sigma rating or an efficiency rating of 99.999999-one error in six million transactions, a feather in the dabbawalla's Gandhi cap-as rated by Forbes Global, a big American business weekly.

Each day in Mumbai, 3,500 dabbawallas deliver nearly 1.5 lakh lunch boxes to Mumbai's hungry officegoers, as they have for over half a century. Tiffins are collected from homes and passed down a network of hands, sorted and delivered to offices, and then returned the same day.

Their Six Sigma secret lies in a system of colour-and number-coding tiffins that ensures even the bulk of the largely illiterate dabbawallas can grasp addresses easily while carting tiffins across trains and handcarts. They make just one mistake in two months. All this for a measly Rs 150 per tiffin per month, which when pooled among these magical lunch logisticians, gives them a take-home pay of around Rs 3,000 per month. Who needs management gurus?

CHIPKO MOVEMENT
Green Warriors

CHIPKO ACTIVISTS: original tree huggers

Chipko in Hindi means "stick to". In the early 1970s, that's what thousands of villagers in the fertile valleys of the upper Himalayas did when wood contractors came to fell their trees. They hugged the trees and dared the government to have them cut. The contractors backed off. And so, one of the greatest ecological movements of India was born. It was coordinated by the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh, then a tiny Sarvodaya organisation, headed by the rugged Chandi Prasad Bhat.

Women, the worst sufferers of environmental degradation (in villages they have to draw water and cut firewood and fodder), became the spearheads of Chipko. Such was the following they built in Garhwal Himalayas that the Uttar Pradesh government was forced to ban felling of trees in high slopes of the mountain range. They also got the Central government to bring in new laws on forest felling that ultimately gave birth to the Department of Environment as we know it today.

INDIA MARK II PUMP
The Simple Solution

DID YOU KNOW The Rural Water Supply programme has used more than 30 lakh Mark II pumps in India and the device has also been exported to Africa and Latin America.

For appropriate technology, this Indian wonder, like the Jaipur Foot and low-cost housing, is also a globally respected phenomenon. In the late 1960s, when drought scarred India, a search for a durable water pump began; with aid, it was easier to drill boreholes than work the long-used, cast-iron pump based on American and European designs. That was for family use, to be pumped a few times a day. India needed hand-pumps that worked round the clock.

So at a workshop sponsored by UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the governments of India and Karnataka in 1975, the search was initiated for a pump that could be manufactured in an unsophisticated workshop, would be easy to maintain, and wouldn't cost more than $200 (less than Rs 1,800 at 1975 rates of exchange; it costs close to Rs 10,000 today).

As teams scoured the country, a Sholapur mechanic's design was found to be the most workable and durable, and the India Mark II was born after field testing.

By 1984, 36 manufacturers were producing one lakh units, which doubled in the next three years, spread across India and were exported to water-scarce regions in Africa and Latin America. The government's rural water supply programme has used more than 30 lakh of these units, equipped with polypropylene washers and galvanised steel parts to prevent rusting. Over the years, the pump has become more sophisticated with increasing use of stronger, lightweight metal, and has spawned the new avatar of the best known hand-pump in the world: India Mark III.

It's still very simple.

CHECK DAMS
Banishing Drought

The ancients were wise because they had less. And many of those who have less in modern-day India, and they are legion, have taken to the ways of the wise. See what has happened with check dams, which archaeological evidence suggests existed even 5,000 years ago.

But in a poor country low-tech and low-cost work best, and these small barriers built across the direction of water flow on shallow rivers and streams have made a roaring comeback, thanks to the effort of pioneering NGOs in Rajasthan and Gujarat. According to Engineers Against Poverty, an NGO, up to 30 per cent of irrigation water in India could be sourced from community-run check dams.

These dams retain excess water flow during monsoon rains in a small catchment area (aquifers) behind the structure. Pressure created in the catchment area helps force this water into the ground, and this replenishes nearby groundwater reserves and wells. The cost of irrigating one hectare of land using a check dam is between Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000 compared to a large dam and canal network that costs more than Rs 2 lakh to service.

The initial investment in a check dam-depending on the size, anything from Rs 20,000 to Rs 6 lakh for these community projects-can be recovered in one or two seasons through an increase in crop yield. Also, unlike large dams and other large-scale irrigation projects, the technology, finances and skill for maintenance are nominal, making them more accessible to poor farmers.

This has changed the face of water-scarce areas near Alwar in Rajasthan, Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh, parts of Andhra Pradesh and the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, with the state having kicked off a scheme to build 2,500 check dams. The low-tech community project has spread to Uttaranchal and Bihar. As parts of India reel under sub-par monsoons, they can take heart from the fact that a majority of check dams are brimming with cached water.

