STORY OF RURAL INDIA - VISUALIZATION

CHALLENGE & SELECTION

I am currently pursuing Masters in Business Administration in Human Resources; In a B-school  we are given a lot of tasks, assignments & projects to work upon. One such assignment was to  build an action plan for reducing the death rate due to snake bites in rural India.

Visualization, as an approach I have used several times often while buying clothes online or  thinking about the color which will best suit a wall, whereas things here were a bit different, I  first used visualization to know how I want to approach this problem, should I go for a primary  research or collect data from the internet to know its cause. This technique helped me map down  the pros and cons of both the ways I want to collect the data and ultimately, I chose the secondary  research as it helped me save time, money and energy.

APPLICATION

I certainly believe in pursuing my targets in a SMART way that is, it should be Specific,  measurable, achievable, relevant & time bound. Hence, without wasting time I gathered all the  data relevant to deaths in rural India and found out roughly 46,000 people die of snakebites in  India every year but most of these deaths are entirely avoidable. I feel Snakebite in India doesn’t

usually affect people of the middle and upper middle class. It’s just a poor man’s suffering, it’s a  farmer’s affliction.

Since the problem was now known to me, I had to find a solution to it and again visualization  helped me, I decided to step into the shoes of an Individual living in rural India and think about  why so many deaths take place and after analysing two major factor which popped up in my brain  was lack of awareness due to which they don’t get themselves treated at proper medical centre   & time constraint due to which they are unable to reach in due time.

Here, Visualization helped me realise how must the people of rural India would be feeling  helpless due to lack of knowledge as to how to contain the venom from spreading and no proper  connectivity and resource adds on to this.

What I visualised here is as soon as a person is bitten by a snake, the people around him become  nervous and go in a state of panic and look for an immediate solution rather than rushing to a  hospital and since in rural areas not everyone has a vehicle, they must feel very helpless as to  what to do and how to save the individuals life.

For the solution I decided to create an application for mobile phones which would make credible  information available to the public sourced from hospitals and doctors, starting from steps to  prevent mishappenings, symptoms of snakebites to steps that should be taken as a contingency  if a person is affected by a mishappening, as and when the affected person is being taken to a  doctor, It will also feature a button which will have the nearest ambulance number saved and a  single touch will send for a call to it which will help the person to reach the medical centre in due  time . This will be a very cost-effective way to spread awareness among the public and will help  in saving lives.

INSIGHT & APPROACH

The thing that I learned after completing my assignment was that the visualization as a tool not  only helped me identify the problem prima facie but it also helped me get a deeper  understanding of the situation, I certainly believe if rather than visualization I would have just  used my secondary research data to come to a solution I would have suggested a mere solution  like building more hospitals in the rural India though this is important but unawareness and lack  of connectivity is more prevalent in this region of India.

I would further like to use this approach in collaboration with story-telling which will help me  engage the audience thoroughly and to help them understand the gravity of the situation.

