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[Moved by the earthquake and its aftermath, AID volunteer Gautam Desai spent several months in Gujarat since the summer of 2001, working with grassroots groups and providing direction for AID's collaborations in Gujarat. Here is a note written by him in April 2002.] Last year's unprecedented post-earthquake devastation in Gujarat generated a correspondingly large philanthropic response from around the world. AID also evolved its own response with the money that donors entrusted the organization. Naturally, the volunteers and donors of AID were expected to seek their partners and projects in accordance with its philosophy to nurture sustainable, participative, and equitable development rather than donor-driven construction alone. One of the AID volunteers spent months visiting various affected areas, identifying NGOs who had prior experience mobilizing grassroot based participative processes and were committed to a long term presence in the EQ affected area. This deeper approach was particularly meaningful as the EQ had hit ecologically degraded, economically marginalized and socially backward area squeezed between international borders, saline coastal area and desert/semi-arid land. The consecutive droughts and previous cyclone had already weakened this dry region with little industrialization and very small pockets of irrigated land. Many NGOs who came in without prior background in development therefore focused on contractor driven construction of housing, or less frequently schools and hospital buildings in selected – adopted villages. While this approach had its own positive impact, it also created divisions and accentuated preexisting imbalances in the society. The government compensation policies too were more like property based insurance underwriter, which further compounded by corruption and bureaucratic hurdles aggravated the deprivation of the most marginalized sections of the society in EQ affected regions. Thus, there was a very ironic tragedy whereby there was all the money pouring in the narrowly defined housing construction type projects duplicating or replacing the government, but very little of that was generating the social or human capital which would raise the capabilities and morale of the people to develop their own self-help mechanisms, form organizations which would help the poor, uneducated people to engage the government in demanding and securing their rights such as just compensation, water for housing construction, presence of teachers in government run schools and so on within its own policy framework. Also, we recognized that the well-entrenched discrimination that is faced by certain communities like Dalits and other minorities is likely to get reinforced in the rehabilitation process unless special efforts are made to avoid or counter that, by working with those communities specially. It is in this context that although the AID money was relatively limited and spread around in smaller amounts to more partners, at least it served as the seed money for social venture capital to form new long term partnerships in a region where we had none existing earlier. We at least went a step in the right direction that after much hesitation, delay and deliberation which was healthy as a self-educative process - we considered livelihood, women's cooperative, community health and such projects. As our confidence in the organizations and the difference they made grew, our comfort level grew too with broader and deeper rehabilitation as it really has to be. However we would have entirely missed the boat as far as relatively spontaneous people's movement to organize for their rights was concerned, because the NGOs who were mobilizing that movement were not recipients of our funding. It was due to one of our volunteer's presence in the field that AID participated in the most educative and fruitful process of rehabilitation. The impact of the few weeks of Lok Adhikar Manch was profound in prodding the government as well as large section of the NGO to pause and think what real rehabilitation was and whether all the claims on rehabilitaition were true. This went beyond money or funding. BSC, Action Aid and MARAG took great risks as individual volunteers and institutions to question the efficacy of the rehabilitation and succeed in redefining some of the priorities. This also showed the limitation of project based, "concrete" output oriented funding - whether housing, livelihood generation, literacy or micro-credit even if they are based on grassroot participation if they don't question the overall development or rehabilitation paradigm and issues like social discrimination. The Lok Adhikar Manch experience further separated those who were ready to go the farthest with the poorest. It is through this experience that aid_gujarat active volunteers came to a conclusion that the remainder of the EQ funding should go to support BSC, MARAG, Action Aid's efforts to strengthen people's organizations, self-help groups, volunteers educating them in government policies and procedures, even communication ranging from websites and brochures, through training of grassroot workers in writing reports and so on... We had extensive discussions with this core Gujarat rehab group and formulated tentative proposal ideas for concluding the funding and disbursal process over the Spring. Unfortunately, before that were to happen, the communal carnage broke out in Gujarat. Within a day or two, it is this coregroup of BSC, Abhigam Collective, MARAG, Action Aid that had redirected their attention to the victims of communal violence. They risked their lives to begin with. It is no surprise because BSC has a over 20 years of history as the champion of dalit rights, MARAG was formed to work with the migrant shepherd communities, and so on. Gradually a much larger group of NGOs expanded the Citizen Initiative as this coalition took shape quickly over the next few days. Please note that it was more or less the same groups and individuals who as Janpath Citizen Initiative, had formed crucial, timely and massive response to the EQ relief almost exactly a year ago January through March. A share of our EQ relief fund had been directed to them. They not only formed the backbone of the initial relief material distribution and damage assessment, but also disbursed funds from European funding agencies such as HIVOS in a most democratic, decentralized way. Such funds went to more than 40 small groups in employment generation through rural development proejcts in the crucial relief phase from March through June '01, in remote EQ affected areas where most other donors hadn't even reached. In my random visits to areas ranging from Jamnagar to Kutch, excellent outputs in terms of people's satisfaction as well as physical infrastructure could be seen. Now, exactly one year later, CI has been reconvening those relief-recovery-rehabilitation mechanisms and networks to help the riot victims. This entwined story tells us how lucky we are in having identified and established close relationships with partners who can form our axis of all future involvement - whether manmade or natural disaster or sustainable development or social equity and justice, they have the track record, capability and vision to carry forward all in an integrated manner. It is the few humanitarian, progressive, grassroot based groups upon whom falls the burden of championing the cause of reaching the unreached. It is this core learning that we want to absorb in our disbursal of the remainder of the funds raised last year. Rather than directing it in a fragmented, project oriented way, we must direct it to strengthen the critical mass of our core partners' institutional capacity to respond to such tragedies. We should aim at the synergy rather than compartmentalized narrow focus which exist only in our minds sitting thousands of miles away. Someone like Prasad (BSC) has to spend two days in Kutch for EQ rehab, 2 days in resolving rehab of Dalit victims of atrocity in an adjoining district, and now the Ahmedabad riot victims among many other ongoing projects. In fact it is because their leaders and volunteers including villagers trained through such a variety of experiences that they're able to be effective. However, because very limited resources get far stretched out like this and most of the funding comes with strings attached and narrowly defined project boundaries, it is these core capabilities which do not get adequately funded or nurtured. Since there is no immediate output to show, or it's often called "overhead" donors are reluctant. However, for organizations with impeccable integrity, it is this which poses the most problem. AID's disbursal of the smaller but not too insignificant residual funding will specifically recognize and focus on the synergy. It will welcome proposals encompassing the remuneration of such versatile human resources, their communication and transportation needs, their valuable educative tools for the society (from EQ to riots experiences) - web, handouts, workshops, cross-communication of various rehab victims to facilitate cross-learning, capacity building to develop future responsiveness and so on. We started with symptoms, and as we learned, we are now going for the root cause of the disease and developing some resilience. When the very fabric of the civic society is in flames, when there is such large scale suffering, our limited resources must concentrate on those who have the courage to walk through that fire and salvage the humanity in a manner that leverages the interconnected nature of the problems. Gujarat has been the laboratory of reactionary forces over the last 15 years. The implications of the disasters (EQ through communal violence), and the NGO response to it go far beyond its boundaries. We are acting there "locally" with "global" picture in mind. |
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