NGOs as Partners in the Process of ‘Reform:’ Are they the Yogis, or the Bhogis, of Development?
Why NGOs?
On Saturday, April 20, 2002, the Prime Minister of India inaugurated in New Delhi a national conference on ‘The Role of the Voluntary Sector in National Development.’ Speaking to a large group of bureaucrats and politicians, with a token sprinkling of Delhi-based voluntary-wallahs, he lauded their efforts ‘for carving out a space.’ Mr. Vajpayee wanted the ‘relationship of benefactor and supplicant’ to be changed ‘to one of partnership where the Government acts as a facilitator.’ All what is to be expected nowadays, including the careful selection of attendees.
Despite the influence of early Gandhian thinking, the development process in India since Independence has been designed and controlled by the ruling elites of the country. A ‘trickle down’ process was to ensure that benefits would gradually improve the lot of the poor. However, even 50 years later, the percentage of the poor stubbornly remains well over 40% of the population. Changing fashions in development theory have now created a mantra out of the concept of ‘people’s participation,’ upheld by all, the World Bank, the Indian government, and other experts thriving on the development industry, academics, NGO entrepreneurs, and their foreign donors. However, the concept of people’s participation itself means several things to several people, and rarely more than a public audience of development projects, conceived, created, and controlled by the various interested elites. Most importantly, since an important component of the funds for these projects emanate from foreign sources, Indian agencies, governmental and NGO alike, tend to fall in readily with exotic superficial concepts of people’s participation. This falling in line is made all the easier by the Indian decision-making elites lacking real social practice in people’s movements. Even many NGOs which vociferously espouse the ‘people’s cause,’ not only depend on the largesse of their foreign, mostly ‘christian,’ donors, but have little contact with grassroots political movements. In fact, they consciously portray themselves as ‘non-political.’ Hence the power over decision-making remains, as it always has, in the hands of the elites, whatever competing identities they may take over internal struggles for power, prestige, or profits.
But let me start with the story of a development mantra that ushered in the NGO as a token partner of government. We all know that part of the current development fashion is the promotion of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) methods, devised by Robert Chambers, an Englishman, late of Her Majesty’s colonial service in Africa. These techniques are nothing more than an extension of the way British district officers learnt of village realities by sitting under the village tree. Clearly, government officials are happy to go back to a system in which they are in command, but the subtlety lies in packaging it as ‘participatory,’ to suit modern politically correct officialese. The participation of the poor ends with the disgorging of local information to the Sahib, who will, as he always has, take necessary steps, with abundant caution, through proper channels. In development or voluntarism, smart marketing as in business leads the way to success.
Since the word is with voluntary agencies, who are now fashionably involved in several circles of development decision-making, it may be best to investigate the process by looking at how these advocates of the people practice people’s participation in these days of structural adjustment, and compare their efforts with governmental initiatives to promote the same. While rural women’s groups have far out-stripped expectations in their ability to manage thrift and savings schemes, their freedom of action seems to be strictly curtailed by the decisions of elite government officials and NGO leaders. The new managerial innovation of involving local communities in the management of forests, and the technology of watershed development are both seen as empowering, but the actual practice on the ground seems to have the opposite effect. Kerala, the small south-eastern State in India is well known for its breakthroughs in women’s empowerment, and the dramatic lowering of the infant mortality rate, the birth rate, and the total fertility rate, now below 1.9. This State is innovating with a new process of ‘people’s plans,’ designed and implemented at the local level, but these are still early days. So, while the principle of people’s participation is widely accepted, the actual exercise of the principle requires the build up of social practice at the grassroots, much more than theoretical visitations from afar, or from the top down.
The Nellore women of Andhra Pradesh, without ever having heard of Paolo Friere, subverted a rather tedious government-run adult literacy programme into a women's movement to oppose the government imposing arrack on their menfolk, most times through powerful contractors, many times as part payment for work done. The Indonesian farmers similarly subverted an innocuous IPM learning project into one that demanded peasant rights, rights of the tiller, and the landless. From these instances we learn that participation occurs in unregulated ways, surprising the organisers; in ways of self-empowerment and community assertion. At the right historical juncture, the weaknesses of those who rule can be exploited by the poor to win some rights, and produce some sustainability at the grassroots.
