The Deccan Development Society Phase Of Consolidation And Transformation
DDS : An Introduction
The professional staff of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) has been working in the project area around Zaheerabad town, Medak District, Andhra Pradesh, for well over a decade. The location of the project and the general direction of development work has been guided by the principle that we should work in the poorest possible area somewhere within the reach of Hyderabad city. The deccan plateau is a part of the semi-arid tropics of the world and contains around half of the world's population living in the semi-arid tropics. The villages are typically drought prone and poverty stricken. Even the choice of the name of the Society, Deccan Development Society, was based on the assumption that the social processes the Society may create might be found relevant in the areas of Telangana, Marathwada and North Karnataka, some of the poorest regions of the semi-arid tropics. However, the Society later decided to restrict its activities to the 40 villages of its project area (now extended to 60 villages following the voluntary establishment of 20 new sangams who took independent decisions to join the society). This decision was taken since the Society never wished to expand into a large bureaucratic organization and the directors always wished to know the sangams intimately, and maintain one to one relationship with all the sangam members. The work of the Society has been based on Gandhian principles. An ultimate goal is to help establish Gram Swaraj or independence at the village level, meaning villages which are self-sufficient, self-reliant and self-provisioning in their regional areas. Another key Gandhian principle has been Anthyodaya, that is, the work should begin with support to the poorest of the poor. From these principles, it has been a natural evaluation that the Society has helped catalyze the emergence of sangams or associations of the poor from among Scheduled Castes, agricultural labourer families and particularly, women of such families who suffer from triple suppression of class, caste and gender.
A summing up of experiences
At the very beginning even before the Society was found, the professional staff of DDS followed a path similar to that of the Integrated Rural Development Projects (IRDP) as developed by the government. It was expected that assets would be created for the poor. However, it was the experience of the Society that more often than not the poor were left with liabilities rather than assets. For example, the major cash crop of the region is sugar cane which depends upon plenty of water being available for irrigation. Wells that were established for the poor were not of much economic assistance to them during good years since every one had bumper crops, prices were low, and the local Nizam Sugar Factory would first of all accept the cane of its traditional suppliers i.e. the middle and rich farmers. The Factory many times would meet its quota out of the produce of rich farmers and refuse cane from the poor supported by the DDS. During the drought years, when the wells needed to play a crucial part, we found that since the water was tapped from the same aquifer, as the richer farmers' wells, the shallower wells of the poor ran dry first letting their crop wither on the fields with the advantage going once again to the richer farmers. Similar examples can be given in several other less dramatic fields of experience. The essential point of this experience was that limited strategies based upon technologies or asset building for incomes resulted in no great benefit for the poor, who were left with bank loans they could not repay, and with greater social disillusionment following the raising of expectations.
Following such community experiences the work of the Society reared around to supporting the employment potential of the region. In this effort the Society also followed the new development thinking in the country which began to lay emphasis on providing entitlements to the poor, with the hope that the poor themselves would take on small sensible day to day decisions with such entitlements which would go to strengthening their communities and laying a better foundation for the future. The theoretical work of Professor Amartya Sen, Oxford and Harvard Universities, gave an historical as well as an economic basis for such beliefs. The key departure of DDS from this general development trend was to focus such employment generation through the activities of sangams that the Society had catalyzed into existence. It is worth emphasizing once again that the sangams are not only simple thrift and savings societies (at a minimum level of definition), but are also primary organizations of local management (a continuation of the historical role of village governance), and possibly an association of the poor brought together in spiritual fellowship (in terms understood by most major religions of the world). In view of the practical necessity of honest and efficient management of sangam funds, and the political perspective of creating an organization which can give a voice to the poor to lead them forward in gradual steps for a rightful share of social, economic and political justice, it was felt by the Society that these interests would be better served in the beginning phases by establishing sangams of women from amongst the poorest of the poor. The attitudes of women as opposed to those of their men folk, has been in favour of simple sustained constructive work to build their communities, and strengthen their members. Despite all temptations for personal profit and carrier building, by and large the experience of the DDS sangams has been that the women karyakartas and sangam leaders have consistently stood by the other women members and their community, even at considerable disadvantage to themselves. Such altruism itself be tokens of an emerging spiritual fellowship. Such experiences are also socially very divergent from associations of men, who perceive themselves as disadvantaged by class, caste, and education and seeing no future for themselves (in common with other marginalized people of world) many times are tempted to fall into the traps of "Development corruption" laid by powerful rural and political forces.
