Social Interventions...

     The interventions made by NGOs and CSRs are widely discussed these days as a solution for issues which are inherent in our system. Our governmental machinery lacks certain essential features and most of these NGOs concentrates on areas which are abandoned by the respective governments. It is not a danger and civil society participation is really good and inevitable in our system

1. Until the participation of these players are not resulting in the withdrawal of state from welfare activities and

2. If they are not misusing the feelings of those so-called abandoned, marginalized people or/and if they are not implementing indirectly the vested interests of influential groups/foreign powers.

All other issues can be brought under these two wide categories. The two conditions mentioned above is unavoidable in a Democracy and if an intervention fails to comply with these conditions; it is in fact undermining Democracy.

I would like to talk about a panchayat called Kizhakkambalam in Ernakulam district, Kerala and the interventions made by the CSR division (they call it Total Responsibility Program) of a corporate company called Anna Aluminium/Kitex. While “Anna Aluminium and Chakson” makes household utensils and kitchen appliances, Kitex is a premium garment manufacturing company. The philanthropic division of this company was really active in social sphere starting from 2013. They consulted the villagers in Kizhakkambalam and prepared a 12 point vision 2020 document. They wanted the Panchayat and its council to implement those programs. 

     Kizhakkambalam is a comparatively big Panchayat with an area of 32 sq. kms and a population of over 23000. Analyzing the demography of the Panchayat, majority of the population are Malayalam speaking Christians. 40% of the people are dependent on the company for the employment or in other words employed by the company and the remaining includes businessmen and those who are dependent on traditional agriculture, IT and Tourism. The literacy rate of the Panchayat is phenomenal which is even above the state average. I.e. 95%. The philanthropic share of this company is 1200 crores and they had spent at least 28 crores in this Panchayat alone. Other than Anna Aluminum and Kitex, some other companies like Sevana, BlackCat, Wireropes also have its manufacturing units in this particular Panchayat. Starting from free medical camps and agreements with 100 doctors, 500 hospitals and 600 nurses in the Ernakulam district, they also increased the availability of water in the Panchayat. Instead of a municipal pipe providing water to the people living in “Laksham Veedu Colonies”, they built bore wells, wells and ponds and ensured local availability of water. Their aim is to create India’s first model village with self-sufficiency in food production, total sanitation, houses, and drinking water for all. Their main plan is to prepare Kizhakkambalam as the first model Panchayat among the four and a half lakh Panchayats in the country. Sabu M Jacob, Managing director of Kitex group, is leading these initiatives. Like the Special Purpose Vehicle made by the State government for developmental projects, the company created a different face for its initiatives in the name, Kizhakkambalam Twenty 20. They had few drifts with the last 'Panchayat governing body' and they in turn plotted their own candidates for the 2015 local self-government body elections to the Kizhakkambalam Panchayat. The poll percentage was around 90% and they got 17 seats out of the 19 seats to that panchayat. Mr. K V Jacob got elected as the Panchayat President, who was a member of CPI (M). It was not easy for them to defeat the ruling congress led governing body but they had the confidence to say that we will get 70% of the total votes polled. Their main argument in support of contesting the election was that the Panchayat is creating lot of impediments to the development plans which are meant for the welfare of people. While some people praise it as an effective intervention, some people are cynical about the developments in which a corporate company is ruling a Panchayat. 

     In order to investigate different related stories occurred in the past around the world, let’s take the examples of Durbar in West Bengal and NGOs (Grameen Bank) in Bangladesh. The NGO called Durbar in Kolkata works in the area of “Trafficking of Women and Children”. Durbar is an organization which assumes that their job is not just about rescuing and they also examines the experiences of those who are trafficked. The NGO understood that the stigma attached to a sex worker and the option of carrying on sex work as a viable option are the main deterrents which blocks sex workers the possibility of returning to their earlier lives. In this context, Durbar acted as counselors and guides providing them with advice, courage, loans and contacts with more friendly malkins. Durbar also believes that for the sex workers to work with dignity and security there should be mechanisms to stop people from harassing and exploiting them. The sex workers think that the way to de-stigmatize the profession is to give it the same social and legal recognition as any other work and recognize their rights as workers. They are clear in their demands for an ideological recognition of sex work as a legitimate and valid occupation. But the sex workers or the Durbar is really ignorant about the situation which made them ask for a legitimacy and their main attempt is not to change that situation.