Indian NGOs, perhaps among the most experienced, have many excellent similar development stories to tell, in micro-credit, community health, primary education, watershed and afforestation schemes; but are these micro-successes replicable? We will know only with genuine large-scale, systematic participation of the people, the poor, in self-managed development. Till that happens, we are left only with interesting anecdotes. Western economists and left-wing intellectuals have developed a penchant for development by anecdotes, from ‘the Brasil Miracle’ to ‘Learn from Dai-chai.’ Such ideological campaigns have led only to strengthening authoritarian regimes. The goal of people-based development remains illusory, as ever.
Area-wise studies are being conducted today on the impact of structural adjustment programmes on different sectors of the economy. Voluntary agencies have been involved to examine the impact of such changes in economic policies on the poor of this country. There is very little regret on any side at the passing away of unhelpful bureaucratic controls and regimentation. Far from securing the interests of the poor in a socialist, secular State, the control by politicians and bureaucrats of the economy through rules, regulations, and licenses merely ensured what is popularly known as: socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. That is, while the interests of Indian businessmen and the rich were taken care of by state policy, and their profits grew under state protection, the poor were more or less free to sell their labour power at low wage rates wherever there was a demand. The interests of wealthy and powerful families were strengthened by this process; the gap between the rich and the poor widened; caste interests and antagonism were enlarged; and the role of a few leading families such as the Nehru family ensured. In the new era that is opening up, well-known assurances and securities for the elite of this country have evaporated, and politicians and businessmen alike are beginning to realize that they have to try new ways for securing their profits and power bases.
Despite the hype that Indians are entering a period of high growth and business and technological success, realistic prognostications are far more pessimistic. The commandist structure of the polity of the country has in no sense been weakened. Major decisions, in fact, any decision of note, flow from the top to the bottom. Administrative and managerial systems remain unchanged and hierarchical. All that is of significance is that the political and administrative elite have decided to share some power, and transfer some decision-making areas, to the business elite in the simple hope that businessmen and industrialists would somehow prove to be more competitive in the world market. While it is clear that the arrogant Indian administrative elite has no skills whatsoever in competing for markets, it is misinformed to think that businessmen are any better. Under the closed-door security offered by government, Indian business houses till now have grown to positions of great importance and wealth without actually having to complete with the much larger, more efficient, and more powerful transnational corporations of the world. In the economy of scarcity, their main role was the allocation of their products, many times at much higher prices than prevailing elsewhere. Their managerial elite has not learned the skills of simple selling. They will not be able to market their expensive products with inferior technology, and without the advantage of economies of scale under competition with the cheaper, superior products of Transnational Corporations (TNCs), which also have far superior selling abilities. The idea that the nation will grow through an export-led growth strategy is wishful thinking.
From the days of Dr. Manmohan Singh to those of Mr. Yaswant Sinha, finance ministers, while doing yeomen service in trying to clean out the tangles of red-tap, have still to produce a single worthwhile idea of how the Indian economy is to prove competitive or to modernize itself. Just as the idea of an export-led growth strategy has been going around for the last several decades, so are the ideas for agricultural development that have been dredged up in the Plan documents. Changing the profile of agricultural subsidies, or trying to establish small centres to promote organic farming or integrated pest management, fall far short of the kind of decentralized power sharing, and encouragement of local planning and growth that is needed in poverty-stricken, environmentally-degraded areas.
If anything, the structural adjustment programmes (SAP) will strengthen the elite, and perhaps produce a broader base for it by bringing into the fore a new class of exporters and businessmen who might be able to take marginal advantage of some openings in the global market. The gap between the rich and the poor will inevitably widen; the middle class and salaried classes will be struck by high inflation; and the divide between the rural and the urban sectors would become even more marked. The present main thrust of the structural adjustment programmes could force India into another form of dependency. Several such unspoken questions linger in Indian minds.
What Price Voluntarism?
In this rather grim scenario the role of voluntary agencies is to be seen neither as humanitarian nor as non-political. Their movement if it may be so called has gone through rather startling transformations: from that of the ‘Handmaiden to Government,’ from the time of Independence till the near-famines of the early 1960s; to the role of ‘The Filmi Rebel,’ in the heyday of naxalite upsurge; to that of the ‘Drab Advocate’ of the 1970s and 1980s; to today’s role of the ‘Sarkari’ Catalyst.
