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Shankar Venkateswaran

MY mainstream newspaper reading habits are somewhat limited but in all the news stories around the protests about Tata Motors and Singur, Mamta Banerjee hogged the headlines, with Medha Patkar being a distant second.Sadly, I do not recall reading anything about what NGOs had to say on the issue. Whether the sector did not say any-thing or whether what it said was not covered, I don’t know, but in either case does it suggest that NGOs are becoming irrelevant? A competent and respected NGO working in a north Indian state had a hairraising experience recently. Asked to submit a proposal by the state government for a government-funded programme, four of its staff members were held hostage and threatened in a government office by goons led by a local politician who threatened them with dire con-sequences if they did not withdraw their proposal! There is an unfortunate sequel to this. After speaking to several people in political and bureaucratic circles, the NGO was able to get an order asking for re-bids. Just when they thought they had finessed the problem, they got a call from the same politician – pick up the tender documents at your peril!

With the law and order situation being what it is, who should they turn to (NGOs in Gujarat who protested the carnage of 2002 can ask the same question)? And when this other so-called NGO that implements this programme does nothing, will it not affect the reputation of the whole NGO sector? NGO response to the Gujarat and Kashmir earthquakes and the tsunami was great in parts. However, what was striking about the tsunami response was how the learning from past disasters was used.

________________________________________ The so-called apex NGO federations are either pursuing individual political agendas or lobbying for FCRA changes like the FICCIs and CIIs of old asking for excise duty concessions. _________________________________________

Some NGOs in Nagapattinam had the foresight to get Sushma Iyengar from Abhiyan in Kutch to help them coordinate their response (she tirelessly spent time there despite indifferent health) and the NCRC was born which rode on the successes of the Kutch response to coordinate relief. But the issue of shelters remained a trou-bling one, with temporary shelters everywhere being unmitigated disasters (Anshu Sharma from SEEDS says that we should call them intermediate shelters because they need to last at least three years!). How does the sector learn from its own successes and failures in disasters where the same mistakes are repeated tirelessly?

Failure of coollective leadership?

These are some instances where the inabilities of NGOs to get together for the greater good of the duty concessions. people they serve and strengthen the sector have been grossly inadequate. Individual NGOs are getting larger and more powerful. Some of them proudly wear the badges of being on various government (the latest being on the various committees for the next Five Year Plan!) and international bodies. Proud they should be, but is not the sector greater than individuals? In many ways, the structure of the NGO sector now resembles the structure of corporate India in the pre-liberalisation era. There are a few large ones, undoubt-edly doing great work. But the majority are small and struggling and also doing great work! Individual lobby groups abound as did industry sector associations in those bygone days.

____________________________________________________ What should NGOs have done about Singur? They should have launched a PUCL-style investigation by a team of people with impeccable records. ______________________________________________________

 

 

The so-called apex NGO federations are either pursuing indi-vidual political agendas or lobbying for FCRA changes like the FICCIs and CIIs of old asking for excise duty concessions. FCRA continues to be draconian and must be opposed but surely there are other issues that need to be tackled too! CII and FICCI have sought to reinvent themselves and serve a purpose far greater than lobbying for government support. They help promote the total quality movement and provide technical assistance to their members. They promote relationships between their counterparts in South Asia, thereby promoting peace. They talk corporate social responsibility. NGO federations seem to have frozen in time. Can we learn from industry and become more relevant? I believe that is the single biggest challenge facing the sector now! We have great individual NGO leadership, but is this a failure of collective leadership? I think we need to stare at ourselves in the mirror and ask this question!

Where should we be head deed ?

What is my vision for this sector? I believe we can say we have arrived when we as a collective body (I am avoiding terms like network, federation etc. because that suggests a particular structure) are invited to : Discuss the budget and are an integral part of the process by the finance minister every year so that it is pro-poor. Host a visiting head of state or senior government official, thereby recognising the importance of the sector. Assist the Planning Commission in the formulation of the plans and their review, and not just for the social sectors because what happens in other sectors also affects the people it serves. So, how do we get there? I don’t have a readymade answer and neither should there be one. I think the path should be a combination of deliberate steps and a process of evolution. However, what is perhaps non-negotiable is that this collective body must be representative of NGOs and be democratic and Gandhian in its approach.

________________________________________________________________ NGO federations seem to have frozen in time. Can we learn from industry and become more relevant? I believe that is the single biggest challenge. _____________________________________________________________

 

The specific activities of this collective body should evolve. I think the industry associations provide an excellent model to adopt. However, given the nature of the issues confronting the sector, I believe that the investigative processes that bodies like PUCL adopt would be extremely critical. To me, there are a few roles that this collective body can play straight away which are outlined below. This, by no means, constitutes a complete set of roles nor any particular order of priority but only serves as an initial set of ideas.

Policy Research

It is very clear that protests in the 21stcentury cannot only be in the form of dharnas, jail-bharosand sitins. The need for protests to be backed by hard-nosed objectivity and evidence has never been greater. Take displacement for instance, an issue that is getting bigger and bigger with each passing day. It has been an issue for long and those movements working on the Land Acquisition Act have significant knowledge on this. Will not a white paper written on this by a collective body, backed by solid evidence from the grassroots, be taken more seriously by all the arms of the state? This collective body does not have to do its own policy research on every specific and specialised topic, just like CII does not write a policy paper on the pump manufacturing industry but depends on the Pump Manufacturers’ Association. It should go to its membership but use its collective clout to ensure that the position is heard and taken more seriously.

Investigation Wrongs

What should the NGO community have done about Singur? I think it should have launched a PUCL-style investigation by a team of people with impeccable records to find the truth. They should have involved local NGOs and genuine community organisations in this though there may well be none there as my NGO friends tell me that it is extremely difficult for NGOs to co-exist with the cadres of communist West Bengal. But there should have been some attempt to at least provide an alternative view of the reality in Singur. Such investigations will be required on an ongoing basis because issues seem to come up on an ongoing basis. Be it submissions to the Shunglu Committee on Narmada or indeed Gujarat 2002, the need for an objective investigation into these wrong-doings cannot be overemphasised.

Protecting NGOs against criminal elements

Take the example of the NGO threatened into not submitting a bid for the government programme. What if there existed a collective body of NGOs that they wrote to seeking help and this collective body investigated the matter and high-lighted it in the media and to the powers-that-be. Will this not give this NGO the confidence to bid and pass a message to the criminal elements that they are, indeed, not alone? And, even more importantly, will not all NGOs else-where be emboldened to put their foot down and fight injustice?

Improving disaster response capabilities

As a neutral and representative entity, this collective body can play a number of significant roles in disaster situations. It can set up a national level information exchange capacity which gets activated with every disaster and which liaises between NGOs on the ground and state/national level authorities. It can facilitate movement of ideas and people with experience in disaster management to the site to ensure quick adoption of lessons and local level NGO coordination. In short, it can serve the NGO community to improve its response capacity.

My Dream Team

A body like this needs the leadership of people of great integrity and competence who have built great institutions to get together and make it happen. My dream team for this (I am sure I have excluded many names – please excuse me!) would be Ela Bhatt, Sushma Iyengar, Syeda Hameed, Shantha Sinha, Vijay Mahajan, Deep Joshi, Gagan Sethi, Rajesh Tandon, to name a few.

 

Views expressed here are the author’s own.
Comments welcome, please email at shankarvee@rediffmail.com