     Durbar sees sex work as a contractual service agreed between consenting adults; which also means that they are trying to conceptualize the flesh trade. According to Durbar, trafficking is employment against the will, applying direct force or through deception, violating fundamental rights of self-determination and autonomy over the body. They neglects the fact that right to a dignified living and right to life is also a fundamental right and sex work is not a means for dignified living. The definition also admits that the autonomy over the body can be submitted to someone against monetary benefits. They put forwards two condition for the sex work to be established as a legitimate profession. One is about maturity and the other is about consent. Durbar also tries to ensure that trafficking is not considered as a way of recruitment to sex work. But when they try to recruit non-trafficked people as sex workers, they are totally forgetting the life of a trafficked person. Trafficking is not going to end in the current scenario and the trafficked people end up in sex work out of no other way of decent living. Durbar also aims to dissociate sex work from all criminal links and eliminate middlemen. In order to establish this new policy, they needs the brothel owners and managers not to recruit the trafficked workers. Durbar is trying to idealize the whole setup and this will only end up in having an official sex workers association and a usual one which includes criminals, middlemen etc. further denying the basic human rights of the workers involved. They also rejects the rescue operations as the rescuers never consult sex workers while evicting them from workplaces and most often they will end up in places not different from trafficked areas. They formed local self-regulatory boards in red light areas to facilitate commercial sex work but the challenge these boards face is their lack of legal standing. They also refuses to submit the rescued individuals into police custody as is required by the law. It becomes extra-constitutional when they try to do the same with a trafficked individual from another country (they do this with the implicit knowledge of the police). The questions like how we can explain these areas as workplaces and why Durbar is not obeying the laws instead of lobbying for change in the existing laws remains unanswered.

     When it comes to the NGOs in Bangladesh, the strategy and the approach is very clear and explicit compared to the above scenario. The micro-credit NGOs have instrumentally appropriated the rural women’s honor and shame in the furtherance of their capitalist interests to the grass roots. NGOs have begun to act like a state, implementing social engineering programs which was formerly in the domain of the state. They have tremendous power to regulate people’s behavior and subject them to NGO mandates. All of these NGOs which work in micro-credit has millions of dollars in donor support and millions of rural subscribers. This is a major crisis for the sovereignty of the nation state with rapid movement of finance capital that lies outside the control of the state (Appadurai, 2001:4). But this helps the NGOs to target poor people by providing services which the state fails to deliver or decided not to deliver because of the pressure from donor agencies like IMF and IBRD. NGOs are also active producers of new subjectivities and social meanings for people and thus they keeps the balance of power with themselves. The Grameen bank regulates the social behavior as well as the present behavior of people which in fact determines their future pay-offs. 94% of its borrowers were women, them becoming an owner of petty capital but husbands or male kin of the women used the loans in most cases. The Bank seek out women because they are seen as docile subjects who can be easily subjected to the norms of an NGO. NGOs adopted the pre-existing social practices in Bangladesh to shame men through their woman. Collective responsibility was another technique the NGOs applied in addition to the obligatory kin relationships. Banks used this group responsibility as a mechanism to maintain tight fiscal control, police women borrowers’ financial conduct and to enforce payment through collective punishment. It resulted in daily strife among these group relations and the NGO officers did not take any responsibility for actions that the community took to enforce payments. The NGOs had even used the apparatuses of the state like police, court etc. to harass these poor women to pay up in this interlocking system of debt. The recovery action ranges from shaming them in public places (which even results in suicides and divorce) to repossessing the capital that the woman had built with her loans or even house-breaking. In a way, the NGOs promoted the institutionalization of coercive norms as well as the reproduction of usury at multiple levels of society. 

     The NGOs started working in Bangladesh when there was an infrastructural vacuum after the war of independence. The west preferred NGOs in order to bypass the bureaucracy and corruption of the Bangladeshi state. NGOs started involving in politics by the transition to democracy and their borrowers became their vote banks. Then the political parties started seeking the support of NGOs in order to win elections thus developing a curious connection between the politics and development. NGOs dominate the rural economy, provides major source of employment as well as two-thirds of credit in rural areas. They are also occupying the moral space by attacking left political parties and by inducting public intellectuals as their consultants who might have otherwise spoken out against the excesses of NGOs. Later the focus of NGOs became the maintenance of high recovery rates instead of the initial social engineering.