By and large, the voluntary sector has grown in this country in response to the idealism of many of its citizens, and the continuing traditions of constructive work that were emphasized by Mahatma Gandhi as a corner stone of the Freedom Movement. The voluntary movement's attempts to support the government in carrying through modern messages of development to the remotest village ended with the failure of the Five Year Plans to produce marked growth. Turning away from being the handmaiden of corrupt and self-interested politicians, the voluntary movement tried to join the people's protest movements during the sixties and the seventies. It was encouraged to do so by the funding agencies from foreign countries, themselves influenced by liberation theology, which found its roots among the oppressed peasants of Latin America. With the defeat of the Emergency in India, the voluntary movement had to take stock of its achievements and found that it had gained little by either supporting or confronting the government over the last three decades. Over several workshops called to find out a mutually satisfactory identity, the voluntary movement settled for an advocacy role or a catalytic role, but it still saw itself as playing a crucial role in the economic upliftment of the poor, and in the struggles of the poor to reach self-sufficiency and self-reliance. All of which required economic strengthening of the poor.
However, in the new period that is emerging of American over-lordship, Washington perhaps sees a very different role for voluntary agencies worldwide. This is not to say that international voluntary and donor agencies have deliberately become instruments of American policy. However, trends in policy-making, academic thinking, and international action programmes also follow fashions, which many times are deliberately initiated, as they have been many times in the past, to serve wider interests. Over a decade ago, Susan George warned voluntary agencies that they should be a bit more critical of the sudden interest the West was taking in promoting their involvement in development, and that they should ask why this change had occurred. It is difficult from a third world point of view to dismiss such fears as the paranoia of the weak. ‘When the World Bank and the IMF speak of governance, for example, they mean simply another set of conditions to be added to the long list of conditions already set out in structural adjustment programmes. Where is "governance" when neo-liberal globalisation not only leaves out vast swathes of humanity and intentionally weakens the State but also plunges even countries like the erstwhile "tigers" Korea, Thailand or Indonesia into financial chaos and mass unemployment? Where is governance when the Fund deliberately turns a blind eye to the looting from Russia of billions of dollars in its own hard currency loans?… Such disasters as have occurred in Asia, Latin America and the so-called "transition countries" show that, contrary to the neo-liberal myth, freedom of capital flows, highly leveraged loans and uninhibited Portfolio Equity Investment are not the road to prosperity but to ruin.’
The break up of the Soviet Union heralded the twin pincer thrusts of globalisation and privatisation in economic warfare, as the preferred mode of conquest in ‘postcolonial’ society. This direct attack on the sovereignty of weaker states is led by TNCs (far more resource-rich than the East India Company for example), as a modern follow up to colonial gunboat diplomacy. Resistance to penetration is decried as an effect of the absence of a ‘free market,’ and this in turn is taken as a critical symptom of the lack of human rights, and democracy. A lack which must be rectified through the ‘free market’ before being given ‘most favoured nation’ status, or other marks of fair dealing.
The processes of Globalisation and Structural Adjustment impact directly on national social welfare schemes of direct benefit to the vast majority of the world’s poor. Despite the new formalism of democratic governance, of which participatory process is a part, the actual methods of rule are still very much commandist in reality. The small highly privileged elite at the top controls the vast dispossessed majority through the very processes of reinforcing poverty, and making knowledge itself the exclusive prerogative of the elite and the rich. The stability of the system is ensured through using brute force or more effectively the 'threat' of force over people who have to make regular real-life decisions what it is worth to them to question authority, let alone rebel against it.
The spaces vacated by government from spheres of social policy are being filled by foreign-donor backed NGOs. The World Bank, the US government, the EU, all support, cultivate, and elevate NGO leadership. Even authoritarian bureaucracy, once suspicious of NGOs, now prefers to deal with such powerful upper-class individuals. A key insider role in colonisation of India was played by local ‘dalals’ or traders. In the recolonisation of the world, what ambiguous role is now marked out for NGOs? Almost all of the Third World in ‘post-colonial’ times has faced authoritarian, or certainly elite, rule. A promise has been held out that NGOs could cataylse the re-emergence of grassroots democracy, and civil society resistance to local and transnational elite control. But they have not yet lived up to this promise.
Leadership among NGOs is mostly in the hands of gifted entrepreneurs, or charismatic individuals. Little networking exists in reality. Occasional grand NGO conclaves produce little more than ego clashes. At the same time, NGO policies seem to be driven by foreign donors, who in turn are influenced by the development perspectives shaped by First World institutes. These perspectives are not unrelated to First World national interests; or interests of dominance.
It is in this very real real-politick setting that a few courageous activists could experiment with 'participation.' The active middle managers of governance, in Government, in Business, and among NGOs, still see the process as nothing more than an opportunity to voice support for the leader, the employer, or the benefactor. To achieve the beginnings of the reality of people’s participation a well-defined boundary has first to be created around the ‘experimental participatory project’ - a boundary well understood by those in authority, and with someone in power having the mandate to make the project work, perhaps, only as an experiment, so that the powerful may gauge its usefulness as a 'survival strategy' –at least for those in power to continue to be in power. And the powerful arbiter has to assure those at the bottom that there will be no penalties for compliance with the new permission to 'speak out.'
