Chief Guest Dr. Abhay Bang’s Convocation address
IRMA Convocation 2018
Mr. Dilip Rath, Chairman of IRMA, Prof. Hitesh Bhatt, Director, the faculty members, graduating students…the guests who have assembled here… I am very pleased to see the doting mothers who have come to see their children getting their graduation degree. I must also mention Dr. Amrita Patel whom I am especially pleased to meet here again.
You have honoured me by inviting me to the convocation of this legendary institute. Thank you.
Young friend who have received their postgraduate diplomas today richly deserve to be congratulated (thunderous applause). You deserve this not only for your hard work. There are three other gifts with which you are blessed. First, you have trained in one of the most glorious institutions of the country. You are very fortunate (applause). Hereafter, you are the masters of your life- practice it masterly, masterfully, and meaningfully. Whatever you do, wherever you go, prove that you are the masters of the art of rural management and rural development (applause).
Your second gift is that you have bigger challenges to tackle. Forty years ago when Rani and I entered rural health, we had three challenges- malaria, mortality, and malnutrition. You are blessed with much bigger challenges. Today, we have a larger population of India and so, a larger field to work with, more inequality, jobless growth, global warming, farmer suicides, and bank scams. Both capitalism and liberalism are faced with a serious crisis. You are blessed with more challenges and, hence, bigger responsibilities. Life awaits you more eagerly than it awaited us.
Third, you have more resources to solve those problems. Richer tools and technological solutions to your problems are at your command. Digital and mobile technology, bio technology, information technology have enhanced your capabilities by several times. A globalized world has opened up infinite possibilities. In short, you are entering the real world full of rural possibilities. Hence, you deserve bigger congratulations. (Applause). When you step out of the gates of this institution today with your certificates in your hands, with your name and degree written on one side of the certificate, do look carefully: the other side is blank. You have been given a blank cheque today, a blank cheque of life on which you have to write your future (applause). It is your privilege and your responsibility to decide what you will write with your life. From tomorrow you will begin a new life. And now the real question starts- what will you do with this only life that you have got?
You get this human life only once. There is no once more. What are you going to do with it? Don’t sell your life for the sake of money. There is infinite money in the world. We have a GDP that is something like 80 trillion dollars. There is no dearth of money.
Imagine that you are standing on the seashore with miles and miles of sand and billions and billions of sand particles. You are standing on that shore with one diamond in your hand. Would you exchange that diamond for the sand? Only a fool will exchange the diamond for the sand- the diamond is much more precious because it is only one. Money is like sand particles. You have a diamond in your hand today. Don’t be befooled by the offers of huge salaries and money. Don’t exchange your life for that sand (applause). Money only provides you with the means for survival, not the meaning for survival. (Applause). And so, find out that meaning for your life. Viktor Frankl, a German psychologist, has very beautifully said in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Those who know the why of living have no problems with the how of living.”
All of us are usually preoccupied with ‘how I am going to do?’ What kind of house we will have, whether we will have a car or not, or an AC… what kind of office will we have.
These are all the ‘how’ of living. All this becomes immaterial if you have one noble purpose with which you passionately identify. If you get the ‘why’ of living, everything else becomes immaterial. Life becomes beautiful; thorns become roses with fragrance if you have that one purpose of life. So don’t forget to ask yourselves the question: “Why am I living? What for?” Discover your ‘why’ of living. And I urge you to make an appointment with yourself today five years from now in the future. Decide where you want to meet yourselves five years from now. What should you be doing at that time? What should you have done by that time? This ‘five years from now’ will become your commitment, your dream. And that dream will give purpose to your life.
Very often you might ask yourselves the question: “But where will I find the purpose?”
Do you all know the famous story of Birbal’s fool? When Akbar asked Birbal to find the ten biggest fools in his empire, Birbal went searching. In those days, fools were not found so frequently in Delhi (laughter and applause). With efforts Birbal found nine but not the tenth fool. The deadline was fast approaching. It got to be eleven in the night and Birbal was still looking for the tenth fool. He saw at one place under some light coming from a window a man bent and searching for something in the street. He asked the man what he was looking for. The man said that he had lost his diamond ring. Birbal asked the man where he had lost the ring. The man replied that he had lost it in the forest on the other side of Yamuna. “Then why are you looking for it here?” asked Birbal. The man replied that it was dark that side whereas there was light on the side where he was searching!
