February 2008
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Darshan Shankar favours transition even as FRLHT is poised for big leap Rita and Umesh Anand |
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SIX months ago, Darshan Shankar began a process that took his colleagues at the iconic Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) by surprise. He privately sounded them out on how they would react to him stepping down from the post of director. The normally placid and even- aced FRLHT campus outside Bangalore has since, in its own quiet way, been coping with this intimation of impending change. Talented scientists, foresters, taxonomists, researchers, computer professionals and Ayurveda physicians work here on giving traditional medicine modern meaning. Most of them were drawn to FRLHT because of Darshan’s vision and they stayed for the large reserves of positive energy that the organisation thrives on.
FRLHT has done more for promoting Ayurveda and other traditional health systems and bringing them within handshaking distance of western science than any other voluntary organisation in its bandwidth. It has been instrumental in influencing national policy and has created awareness about medicinal plants and folk healers. Perhaps most significantly, FRLHT has tried to bridge the gap between traditional knowledge and the modern market for it in integrative approaches to healthcare.
It is rare that heads of Indian voluntary organisations offer to demit office. In Darshan’s case, the decision to take early retirement waseven more surprising because FRLHT is at the acme of a success built with hard work, innovation and much sacrifice over 15 years. Darshan has been at the helm all this while. And to go now would be to walk out of the spotlight just when he should be basking in many watts of deserving glory.
Civil Society first reported on Darshan and FRLHT in a cover story, “Meet Mr Roots”, in January 2004. In the grand sweep that Darshan was able to institutionalise, FRLHT moved from working with communities to creating digital databases of plants, documenting local knowledge, setting up a modern laboratory for validating therapies and finally establishing an Ayurveda hospital. The organisation leapfrogged from a city office in Bangalore in the nineties, to a five acre campus on the fringes of the city. It now employs over a hundred people and its departments are headed by skilled and personally secure professionals who are empowered in their spheres. Darshan, a robust but benign head in this flat hierarchy, could have continued as director for life in such circumstances. But Darshan was adamant that he has to go. At 56, it was time, he said, to hand over the directorship to the second line.
OVER
THE
YEARS |
||||||
In situ conservation of medicinal plants in forest habitats. Till 2007 there have been 84 conservationareas established in nine states |
Database on
botanicals
used by Indian
systems of
medicine |
Network of folk healers in seven states. |
170,000 home and institutional herbal gardens |
Bio-cultural herbarium and raw drug repository |
Community owned company for medicinal |
Laboratory for pharmacognosy & product development |
1993 |
1994 |
1996 |
2001 |
|||
He could continue to be in the organisation to serve, but he was insistent that others should have the opportunity to lead. And so with those first private chats began the process of consultation about who that person could be. If it was someone from within, would he/she have everyone’s approval? Would it be possible to shift to a collegiate model of paths chosen by consensus? Darshan has been a team player, but he brought to the founder-director’s job an entrepreneurial edge. Would a successor be able to wrest the same space, set the same tone? Or was it necessary to replace Darshan with an outsider and make a clean break? Perhaps an outsider would come with new energy and vision and put the organisation on another trajectory. May be a better, more beneficial one than Darshan has been able to define.
As it happened the choice fell on someone from within. It was decided that Additional Director DK Ved would take over. Ved is a mechanical engineer, by training, a forester by profession and perhaps one of the country’s most knowledgeable experts on the geographical distribution of the 6,000 species of medicinal plants of India. He has designed and developed multidisciplinary medicinal plant databases in FRLHT. Darshan intends to be around in some kind of emeritus role to make the transition smooth. But a new phase in leadership would be clear to all. Ved will now assume office in March.
However, even as consensus emerged several stages remained before the decision could be formalised. If the FRLHT team had talked it through, the governing body remained to be consulted. Darshan wrote to the redoubtable Sam Pitroda, chairman of FRLHT’s board. Pitroda had helped Darshan in critical ways when he had wanted to set up FRLHT in 1993 and has continued to serve as chairman, nurturing the organisation with strategic directions and his many connections. Pitroda, who once fathered the technology missions and was a key advisor to Rajiv Gandhi, is now chairman of the Knowledge Commission and much, much more. Pitroda was often thrilled at what FRLHT had managed to achieve with his moral support and strategic advice. He has helped by his opening a door here or there. Darshan had gone to him as a young man with a big vision in search of a benefactor.
OVER
THE
YEARS |
||||
Methodology
for sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants |
Ethnobotanical garden and nursery |
Ayurveda
hospital
is set up
at FRLHT campus |
Herbal
remedies
for
malaria
prevention |
Documentation of ancient medical manuscripts |
2003 |
2004 |
2005 |
||
Once asked by a leading light of the NGO movement what he as a technocrat was doing as chairman of an organisation working on traditional knowledge, Pitroda responded: “Find me 100 other Darshan Shankars who are as serious and committed to an idea and I will happily help open doors for them and be chairman of their organisations.” Pitroda was okay with Darshan retiring if he really wanted to, but he insisted that the process of handing over would have to be structured. “It is a world class institution and not some pan shop that you can transfer to somebody else,” he said. A committee should oversee the transition, redefine roles and responsibilities of the second and third level leadership and endorse a successor. Darshan, he advised,would have to hand over the mantle at a public function so that the world could know of the change, Darshan’s contribution and FRLHT’s many milestones.