The Inner Truth
So how shall we see the NGO intervention? And how may we regard the NGO itself? Is it like a pair of drainpipe trousers round the belly of its fat leader? Or is it truer to see it as a romantic Robin Hood band that somehow has yet to deliver to the poor? Or are these social entrepreneurs only prosaic ‘development dalals?’ Or is it a benign zamindari? Or is there reality in the fear that NGOs form a ‘sixth column’ through which the Great Powers are trying to subvert the independence of nations?
Before we can even formulate a suspicion, we must realize there are several kinds of NGOs, several histories. We must not for a start confuse them with genuine ‘people’s movements,’ like the famous one led by the late ‘J.P.’ over 30 years ago, or Medha Patkar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the Adivasi struggles for recognition of human rights. These are large amorphous movements, held together by a shared ideal or grievance, rather than by the structure of a funded organisation. In a very tell-tale way power is far more diffused in a people’s movement, while it is tightly held in an NGO.
But it is the very hierarchic structure of the NGO, clothed in an aura of empowerment, that has found such laudatory approval from international bodies, such as the World Bank, and ready acceptance from the more insightful of governmental circles. GONGOs, or Government-Organised NGOs, are mushrooming all over the place to empower charismatic leaders and bureaucrats to spend money without being confined to departmental duties, or having to shoulder old governmental responsibilities. The Andhra Pradesh government leads in this imaginative exercise, and has already scored a notable success by imitating an NGO initiative to make the Public Distribution System rice available to Below Poverty Line families on credit and at export prices! This opportunity to do something outside of government has not been lost on aging civil servants looking for life of power after retirement. The new breed of RONGOs, or Retired Officials NGOs, permit bureaucrats to indulge their fancies. Last year’s Czars of Shastri Bhavan (the seat of the Education Ministry) can conveniently jettison their proclaimed ideologies in favour of foreign money to try their hand at primary education. Defenders of the Green Revolution after retirement find safety in organic farming institutes. Upholders of the rights of the Forest Department, once out of Paryavaran Bhavan (where high foresters sit in Delhi), are equally eloquent about community conservation. Even police officers known to chivvy outspoken democrats when in service speak up for human rights when drawing a pension. Not far behind are the B-RONGOs, or Brahmin Organised NGOs, whose chief concern is voicing the injustices, suffered by Dalits in any conference they can find, from Berlin to San Diego. The early-bird RONGO, or the CANGO, short for captured NGO, needs a government to tango with an NGO to get an in-service official running it.
So, the appearance of several specialist NGOs have now made it imperative to create a taxonomy of voluntary effort, which by the way most find very paying. The BINGOs, or Business Inspired NGOs, continue to reap corporate benefits by spending tax-deductible money lavishly on adopted villages or media-worthy programmes which can lighten the pages of annual reports, and balance out unfavourable public comment. But their reward is nothing when compared with that gained by the DINGOs, or Donor International NGOs.
In the structuring of development packages, we see how institutions in a Western country, say, such as the British DFID, research institutions, such as IIED, or IDS, located in Sussex University, and donor international NGOs, such as Oxfam or Christian Aid, run as a pack. The fact that aid brings in extra profits through increased trade is openly acknowledged. The Canadian CIDA has always justified its existence on this count alone. The aid research industry is a major source of employment in the West, particularly of a dangerous class of educated unemployables. These, in return for the security of academia, dredge up patent colonial ideology as the new science of development. They are secure in the knowledge that no challenge can come from the third world intelligentsia, who are kept locked into convenient subaltern positions with suitably graded rewards of fellowships, visiting assignments, and invitations to conferences, and consultancies. To these rather simple benefits is added the even greater one of pacifying the large body of home-based liberals, who are unhappy with the exploitative nature of their society, and to whom aid and charity are presented as justifications of overlordship. The great ‘christian’ donors of Europe saw aid as an answer in the mid-sixties to the crisis of relevance within the Church, and as a way of attracting youth back to the folds of belief. But behind all these apparent and rather pathetic reasons for the convergence of the interests of government, church, and academia, lies the formidable project of Western civilization itself, its need to control the people, societies, and resources of the third world, and its lust to destroy other cultures, and other ways of being. It is not only money power that dictates this process; but the psychological legacy of cultural subordination under colonialism. Despite the intellectual glitterati of the Third World vociferously condemning the results of ‘orientalist’ scholarship, their persistent personal need emerges for recognition by the ‘international,’ meaning, ‘Western’ community of scholars.