IRMA graduates must go where the problems are, not where they are not (applause). With all humility at my disposal I urge you to give meaning to your life: go where the problems are, not where the facilities are. You are not required at places with facilities because you become a problem there. There are long queues there. With your certificates you stand at the end of the queue. Pitiable! Go elsewhere and start a new queue (applause). Become pioneers. Vinobha Bhave came up with a strategic master stroke once. He said, “Turn your back on the world and the whole world will be standing behind you.” (Applause)
What you need to do is turn your direction 180 degrees; then you come first, you become the pioneer. There are many challenges waiting in the rural areas to be solved, explored, and studied. You know this better than I do. And now you have the art in your hands regarding how to do that.
So my young friends, 30 years ago Rani and I with our fresh medical public health degrees decided to go to Gadchiroli, the kala paani of Maharashtra. It was the wisest decision of my life. We learnt more about medical and public health in the recesses of Gadchiroli. So, my advice to you is: find your own Kurukshetra (applause). Never forget that Gita was not a talk in the classroom. The reason it continues to inspire after three thousand years of its being written is that it was not a classroom talk but a lecture delivered in the Kurukshetra of life. It is a wonderful module of training and education. If Krishna had, like a rishi, delivered the lecture to Arjun, I am doubtful if we would have remembered it today. But it was delivered on the battle ground. You are going to such a Kurukshetra now. Create your own Gitas. New challenges await you. They invite you.
There are several challenges in rural development but I will mention three which are very visible. There are nearly 100 tribal districts in India. We may not be aware, but there are a hundred million tribal people in India with one-third of the tribal population living here. Socially, culturally, and economically there are the most marginalized people in India. You will be barely able to look at the health indicators of the tribal population because there are no data. We have, masterfully, not collected data on tribal health so that nobody can raise fingers at us. I am the Chairman of the National Expert Committee on Tribal Health. We are trying to develop a picture of the health care and health situation of the tribal people but there is no data. Many tribal districts, as you would know, are affected by Naxalsim. I am sure you would have read about the forty-seven Naxalites who were killed in Gadchiroli and Chhattisgarh in the last 3-4 days. Which also tells you there is a problem. Without economic development and without equalizing the tribal people with the rest of the country the problem will persist. Forceful development is a problem. Some five million tribal people have been displaced because of development projects. They are living in various city slums, surviving at the bottom of the rung. This is not the way to pursue tribal development. So, you need to set up new models of tribal development, which will not replicate the agricultural model. This is because tribal suicides are partly linked to agricultural models and partly to pre-agricultural models.
Today’s education doesn’t offer them any light. That is because the curricula are same for tribal children as for their counterparts in Mumbai. The tribal child, hence, is utterly confused and does not understand what is being taught. On the first day of school the tribal child is taught Marathi and English, both foreign languages to the child who only knows Hoodi. Imagine yourselves in that situation had you been taught Russian and Spanish on the first day of school. How do we allow tribal children to grow intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually without displacing them from their natural environments? Tribes thrive in the forests. Please become pioneers of tribal development.
Nearly 30 lakh children die in India every year. Whereas in the developed world infant mortality is now down to three. We talk of digital dividends, but can we let our children die? The Hon’ble Chairman mentioned the home-based newborn care model that we have developed. The crux of that is empowering the mother and the health worker so that children may be saved. The Government of India has incorporated this in its national plan. Currently, eight lakh ‘ashas’ are being trained on that model. I am told that 8 million new mothers received home-based newborn care last year. Yet there are enormous gaps in the implementation of the model. Can we organize mothers’ clubs or mothers’ cooperatives? Ultimately, health care should be in the hands of the people themselves. Insurance, finance, doctor delivered and hospital dependent model of health care is not suitable for this country. The per capital cost in the US is $9, 400 in the US for this type of model annually. This is not even per capita incomes for Indian families. So the US model is not very appropriate for our country. Can we provide health care to 130 crore people living in one million locations in villages and hamlets from a few thousand hospitals in those areas?
