Anirban Ghose, Anish Kumar
“How would you
like your children to be when they grow up”, he asked.
“Like you”, she
said.
The man asking
the question was R Venkataramanan, Managing Trustee of Tata Trusts; the woman,
a farmer whose income had increased tenfold to Rs 2 lakh annually through her
work in the self-help groups (SHGs). Although her family’s life had improved
due to food availability and more income, the quality of life on several counts
had not changed: schools in her village were non-functional and healthcare
non-existent. Her increased income, therefore, had not translated into better
opportunities for her son.
Her statement – I
want him to be like you – stayed with us. We were at PRADAN then and had been
working with communities across India for over two decades. At that point, we
asked ourselves: what will it take for the next generation of Indians, whoever
they are and wherever they are, to have the same set of opportunities as the
privileged urban-born?
Could we look
beyond just providing jobs, training, and skills to a generation of men and
women and instead focus on ensuring equal opportunities for their children at
least?
It won’t
happen on its own
Through our work
in rural India for over two decades, we know that left to market forces – despite
rapid economic growth and expanding government social spends – the inhabitants
of the bottom 100,000 villages (of the 600,000 villages in our country), do not
and will not have the same opportunities as citizens born in urban India or
even other villages. Not at a systemic, mass level at least.
Sure, we have an
APJ Abdul Kalam, who was able to get himself out of a deprived background and
become DRDO chief and the President of India. But what about his friends, his
brothers, relatives and neighbours? What are the chances that they got out? We never
talk about those left behind.
Individual
ascension can happen – with some education and a great deal of luck. But how do
you take development to the entire village? How do you build basic resilience,
so that our future generations can aspire to and achieve better lives?
The inhabitants of the bottom 100,000 villages do not and will not have the same opportunities as citizens born in urban India or even other villages.
The stepping
stones to resilience
Addressing
hunger
It starts with
food-sufficiency. We remember one of the first conversations we had when we
joined PRADAN and one of our colleagues told us bhookhe pait bhajan na hoye.
One needs food in one’s stomach before one has the ability to aspire.
When PRADAN
started its work in the 1980s, addressing hunger and poverty was a priority. We
believed that if you worked with communities to create strong livelihood
opportunities in an empowering manner linked to government and private markets,
it would have a positive domino effect on the other challenges they faced – health,
nutrition, education. One had also hoped that there would be gains around the
intra-family and the inter-family relationships, in terms of gender, caste, the
ability to influence local decision making and so on.
But in 2005, when
we did our strategy-refresh and reflected on our work in the earlier decades we
realised that this whole premise of automatic spillover gains to other areas
wasn’t happening.
So, while there
were enough anecdotes, in terms of scale, the impact was limited to increased
incomes – in some cases as high as Rs 1.5-2 lakh annually.
Cash flows had
increased and there was more food at home. But for most households this did not
translate into other important areas: child malnourishment continued to be high
as did maternal and infant mortality; women had little control over their
increased incomes (even though all our activity was focused on women and
increasing their incomes). They had even lesser decision-making powers and
almost no control over assets.
Building
social capital
This made us more
acutely aware of the second necessary condition for development: social capital
– acquiring a voice and some sense of agency –through mobilisation of groups
and communities. The SHG movement, which started in a small way in the 1980s,
was taken to scale by non-profits in the 2000s and later adopted by the
government. Today, there are large numbers of villagers, even in the bottom
100,000 villages, where some level of social capital has been created.
Meeting
aspirations
Once this kind of
foundation exists – enough food, money and some social capital – there arises
an opportunity to mobilise the aspirational energy of the community. The
challenge today then is clearly people’s aspirations of having equal
opportunities for the next generation.
The SHG movement, which started in a small way in the 1980s, was taken to scale by non-profits in the 2000s and later adopted by the government.
But there
are barriers
Traditional
norms and practices limit opportunity
Consider the
situation of the tribals. They have a huge sense of identity and pride and are
unable to work in hotels and clean dishes; it’s not acceptable to them, unlike
non-tribals where some castes will do this work in towns and cities. So the
only jobs tribals end up doing are building roads and digging trenches. This is
a 100 million strong segment of society and the only opportunity open to them
(outside of marginalised farming) is road construction!
There is a
sense of hopelessness
At the policy
makers’ level, the aam janta and even within the development fraternity, there
is this sense of ‘bhaiya, yaha toh kuch hone vala nahi’. Nothing can happen
here.