What is alarming is not that the West is developing an armory of neo-colonial control mechanisms, but that there is so little challenge to rather blatant practices of mixing science with disinformation; persuasive aid money to governments and NGOs, and chances of personal promotion to key individuals, with scorn and threats towards dissenters; and media-designed calls to conform to ‘global,’ in other words, Western, standards, with open relegation of third world needs and perspectives into subordinated and disconnected positions.
Let us look at historical instances of how the West has governed development policy. Green Revolution scientific ideology to be discussed in international workshops, and had helped appoint the supporters of such policy in several universities and research institutions throughout the world. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was created at that time not only to help increase food supply in the world, but to support transnational agri-biz. The selling of the Green Revolution to the third world as a scientific package without which they could not possibly survive is perhaps the best example of how a business opportunity for the West can be presented as aid, and as scientific dogma to poor countries. While great oil companies, such as Shell, were already forecasting that the bulk of profits in the 21st century will come from agri-biz, Indian scientists and politicians humbly accepted a strategy, which enriched richer farmers in selected areas, such as the Punjab, coastal Andhra, and Tanjavur, where the irrigation infra-structure already existed, created long ago by the British, the Moguls, and the Cholas. In furthering the interests of petroleum-based agriculture, the gap between the rich and poor widened; the Punjab went up in communal flames; around 80% of the rural population, of small and marginal farmers, and agricultural labour, were neglected over a crucial two-and-a-half decades; a hundred districts were declared drought-prone and left to endemic hunger; with extensive, consequential environmental degradation.
Social forestry projects, funded by the World Bank and other international aid agencies, have swept the country like a forest fire. They did not promote trees to feed and support the poor, but stands of eucalyptus and similar species as raw material reserves for industry. It was only when the indigenous people of Madhya Pradesh took up arms against such plantations that the world's experts started being solicitous about peasants and tribals. Even the phrase, "social forestry," is believed to have been designed in Harvard University, as a marketing tool for selling a package to a third world country as science, as aid, and as community help. While readily accepting this half-baked idea, the Indian Government never enquired into its own long history of people's managed forestry, never questioned how the British by a legal fiction appropriated all forest lands as government property in the 19th century, disinheriting villagers, peasants, and forest dwellers.
We cannot talk about forests without talking about tigers. There is a story going the environmental rounds in Andhra Pradesh that the Forest Department has more conservators than there are tigers in the State, and this despite the Sri Sailam reserve being the largest of the Project Tiger sites in India. A recent tiger census came to nothing; one believes not a single animal was sighted and the few pugmarks found added to the confusion over numbers.
The three-decade old project, with India having primary responsibility for saving the tiger, was inaugurated with much fanfare by the international conservation crowd led by the World Wildlife Fund. Interest in tigers goes back to the time when rajahs and captains couldn’t look one another in the eye unless they had killed a number of these beasts in sport. Mogul miniatures attest this fact. John Nicholson of 1857 fame is known to have sabred tigers from horseback. Jim Corbett after whom our most famous wildlife sanctuary is named became immortal thanks to the man-eaters of Kumaon. Aristocratic Indians were not far behind. A Maharajah of Bikaner is said to have shot over 3,000, while another Maharaja of Sarguja could kill no more than 1,800, though he festooned forest trees with tiger-signaling telephones and ranged rifles like golf clubs in his hunting jeep. Parkinson’s disease disabled his left hand for teacups but not for rifle barrels! In fact, killing a tiger was a rite of passage for the ruling classes – from Lord Willingdon, who disturbed his entourage’s sleep by dragging along a roaring tiger in the last bogie of his train for the morning’s shikar, to the District Collector or Forest Conservator, who would tell tall stories of the ‘kill’ while patting the glassy-eyed stuffed head of the 12-footer which had almost ended the sahib’s career. Even the great royal patrons of the WWF, Prince Philip of England and Prince Bernhardt of Holland, were known as avid shikaris, till they saw their hunting grounds vanishing.
The feudal aristocracy of Europe knew how to preserve game, and hang hungry poachers who would eat what they massacred at pleasure. The notorious Brandeis Commission of the mid-nineteenth century brought a European prescription for the control of Indian forests, and by an act of expropriation, which far outdid the depredations of Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse, made the government owner of all forest land. Not that Indian kings in olden days did not have hunting rights in parts of the forests; but villagers also had their rights, as did animals in areas designated as ‘ elephant forests.’ This was customary division of forest areas, as attested by the Arthasastra, whose author, Kautilya, was not known to give away any rights unless forced to.
