Jaipur Arrival

Made it to Jaipur and am spending Wednesday and part of Thursday at IIHMR, the Indian Institute for Health Management Research, just outside the Jaipur airport. This is the home base of Dr. Ashok Agarwal, who's technically the patron of my work here in Rajasthan. It is LARGE, the size of a small college campus in the US. It's also clearly a high-powered place; over the breakfast table, my companions were discussing one of Obama's administration picks (NASA head, I think) because he was also a recent co-worker of theirs. They're part of a group called Safe Water Network, over here to work on a new rainwater collection scheme. I'd trust their capacity to do it, too -- one of the guys with them is an engineer who was telling me some of his war stories, which include making a Pepsi bottling plant work with the highly-suspect Indian water and designing a sewage treatment plant that produces zero sludge. (If you don't understand why zero sludge is impressive, go to my Flickr and leaf through the public health photoset.)

I mostly spent the day soaking in the place, chilling in the computer lab, and meeting a few faculty. Mainly, I managed to define better in my head what's going on with the relationships here -- the initial project info talked about working for the Bhoruka Charitable Trust, but most of my contact has been with people from the Indian Institute for Health Management Research. The basic story is that both derive from the late Shri PD Agarwal, who is as much a rags-to-riches as you'll ever hear. See the websites for the full story, but the basic deal is that the dude came to a small town from an even smaller village, busted his butt alongside his brothers, and eventually bought a truck. From that, he became the magnate of the Transport Company of India, and the resulting wealth established the BCT to attempt to de-suckify the area of Rajasthan where he grew up. His sons run various parts of the ensuing megacorp, which handles transportation, power, mail, and other infrastructure needs.

One son, however, went to the US to do an MD (and an MPH? I'm not sure) at Johns Hopkins. That's Dr. Ashok Agarwal. Dr. Ashok returned to India and realized that the concept of "health systems management" didn't exist here, and promptly decided to start what is basically the equivalent of a healthcare MBA program. That same Institute also does a lot of training for NGOs, hospitals, and anyone else who wants to make their staff manage better. Practically, as the son who's least involved in running corporations (although he does manage a few), Dr. Ashok is also the one most directly involved in keeping BCT going. So, the two organizations share a building, though the lion's share by far is IIHMR. They divide up the work such that IIHMR does planning/research and BCT does actual work involving slogging through deserts.

Have not seen much of Jaipur the city as yet (and probably won't before I ship out for Bhorugram tomorrow), but the weather is lovely here -- feels about like Pittsburgh in mid-March. We even had a brief thunderstorm the night I arrived. Summer will show up in April, and then we'll be baking, but for now it's nice. Dr. Ashok's house in particular is very nice. It's not large; in fact, it's smaller than most doctors' houses I know in the US. It is, however, extremely well-decorated. Not lavishly, but everything is of genuinely well-executed craftsmanship, from the perfectly arranged vases of flowers to the inlaid marble all throughout to the hand-painted paisleys on the ceiling. In a country where labor is cheap but quality work is a constant struggle to find, that might be the ultimate statement of wealth. It's making me feel a little bad that all I'm able to give the guy in thanks for 2.5 months of taking care of me is a measly bottle of blended Scotch.

Made it to Jaipur and am spending Wednesday and part of Thursday at IIHMR, the Indian Institute for Health Management Research, just outside the Jaipur airport. This is the home base of Dr. Ashok Agarwal, who's technically the patron of my work here in Rajasthan (even if I've yet to meet him as of this writing). It is LARGE, the size of a small college campus in the US. It's also clearly a high-powered place; over the breakfast table, my companions were discussing one of Obama's administration picks (NASA head, I think) because he was also a recent co-worker of theirs. They're part of a group called Safe Water Network, over here to work on a new rainwater collection scheme. I'd trust their capacity to do it, too -- one of the guys with them is an engineer who was telling me some of his war stories, which include making a Pepsi bottling plant work with the highly-suspect Indian water and designing a sewage treatment plant that produces zero sludge. (If you don't understand why zero sludge is impressive, go to my Flickr and leaf through the public health photoset.)

I mostly spent the day soaking in the place, chilling in the computer lab, and meeting a few faculty. Mainly, I managed to define better in my head what's going on with the relationships here -- the initial project info talked about working for the Bhoruka Charitable Trust, but most of my contact has been with people from the Indian Institute for Health Management Research. The basic story is that both derive from the late Shri PD Agarwal, who is as much a rags-to-riches as you'll ever hear. See the websites for the full story, but the basic deal is that the dude came to a small town from an even smaller village, busted his butt alongside his brothers, and eventually bought a truck. From that, he became the magnate of the Transport Company of India, and the resulting wealth established the BCT to attempt to de-suckify the area of Rajasthan where he grew up. His sons run various parts of the ensuing megacorp, which handles transportation, power, mail, and other infrastructure needs.

One son, however, went to the US to do an MPH at Johns Hopkins. That's Dr. Ashok Agarwal. Dr. Ashok returned to India and realized that the concept of "health systems management" didn't exist here, and promptly decided to start what is basically the equivalent of a healthcare MBA program. That same Institute also does a lot of training for NGOs, hospitals, and anyone else who wants to make their staff manage better. Practically, as the son who's least involved in running corporations (although he does manage a few), Dr. Ashok is also the one most directly involved in keeping BCT going. So, the two organizations share a building, though the lion's share by far is IIHMR. They divide up the work such that IIHMR does planning/research and BCT does actual work involving slogging through deserts.

Have not seen much of Jaipur the city as yet (and probably won't before I ship out for Bhorugram tomorrow), but the weather is lovely here -- feels about like Pittsburgh in mid-March. We even had a brief thunderstorm the night I arrived. Summer will show up in April, and then we'll be baking, but for now it's nice. Dr. Ashok's house in particular is very nice. It's not large; in fact, it's smaller than most doctors' houses I know in the US. It is, however, extremely well-decorated. Not lavishly, but everything is of genuinely well-executed craftsmanship, from the perfectly arranged vases of flowers to the inlaid marble all throughout to the hand-painted paisleys on the ceiling. In a country where labor is cheap but quality work is a constant struggle to find, that might be the ultimate statement of wealth. It's making me feel a little bad that all I'm able to give the guy in thanks for 2.5 months of taking care of me is a measly bottle of blended Scotch.