There is a
feeling of hopelessness and fatigue especially if you’ve been doing it for a
long time and you see change happening really slowly. Many of us have worked on
economic development issues and take pride in our work but when we seek to
answer the question of what will it take for their children to be like our
children and the increasing gap between the two, one can only feel overwhelmed.
There is a
feeling of entitlement
We’ve reached a
stage today where there is a strong sense of rights, but not of
responsibilities. There is a sense of entitlement that has been seeping through
in the way people think and act, and we’ve seen this increase over the two
decades that we’ve been in the field with PRADAN and now TRI Foundation.
To quote one such
example: We were in Hazaribagh in central Jharkhand, talking to women in an
SHG. This SHG was among the top five per cent of SHGs in India and was a poster
child for the movement. Every year, the women distributed a dividend of INR
18-25,000 per person among themselves.
Despite the
overall economic prosperity in the village, we saw malnourished children. When
asked whether the women had thought about nutrition for their children, they
were very articulate. They said that they had created a citizen report on the
state of ICDS in their block, had mobilised themselves and then gheraoed the
officials demanding rations be delivered to their villages. They were told that
the government machinery wouldn’t be in a position to deliver rations for six
months.
When we asked
them, “You have the money, why won’t you buy the nutrient-rich food and feed
the children”, the women answered saying “we are entitled to the rations”! We
understand there might be other factors and this may be an oversimplification,
but the reality is that people are not taking responsibility for their lives.
It doesn’t mean
you let the government off the hook; you should hold them accountable. But one
must also focus on solving the problem; one must focus inward and see what can
be done by oneself.
The challenge today is clearly people’s aspirations of having equal opportunities for the next generation.
Build
resilience–adopting a multi-pronged approach
We, along with
the Tata Trusts and with guidance from Dr Sanjiv Phansalkar, analysed the
situation on the ground. Having understood the enormity of people’s
aspirations, we realised that if the development indicators had to change for
good, we had to look at two aspects – things that:
Communities can
do themselves with a little support in terms of knowledge and capacity
Need external
support from governments and markets
For instance, in
the area of child malnourishment, the women can do the recommended IYCF
practices themselves. But when the child is ready for vaccination, that has to
be supplied by an external entity and injected by a trained person. This
external ecosystem support could come either from the government or a private,
market-based enterprise.
Having understood
this, we broke it down further to understand the basic things that people
require to live comfortably. After several conversations across multiple states
we narrowed it down to four key areas:
Prosperity: People in the bottom 100,000 villages need
about Rs 8,000-12,000 monthly cash income to live well. This translates to
around Rs 1-1.5 lakh annual income.
Healthcare
and nutrition: With a
focus on pregnancy to the first five years of a child’s life and basic
cognitive development. In essence, preventive, formative and curative
healthcare.
Education: Primary education to ensure a certain level
of foundational education and mobility.
Water and
sanitation: Safe
drinking water and sanitation.
In order to
ensure that marginalised communities can influence local decision making and
are not excluded from services and infrastructure, we also included local
governance and gender as cross-cutting issues as these parameters are closely
interlinked.
Therefore, if we
have villages where we are able to move the needle on these four result areas
and the cross-cutting issues of governance and gender, then we will be in a
position to say that this village has the wherewithal to thrive on its own
steam and that its children are well-equipped to capitalise on opportunities
across India and the world.
Connecting
to urban India on equal terms to achieve those aspirations
The opportunities
outside of the village are the ones that the woman who met Venkat wanted for
her son. If the country is growing, the bottom two deciles of rural India
should also be able to participate in this growth. However, if I have to
connect with the opportunity only as a coolie, and my child also has to engage
with that world only as a coolie, then that is not opportunity.
To be able to
participate on equal terms and negotiate these opportunities, there has to be
an interplay between what the communities can do themselves and a supportive
ecosystem of public and private markets – samaaj-sarkaar -bazaar have to come
together if we have to address the rural-urban cleavage.
(Anirban Ghose is Co-lead of Transform Rural India. Previously,
he was on the leadership team at PRADAN, a rural development NGO. Anish is
Co-lead at Transform Rural India. Previously, he was part of the senior
management team at PRADAN, a rural development non-profit)
(This article was originally published on IndiaDevelopment Review and can be viewed here.)