The greatest impact of ‘scientific forestry,’ which disinherited all tribal communities, and made them interlopers in their own homeland living under sufferance, was first to destroy the teak forests of the Malabar to feed the Royal Navy, and later wherever axe could reach to help build railway lines and maintain the huge armies of the Empire during the World Wars. The great Indian forests have shrunk to a fifth of their original size, fast losing their capacity to support animal life or tribal communities. Tribal discontent was suppressed with the ruthlessness of conquest, leading to unquenched discontent among oppressed peoples, later igniting into the naxalite movement across the country. Murder, extortion, rapine, and constant humiliation suffered by tribals to this day make forest areas a veritable war zone, and hence incapable of being protected.
The elite international environmental NGOs and bodies, whose Third World branches glitter with the leaders of the social register, can have little patience with the plight of the tribals, whom in their own circles they consider as the rascals responsible for poaching. The WWF, with a $ 300-million annual income, around half of which is spent on conservation, for years followed protectionist policies that Sally Jeanrenaud describes as ethnocentric, ecologically outmoded, and self-defeating. As old growth forest loses out to scrub land, fewer the animals that appear, and more the armed guards that are emplaced to guard emptying reserves. Miserable poverty and governmental oppression of tribal communities are the two best ways for ensuring destruction of forests and the killing of wildlife. Great scarcity drives people to make inroads on their own natural resources, and oppression surely leads to disaffection and tacit connivance with poachers. Anyone who has lived in jungle areas, or talked on friendly terms with tribals, knows that they are quite aware of the benefits of bio-diversity; they know that carnivores maintain a symbiotic relationship with herbivores; and that every tiger signifies at least 25 square kilometers of healthy forest, stocked with plant and animal life.
For elite supporters of the WWF, however, their concern is still signified by the cuddly panda, whose bamboo forests have been much destroyed by slash and burn cultivation. But there is a lesson here that none has learned. The tribals at fault are supposed to have migrated from their traditional eastern Tibetan homelands a couple of centuries ago. Attracted by the vast profits the British were making in the early half of the nineteenth century by pushing opium on the hapless Chinese, they grew opium themselves to corner part of the lucrative market. When the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949 all opium trade was banned. Even as the drug barons left Hong Kong for greener pastures in the West, the tribals took to slash and burn agriculture. Clearly, the difficult answer here was introduction of sustainable agricultural methods suited to the region, rather than offering a few jobs as tour guides or teashop owners.
We in India are very much better placed. The agricultural practices of tribal communities are by and large eco-friendly, despite concerted attempts by ICAR staff to wean them away to mono cropping, and the use of pesticides and hybrids. If many practice poduor slash-and-burn cultivation, this perfectly sensible technique became dysfunctional only after the forest cover shrank alarming under the inroads made by greedy contractors, and corrupt or negligent officials. What tribals need is technical and financial support for sustainable mixed farming practices integrated into the forest eco-system. They need supportive capacity building for social development, and environmental stewardship. Perhaps, the Joint Forestry Management programmes, and the newer Community-based Management of Forests programmes could teach forest officials, NGOs, and tribals to take small steps towards each other in support. What they do not need is further policing, or exclusions from tribal homelands.
At last, the penny is beginning to drop in high places, mostly because of the potential multi-billion dollar business that could be generated out of medicinal plants in forest areas. Successful extraction of active principles for the pharmaceutical industry may require first-level processing to be carried out in forest villages. The bio-diversity of our forests shelter several living gold mines, and we need to partner tribal communities if we wish to get at them. They can no longer be excluded from their homelands. In fact, neither the forests nor the bio-diversity of the country can be saved without tribal communities taking leadership in protecting their own environment.
Several great imperialists have done their best and worst, and departed – the Maharajahs, the Moguls, the British, the Nehruvians – the land has borne all, the people even more. The time may now be not to think of great deeds, of leaving our imprint on one and all. But to let the humble and the dispossessed have their time and space. By trusting the simple, we may win through to a better understanding of who we are, our land, and all the life we share it with. Time to heed Ashish Kothari, one of India’s best known NGO environmentalists: ‘Wildlife conservation and social justice both require us to move towards a model in which local people are central partners in managing and benefiting from conservation.’
