The 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Anne Heraty travels to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) the spiritual home of aid agency GOAL and one of the world’s most impoverished cities. There she witnesses first hand the poverty, the overpopulation, children living by sewers, and thousands sleeping on the street.
GOAL try to bandage the desperate poverty, creating a glimmer of light for only a minority. They encourage Anne to travel six hours west to the Sunderbans, to look at where the immigration to the city is coming from.
The Sunderbans in the world’s largest mangrove forest and home to the maneating Royal Bengal tiger. It’s an area suffering from increasingly difficult environmental problems. Survival is hand to mouth.
The challenge is to keep people in the area and avoid the harsh destitution that so many find in the city. Anne discovers people eager to develop their natural resources but unaware of how to do it. She looks at local produce such as muri, a form of puffed rice. Is there any way of adding value to their food production?
Anne, who is CEO of the international human resources company CPL, believes that harnessing the power of people working together is the answer to some of the Sunderbans issues. She encourages a number of women to set up a co-op, where they can manage their agricultural resources more powerfully than on their own.
They decide that to increase their financial independence they need to be able to store their produce – hence increasing their bargaining power with their dealers – and stick together to keep product prices higher.