India programme

Report

The India programme completed the second year of its five-year Strategic Plan during 2014/15, making 31 grants amounting to a total of £1,368,681. Of these, 20 were first-time grants and 11 were renewals.

Our work in India has two components. The first is an Open Grants programme that operates across prioritised geographical areas, which have historically been low on almost all social development indicators. The second is an introduction to what we have called ‘theme grants’. Of the four chosen themes, the first that we have taken up in full measure is related to children in contact with the railways.

open grants

The India Open Grants scheme is a unique offering to the development sector in India. Our grants provide an opportunity for organisations to evolve ideas and thoughts that they feel are important and which they feel require action. We have designed the scheme to encourage small and medium-sized organisations to access funding support from us, as we believe that the existence of a widespread and vibrant civil society is in the interest of the vulnerable people of India. The Open Grants scheme currently constitutes around 80 per cent of the India programme.

Open Grants, by their nature, provide us with a diverse portfolio. We have used a broad framework to determine what it is that we fund within that portfolio. We have supported programmes in health, education, livelihoods, disabilities, women’s empowerment, conservation of natural resources, children’s protection and agency, institutional development and integrated development.

Twelve per cent of our grants are usually made to projects which are investigating problems, by which we mean that they represent a new idea, new thoughts or new approaches which need to be experimented with. Forty four per cent of our grants are made to the next level in the framework, which is running a pilot. These are ideas that have been investigated and now need to be tried out in a project space.

These two categories in a way reflect the very special nature of the Open Grants programme in India – geared towards new ideas and approaches for social development, whatever the sector of involvement. A further 30 per cent of grants are made to take the tested pilots to a level of implementation. Finally, around 14 per cent of the grants are made to spread practice and take ideas that have been tested to a larger audience.

capacity enhancement approaches

Our strategy in India aims to work across geographical areas that comprise communities who are extremely vulnerable and low on development indicators.

Within these areas, our preference for grant-making is to focus on small and medium-sized NGOs which would not normally have easy access to resources to undertake programmes that they would like to take on. This makes capacity enhancement an important component of our relationship with grantees. As part of our strategy for 2013–18 we have identified capacity enhancement as an overarching goal of our work in India.

Three main approaches are being pursued to help our selected NGO partners. The first is to help each organisation identify its own capacity deficit areas and help them link up with suitable support organisations or individuals who can provide training, exposure or hand-holding support to partners. Grants made to partners in this way have a line in the budget which grantees can use to access relevant and timely support when required and necessary.

The second approach is to help partners strengthen the people’s collectives that they form as part of their work. These could be women’s collectives challenging violence, a people’s group struggling to ensure they get their entitlements, or a federation of self-help groups working on microfinance. Strengthening collectives ensures that initiatives with them are sustained and people can take care of their own concerns.

The third approach, which we are currently initiating, is to channel support inputs through a carefully identified resource organisation to small and unseasoned organisations in our geographical priority areas. To begin with we are considering two such regions which are poorly populated with civil society initiatives. The first is an area in central India called Bundelkhand. It is an area characterised by a very strong feudal system, poor development indicators, extreme levels of discrimination against lower castes and particularly against women, and a high incidence of poverty. The second region is the state of Chattisgarh, which is essentially tribal, is struggling under the threat of exploitation of natural resources and also has poor development indicators.

Our ongoing financial and systems support initiative has been very effective and useful for both us and our partners. As part of this we continue to provide a systems and accounts audit wherein an auditor appointed by the Foundation visits the grantee organisation and helps its teams (particularly the CEO and the accounts in-charge) streamline their accounts, and the financial and governance systems.

theme grants

Our theme grants focus on issues which are critical, but for some reason do not occupy significant mind and funding space in the development sector. We have identified four such themes.

The first and best developed of our themes is Lost Childhoods – children in contact with railways. Our work on Lost Childhoods is guided by a structured strategy. The progress has been positive and, in addition to field-level organisations, we now also have a meso-level support organisation doing structured documentation. We are also close to finalising the first research piece on this issue, which will focus on children’s perspectives on their lives on the trains and railway stations in the context of Agency of the Child. Work on the issue has opened up our understanding to the two parallel approaches being followed in India: care and protection for children at one end of the continuum, and agency of the child at the other. Both approaches are important to understand and we believe that the solution to the issue lies somewhere in between the two.¹

We have begun to fund stand-alone initiatives on our second theme, trafficking, but are exploring the possibilities of linking up with other donors with similar interests to jointly develop a strategic and structured response to the issue of trafficking. We believe that a coordinated response which is able to address the social, the criminal and the legal issues of trafficking will have a greater impact on the issue.

As with Trafficking, we are responding to proposals on Mental Health that we are receiving through the online application system. We are still about a year away from a structured and considered response. Our experiences of working on stand-alone projects that we are funding will help us to evolve a clearer approach to address this issue.

On Migration, the fourth of our themes, we are taking a different route and attempting to link up the work we are doing in the UK to initiatives in India. We are proposing to build a sharing and learning platform. The work in India has more to do with interstate migration in search of better livelihood possibilities and also a whole space related to undocumented people in India. These ideas will be discussed and prioritised over the next year to evolve a structured programme.