Civilisational Faults and Acts of Madness
There might be a quick assumption that I wish to revert to the middle-class obsession with ‘corruption.’ In fact, most critics of NGOs focus on the predilection of a few NGOs to fudge the books. To imagine that NGOs should be as incorruptible as Robespierre, when no other sector is, neither religious institutions nor universities, is to be hypocritical rather than unworldly. It is power that corrupts absolutely, as Robespierre discovered too late. Now, if the message of ‘service before self’ is to be adopted by the NGO movement in all sincerity, we may have to try and overcome the Civilisational Fault of building individualised empires rather than democratic institutions. And we may have to choose ‘Big is Beautiful’ as a slogan in a country were the masses are victims of elite decisions, including those of conference-wallahs. We may not be so self righteous in priding ourselves on small self-indulgent charitable work. So, what should be the new sutra? Since all the sectors of leadership have proven over the last fifty years their clear inability to help the poor, or the environment, can NGOs help create a social space for dialogue and decision, involving officials, business managers, academics and grassroots activists? If no one is in charge, can ordinary people come into their own? The United States has produced the Social Venture Network of hundreds of socially concerned corporate houses. England’s Prince of Wales has his International Business Leaders Forum, also with a clear social agenda. Why is it so difficult for Indians to cooperate? What will we lose except our egos? Mr. Vajpayee while lauding the voluntary sector also stoutly defended his Party’s role in the Gujarat massacres. I guess to emphasize the voluntary nature of atrocities. While so ably partnering Government, can the NGO sector help work out the Atrocity Codes? Amartya Sen has given credit where it is due by pointing out that the Indian Government’s highly successful Famine Codes found their prototype long, long ago in the foresight of India’s famous mad monarch, Mohammed bin Tughlak. Well, can NGOs match this madness today? One Case History after another, from the days of Partition to those of Gujarat have shown that ‘development’ leads to social conflict. Parliamentary democracy of the Westminister model has sneaked in adversarial confrontation into the fabric of multi-communal Indian life. There were several traditional ways of dealing with potential dispute, fear, or jealousy. Essentially all these were ways of seeing both sides of the question at the same time, and being inclusiveof both sides, or many sides. This accommodation of interests and viewpoints was found to be both devious and inscrutable by upright Englishmen, leading even very good men like Stafford Cripps to dislike cordially the oriental in Mahatma Gandhi. Be that as it may, NGOs could give new life to the injunction to try sama, or inclusive dialogue in any dispute, and later, dana, or giving in, if dialogue could not resolve the issue, long before resort to adversarial confrontation. Arun Maira calls for dialogue, for an ‘alternative means we will use to resolve differences.’ A dialogue that will have ‘participative formats that facilitate listening, inquiry, and exploration: not speeches from a panel with perfunctory questions-and-answers. We urgently need effective dialogues to help stop the bleeding of our national potential and the lives of our people.’ Why NGOs? Because most could have their ear close to the ground; and they might hear better, if they remembered to keep their big mouths shut.
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Dandekar, V.M. The Indian Economy 1947-92, Vols. I & II, Sage Publications, 1994.
George, Susan. ‘The Global Citizens Movement: A New Actor For a New Politics,’ Conference on Reshaping Globalisation: Multilateral Dialogues and New Policy Initiatives sponsored by the Central European University, Budapest, 18 October 2001.
Jeanrenaud, Sally. People Oriented Approaches in Global Conservation: Is the Leopard Changing itsSpots? London: IIED/IDS, 2002.
Maira, Arun, Chairman, Boston Consulting Group, India. The Economic Times, 17 April, 2002.
Mathew A.S.: ‘Kabbanala, Ralegaon Siddhi and Panipanchayat: A Revisit,’ Administrator, Vol.XL, No.2. 1995.
Mawdsley, Emma, Townsend, Janet et al. Knowledge, Power and Development Agendas: NGOs North and South. Oxford: INTRAC NGO Management and Policy Series No: 14, 2002.
Rajan, Vithal. ‘Power of the Poor,’ Resurgence, Sept/Oct 1994.
Ramachandran, Vimala. ‘ External Aid in Elementary Education: A Double Edged Sword,’ Economic andPolitical Weekly, Vol. 34, No: 50, 1999.
Sankaran,S.R. ‘Planning for the Poor: Indian Experience,’ The First Dr. C.D.Deshmukh Memorial Lecture, 1997, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, 1997.
Sen, Amartya and Drèze, Jean. The Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze Omnibus, Poverty andFamines. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. The Economic Times, 11 May, 2001. The Hindu, 5 February, 2002. ________, 21April, 2002. The Times of India, 20 April, 2002.