The regions in which the Society and the sangams work are, as stated before, extremely poor in resources. Further, during the period of colonization and the early years of independence which pushed the nation towards the western defined goals of modernity, the region has suffered deskilling of people and the stripping away of resources. It is well-known that food security in this region at the village level was made possible by several carefully constructed village tank irrigation systems in medieval times. The great majority of these were destroyed or brought into disuse during the colonial period, which established new tenancy systems and oppressive levels of rents and taxation, requiring the farmers to break their community solidarity and go in for individual farming, essentially of high paying cash crops in an attempt to meet the demand of state and landlord. Further global industrialization stripped the village communities of all the wealth of rural manufactures which, according to most conservative historians, supplied more than half of rural incomes. After independence, the definition of development in terms of modernity and catching up with the west, continued to perpetuate the increasing impoverishment of rural areas and deskilling of the rural masses, when the nation followed a path of industrialization and centralization. Only now, faced with industrial stagnation and deepening economic crisis in a global setting where India has few opportunities for dynamic growth, is there any discussion at decision making centers about alternative paths of development. But this particular resource poor area has faced at least three decades of frightening environmental degradation with massive cutting down of trees, followed by loss of top soil (in some areas at the rate of 100 tonnes per hectare per year) and loss of water retentive properties of the land. The process of environmental degradation, and impoverishment of the poor, has destroyed traditional food security, that seems to have been available to the Indian poor, during the greater part of their historical periods. The best lands have gone for cash cropping, and the poorer lands for food, which the degraded soils are not able to produce in sufficient quantity. Consequently, grazing is now occurring degraded forest areas with a total consequent loss in the viability of forest areas, grazing lands, and agricultural lands. Under these conditions, local crafts have all but disappeared, leaving the poor dependent on centralized manufactures.
Under these conditions, the Society and the sangams have worked first of all on establishing savings for the poor, as sangam-helped thrift cooperatives, and then on employment generation through afforestation work, developing agricultural incomes by leasing in fallow and waste lands or by working cooperatively in their own waste or fallow lands. A gradual strengthening of this land based economic work has led the sangams to develop other community-based programmes, such as community health, depending on traditional medicines and practices as known to the village women themselves. Balwadies to take care of the little children of the working women of the sangams have followed, as well as adult education and literacy campaigns for the benefit of the community. A "Pachha Shala" or a school for the children of the rural poor has now been established at Machnoor village which hopes to educate all the children who have never had the opportunity to go to school, and make these children of the poor the natural leaders of the sangams in the decades to come, as well as the hopeful executives of the DDS of tomorrow. A Krishi Vigyana Kendra or Farmers Training Institute is being established by the Society in cooperation of Indian Council of Agricultural Research. This institute will be primarily at the service of the sangam members and will deepen their understanding of ecological agriculture or the relationships between forests and traditional multi-cropping systems, water, soil, livestock, and human communities - an essential development of the permaculture demonstration farm and permaculture practices established among the sangam members (Permaculture, while being an international movement, is seen by DDS in its Indian context has designed, organic farming methods which require low capital inputs and much higher community labour to bring back the environment agricultural productivity, and human communities, back into an upward developing spiral.
Perhaps the single most important effect of the economic, educational, health and social work of the Society and the sangams has been the changed self-concepts of the sangam members. It is evident to all that the sangam members are no longer of what they were a decade ago, or like the Scheduled caste women in nearby villages. Despite the fact that no vast changes have occurred in economic terms, and that their economic activities are still very much land-based, and still in the earlier stages of establishing the sustainability of their community, the sangam member, their families and their children, exhibit a sense of self-confidence and awareness, in their discussions with themselves, with the village elite, government servants, and politicians, which cannot be seen anywhere else. They have demonstrated that poverty has not only an economic dimension but a socio-psychological one, and that in their own eyes they no longer see themselves as inferior or dependent in any sense. (In a sense, the sangam members psychological development closely parallels the confidence of the Kerala poor who while having a per capita income now better that in Uttar Pradesh, not only exhibit much greater social confidence and awareness, but have been able to bring down dramatically infant mortality and birth rates, and have taken lead in establishing a higher status of women and a higher literacy rate among the rural poor). It must also not be forgotten that such community self-confidence is also matched by the fact that wages in the sangam villages are generally much higher than in surrounding villages; that the bonded labour system and the need to borrow money from landlords at ruinous rates have become a very minor issue: and that wage employment in the sangam villages has increased to around 100 extra days per year, per person, particularly in the summer months. This last feature is substantiated by the fact that our employment programmes are no longer drawing a full compliment of people, since the sangams' activities have increased labour demand in the area.