Sachin Sachdeva
Director, India

Case studies

Baihar Nari

Rs. 5,460,427 (£58,911) over 24 months awarded in 2014/15, Rs. 4,173,880 (£55,627) over 36 months awarded in 2010/11, Rs. 2,935,000 (£41,929) over 23 months awarded in 2009/10, Rs. 604,800 (£7,560) over 11 months awarded in 2007/08
The Baigas are a ‘primitive tribe’ in the Kanha forest in Madhya Pradesh. During land reorganisation in the 1960s and 70s, the Baigas chose to not seek land allotment in their names as their main source of livelihoods was the forest. However, forests in India were acquired by the government as part of new conservation policies in the 1980s. Many Baiga families were forcibly moved from their homes when Kanha was declared a National Park.

Today, many Baiga are bonded workers, indebted to local merchants who offer loans in return for labour. The average rate of interest is around 10 per cent per month. Even though the amounts they take are small, they are unable to pay it back. Debts are transferred to the son of the family. Most Baiga families have a debt of 5–10,000 rupees.

Baihar Nari, led by Meena Qureshi, works with the Baigas to help them revive their faith in themselves, adapt to modern times and help them access what is rightfully theirs to rebuild their lives. By establishing savings and credit groups, Baihar Nari has helped Baigas become self-dependent for minor credit needs. Borrowing from the group is charged at 24% annually, enabling the scheme to save around 50 rupees each month per member to build the group’s capital.

One of the main focuses has been supporting the reintroduction of traditional crops and improving farming techniques. Under the Forest Act 2008, about 800 Baiga families have gained rightful ownership of land they had been ‘illegally’ cultivating. Provision for community forest rights has also helped seven communities gain common ownership rights on land which was traditionally theirs. Though a small step, this will help the Baigas recreate their identity over time.

Our final two years of support for Baihar Nari will be to consolidate individual and community forest rights, strengthen representation in the Panchayat, improve writing and reporting on the Baigas, and invest in Meena Qureshi to emerge as an advocate for the Baiga community.

Iswar Sankalpa

Rs. 8,988,164 (£90,000) over 36 months awarded in 2013/14 and Rs. 1,004,000 (£11,812) over 12 months awarded in 2012/13
Under the Khidderpore flyover on Karl Marx Sarani in Kolkata lives Sudhakar Gopal. He sleeps on a trunk opposite a shop owned by Rabi Shahu. During the day Sudhakar goes to a drop-in centre run by Iswar Sankalpa at a nearby police station, where he has a bath, eats lunch and takes part in a few activities. He returns to the flyover later in the day, where he does odd jobs for Rabi and other local shopkeepers and stallholders.

Some years earlier, Sudhakar was found walking the streets, naked, with severe schizophrenia, and no idea where he was from. He is one of many men with mental health problems living on the streets of Kolkata targeted for help from Iswar Sankalpa’s ambulance team. After they were able to establish contact with Sudhakar he was linked up to Rabi, who agreed to take him under his care. He helped Sudhakar get over his symptoms by ensuring that he took his medicines.

Provision of ‘street care’ by local caregivers is a unique model, developed by IS to help mentally ill men living on the streets. Born of necessity – IS had no facilities to take the patient to nor any money to take care of them – the approach has shown some fascinating results. While not suitable for women, who would be made more vulnerable if they continued living on the streets, for men, despite remaining on the streets, it provides a life with some independence compared with institutional care. While treatment can take longer, it brings greater stability, as the patient is not removed from his surroundings and does not have to readjust to life after treatment.

For the local caregiver it also offers something. Mohd Nahal, another carer at Karl Marx Sarani, says that helping a fellow human being is a ‘more effective ebadat (act of devotion) than worshipping the creator’. For wider society, where huge stigma is attached to mental illness, the approach offers a means for treatment and recovery to be visible and for mental health to be better understood.

lost childhoods

Support for organisations working with children in contact with the railways
Rs. 6,873,141 (£74,152) in 2014/15
Our work with a group of organisations through the Lost Childhoods portfolio of grants has enabled us to deepen our understanding of the issue of children in contact with the railways. We have supported organisations to reach substantial numbers of children in difficult circumstances and also engaged with diverse stakeholders in the field. In the process, we are gaining insights from the ground, recognising gaps in strategy and operations, and identifying challenges and opportunities for work in this area.

Different strategies are employed to tackle the issue of children on the railways. One approach believes that children need above all to be protected, and that children should be ‘rescued’ and restored urgently to the family or assigned to a childcare institution. This approach corresponds with most of the implementation work delivered through the government and social sector. However, through our work we have seen some of the difficulties faced by frontline workers in maintaining protective homes and shelters, which often house large numbers of children.

An alternative viewpoint highlights that there are a range of reasons for children of different ages and backgrounds to leave home. Many children have made a choice to be where they are and are exercising agency in choosing not to engage with protective homes. Large numbers of children who continue to live on railway platforms and similar spaces sustain themselves through a network of peer groups, care givers and informal livelihoods.

In light of this debate, we became part of the All India Working Group for Rights of Children in Contact with Railways (AIWG-RCCR). This informal collective seeks to promote the idea, from a child’s perspective, that the child has agency and that this should be part of the laws and policies in India dealing with children. An important gap that the collective has highlighted is the absence of children’s voices in the policy discussion space and the need for participatory research to highlight children’s experiences, motivations, challenges and needs. We have proposed to support such work.

We have not taken a position of ‘either/or’ in this debate, but recognise that both points of view merit engagement and need to be backed by evidence. We want to see the different viewpoints speak to each other to find suitable new responses to children’s needs.