When Gopi Gopalakrishnan and his team mates set up a family planning camp at Kishenganj, one of the poorest districts in northeast Bihar, a few years ago, they did not know what was in store for them.
A large number of angry villagers turned up at the camp and raided it before damaging their equipment. When the shamiana was torn down, Gopalakrishnan and his colleagues had no option but to run for life.
But what was Gopalakrishnan’s crime? Janani, a non-profit entity founded by Gopalakrishnan to provide child and reproductive health services, made arrangement of family planning sterilisation for 100 people in that interior locality of Bihar, but over a thousand women with their families turned up. Once the organisers refused to take any more registration, the angry mob did the damage.
“I guess the turning point of my life came in 1995 when I moved to Bihar to set up a social marketing programme. Janani was established as a non-profit society and its purpose was to deliver family planning products (condoms and oral contraceptives) to rural communities, and products and services (IUDs, sterilisations, injectable contraceptives) to urban communities,†says Gopalakrishnan, describing his entry into social entrepreneurship.
Now, he is the project director of World Heath Partners, a global venture with an objective of providing quality healthcare and family planning to millions of rural people living in under-developed nations of the world.
Gopalakrishnan’s experience and expertise in healthcare are well recognised by now as he is on the global technical advisory board of International Finance Corporation, an affiliate of the World Bank, and on an advisory group in the Indian government’s National Rural Health Mission. He is also a member of India’s Population Commission.
Gopalakrishnan has successfully leveraged private sector resources to complement public sector necessities. He roped in social marketing companies and created a huge distribution network for many cheap but quality healthcare products. For Janani, the services were delivered through a 41,000-strong network of rural and urban facilities, both owned by the organisation and franchised through other rural and medical entrepreneurs to scale up the project. Now, Janani accounts for over 20% of family planning in Bihar.
But for Gopalakrishnan, it has been a chequered journey. “While the community responded to easy availability of products and services, there were various hurdles, most of them avoidable. There was a lot of distrust among officials about the NGO sector using private providers as its strategy. An organisation working in Bihar faced this even more,†he says.
In fact, routine clearances got delayed for months and government schemes under which such projects could have benefited had many entry barriers. “But in that process, the losers were the masses since the services could have helped them plan their lives a lot better,†he adds.
Yet, there have been high points too. “Thanks to the huge number of subsidised contraceptive products we sold, the project got nominated as one of the five most innovative projects in the world by a prestigious US university,†says Gopalakrishnan.
While working in various rural pockets of India, Gopalakrishnan now argues that in states like Bihar and UP, there are high aspirations among the very poor, a phenomenon which may ultimately energise the country.
“You will find some extremely well-qualified women, some who hold post graduate degrees, sitting idle at home because they do not have any opportunities…One caveat though: the training needs to be hands on,†he says. Gopalakrishnan like many other social entrepreneurs has taken risks in unchartered areas, but the job satisfaction of delivering larger services to a community is what keeps him going.