India Programme

Report

This programme supports non-governmental organisations working in social development to help the most vulnerable groups in India.

Increased grant spend

Our grant-making in India has grown this year. We made grants worth INR 73,228,333 (£922,779) to 22 development projects with 20 different Indian NGOs. The grants were spread across the country and included support to health, education, children in distress, disability, governance and training-related activities. The stated emphasis on supporting work in India’s poorest regions is finally showing in the portfolio, with grants in the most difficult districts in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa.

We have also followed through on the India Committee’s advice of September 2008 to focus on capacity and systems within the India Programme’s NGO partners1. Guidelines have been prepared on partners’ standards and on minimum requirements of partners’ financial systems, and these have subsequently been approved by the India Committee. We are now working to implement these across our supported projects. A system of financial audits of supported projects has also been implemented.

Panchayats conference

We held a PHF Partners’ Consultation on working with panchayats (grassroots political institutions) and municipal bodies. This was hosted by ARAVALI, a Jaipur-based PHF partner. Representatives from 15 PHF partners, all of whom had experience to share on this issue, participated along with the Foundation’s India-based advisors, staff and consultants2.

The main purposes of the consultation – to share experience from different parts of the country (and across rural and urban areas) and to discuss what works (and what does not) – were achieved. We were also treated to a talk by a guest speaker, Mr TR Raghunandan, a former senior official in the Government of India’s Ministry of Panchayati Raj. He identified future game-changers for development in India and put the efforts of NGOs in dealing with grassroots institutions into perspective. As a result of the consultation we have concluded that:

  • We need to increase support to work in smaller urban settlements
  • We need to understand other factors that bring about change, such as technology and markets
  • NGOs will find social change harder to bring about in the future and accountability is going to be critical. Encouraging this through capacity building, learning from each other, sharing of learning and peer assessment should play a greater part in PHF’s agenda.

The decisions taken in 2008/09 to open an office in New Delhi and recruit staff have been implemented this year, beginning with the formal registration of an India Liaison Office with the Government of India. Ajit Chaudhuri, who has worked part-time for PHF since 1999, is now a full-time Director. Skalzang Youdon joined as Administrator in December 2009. An office has been functional since January 2010.

Gazala Paul continues as Consultant to PHF for western India, and we welcome Veena Lakhumalani as Consultant for eastern India. The advisors to the programme – Sushma Iyengar, Donald Peck and Shankar Venkateshwaran – complete the team.

We have started to synchronise administrative, financial and grant-making systems between London and New Delhi. The operational focus for 2010/11 will be to consolidate these. In addition, we will give more weight to the governance and systems within our NGO partners while continuing to make good grants.

Open grants scheme

Grants awarded in 2009/10

Apne Aap Women’s Worldwide

Rs. 999,000 (£12,823) over one year

Young girls in India’s poorly developed areas face the risk of being trafficked to large cities for prostitution. This is a particular problem in the districts along the Indian border with Nepal, which are India’s least developed and where trafficking of girls from Nepal is also rampant. The trafficking industry is mafia-controlled, and working against this is both difficult and risky. Apne Aap is an anti-trafficking NGO that works with commercial sex workers in red light areas in Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi, and also works in the town of Forbesganj in Araria district, Bihar.

We made a grant for setting up ‘safe spaces’ for 100 adolescent girls in red light areas of Forbesganj. These provide basic education, legal literacy and vocational training so that the girls are aware of their rights and have alternatives ahead of them other then prostitution.

Promoting rights: Women’s rights that exist under the Indian constitution are not always observed. Asserting those rights can be risky but girls’ education is an important requirement.

Ongoing grants

Kutch Mahila Vikas Samiti

Rs. 6,789,008 (£84,863) over 30 months

Panchayats, or village-level political institutions, have traditionally been male spaces, but in 1993 the Indian Parliament changed the constitution to ensure that 33 per cent of seats in them were reserved for women. Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS) is a federation of village-level women’s groups based in the Kutch district of Gujarat. We made a grant in 2006/07 to enable the setting up of a resource centre for elected women representatives (EWRs) in Kutch.

The resource centre, now called Sushasini, today works directly with EWRs in 163 villages across five blocks in Kutch, and through collaborations with other NGOs in 596 villages. It has formed block-level federations of EWRs, and also a district-level federation, where issues affecting EWRs can be addressed collectively. Sushasini also provides training and information to enable EWRs to function effectively.

Capacity building: Though we have made this grant in a project mode, we are in fact supporting the building of an institution, which has required the India programme team to have a different relationship with KMVS, focusing less on outputs and more on building strong foundations.

Completed grants

Seva Mandir

Rs. 10,670,524 (£133,380) over three years

Seva Mandir has worked in southern Rajasthan for over 40 years. Its relationship with Paul Hamlyn Foundation began in 2002, with the conversion of village pre-school centres from half-day into full-day centres.

When the project started, southern Rajasthan was recovering from a severe drought. Full-day centres enabled families to participate in government drought relief works by freeing mothers from looking after small children during the day, and provided two meals a day for the children at the centres. A total of 200 centres operated under the project, and about 4,500 children benefitted. A PHF grant in 2006 met about 40 per cent of the project costs in 2006–09.

In the years that this project has been operational, we have experienced successes and failures, which were outlined in an independent review in 2009. An important success has been that an intervention of this magnitude has been implemented in a stable and regular manner. This has in turn enabled the regular operation of the centres with a high attendance rate – in sharp contrast to other pre-school programmes in the region.

Learning relationship: We have taken some important lessons from this project. On sustainability, some interventions will always require financial support from external sources, and this should not detract from a decision to support. On the issue of supporting a model intervention in the expectation that it will be scaled up and/or replicated, a key lesson has been that cost can be an even more critical factor than whether outcomes are achieved.

Footnotes

  • 1 Organisational impact: Though our overall mission is the same, the India programme, with a smaller spend spread across a far larger territory, prioritises capacity-building for organisational impact over innovation or participation (though these are desirable traits for applications)
  • 2 Sharing learning: A report on the proceedings of the Panchayats conference titled: “Consultation on working with elected local bodies in India” is available under the Publications section