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"  In 2003, social entrepreneur BP Agrawal was sitting around his Virginia house with some friends. Everyone in the crowd worked in the corporate sector, and people started bragging about the tens of thousands of dollars they&amp;#039;d contributed to charity in their native India. Suddenly, someone posed a provocative question: &amp;quot;&amp;#039;What difference would it make even if you were to contribute $100 million to India?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Agrawal recalls. &amp;quot;And everyone was quiet.&amp;quot;  It got Agrawal thinking about what kinds of interventions would make a difference for the impoverished, rural communities in India that lack access to basic health care and clean drinking water, among other things. The key, he decided, was to develop what he called self-sustainable solutions; Agrawal, who himself grew up in a small agricultural village in India, realized that by working with young Indian entrepreneurs, he could design programs that were economically, culturally and politically sustainable. Agrawal and the nonprofit he founded, Sustainable Innnovations, are now implementing these programs in a small number of Indian villages.  The work earned him a big prize; today he was announced as the 2010 winner of the Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability, an honor that comes with a $100,000 prize. But, with plans to drastically scale up his programs, Agrawal says his work is far from done. &amp;quot;Typically I work 15 to 16 hours a day,&amp;quot; says Agrawal, who has advanced degrees in both business and engineering. &amp;quot;By nature I&amp;#039;m an eternal optimist. I don&amp;#039;t take &amp;#039;no&amp;#039; for an answer.&amp;quot; Agrawal&amp;#039;s Programs: Aakash Ganga (River From Sky) This water-harvesting program rents rooftops from villagers and uses a network of gutters and pipes to channel the rainwater underground, where it is stored in a network of newly built tanks. These reservoirs can provide up to 12 liters of clean drinking water a day for each local resident. (According to the World Bank, 21 percent of the cases of communicable disease in India result from unclean drinking water.)  The project is now in six villages. &amp;quot;It costs $60,000 to $80,000 to get the program going, and the system lasts 20 to 30 years, Agrawal says. That means it costs about one dollar per person per year to provide clean water. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s insignificant for a water project,&amp;quot; Agrawal says. Later this year, Agrawal hopes to scale the project up to 100 villages, with a total population of 250,000 people. The World Bank has helped fund this program, and Agrawal is now working with the Indian government to expand to 100 villages. Arogya Ghar (Clinics for Mass Care) Rural Indian communities often lack access to any health care. (Even when clinics are located within a reasonable distance, rates of absenteeism are high, with practitioners often failing to even show up.) This project trains female high school graduates to perform basic health care in their rural communities. Agrawal and his colleagues teach these young women to use laptops loaded with all sorts of medical information and protocols. Outfitted with these laptops and some basic medicine\u2014such as antibiotics\u2014the young women go door-to-door in their villages, diagnosing and treating common problems, including diarrhea, anemia, and ear, respiratory and vaginal infections.  The women run their mini-practices as their own businesses and get to keep their earnings. A visit costs patients 25 cents. aYoung women are working in four villages as part of the program, and Agrawal hopes to expand to 50 villages by 2012. One great side effect? The program also empowers young women, most of whom had never thought they could ever run their own business. &amp;quot;When they came to our class,&amp;quot; Agrawal says, &amp;quot;you could see a glow in their eyes.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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