At the present moment a casual check list of crisis points in development would figure the following:
Stagnation of industrial development;
Population growth, though reduced still at insupportable levels;
Uncontrolled growth of megapolis centres;
Sharpening religious, caste, and regional conflicts to a level of violence that the people of India have not experience since the days of partition;
Endemic poverty in rural areas, stagnation and lack of food security for around 3/4th of the rural population; and
Catastrophic environmental degradation in all the agro climatic zones of the country.
It is argued that the first four crisis points which can be seen essentially as crisis in urban areas are fuelled by continuing poverty, and stagnation of the great rural masses of the country. Industrial stagnation is a result of the lack of purchasing power in the hands of the rural masses. Population growth while being a mega problem cannot be tackled by government decrees or technological interventions. The experiences in Kerala have established in qualitative and quantitative terms that it is the emphasis on the status of women, female literacy rates, and employment of women that bring about both a fall in unacceptable high infant mortality rates, and in birth rates. Once again the solution lies in stabilizing in rural communities. The growth of megapolis is a result essentially of distress migration from rural areas, since few in India, except the rural elite, wish to leave their lands, and their communities in search of uncertain urban futures. It is when all possibility of livelihood has become extinct that people migrate finally to an urban centre. Ethnic and communal conflicts while having many sources, historical, cultural, and religious, have today been brought to a point of explosion by the growing joblessness, frustration, and lack of any future, among young males in urban slums, who seek security, comradeship and psychological comfort in fundamentalist and fascist associations. This is a social phenomenon that has been observed in other parts of the world, and at other times, and while economics alone can never find a solution, employment, and social stability can defuse potential flash points, and establish more socially rewarding paths of individual development, than hitherto experienced by the urban poor. If industrial growth is an answer for this, that in turn is dependent on rural regeneration and increase in the purchasing power of the poor. A further linkage between urban and the rural sectors is the enormous demand placed on natural resources by urban centres. It is a known fact that timber and fuel wood travel hundreds of kilometers into urban shrinks, (wood from Assam comes to Delhi). Hence it is argued very strongly that the total development of the country, and the many related features of such developments, political, economic and social, are dependent in a critical manner on the reestablishment of rural communities of the poor in a manner that leads to sustainability, food security, local self-management at the village or sangam level and in an emerging purchasing power in the hands of the rural poor. The activities of DDS are focused sharply on contributing to this elemental process of development.
Biases - Affirmative and Negative in development
It could be argued that an era which encourages free market forces, a more dynamic path of development can be chosen by the country. This has essentially been the argument of great development agencies, such as the World Bank, and the Planning Commission of the Government of India. However, it is argued by us that whatever chance of success existed for a huge country like India (as distinct from small countries like Singapore) during the period of bipolar struggle between USA and USSR, such chances are now extinct in an era of American hegemony. The political, military, and economic demands of the super power are such that while it will encourage the development of consumerism in a third world middle class, and expect India to parallel the political configuration of similar countries in Latin America, such as Brazil, America will not permit an industrial challenge to its might. The polemics of the Wall Street Journal and other business magazine are now turned on economic "enemies", such as Japan and China, who challenge the United States for global markets. Such a clear perception of US interests means that the US will never permit another industrial challenge to arise in India. While US economic pundits over the last 40 years have discouraged Indian decision makers from focusing on land reforms, and have termed such measures as counter productive, they have at the same time carried forward far reaching land reforms in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, since these were military bases for the global containments of communism. Hence the United States always has seen its own national interests with great clarity and has used imperial cynicism in curbing the development of third world challenges. India can never hope to offer any kind of an industrial challenge in this period of US over lordship, since she is particularly hampered by received second-rate technology, and an inefficient industrial production system with protective safeguards for Indian capitalist working in restricted markets. The only hope for industrial viability is development of the purchasing power and economic strength of the vast Indian rural countryside. This is precisely what has happened for the "East Asian Tigers" and in particular in China whose industrial might second only to the US and Japan (in terms of the newly defined and politically motivated purchasing power parities) has been based on decentralized development of rural areas from 1945 till 1975. It is in such decentralized rural development, which gives employment, land and self-management to the rural masses and enlists their own skills, that lie the hope and salvation of the people of India.