More importantly, it was decided that FRLHT needed a formal transition plan. Prof KRS Murthy, former director of IIM Bangalore who is on the FRLHT board, was given the task of drafting such a plan. The idea was to plot a path for the future growth of the organisation so that it could keep up its momentum. Darshan had not only been a builder of durable systems and a motivator of people. He had also been a hugely successful fundraiser. He had worked to create a wider identity for FRLHT, connecting it with government and privateinstitutions across the globe. The transition plan needed to ensure that all this was not thrown into jeopardy. “When there is a change of leadership, be it in a company or an NGO, it is necessary to examine what is at stake and how achievements can be consolidated. It is also the time to see whether a shift of gears is possible,” Murthy told Civil Society in Bangalore.
Awards |
||
1998: Norman
Borlaug award for
contribution to conservation of
medicinal plants |
2002: Equator
Initiative Prize for
linking
conservation to
livelihoods |
2003: Cultural
Stewardship
Award from the
Columbia School
of Medicine |
“Change is inevitable. Even good,” says Murthy. “But change needs to be handled carefully. Darshan’s strengths in bringing good people together, providing a profile for the organisation, raising funds etc are essential for the future of FRLHT. So, it is necessary that he continue in an advisory and supportive capacity even as a new director takes over.” Murthy observes that there are limitations to the roles that founders can play be it in commercial entities or voluntary organisations. They mostly tire, lose perspective and fail to make technological leaps. For instance, research shows that in family owned companies, the business begins to wither by the fourth generation. Professionals are then needed to take over. The challenge founderentrepreneurs face is when and how to hand over.
The criticism of Indian NGOs is that their founders tend to hang on for too long. Organisations are built around individuals and tend tomirror their personal whims and fancies. The promoter of a good idea grows rapidly in the public eye, then plateaus and finally hangs on at all costs because of the insecurities associated with letting go. Indian NGOs tend to pay little attention to structure and systems though they use public money. They prefer self-regulation to more rigorous forms of independent scrutiny. There is a sense that transparency worries them unless they can choose the parameters. NGO organisations are built mostly as pyramids with a huge gap between the person at the top and the next in command. Transition plans are therefore unheard of. And when they are implemented, they are invariably accompanied by undisguised backseat driving.
No one is left in any doubt as to who is the real boss.
In Darshan’s case he seems to be blessed with the temperament to let go. Asked what gave him the idea to quit, he replies with an example from his past: “When I was in my twenties I set up an NGO in a tribalarea of Maharashtra. At
35 I felt I should find a younger person who had the natural enthusiasm and
energy to continue doing the kind of work that was required of me there. I then
went out and looked for someone in his twenties who could take over and
found such a person. When this person turned 35 he came to me and said he
was ready to hand over. It so happened he died of a heart attack swimming in
the river the day after he had found a successor for himself.”
There is an inevitability about handing over and passing on. The greater oursuccess the closer we get to obsolescence. The strongerwe burn, the weaker we get. Traditional systems of medicine make it easier to understand such permanent impermanence with their emphasis on connections between body and mind, on the inward-outward oneness with Nature. But Darshan is no aloof philosopher. FRLHT would have never been built and grown into the institution it is today if he were not a man of action: impatient, practical, driven by the need to act. A poster by his desk quotes from Goethe: “It is not enough to know. It is necessary to do” Pitroda oois a man of action. Speaking to Civil Society on the seventh floor of the Taj Palace in Delhi on one of flying visits to India because he lives in the US, he says: “We have to learn to move on. When C-Dot was over I never looked back.” Pitroda almost changed the face of Indian telecom in the eighties with a young team of engineers in C-Dot.
They came up with the small rural automatic exchange or RAX which made rural telephony possible in difficult Indian conditions. If politicians had allowed them to continue they would have provided the first large indigenously made telecom switch. As C-Dot lostmomentum, India’s telecom revolution was delayed by a decade. Pitroda likes being a trigger, a sponsor of new and useful ideas.“When Darshan came to me 20 years ago, I saw someone simple, honest and willing to do something different. I instinctivelytrusted him and have always trusted him since. It was my gut feeling. If we had more people like him, India would benefit.”At first the support Pitroda gave Darshan was in bits and pieces. Then came the idea of a foundation. “I didn’t do much. I’ve been a catalyst but he did it. It took 15 years, but now it is an institution,” says Pitroda.