     The texts of development have always been avowedly strategic and tactical- promoting licensing, and justifying certain interventions and practices, delegitimizing others… (Crush, 1995: 5). Similarly, the state institutions always view the rulers with awe and treat civil society as an adversary. Some of them often venture into areas of policy and ideology which are alien to it. By definition, an NGO means a dedicated individual or group working selflessly among the people without any external support. If they are receiving foreign funds, they have to register under FCRA act (in India). Some NGOs where successful enough to raise certain concerns which would never have come to the forefront of political or governmental discourse. But over the years their character has changed globally due to the ever-increasing infusion of foreign funds from large corporates. In some cases, the objectives of the donors may come into conflict with the policies of the ruling political executive. The conflict between Union Government and organizations like Green Peace, Amnesty International etc. are recent examples. But the fact that RSS is also a beneficiary of foreign donations need to be read along with this. Once BJP got the support from civil society to campaign against the Congress led government and now they are afraid of the very same forces. The donors, be it foreign donors or the donor company of Kizhakkambalam 2020, may try to influence government policies though these organisations. Sometimes the intentions are good while lobbying and sometimes not. In response, government agencies like the Intelligence Bureau refers to NGOs in their reports as actors who have “stalled development projects” by encouraging people’s agitation against the state. For example, the NGOs which protested against the Vedanta Project in Orissa were funded indirectly by the rivalries of Jindal. The mining took place at a location, which is notified under the fifth schedule to the constitution, without any mention of the rights of the tribals and their travails. The NGOs had to take up their cause when the government remained insensitive while the company violated environment laws, PESA, FRA and other tribal rights. 

     Coming back to the Kizhakkambalam 2020, they had appointed 42 member committee of people who have Masters in Social Work. They categorized the households into different poverty lines based on the size of the houses, source of water and other amenities. Their approach is of a corporate company and their progress card also claims that it has turned large parts of the barren area under the Panchayat into arable land. But not everyone is happy with this initiative and lot of shopkeepers complain that the shops owned by the company is selling groceries in subsidized prices and it is badly affecting their business. I doubt the concept they apply is the adoption of this village and it is not possible to replicate this model. Political parties accuses that contesting elections is companies' way of getting free clearances for its projects in the future. Companies can have vested interests and they can manipulate local bodies to serve their interests which will lead to a negative sort of politics. Few environmental activists argue that this company started political activism once they got caught red-handed in environmental pollution. The response of the officials is that the Kizhakkambalam 2020 and the donor company is different and it is the 120 odd rock crushers and brick kilns in the village which causes this pollution. They also claim that they will make all of them accountable and will try to comply with the regulations, in the future. 

     “Law-abiding NGOs, foreign or domestic, are an asset to any society because they enlarge the debate via research and advocacy” (Surjit Bhalla, 2014). The role of civil society organizations are critical because the democratic space for disadvantaged sections to participate in decision making is very less in our system. So the solution is not to suppress voices of dissent but the NGOs and initiatives like Kizhakkambalam 2020 should subject themselves to greater public scrutiny and comply with the law of the land. There is immense danger when they themselves say that they are here to fill the vacuum left by the government. That is what happened in the case of Kizhakkambalam Twenty 20. But the Kizhakkambalam 2020 did something different from the Durbar and Grameen Bank. They formulated the project with the participation of people and they tried to gain political legitimacy for their mandate by contesting elections. Poll promises by the new political formation also includes recall of the elected candidate if two-thirds of the electorate express lack of confidence in the candidate. These initiatives will help to deepen and enhance the democracy as they try to function within the available democratic space instead of challenging it. The government can also think about instituting an independently administered fund without any strings attached to it in order to support the efforts of civil society organizations.

REFERENCES

• http://www.2020kizhakkambalam.com/, 26 April 2016

• http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/watch-out-for-twenty20-at-kizhakkambalam/article7801998.ece, 26 April 2016

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizhakkambalam, 26 April 2016

• http://www.business-standard.com/article/politics/a-political-twenty20-in-a-kerala-village-115112100838_1.html, 26 April 2016

• Balla, Surjit (2014): "In Defense of Greenpeace", Financial Express, 14 June 2014 available at:

• http://www.financialexpress.com/story-print/1260144

• Crush, Jonathan (1995) Imagining Development. New York and London: Routledge

• Appadurai, Arjun (2001) ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.) Globalization, pp. 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.