It has been argued that subsidies should be drastically cut back in the rural farming sectors. However, all of Indian agricultural production, and the consumption ability of rural produce of the urban rich, are based on a vast subsidy offered by agricultural labourers who do not receive even the minimum wages stipulated by government to keep them just above the poverty line. Nor do cultivators receive a computed wage for family labour which would put agricultural prices at a level beyond consumption abilities except of the superior rich. Further the complex development of the various varieties of agricultural seeds, the development of agricultural practices, water harvesting abilities, and land development are all social contributions of the rural poor from which the rich of the world have benefited, including future scientists who may get patent rights under the Dunkel agreements. Hence in terms of realistic development any subsidy, such as continuation of employment policies of public distribution systems, acquiring land under land reforms measures are but very small compensations towards matching the subsidies the rich receive from the poor. In any case such subsidies are crucial element of investment in future sustainability and viability of the Indian economy.
Question of Merit
The question has been debated in India, with a focus on systems of employment and education which have an elite bias. Such elite and urban biases has perpetuated the impoverishment of the poor, the drain of natural resources into urban areas, and the drain of Indian resources towards the West. A redefinition of much needed skills, sustainable life-styles and demands of different communities on each other and on the environment is necessary to give us a guideline for balanced and sustainable development of the country. Such balances can only be in favour of moving resources towards sustained bedrock of the bulk of the Indian masses who are rural and poor, who are low caste rather than upper caste and who are based on cultural and traditional knowledge, rather than on a system of education imported from the west and tailored to make ruling elites rather than dedicated citizens.
The Question of Gender
Cultural and religious living practices of the Indian people bring back into a sharp focus the need to give an affirmative gender bias to development work. Such a bias will not only help the communities of the poor to develop in gradual consolidated staged, but also be in consonance with the cultural traditions of the masses of the Indian people, who are essentially inclusive of minority elements, tolerant of diverse cultural practices enmeshed with each other, respectful towards the holy of all religions, and with life-styles that have continued to emphasize community solidarity rather than individualistic growth or mechanical efficiency. (A reading of Indian economic history points to the fact that even during the days of Moghul decay, India had all the prerequisites for launching an industrial revolution outstripping the West. It was community emphasis on maintaining sophisticated community-based cottage-level skills, and maintaining full employment among the masses, which delayed a switchover to mechanical production. By the time the economic advisability of such a switchover become manifest in India, political levers of power had already gone into British hands who as conscious and deliberate policy, prevented such industrialization, till the mills of England "the engines" of growth for the industrial revolution", according to Lord Robbins, had secured supremacy for England).
Primary organisation of work and Society
It is argued in DDS that what is essential today for holistic and sustainable development is the establishment of the primary organization of work and society at the sangam level - that is, at the level of poor, around real activities of community building, and economic development, such as by afforestation, land reclamation, holistic and ecological development of agriculture, and community development through developing local health traditions, Balwadies, literacy campaigns and self-help thrift and sangam level banking systems. Such a primary organization will produce the necessary primitive accumulation of capital by bringing into use the 200 million hectares of wasteland, and a similar size of degraded forest land and fallow and non-worked lands, into life and regeneration. The experience of small government projects, of NGOs and activists, have shown that there is no ecological law similar to the second law of thermodynamics. Nature can recover, but at a much slower pace than the process of destruction. (The tourists' paradise of Switzerland is a testimonial to the recuperative capacity of the nature and the ability of communities to consciously regenerate denuded forest slopes and degraded lands as the Swiss communes have done over the last 100 years, from the time when they were one of the poorest communities of Europe, who had destabilized their mountain slopes by indiscriminate felling of forests). Nearer at home, the Algole sangam members demonstrated the ability of sangams and nature to bring back to life a natural forest plantation with 100% survival. This near miracle has been accomplished without the need for watering or physical fencing, on lands that are stony beyond belief. The fashionable utilization of PRA techniques further reinforced distant elites that the poor of this country have vast capacities and indigenous knowledge, particularly in resource poor areas, yet escaping the crushing influence of agri-biz. The work of DDS, and several neighbouring NGOs, such as the integrated pest management worked of ASW, gives ample proof of this assertion. The key to development lies in catalyzing sangams as the primary organizations of work and society. While the government is seeking to renovate antiquated village panchayat or caste panchayat structures, these older bodies which carried out the functions of governance at grassroot level in the pre-colonial days, have already been corrupted by the present- day political system management and development wastage. Essentially, the focus of development has shown a strong bias towards high-capital inputs giving profits to the elite, and to western countries; a bias towards political control which has favoured, for example, profitable construction of large-scale dams (though Indian engineers over the last 40 years have spoken for minor and micro irrigation as producing better results at the village level); and finally for centralized bureaucratic management which the power squarely in the hands of the elite of India, and the elite of other controlling powers. The plea then is to focus energies in a consolidated manner on sangams, indigenous knowledge, acquiring land, either through land reforms or through purchase, and above all by making use of the excellent employment generation strategies of the Indian government (in use by imperial powers in India from the days of Emperor Mohammed Bin Tuglak, of the 13th Century, which have assured, whenever properly applied, the stability of government, and the prevention of famine or other larger scale destabilizing events. It should be emphasized such employment-oriented strategies have prevented catastrophes in areas such as the Deccan, where per capita availability of food grains is less than the famine-hit regions of Sahelian Africa). Employment generation strategies must be linked to the holistic development of land, environment and agriculture, under the general control design and direction of sangams. Continued activity along this path will, it is hoped, produce early structures of the goal of Gram Swaraj.
