Humanitarian and Development
Place
Villages of Tamil Nadu, India
Sponsor
Thierry Vandevelde
Grant(s)
30,000 € to the Selection Committee at 2008/12/02
Project leader
Orcades
Founded at Poitiers in 1974, Orcades is an international outreach NGO which conducts numerous projects from education to development. It has been working in India for over ten years and is particularly active in the southern state of Tamil Nadu helping the villages ravaged by the tsunami of December 2004.
With an Indian partner NGO, INDP (Intercultural Network for Development and Peace), Orcades has designed a comprehensive program to help the population.
Between 2005 and late 2008, many projects have thus been undertaken: remediation of soils polluted by sea salt, forest maintenance, animal husbandry, restructuring and schooling of a village, access to vital services - drinking water, wastewater treatment, production of electricity and gas for cooking, management of plastic waste, etc.
A new 2008-2009 action plan now aims to guarantee the viability of all these projects and to continue mobilizing the villagers living in the neighboring areas.
Towards village self-sufficiency
In this connection, seven new villages will be receiving drinking water purification facilities, with a concern to ensure the maintenance of the installations from the outset - to make sure that the villagers can then handle this task themselves.
Orcades has therefore entrusted to INDP the duty of setting up appropriate training programs for the villagers in order to make them aware of the importance of carefully managing the precious resource. In addition to teaching them about drinking water conservation and hygiene, the two NGOs have decided to train the villagers so that they can become self sufficient as quickly as possible. They will thus participate in desalination operations and will be encouraged to take over the management of the water supply, and then to plow back the profits earned in order to plant food crops.
The Veolia foundation, a partner of Orcades since the tsunami, is accompanying this comprehensive program, which has already very substantially improved the lives of many villagers and which is now spreading to still relatively unaided zones.
Thanks to this grant, new drinking water purification equipment will be installed in seven villages.