FREE PRESS
Write to Know

DID YOU KNOW There are more than 5,000 dailies, 16,000 weeklies and over 6,000 fortnightlies in all Indian languages.

It's possible that were it not for an institution upholding freedom of speech and expression, and the right to information, you wouldn't be reading this. The irony is, of course, that arguably the most subversive mechanism in any society, the free press, is the greatest champion of India's Constitution, democracy and freedom.

In turn, except for two years of Emergency in 1975-77, when Indira Gandhi and her cohorts trampled on the rights of individuals as enshrined in the Constitution, the right to a free press has been vehemently defended in open society and courts of law.

The Statesman, which was routinely censored, considers the nearly blank front pages from those days a badge of honour. The Indian Express and its feisty proprietor, Ramnath Goenka, took on Indira Gandhi, the Emergency, the surging Ambanis, a defensive Rajiv Gandhi-and won.

There is much that India's press still needs to learn, a growth curve that mirrors the country's. However, the media, earlier through print but now also via television, remains the greatest insurance against corruption, political skulduggery and corporate excess. During disasters, it brings vital news that helps raise funds for relief work, and prevent misuse of precious aid. And next only to general elections, it's the nation's most emphatic vox pop.

Today, there are over a hundred satellite channels that beam news and entertainment, over 5,000 dailies, 16,000 weeklies and more than 6,000 fortnightlies in all Indian languages. Because people have a right to know.

AMUL
White Knight

For almost 36 years the Amul moppet hid one of the biggest natural produce movements in the world. By 1966, when the girl edged into India's consciousness selling her "utterly, butterly delicious" product, Amul cooperative was quietly weaving what would be known as the White Revolution. Technically the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union Ltd, it was set up in 1946 on the advice of Vallabhbhai Patel and former prime minister Morarji Desai to break the cartel of milk contractors. Today Amul spearheads the National Dairy Development Board's proudest statistics to come out of Operation Flood, a milk and dairy products initiative: India has the world's largest milk production at over 78 million tonnes a year, ensures the livelihood of almost 11 million farmers in 96,000 village-level societies across India.

JAIPUR FOOT
Footprints in Time

A doctor fits a patient with a Jaipur Foot

If all I saw was your nose, it would be enough for me to sculpt the likeness of your body," says one-time wood-carver, Ram Chandra. Few would need to go that far. As it stands, thousands of people across the world's war-torn and disease-struck zones are relieved that Chandra and his colleagues at the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, a charitable trust, have for more than 30 years, often without seaeing their bodies, made the likeness of their limbs. It is one reason why people in remotest India or Rwanda or Afghanistan, who may not know much about peace or the rest of the world, are aware of Jaipur, the birthplace and headquarters of an amazing prosthesis called the Jaipur Foot.

Chandra used to see amputees fitted with cumbersome limbs that were too heavy and impractical, making it impossible to sit cross-legged or squat. So after a lesson in the anatomy of the human leg from doctors at the Sawai Man Singh Hospital, Jaipur, Chandra set to work using vulcanised rubber and wood. Tens of thousands of limbs and callipers later, it still takes about 45 minutes to make one, costs about Rs 1,500 per limb, lasts about five years and allows a person to walk, run and lift heavy weights. The Samiti undertakes annual roadshows across India for fitting prostheses and has established centres in the Philippines, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Honduras and Panama. Last January, accompanying the planeloads of aid from India to Kabul was a team with 1,000 sets of the Jaipur Foot for Afghans.

YOGA
Life Line

They call yoga an elixir. By practising one of the yogic techniques, the khechri mudra, Devraha Baba, the sage of Vrindavan and a favourite of India's senior politicos, claimed to have lived for 700 years. It may be purely anecdotal, but the efficacy of this 5,000-year-old holistic science, first noticed in an Indus Valley seal of a yogi and later codified by Patanjali in the 2nd century B.C., is accepted without question as a superb mind, body and soul exercise. Yoga schools have proliferated in thousands all over the world, and yoga teachers are the rage in urban India and among karma tourists.

Gurus claim that if followed correctly, yoga reduces heart attacks, incidence of cancer, controls diabetes, cures asthma and numerous other ailments. Scepticism exists because its advantages are not as sharply defined as an aspirin throttling a headache. Yoga is a better analgesic and anti pyretic, but as it combines the mind, body and breathing, the results are more complicated. But it's well worth it. Imagine for how long Rekha, star-yogin at 50, could be around if she practised a little khechri mudra.