Pitroda believes that there is little difference between a small NGO and a small business. Both have high expectations, chase great ideas and are invariably short of money. Both need help in finding their way through the system and this is where a Pitroda, reaching out to industry and government as a well networked benefactor, can help. But the challenge is to move from hand-holding to selfsufficiency. Like a business must depend on revenue streams, NGOs need to be sustainable and capable of institutionalising their gains. “Very often NGO leaders want money to do what they like doing, as though it were a hobby. That is not good enough,” says Pitroda. For Pitroda, the next stage at FRLHT is to commercialise and build market linkages so that the organisation can sustain its activities without asking for funding. As the wellness business grows along with interest in traditional therapies, FRLHT is certainly on the threshold of great opportunities.
The first building blocks of a new identity are already in place. A hospital and
wellness centre with 20 beds and plans for 80 more, amodern laboratory for
validating therapies and a company for producing value-added herbal products
whose shareholders are marginal farmers and rural women all serve to draw
FRLHT into the gravitational pull of market forces.
You could add to this a potentially lucrative finishing school that FRLHT will
shortly initiate for short-term training for doctors and therapists to equip them
to serve in the Ayurveda and Yoga departments in allopathic hospitals and
wellness centres. Such are the huge investments in holistic care across the
world that FRLHT can hope to be much in demand.
In addition, FRLHT is well advanced in terms of what it has already achieved, to transform in the next few years into an Indian Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine. This is visualised to be an IIT-level institution that will provide undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level training. FRLHT began with the rather basic programme of designing and implementing an innovative strategy for preserving medicinal plants in the wild. That was in 1993. It is to Darshan’s credit that he foresaw the entire range of activities that could emerge from that beginning and moved as and when resources permitted to establish them.The evolution of FRLHT is a story of how a large vision can be realised step by step with steadfast perseverance and unwavering focus.Says Darshan: “In 1993, the only support we could get was for the conservation of medicinal plants. But even then FRLHT dreamt of becoming a world class institution. The problem was resources. No one was willing to support a comprehensive vision of an unknown organisation in an unchartered field.”
But FRLHT kept taking the steps it needed. It developed its strength in informatics in 1994 with the use of computers to store traditional knowledge and make it easily accessible. Now you can get CDs of the seminal Charak Samitha at FRLHT. Then came a bio-cultural herbarium in 1996, efforts for reviving community based health traditions in 1997, a modern laboratory in 2001, the beginnings of the hospital in 2004 and finally research on medical manuscripts and the theoretical foundations of Ayurveda in 2005. The achievements of last 14 years prepare the FRLHT institution to effectively contribute to the emerging era of pluralism in medicine, many had envisaged but few had been able to act upon in the early nineties. As Ayurveda and Yoga acquire increasing importance in integrative healthcare, FRLHT is uniquely positioned to be an institutional bridge between traditional Indian systems and western science.
FRLHT’s mission has been to make traditional systems comprehensible to the
modern world. The survival of traditional systemsdepends on them being
understood in contemporary scientific terms without diminishing their original
knowledge base. The problem is
that while traditional
knowledge is based on holism,
modern science is rooted in
reductionism. Making the
connectionrequires a complex
vision and a deep
understanding of comparative
epistemologies. It is the
challenge in medicine as physicians and scientists
explore uncharted frontiers.
Some of the concerns belong
in the realm of pop culture.
Books like “The monk who sold his Ferrari” look for body and mind solutions.
Deepak Chopra dominates this space. The debate goes deeper and is difficult to
enter in the absence of a common scientific idiom. Modern medicine is structurally
defined and therefore is full of quantitative certitudes. The practitioners of
Ayurveda on the other hand rely on knowledge that is based on systemic theories
and hence the fieldsin Ayurveda cannot be reduced to structural entities.
The challenge in integrative medicine is to evolve a methodology to define the relationship between the whole and the part. It is clearly not a one to one relationship. “FRLHT or for that matter any one else does not have the final answers,” says Darshan. “But it is a pioneer in exploring the relationships in the context of health sciences. It respects both holism and reductionism as ways of knowing Nature. The way we see it is that the whole consists of the parts, but the parts don’t necessarily add up to the whole.” A modernscientific laboratory is necessary for translating the systemic parameters of Ayurveda into the scientific structural parameters of modern science. It can develop quality standards for a plant or an Ayurvedic drug and check it out for toxins, heavy metals and so on. The laboratory tests become a means of epistemologically sensitive communication between practitioners of different systems.
But the laboratory cannot measure the systemic parameters on which Ayurveda is based.It can only measure representative points inthe systemic field. In the hospital an Ayurveda practitioner can benefit from reading an MRI or an ultrasound. He needs to however betrans-disciplinary in his perspective in order to be able to interpret the change in structural parameters in Ayurveda’s systemic framework. The vaid in Ayurveda will still need to read the pulse and assess the body type of the patient in ways that are completely alien to the physicians trained in modern medicine. FRLHT was founded to find everyday solutions to such complexities. Its success will finally be in creating new and sustainable relevance for the wealth of knowledge that is India’s legacy but tends to get lost in debris of change and confusion about the content of an Indian programme of modernisation.
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