SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 Edition

 

 

Some of the most engaging stories that Civil Society has done in the past four years have been about people trying to solve their problems and get on with life. The stories have been about setting up social businesses, opening hospitals and schools, going organic on farms, saving water bodies from pollution, reviving traditional water structures, providing finance, delivering justice and something as unlikely as teaching lower middle class girls unarmed combat.

Invariably, these efforts have been prompted by governments having failed to either deliver services or help citizens cope with problems. As India turns 60, such examples of self-help are reason for hope. Our Civil Society Hall of Fame: Leaders To Look Out For consists of remarkable individuals from across the country who are committed to building a modern India. To us they are the best of the Indian private sector and their entrepreneurship equals that of the business leaders we fete so loudly in newspapers and on television. What is the market cap of the Civil Society Hall of Fame? On what basis should the net worth of these leaders be assessed? We ask you and leave you to judge. For sure, ours is not an exhaustive list, but that is hardly the idea. A basket can at best be representative. So, welcome to our Sensex. We have called these individuals leaders because they have cut new paths with courage and have searched with positive energy for solutions. They were each chosen specifically for the work they have done. They were identified by a network of public spirited people who are friends of this magazine and will silently continue this process in coming years. It is our way of celebrating the distant solution and highlighting the inadequacies of centralised authority. The entrepreneurial spirit in India, as we have been fortunate to observe it, is alive despite adverse conditions.

We see it amid the teeming activity in the unorganised sector in our cities and we sense it in the urgency that farmers show in solving their problems of falling yields and finding better prices for their produce. By contrast governments are fat, slow and weighed down with the cholesterol of corruption. There could be a mood of optimism over nine per cent growth and a flourishing corporate sector. But if the government has made things simpler for industry and allowed it to prosper, it hasn’t done much for the common man. If anything, there is a sense that government and industry read each other a little too well for the comfort of everyone else, be it the poor or the consumer.

Industrial growth is needed for reducing poverty. When companies invest people get jobs, when technologies settle in economies moveup. But industrial growth cannot be a substitute for good governance, particularly in a country with embarrassing backlogs in socialinfrastructure. It is also important to ask whether industry can substitute traditional livelihoods. And if not, what will be the fate of people yanked out of their current security? Often pronouncements help define a government. Policies and laws on tribal rights, the rightto information, rural job guarantees add up to a certain kind of pro-poor image. These are important measures and the government should be lauded for them. But it is simultaneously necessary to work on delivery systems. We could ask why farmers continue to die in Vidarbha even after Rs 1,000 crores was showered on them. The answer is that the government needs to hone its search for solutions. It needs to be contemporary and less driven by older and unworkable models of development.

You can see from the change leaders we have listed and been covering on a regular basis, how new and localised solutions are being found to conserve water, improve agricultural yields, get children into schools and so on. There is very innovative work being done in healthcare. For a government to be effective it has to bond with and learn from these efforts and not deny and suffocate them. It has to learn to listen. It should perhaps bother us that our democracy does not provide adequately for dialogue and discussion. It doesn’t have the bandwidth for taking messages of change to people and decoding their responses. It is because of this that the BJP-led NDA was defeated and there are some who believe that similar insensitivity will be the undoing of the Congress-led UPA as well. There are feelings of mistrust. As aspirations rise, there is concern over how fair the system is. The farmers who don’t want to give their land to industry aren’t against growth and development. They want a better life for their children and themselves. But they have the fear that they are being diddled and pushed out of the way, which is undoubtedly the fact more often than not.

While the government celebrates its role in bringing in investments and taking up the GDP, it has little to show for its core responsibilities of improving the quality of life, bringing a third of the population out of poverty and preparing the others (who may not be poor) to be globally competitive. When we talk of India being a great economy and a country whose moment has come, we have our work cut out for ourselves. We need to reform the justice system, root out corruption, deliver education and healthcare, restructure our cities, put our forests to productive use, take banking to 500 million citizens, clean rivers, cope with water shortages, halt if nor reverse environmental decline, provide electricity, develop public transport, generate affordable housing …. Can an unfinished and gigantic development effort be accomplished by large doses of industrial investment alone, as is now being attempted? Will that trickle become a healthy flow on its way down? Will the growing wealth of a few bring everyone up? Should we expect miracles from special economic zones (SEZs)? At Civil Society we have all along believed that there is an urgent need to redefine the private sector so that it includes not merely industry but a sea of enterprise, both socially inspired and profit driven, both rural and urban, that can bring fresh talent and inspiration to a national growth push. Having given such private efforts the space and encouragement to find solutions, the government needs to create social assets, channel technology in ways that deliver exponential results and be trusted as an impartial facilitator ofchange.

The government should define policies, create opportunities and allow communities, groups and individuals to lead the way. Much of what is required to be done is region and area specific, many of the solutions already exist but aren’t allowed to take shape. There are answers to current problems to be found in traditional knowledge and skills. There are measures of sustainability that people know to instinctively respect. Innovation is the key to growth. Once again it should come from freeing up space in which individual enterprise can experiment with ways forward. We have in this issue a wide range of contributors who have dealt with these issues. As is our mantra, they come from industry and the social sector. You could say that they don’t all add up. But then that is what makes them interesting.

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