The Srinivasan Services Trust (SST), founded in 1996, aims to realise my father’s dream of equitable, participatory and sustainable development. SST, the social service arm of TVS Motor Company, was set up with the aim of being a committed partner in the sustainable transformation of rural communities across India. The SST model is an inclusive one that includes multiple stakeholders.
This book is testimony to the upbeat growth stories across 25 years, that started with a few villages in 1996, has touched around 5,000 villages across five states in India, in some way or the other, positively impacting the lives of approximately 3 million people, to
date. At any given point in time, the SST team engages actively with 2,500 villages.
With engaging anecdotal references and first-person narratives, the book unfolds journeys of transformation that are at once both deeply personal and empathetically collective. While tracing the dedication of local communities at the centre of change, it also pays homage to the tireless efforts of partners and TVS employees who have worked alongside to ensure that the processes initiated maintain qualitatively high standards and are sustainably integrated into the rural context. – Venu Srinivasan, Chairman, TVS Motor Company
This is the story of a silent revolution, one that has been unfolding in the villages of India for the past two decades. A revolution in which thousands of men and women living in some of India’s most impoverished communities have found the strength within themselves to turn their lives around. It is a story of broken things being fixed, of people coming together, of lives being transformed.
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This is the story of SST, the Srinivasan Services Trust, the social arm of the TVS Motor Company and Sundaram-Clayton. Over the past 25 years, SST has evolved into an organisation that approaches rural development in a radically different way. SST partners with communities across five Indian states and works with a team of over 400 who live within the communities that they serve. SST works in deceptively simple ways, using counterintuitive interventions that result in remarkable transformations. Through years of learning, SST has discovered a unique model of community development that creates real, dynamic, replicable change.
SST’s work is centred around two things—factories and temples. The factories are where TVS Motor Company’s world-class vehicles come to life. The temples, ancient edifices that have been painstakingly renovated all over south India, continue to be the centre of rural life. Today, within these villages, people are living to their full potential. There is the quiet hum of things functioning as they should. People are working, saving and building homes for themselves that have solid walls and roofs that keep out the rain. They fill these homes with comforts. Running water, electricity, plastic chairs to sit on. The children of these communities are learning, bumper harvests are recorded and contented livestock doze peacefully in the shade. One good idea runs into the next. One positive change inspires ten more.
Laughing children teach their parents to wash their hands with soap. Sun-burned men learn to cultivate organic crops. At night, their mothers learn to read. There are parts of the SST story that seem too good to be true—they go so far against what we have come to believe is possible in this world. But this is no fairy tale; this is the story of a living, breathing revolution.
At the beginning of the SST journey, there were no heroes in capes seeking to change the world, no lofty mission statements. There was no belief or expectation that this would be anything very different from the charity wing of any family-run company. No one thought that thousands of villages would be transformed or that the lives of millions of people would be touched. Even today, Venu Srinivasan, the Founder and Managing Trustee of SST, finds nothing very remarkable about the organisation he has so lovingly nurtured. It is the people in India’s rural communities and their unlimited potential that he finds so inspiring. ‘Just like the tiny drops of water that finally flow as the mighty river Amazon, it is not the hundreds of people working in SST, it is the thousands of people in the villages working for themselves who make this powerful change possible. That is what we are really harnessing,’ he says. The Trust had no intention of starting this silent revolution, of harnessing this power of change. But revolutions, silent though they may be, often have minds of their own.
This excerpt from ‘A Silent Revolution’ by Snigdha Parupudi has been published with permission from HarperCollins India.