Returning from Johns Hopkins in 1984, I met an old man in Delhi during a conference at the Gandhi Peace Foundation. He resembled Mahatma Gandhi a little. It turned out that he was actually the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. He had been a professor with Santiniken. He asked me what I had studied at America. Then he asked me to describe health. I uttered the WHO definition. The old man replied, “That is a western concept.” He asked me the Indian definition of health. I did not know. I did not even know that there existed an Indian definition of health. He said, “The word is Swasthya in Hindi and Sanskrit. Whoever is stable within is healthy- that is what it means.” (Applause) What a beautiful definition!
My studies in the US and in medical school in India had never taught me this insight. I coined a dream for myself – taking a cue from Mahatma Gandhi – ‘Aarogya Swaraj’. This does not mean ‘rule of the self’ that could give rise to a million Hitlers. According to Mahatma Gandhi it means ‘rule on the self’. (Applause)
But who will develop the model of ‘Aarogya Swaraj’? Ask the rural what their priorities are. They will definitely mention livelihood, children’s education, healthcare and so on. But I have yet to come across a village where the women stated alcohol as priority. You are teaching increasing productivity to farmers including marketing, processing, and collecting. But while raising incomes do not forget to ask where that income is going and its use. We did a study in Gadchiroli on the consumption of tobacco in 2006. The NRHM budget for the district was Rs. 10 crore; ICDS budget for malnutrition was Rs. 14 crore; MNREGA budget for that year was Rs. 22 crore. People had consumed tobacco worth Rs. 77 crore. But there is worse. The survey was repeated in 2016- people of Gadchiroli had spent Rs. 260 crore on tobacco! That year they had also spent Rs. 79 crore on alcohol. People lost twice the money that the government had put in. Poverty is generated not just through economic reasons but also through cultural and behavioural ones. Can we not reduce this spending? There will be enormous benefits including women’s safety, dignity, and security.
I was asking colleagues of IRMA who had come to receive me at the airport yesterday about their views on prohibition. One of the women in the group replied, “We don’t see rowdiness and men lying on the roads here.” Women in Gujarat move relatively freely even after evenings. If you want to set up cooperatives in other states, it is difficult to cobble people together for meetings in the evening. That is because a single drunkard can ruin the meeting. Alcohol, through which governments earn huge dividends, does not allow social cohesion. It does not allow women to come out after 6 pm. It doesn’t allow group interactions. It does not allow Gram Sabhas to operate. When you ask Sarpanches why they do not attend Gram Sabha meetings they reply “why should we get insulted?” An alcoholic can publicly insult the Sarpanch- you cannot fight with him.
So, we need to find alternative ways for economic development in the face of money coming from alcohol and tobacco. This will be an alternative way of reducing poverty apart from health and other benefits.
People are waiting for you with hundreds of such challenges in a million villages and hamlets. My friends, your future will be shaped not by the length of your CVs, not by your designations in five star organizations, not by your salaries, not by the speed of your computers. Your future will be shaped by the place you choose to go. The challenges you take upon yourselves, and your responses to those challenges.
We often struggle with the question: “Who am I?” This is a bit difficult to answer. But there is a way of understanding this question. Go to the Himalayas and practice meditation but you may still not find out. In Physics, a ray of light becomes visible when it falls on an object. Otherwise it is invisible; the self is like a ray of light. Yourself becomes visible to you when you take up a challenge.
You are aware of Maajhi’s story – one man against the mountain. Your problems could be mountain sized but new paths can still be developed if you start digging.
In 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi announced Salt Satyagraha, Motilal Nehru wrote a 22-page letter to Mahatma Gandhi stating in legally couched language that Bapu’s decision was wrong. He was certain the British Empire, the most powerful in humankind, would completely ignore Mahatma Gandhi’s call for a fistful of salt! He was certain Mahatma Gandhi would lose face and urged him to withdraw his programme. All Mahatma Gandhi did was write a reply to Motilal Nehru on a postcard saying, “Try to do it, Yours Bapu!”
At twelve in the night there was a knock on Motilal Nehru’s door. A British soldier walked in saying, “We have a warrant against you for acting against the Empire. The Empire is threatened by your action. Motilalji asked if he could write a message. The soldier said he could but the message could not be a political one. Motilal took a telegram form and wrote, “I saw the result before even trying!”
So, my friends, when I give my best wishes for your future my only advice to you is “Try to do it!”
Thank you.
