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Friday, March 29 2024
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Proud Indian: Rising by uplifting low-income communities

Proud Indian
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Are you proud of your country? Do you contribute to the society that gratifies your social and patriotic values? Meet this NGO named Proud Indian, co-founded by Chenthil Kumar S (33). Proud Indian is a non-governmental organisation that works toward empowering low-income communities. Kumar has a Master’s in Aeronautical Engineering and simultaneously working as a Project Management Officer in Simple Energy Pvt. Ltd., Bengaluru.  

In an exclusive interview with NewsKarnataka, the co-founder of Proud Indian expressed about the NGO’s journey so far. Founded on January26,  2019, Proud Indian is still in its infancy, at the age of 3. Speaking about the aim behind naming the NGO as Proud Indian,  Kumar said, “every responsible citizen calls himself a ‘Proud Indian.’ But the name ‘Proud Indian’ gives us a huge responsibility to resolve the social issues around us.” He added that the team helps build a self-reliant community by providing the necessary financial and business-related training. One of the core projects of Proud India includes empowerment training where the NGO’s volunteers closely connect with low-income communities and train them to become small entrepreneurs. Furthermore, Proud Indian sponsors ten women graduates emerging from low-income communities to prepare for competitive exams. 

In conversation about challenges faced in implementing their projects, the co-founder explained that Proud Indian’s target beneficiaries are from the slum communities of Bengaluru. Most of the slum belongs to individual landlords. Most of these landlords hinder any developmental programs being executed on the lands to avoid legal constraints. “In some cases, landlords did not allow us to fix solar street lights, portable toilets, and so on,” Kumar claimed. The NGO team – the core members, have taken the fundraising responsibility as primary and significant to help support volunteers for fast implementation. Volunteers’ functionality usually revolves around planning and execution. “We never give any pressure to our volunteers to raise funds,” the co-founder of the NGO confessed. 

 Social media and pandemic

Social media has inevitably become a tool for marketing, advertising, and broadcasting essential updates that need to reach the public. Kumar affirmed that social media did play a significant role in the journey of Proud Indian. “As we are a very young organisation, social media helps us build our organisation in team-building and crowd fundraising. Whatever we have achieved so far has been through social media support. We can now connect with friends who believe in our financial transparency and mission towards social impact,” he said. 

As the NGO is relatively young, the pandemic affected its growth right at its roots. The pandemic involved Proud Indian hugely in getting volunteers to fulfill their field requests and fundraising. Nevertheless, they were still able to manage every request with the help of some dedicated volunteers and generous donors. Proud Indian delivered 250 grocery kits, and 1062 meals, providing various medical support for Covid Care Centers. Through this journey, Proud Indian could connect well with the community named Proud Indian LoG Community. They believe that connecting with people is crucial to creating an impact in the community and Proud Indian was able to achieve that within a concise duration. “In the first phase of the tailoring programme, we completed training for 15 women before the pandemic began. From this batch, two women out of the fifteen chose to tailor as their revenue-generating model. As part of our Lighten Up India pilot project, we were able to lighten up 24 houses in our community,” the co-founder informed. 

Why target low-income communities?

Proud Indian chose low-income communities since these communities have very little awareness of the government schemes and the importance of sustainability. Speaking about the difficulties that low-income communities face, Kumar asserted that some prominent causes of these challenges are lack of electricity, lack of employment, and lack of awareness regarding government schemes.

“We are working on installing solar lights in such communities. We are also working to build various training models to help the community people rise as entrepreneurs. In addition to that, Proud Indian is regularly creating awareness sessions on different schemes available for the benefit of such communities,” the co-founder said. 

Governmental aid and its dynamics

In conversation about the role of the government and suggestions to better the move of these authorities, Kumar proposed that root level implementation needs to be introduced. For instance, Proud Indian has made many policies for the upliftment of low-income communities, but the awareness of these policies is on the backfoot.

“When we approached the community people through our ‘Know Your Benefits’ programme, we understood their lack of knowledge towards the government schemes drafted especially for their benefits. We think that Government officials should work towards letting these schemes reach gross root levels, and government authorities can easily do this,” he added. 

A message for you

Post the pandemic; many things have changed in the volunteering structure; the ratio of volunteers and donors has drastically reduced due to various commitments, which affect the social impact balance. “We believe everything will come back to normal soon, and we all together can create a huge impact on the society if we decide to work together,” the Proud Indian co-founder urges!

“As we are working towards a low-income community, our future plan is to start an organisation in a rural area to uplift more people and help them be self-sustainable entrepreneurs,” Chenthil Kumar S. signed off. 

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Siri Shekar

The author is a student reporter who is also pursuing Psychology and English Literature. A wanderer searching for faces that inspire an optimistic place about the world, she hunts for different human experiences, not just leads for a story.

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