Our visit to Proto Village
The first thing that struck me as soon as I entered the village was the stark difference in temperature between the indoors and the outdoors. Mud walls held together by lime, with vents for circulation created an instant cooling effect in the houses. Just one of many innovations at the proto village.
Proto Village is a concept village created by Kalyan Akkipeddi near Anantpur district in Andhra Pradesh. Kalyan Akkipeddi is a MBA graduate who spent a number of years in the corporate world before deciding to embark on a journey across India. The drive for this journey came from a deep desire to understand his own country. His only condition was that he would not spend money on stay or food and relying only on the hospitality of strangers to provide him with basic needs. He realised travelling through the cities would be a lot more expensive and also not provide him with a cultural understanding of the country. And thus he started his journey through the villages of India trying to gain new knowledge but more importantly finding himself.
What would start out as a month or a two-month trip turned out to be a 2 and a half year life-changing experience. He evaluated the villages in and around the district based on diversity of skill, caste, occupation, education, proximity to government bodies and NGO footprint. He then decided to buy 12 acres of land near Tekulodu which had about 80 villages in close proximity and matched the criteria he was looking for.
Our journey at the Proto Village started out with the most adorable Joey (the village labrador) welcoming us with pecks and hugs! After the round of welcome with the dogs, we sat down with Kalyan for a detailed discussion about the concept and the idea of the proto village.
The main idea behind the proto village was to create a community that could sustain itself for an extended period of time. What we now know as cities, have been in existence for only about 300 years or so, whereas tribal communities have survived and prospered for thousands of years. Cities have already shown major signs of decay with the rising pollution levels, plastic contamination, water pollution and overpopulation. Kalyan speaks of resilience and the aspects of a community that creates resilience. A person’s fundamental needs involve food, shelter and clothing. Kalyan goes on to extend this concept and to create a sustainable community, the following nine factors play a key role :
- Food
- Water
- Shelter
- Clothing
- Healthcare
- Energy
- Communication
- Connectivity
- Trade
- Disaster Management
The concept of interdependence is something Kalyan constantly emphasises on. Trying to create a single community that can provide for all of the above is too idealistic and can potentially create a closed community. The openness of the community to fresh ideas is important, so the idea of creating value chains across a network of villages where each village can contribute to a part of the process, thus creating value at each step creating sustenance while being interdependent. The core philosophy of such interdependence stemming from the idea of “I am because you are.” While creating this network of interdependence, it is important to stress the fundamental principles that all participating members have to adhere to. “A deep respect for soil, air and water” is what Kalyan stresses on. Any idea or activity that involves the proto village requires the members to have utmost respect for these basic elements. While these are not laws in the community, everyone seems to follow them out of pure respect for nature. This is missing in cities today. The respect for these principles is shown in Kalyan’s marketing strategies where he refuses to sell on Amazon because selling on Amazon requires bubble wrapping.
Forests are the first casualty during development. This is evident in cities like Bengaluru where orders are passed for cutting down trees in favour of industries. Over the years, this has led to a sudden rise in temperatures, drying up of groundwater, and a more polluted environment. It is important to understand the need to live responsibly.
Across his travels, Kalyan encountered several homes who have been categorised as living below the poverty line and yet they were able to host him and feed him for months at a time. This led to him questioning the very definition of poverty. The idea of poverty comes from differences, whereas the idea of resilience comes from similarities. The problem with the existing definition of poverty is that it is solely based on the concept of money. And if money is the baseline, then even if we provide everyone with enough income to lift them out of poverty, then increased inflation will cause the poverty line to increase as well. As long as society is structured as a pyramid, there will always continue to be people at the bottom. Instead, redefining society based on resilience hopes to eliminate the idea of poverty itself. At proto village, every member develops skills to ensure continued sustenance of the village, hence increasing an individual’s self-worth and at the same time, ensuring the idea of poverty can’t exist.
When asked about scaling out, Kalyan believes that scaling out is not always the best option. A forest does not scale out, but the diversity of the forest increases over a period of time. This is what Kalyan aims to do with the proto village, where creating an interconnected web of villages, with each village being unique in its value creation, and also contributing to the entire value chain, creates a diverse society which is highly efficient. These model villages start off by being unique and diverse, the creation of interdependence and thus establishing harmony. Over a period of time, these networks organise themselves, to create continued value and also innovating to identify newer opportunities by networked collaboration based on the core principles.
There are two main points of leverage while creating these interlined villages. Education and Trade. While education enables people to transit knowledge, trade creates the ability to exchange goods. In such a system, money becomes an incentive towards replenishment. The current model of education at the proto village emulates the Gurukula system of learning for the modern world. Kids are not taken through a structured program, but given free access to participate and learn anything they like out of their own interest. Kalyan compares such a system of education to planting a tree. Once the tree is planted, all you need to do is water it and then it finds a way to grow on its own. Children are like that. The common notion might be that the kids will slack, but examples at the proto village show us quite the opposite. Making the best use of technology, kids learn how to make solar-powered boats, and code in C, purely out of their own interest to create. The kids are mandated by the same principles of creation as the adults — respect for soil, water and air.
One of the more obvious problems in creating such communities is, how do you get people to build systems that they have not created before. It can be overwhelming to be in charge of creating your own source of electricity to building your own house. Kalyan believes in the idea of “Demonstrate, don’t preach”. He focuses on iteration and failure to achieve something is ok, as long as you get back at it the next day. He does not believe in charity and the focus is on empowering people with the knowledge to create what they want. This ideology was very evident in our visit to the proto village where people where hustling constantly, and everyone walked around with the kind of joy in their faces that you don’t get to see in cities anymore.
It is important to not be constrained by existing systems while trying to create a new concept. New ideologies require a new foundation and this is what Kalyan aims to do with the idea of a Rural Economic Zone. There are close to 6 lakh villages in India and currently, these villages are seen as places of charity. Kalyan’s vision is to empower these villages to contribute back to the GDP by creating specialised Rural Economic Zones based on the concepts mentioned above.
After the extended conversation, Kalyan took us on a tour of the village, showing us the community kitchens, the place for learning, named “Maya Bazaar”, a maker space for people and also a tour of his own house. A remarkable quality of the village is that nothing is left to waste. The key principles of respect can be found everywhere. The choice of plants for farming based on the context and availability of resources in the region, raw materials for buildings coming from waste stones discarded from other villages, use of chicken manure to feed fishes which in turn is used for the growing of gourds.
It is quite remarkable what humans can achieve with the right guiding principles. Proto village is a living concept of that idea. At the end of the day, we begrudgingly walked back to our tempo, in contempt of the society we currently find ourselves in.
To find out more about Kalyan and the Proto Village, you can visit http://protovillage.org/
