We had a ball when Vinod Iyengar, an advisor to the Satyam Foundation, came to visit last week. Vinod and I were on the assessment team for the NGO of the Year award and we had so much fun traveling together to visit different voluntary organisations I asked him to come to Dehradun and visit ours.

Vinod told us about the way his team approaches “problems”. They call them monsters and their first task is to understand what the monster looks like – can it be killed, they ask themselves, or should we run? One they recently took on was the lack of emergency services in India. After a series of power lunches and all-night brainstorming sessions, they came up with the EMRI (Emergency Management Research Institute) beginning in Andhra Pradesh and now in operation in several other states (Uttarakhand is next on the list). Anyone, anywhere in the state can dial the toll-free number (108) 24-7 and get instant access to advice and, if necessary, on-the-spot assistance. This includes fire, police and medical emergencies and Satyam reckons they have saved 60,000 lives since the program was introduced in 2005. State of the art communication systems, ambulances and fire engines are an integral part of the system and Satyam has trained local people throughout the state to handle the phones, the vehicles and the emergency response team.

Quite a monster! It’s one that most of us would have quailed in the face of, yet also one which we all worry about (late at night, in those awful moments of panic and fear when we imagine our elderly loved ones having a heart attack or a stroke and there’s no one nearby to call for help).

So three cheers for Satyam! Three cheers for an organization brave and bold enough to ignore the possibility of defeat, to refuse to say that the monster is too big and to have so much fun cutting it down to size! Excelsior!