My first field
visit with Sarvajal began with my journey from Ahmadabad to Jaipur. I was
incredibly excited because this felt personal: Rajasthan is my home state and
it always feels good to be home. In addition, I wanted to see, how the
organization I had just started working for was helping communities from my
home state.
I reached Jaipur
in the early morning and went straight to my hotel for a brief rest in order to
recharge myself for the day. After a power nap, I met the local team and we
planned to start the day by visiting a franchisee’s location on the outskirts
of Jaipur. We took a bus ride to the location. The roadways bus, as expected,
was jam-packed. There wasn’t much space to stand and people kept falling all
over each other due to sudden brakes. Despite the ride not being smooth,
it was still fun – always an adventure
traveling in India!
We arrived at our
franchisee’s plant. His name was Govind
Singh. The place was neat and everything was in order. He showed us the place.
After a short chat, we asked him about his experience with Sarvajal so far.
Govind came across as a person dedicated
to his work. One of our team members told me that sometimes Govind himself
delivers water to his customers despite having 9 supporting staff. This is because he still gets pleasure from interacting
with his customers and seeing how the water he provides is making a difference in their lives. For this
same reason, he has been actively
participating in the local marketing activities hosted by Sarvajal. He is also earning good money by selling 200-800
campers every day.
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| Shri Gurukripa Franchisee water shop |
One thing that
struck me the most about Govindwas the
effort he had invested; everything from putting campers on the car for
delivery to cleaning the place was supervised by him . He also took great care about hygiene. It felt wonderful seeing Sarvajal impacting people’s
life directly. Not only the people who get their clean water and Govind Ji but
also the 9 workers and their families.
After finishing
our visit with the franchisee, I headed out for the next road trip to Ladnu
which is around 300KMs from Jaipur.
Reaching Ladnu after travelling 8 long
hours I was greeted by local team members Ajay & Gorender Ji.
Ajay had recently
joined Sarvajal and Gorender ji had been working with Sarvajal for the past 6
years. Both of them were really nice and were quite knowledgable about the
communities and the local marketing activities they do.
I was all covered
in dust and sand and feeling really exhausted so we called it a day. We started
our day the next morning at 9:30 AM and visited the local public school to
conduct our school drive activity. We noticed there was some other function going on simultaneously. Despite that I was excited to
see many enthusiastic students come to take part in the event. We explained
about what Sarvajal does and why the work of providing safe drinking water is
important before asking the students to draw pictures on the theme of safe and
clean water.
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| School drive at Public school in Ladnu |
Some of the kids
really amazed us with their beautiful paintings.. In the end, we
gave out prizes to the winners in appreciation of their effort and enthusiasm.
We ended our visit by distributing Sarvajal water to participants.
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| School drive at Public school in Ladnu |
Stay posted for the next installments of visitng Sarvajal in the field!
---Monika Meena
[Monika Meena is a fellow at Piramal Sarvajal. Find out more about us at Sarvajal and follow us on Twitter at @PiramalSarvajal]