Freely translatable as ‘ascetics or sybarites’ of development. The Hindu, 21April, 2002.
Ramachandran, Vimala. “ External Aid in Elementary Education: A Double Edged Sword,” Economic andPolitical Weekly, Vol. 34, No: 50, 1999. After making the point that all donors are encouraging the involvement of autonomous societies, she reminds us that making “societies genuinely democratic and transparent could help us address issues related to leadership and control.”
Rajan, Vithal. ‘Power of the Poor,’ Resurgence, Sept/Oct 1994.
Bandopadhyay D. " People's Participation in Planning: Kerala Experiment", Economic and PoliticalWeekly, Vol.32, No.39, 1997.
Arole, Mabelle and Rajanikant. Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project, 1994.
A very successful single-teacher single-room school system has been innovated by the famous Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, for educating poor out-of-school children. Sixteen satellite schools are run around the main school campus, and the system is now being replicated for adoption in tribal villages under a special UNICEF programme.
Mathew A.S. "Kabbanala, Ralegaon Siddhi and Panipanchayat: A Revisit", Administrator, Vol.XL, No.2. 1995.
Arora, Dolly. "From State Regulation to People's Participation: Case of Forest Management in India", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.29, 1994.
See the careful analysis of the Indian economy made by Dandekar, V.M.The Indian Economy 1947-92, Vols. I & II, Sage Publications, 1994. See also trenchant criticism of the failure to reduce poverty by Sankaran, S.R.’ Planning for the Poor: Indian Experience,’ The First Dr. C.D.Deshmukh Memorial Lecture, 1997, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, 1997.
Meaning, in popular derisive terminology, ‘government dependent.’ During an annual convention of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), at Dakar, Senegal, in 1985.
George, Susan. ‘The Global Citizens Movement: A New Actor For a New Politics,’ Conference on Reshaping Globalisation: Multilateral Dialogues and New Policy Initiatives sponsored by the Central European University, Budapest, 18 October 2001.
Emma Mawdsley, Janet Townsend et al. Knowledge, Power and Development Agendas. Oxford: INTRAC, 2002, p. 91. Dr. Bala Reddy is quoted as saying: ‘ … I see a direct link between great power and superpower interests and the fashions of development as handed out by the so-called Christian organisations that are affecting the working of civil society in this country.’
The A.P. Government has innovated by establishing a GONGO, termed rather hopefully as the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) to implement the Rs. 3000-Crore World Bank funded District Poverty Implementation Programme (DPIP). The World Bank has also launched similar programmes in the States of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. However, in a recent assessment workshop held at Hyderabad, IT, media and jargon savvy A.P. officials outshone their colleagues from other States.
The Times of India, 20 April, 2002. By December 2001, 4,262.89 tonnes of rice valued at Rs 26.5 million had been distributed, of which Rs 24.5 million advanced as credit was recovered by 31 March 2002, benefiting 5,914 Self Help Groups, covering more than 73,795 families.
The Voluntary movement in India has vigorously put forward this viewpoint, led by the Centre for Science & Environment, and Lokayan, of New Delhi; Samvardhan of Ahmedabad; and others. From recollections of childhood! Jeanrenaud, Sally. People Oriented Approaches in Global Conservation: Is the Leopard Changing itsSpots? London: IIED/IDS, 2002, p. 26. The Economic Times, 11 May, 2001. The Hindu, 5 Feb., 2002.
‘Founded in 1987 by some of the nation's most visionary leaders in socially responsible entrepreneurship and investment, Social Venture Network (SVN) is a nonprofit network committed to building a just and sustainable world through business…. SVN promotes new models and leadership for socially and environmentally sustainable business in the 21st century. We champion this effort through initiatives, information services and forums that strengthen our community and empower our members to work together on behalf of their shared vision.’ ‘As an international non-profit organisation working with some of the foremost global companies and community partners to promote responsible business practices and partnership for development, The Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum is committed to assisting the United Nations engage business as an active partner in the ‘Global Compact’ announced by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in January 1999…. Helping to interpret the UN Compact for business including identifying opportunities for dialogue, input and practical engagement in specific areas such as human rights, conflict prevention and working standards…. Identifying the areas of common agenda between UN and business in good governance, standards, social development and security.’
Sen, Amartya and Drèze, Jean. The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus, Poverty andFamines. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 43.
Maira, Arun, Chairman, Boston Consulting Group, India. The Economic Times, 17 April, 2002.