It is on this path that DDS and its sangams wish to tread. In this present phase of development it is clear to Board of Directors of DDS that all the activities that have gone on before can only be consolidated in the coming phase, to achieve a measure of community security. But consolidation in itself cannot be a goal. Therefore, this phase is though of as a phase simultaneously of consolidation and transformation, where even the part achievement food security and community stability that is hoped for can only come about if the Society and the sangams are controlled and directed in a very real sense by the sangams themselves. It is hence clear to the directors of DDS that their immediate goal in this phase of work should be a step-wise transfer of responsibility and power from the hands of the Board of Directors into the hands of the sangams.
The Board of Directors realize that it is much easier to set such a goal, and far more difficult to achieve such a goal, taking into consideration the diverse experiences, ambitions and expectations, not only of the Board members and staff, but of the emerging leadership from among the sangams. However, the Board of Directors are unanimous in seeing that the great goal the Society has set for itself cannot be achieved by an urban elite, however, dedicated, despite the very real acknowledgement the Society makes of their far-reaching contributions. Hence if stagnation is to be avoided during the period of consolidation, power must be transferred into the hands of the sangam members and it must be transferred in such a way that the mischief of a new sangam elite does not thwart the process of making the sangams the primary organizations of work and society. Towards this end the Board of Directors are requesting the sangams to bring into being a consultative council from among the acknowledged leaders of the sangams, who will review in the first place all decisions taken by the Board, and refer back to it such matters with which the experienced leadership of the sangams has some problems or differences of opinion. Secondly a whole set of committees or sub-committees will be set up at a sangam level so that the day to day management of all the activities of the society will be immediately carried out by those sangam members who are experienced in the fields of afforestation, land management, community health, education and literacy, house building, credit management etc. These sub-committees will act within well stipulated budget lines and will be accountable to a new Core Management Team (CMT) composed of the staff of DDS and under the leadership of the Project Coordinators and Assistant Project Coordinators. The new CMT will be supervised and led by the directors in the field who have experience. The Board of Directors will be enriched not only with a few advisory directors who have vast experience in the area of development, but also with alternative directors called up from among the project coordinators. All of these structures are seen as structures in a period of transition, the ultimate purpose of which is to enable the sangams to federate themselves into a strong body, with governance at the local levels, and an ability to work directly with the government, and with donor partners of DDS. It may even by possible that the consultative council could become the executive board of the federation of the sangams, while the present Board of Directors would then become an advisory panel, to interact with the executives at the sangam level, and the other partners, such as donors, if necessary. The DDS Board and Core staff personnel would play themselves unreservedly at the service of the executive members of the sangams and work with them on producing and creating new levels of organization for rural manufactures, rural crafts, and industries and services, which must take place sooner or later to meet the aspirations of a newly conscious sangam membership. Or we could begin working in a new and contiguous villages and request the federation of the sangams with their experience to join hands in replicating the process of development, and enlarging the transfer of power to the people, and the establishment of Gram Swaraj.
The donors of DDS have for a long time, questioned us on "withdrawal strategies". What has been sketched out would be a realistic withdrawal of DDS, which will be a point of pride for all the partners concerned. It would be withdrawal without weakening, and a withdrawal from one level of activity for engagement in a succeeding and more rewarding level of activity, both for the sangam members, and rural community as well as the Indian government and the donors of the Society. This process has been sketched out after a decade of experience, discussion, and heart searching. It is in essence the management of a gradualistic revolution which perhaps is the most sympathetic social process considered Indian cultural tradition and the inter-dependent needs of all our, many faceted communities.
Published in: A Healthy Environment is a Human Right,
Canadian Human Right Foundation,
Montreal 1996
