India Programme
Report
The Foundation supports social development in India through grants to non-governmental organisations, to enable vulnerable groups, especially of women and children, to gain access to basic services that are not ordinarily available to them.
A new framework for our India work will see higher grant-making to NGOs in coming years to improve the life chances of vulnerable groups, and a new direction for the programme which over the longer term will seek both to build capacity and influence government policy.
The total value of grants will rise over the next few years as part of a revised strategy and operating principles for the programme which were agreed by the board in September 2007. These reflect the views of grant-holders who took part in a consultation earlier in the year and who have welcomed our new approach.
We will continue to help vulnerable groups of people, and especially women and children among them, to gain access to basic services that are not ordinarily available to them.
This year large grant-making was one way we fulfilled this element of the strategy. By far the largest grant in the India programme, 19,456,880 million rupees (£243,211), was awarded to Samaj Pragati Sahayog in Madhya Pradesh to continue and scale up its work linking women’s self-help groups to the government’s banking system.
We also seek to improve conditions for the most vulnerable groups by working in partnership with other donor agencies: We have been supporting the Bodh Shiksha Samiti, in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in a consortium with the American India Foundation and the Bunyan Tree Foundation; we plan to extend the relationship while including the Aga Khan Foundation in the partnership.
We have more recently participated in a consortium working on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme with the American India Foundation, the Ford Foundation and other funders. As our new strategy unfolds, we will also seek to build the capacity of the non-governmental development sector, initially through the projects we support. In time, we intend to develop a programme which contributes to capacity-building.
At our special conference in early 2007 many NGOs told us of their concerns about maintaining the numbers and quality of people coming to work in the sector. To inform our thinking about possible approaches to a capacity-building programme, we have commissioned a study into the sector’s HR and capacity issues.
We recognise that India is a large and diverse country in which broad and across-the-board solutions do not work. We will therefore support projects based upon specific operating environments and the skills and preferences of our NGO partners. We will look to support organisations that have clear perceptions, based on their own experience on the ground, of what ought to be done, and which have the skills and systems to do it.
We make many of our grants with the aim of improving public systems. Several recent grants have the express purpose of enabling better governance at the village level, and of exerting pressure toward better participation of women and weaker sections of society within the village institutions, known as panchayats. These include grants to Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, Kutch Navnirman Abhiyan (both in Gujarat) and Nari Uthan (in Madhya Pradesh).
In the longer term we also plan to influence policy makers through research and advocacy. Increasingly we will build relationships with NGOs, education and training institutions, government nodal agencies and NGO networks, and policy and advocacy bodies. We will also develop more partnerships with other donors with whom we share common fields of interest.
We have been giving considerable thought to how we can implement our revised approach effectively while retaining the characteristics of the programme which our grant-holders particularly welcome and which have become a hallmark of our involvement in India. They like our flexibility, willingness to consider ideas that have come up from grassroots, and the relative lack of red tape we give them.
We have reviewed the governance and operations of our work in this programme. While we have not finally determined the future structure, our adviser in India, Ajit Chaudhuri, who has assisted us on a part-time basis since 1999, will be joining the Foundation full time to lead the planned expansion of our operations.
Open Grants scheme
Chetna
Getting Delhi children out of work and into school
1.05 million rupees (£13,430)
Chetna was formed in 2002 to work with street children and child workers in Delhi. Chetna works directly with the children and campaigns to change attitudes so that government schools accept them for admission once they have attained basic literacy levels. It also works with opinion and policy makers. The Foundation has supported Chetna to set up 16 contact points for working children in west Delhi, providing links to the education system for them.
This project has been a learning experience for us and a testing of our value system. Not only is it unlawful, but it is repugnant to us for children to be working, and particularly in the nation’s capital. Is Chetna encouraging this situation by not being confrontational, by establishing relationships with the children in the places where they work, by influencing proprietors, and by not blowing the whistle to the authorities? We have come to feel that, given the large numbers of working children and government’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the problem, Chetna’s approach may be more effective in the long run.
We are supporting Chetna for two years ending June 2008, and will continue support if we feel that the project is reaching out effectively to children in the worst situation – those who have been trafficked to Delhi and are away from their families, and who are facing physical and/or sexual abuse.
National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme consortium
A historic opportunity to improve rural livelihoods
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is a government programme set up in 2005 that guarantees 100 days of labour at the statutory minimum wage rate to any rural Indian household that desires it. Initially it was available to the 200 poorest districts. The government has faced difficulties in implementing this at scale and in ensuring that funds are not siphoned off. The Foundation believes this scheme is a historic opportunity and its success critical to the welfare of India’s poorest families. One of our existing partners, Samaj Pragati Sahayog SPS, leads a consortium that aims to be an enabler for panchayats so that NREGS is implemented effectively and the poorest are able to participate.
The consortium is made up of grassroots implementing organisations whose work is oriented toward panchayats, organisations that provide specialised support services, and donors. We are participating in the consortium by supporting the work of five NGOs in Gujarat and Chattisgarh states. Dr Mihir Shah, Secretary of SPS, writing on the leader page of “The Hindu” about the brutal murder of Lalit Mehta, a young activist, explained how the radical provisions of NREGS threaten vested interest. Dr Shah pointed out that “the biggest employment programme ever undertaken in human history faces a huge crunch of quality human resources. This calls for a massive national campaign for capacity building of grass-roots workers”.
Ongoing grant
Kutch Navnirman Abhiyan (KNNA)
Improving governance through a village development fund
2.7 million rupees (£33,750) – Kutch, Gujarat
Though officially the government says it wants to decentralise decision-making, in reality members of village institutions, or panchayats, have responsibility without authority and little financial power. The Foundation, which had previously supported KNNA, began helping its village development fund (VDF) in 2006, with a view to enabling a greater role for panchayats in rural development.
VDF was set up to provide 25 panchayats with an untied grant of 100,000 rupees each to use for the benefit of the village. The grant was made with conditions attached with the aim of ensuring that decision-making was transparent and open, and women and other vulnerable social groups were included.
The VDF has only recently acquired a momentum after slow progress. It has been hard to make headway because of continuous elections at panchayat and state levels, panchayats’ difficulty in adjusting to a development, rather than a political agenda, and problems within KNNA.
We do, however, continue to see the VDF project as an important model for strengthening the functioning of panchayats, for enabling the interests of marginalised communities to be included within them and for ensuring a focus on social development. We expect the learning from this experience to drive a special initiative for the Foundation on working with panchayats.