Creating a Better World

Speech by Mr. Rajeev Chandran,
Spokesman for India and Bhutan at the United Nations
Given on 23rd July 2008 at Lucknow, India

Photos taken during Mr. Chandran's speech:
photo 1 | photo 2 | photo 3 | photo 4

Revered Master, brothers and sisters,

Let me first offer warmest felicitations to you, Master, on this milestone birth anniversary. The eighty-first anniversary is truly a wondrous event, and I bring you the best greetings on this occasion, and the hope that the valuable work that you and your organisation have undertaken will continue to grow further in strength, evermore.

There are many commonalities between the Ram Chandra Mission, and my organisation, the United Nations. Both enshrine universal values, values of peace, values of tranquillity, values of development, values of fraternity, equality, and dignity of every individual. These are values that the Ram Chandra Mission undertakes in a certain direction and the United Nations catalyses in one hundred and ninety-two nations, which make up its member states. But what is important is that both your organisation and the United Nations are looking in the same direction. And that direction is one that will bring us a world that is free from fear and from want. These are the two basic things that torment us as individuals, as nations, as communities. And if we are able to create a tomorrow where we are free from both fear and want, we will then create that better world to which all of us together aspire.

It is towards that end that, in the year 2000, all leaders of all nations of the world came together at the UN headquarters to come up with a basic charter, a new agenda that everybody could work towards. And we call them the Millennium Development Goals. Eight very simple points: all countries, all partners, all peoples would work towards eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. We would all work towards achieving universal primary education. We would promote gender equality and empower women. We would work towards reducing child mortality, improve maternal health, fight diseases that make us all vulnerable, ensure environmental sustainability. And subsequently, the climate change battle has joined this agenda. And towards all these seven ends, we would develop various kinds of global partnerships that would make this possible. But what was different about the Millennium Development Goals? Because we all set goals. The UN has been setting goals since its founding in 1945. But what is different about the MDGs (or the Millennium Development Goals) is that there was a deadline by which they had to be achieved, and that was 2015.

Last year, on the 7th of August 2007, was the mid-point in this fifteen-year period we had to achieve these goals, and today it is almost mid-August now (it will be in a month). So eight years of those fifteen years timeline we have already passed. And we all realise that so much more effort will have to be made in achieving the goals by 2015. Because, really, it is not what we measure, but what we aspire to. We should all start working towards these goals—you as an organisation with grassroot support, with global grassroot support, and we at the United Nations working through governments, and through organizations such as yours. We can all work together to influence policy, to create policy, to make change happen. And change happens in many ways. Change happens when you meditate, and when you change yourself from within; but there are other examples of change that make other kinds of difference to communities.

I will share one of my favourite examples from the United Nations work here in India, just to portray what a small initiative can really achieve. Let me take you to, Master, a very interesting example. This is a small village near Ajmer called Badu, in Ajmer district, a very poor village in Rajasthan. The UN program identified the leather workers who were really outside the pale of society in Rajasthan. The chamar community really had no place in the village matters. They lived outside the village, and they would make very humble joothis, you know the shoes, the slip-on slippers out of local leather. The UN decided to empower the leather workers. We sent in our study teams to analyze what prevented the handmade joothis from joining the global market. Our studies came back saying that the joothis were not size differentiated because they were just making them through memory, and there was no left-right differentiation. We all know that this is a problem when we buy joothis from Rajasthan.

So once the problem was identified, we found the solution. Pre-cast moulds, size differentiated, left-right differentiated, were send to Badu through a UN grant. The women workers were taught how to use those moulds to create better shoes. Designers from the National Institute of Design and the National Institute of Fashion Technology were sent to train them in new designs, new threads, and how to create new colour palettes for the international market. The waste from Rajasthan's jewel industry was funnelled to Badu so that the semi-precious stones were incorporated in the joothis. Within about three years of this initiative, the joothis became a fashion statement and Project Mojri's products are now hot-selling items in Tokyo, in Milan, in Paris, all over the US.

Now that is one side of it. But what did it do for the community? And I think that is what is more important. By placing money at the hands of the women, development priorities in Rajasthan, in Badu, changed. Women wanted schools, they wanted wells, and they established schools and wells near their part of the village. And for the first time, the schools and the wells were in the chamar part of the village. Very soon the village geography and topography changed to include this community, which had become wealthy, into the village. And now, today, the sarpanch [village head] of Badu is a chamar woman who leads the Mojri Cooperative.

So right from economic, social, political empowerment, a simple initiative at the local level can make a wondrous difference. This is what change is all about—whether we change ourselves, whether we change our community, whatever we catalyze. We are here with responsibility; we are not here just to consume. We are not here just to enjoy life. Enjoyment comes, but enjoyment comes only when we share, only when we make a difference to others around us, only when we leave the world a better place than when we came into it. That is responsibility.

I think it is things like this, events like this, the organisation of such a camp which is such a challenge. There are so many learning lessons in everything that we do: how we work together, how we think together, how, as I said, we look together in the same direction. After all, the beautiful words of Tagore, "Where the mind is without fear, where the head is held high, where knowledge is free."

Let us all work together in that mission through the Millennium Development Goals, through the goals of the Ram Chandra Mission, through any goals, through any tools to reach that world, that better tomorrow.

I bring my greetings once again from the United Nations to your organisation, sir, and congratulations on the wonderful work that you and your people are doing, not just here in India but all over the world. And we look forward to closer collaboration, closer cooperation between the UN and your Foundation.

Thank you.