About | Sustainability
Sustainability is a necessity and no longer a CSR activity – especially in rural regions where we’re based. The story of our village is no different from the other villages of Uttarakhand. The state faces a massive water shortage and organising piped water is difficult due to the terrain and the remoteness of most villages. Most villages face employment issue as well due to the lack of opportunities and sources of income. We realised that if the venture had to succeed, it had to consume less and local resources.
Poverty
The region we work in is reasonably educated and well off. There isn’t abject poverty around. There is just a lack of opportunities which forces locals to look for jobs in the larger cities. One way of preventing people from leaving is by employing local staff. However, unless we scale really quickly, we cannot do that. And we don’t want to scale very quickly. So while we have employed staff from the villages nearby, it is not enough yet to create a substantial impact.
Another way that we can generate is by encouraging entrepreneurship. This means buying local – the local bakery, the local craftsmen, the local logistics, the local farmer – as much as possible. While the contribution per capita may not be huge, this helps create a certain demand for the stakeholders involved.
Hunger
As we mentioned before, since these villages are agrarian and self-sufficient, nutrition and hunger aren’t really big problems to be solved for the moment.
Good Health/ Well-Being
We have not worked on this aspect yet. This will be done in the future.
Quality Education
On this aspect we are working more on primary education. Since we are not educationists ourselves, we have limited ourselves to providing some resources to make education multidimensional. This includes colourful educational posters and a laptop to access the internet.
Gender Equality
We hired our first female employee in 2020. Going forward, we are working towards having more female employees for the day-roles that open up at Nayalap.
Clean Water/ Sanitation
While clean water and purity of water is not a problem, the supply of water itself is a challenge and this is a problem in many parts of Uttarakhand. There are also horror stories about water scarcity being caused by the presence of many hotels in a particular place. To keep our footprint low, we have introduced the following measures.
- Use of low-flow flushes and efficient showers
- Grey water treatment and usage for the garden flowers (water from showers and that from the ROs)
Affordable/ Clean Energy
While there is definitely some headway to be made in using solar energy, we had taken some efforts in ensuring that the energy usage is minimal. As a result, heating systems include traditional architecture and blankets. We have consciously avoided the use of Diesel Generators and power backup relies on inverters.
Decent Work and Economic Growth
When we started Nayalap we were more interested in generating employment. Soon we realised that that would be a slow process as physical service businesses grow slowly. We then started focusing on encouraging entrepreneurs in the region. We now work with craftsmen and bakers and procure as much as possible, locally. While the economic contribution of a small enterprise may be small, we have seen that the addition of these skills helped them sell to existing and new customers.