Insiders in the development story

Anchoring Change celebrates the grassroots interventions over 75 years but it could have had a more diverse set of organisations and initiatives

Anchoring Change 

Editors: Vikram Singh Mehta, Neelima Khetan and Jayapadma RV

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Pages: 361 

Price: Rs 699

When I was asked to review the book, I mentioned that I know two of the editors quite closely and if this would be a conflict of interest. I was advised to disclose this in the review and proceed. As I started looking at the contents page, there was more conflict to come up. Seniors and juniors from my management school, my own students, an ex-boss, an organisation where I was employed, an organisation that I am currently on the board, an organisation where I have done a case study, organisations that I have advised/consulted, ex colleagues….as I was reading the book, it was almost like attending a college reunion. Is this conflict of interest or confluence of interests? Is this just coincidence or does this reflect a larger club culture of the civil society organisations in India? Is it like the great Indian middle class where a 10-minute conversation leads to establishing some link or the other with someone in the workplace or a lost cousin?

I think interrogating this familiarity could be used to introspectively look at this space. This may be a good peg of objectivity on which I could drape this review. One set of common players come from the government system, where we could club Kudumbashree, Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty and Jeevika — each having carved out relatively autonomous entities within the state government, eventually working with the National Rural Livelihood Mission. These should be seen in the backdrop of Myrada, which was an early innovator to community-based savings and credit groups that became the basic design parameter for the government programmes named above. Basix, and to an extent Pradan, adopted these learnings in their initiatives.

The other two government programmes listed are standalone ones — the Tamil Nadu Midday Meal Programme and SHRC Mitanin. The next cluster emanates out of Pradan. The National Smallholder Poultry Development Trust is an offshoot and the Basix social enterprise group also had deep connections with Pradan, having a common promoter across these organisations.

For celebrating the grassroots interventions over 75 years, we possibly could have had a more diverse set of organisations and a diverse set of initiatives. If we were to remove these overlaps, and looked harder, I am sure the editors could have gone beyond this closed club to get some diversity. I am aware that it is usually unfair and lazy to resort to whataboutery to list the exclusions rather than interrogate the inclusion. But the domain overlaps do encourage me to ask this valid question. Granted that “movements” and “well known” institutions were deliberately left out. Granted that only “success” stories were to be included which resulted in “significance” in the domain. Even within these parameters a representative organisation in a domain would possibly have sufficed and looking hard at other domains would have helped: Nutrition; food security; sport; fine arts ; music, theatre and other performing arts; the wish list is long, and part of that could have been achieved by minimising the overlaps of personalities that tower over the current initiatives and the domains that overlap.

Then there are bones to pick about the style of narration. The synthesis says, “We decided against looking for third party writers” in favour of the protagonists narrating their story. The effect of this is visible in the significant variability in how each story is crafted. Some of the stories read like a catalogue of activities undertaken; some read like reflective and introspective pieces and the write up on The Ant reads like a piece of literature. Some have achievement numbers, some have just process texts. In general, while the pieces are informative, they do not help in developing a framework of understanding of the space lying between the state and the markets. We are operating in this space where markets fail; the state is not possibly able to deliver effectively because of its constraints. The civil society and grassroots institutions fill in the gap that the large systems cannot fill up.

Even when we look at the innovations within the government, they have a frame where there is a relative insulation from the classic delivery architecture of the state (SERP) and in places where it is not possible for the state to intervene by direct participation, there are partnerships that evolve (Myrada with Nabard, Aajeevika Bureau on identity). In general, these are initiatives that engage with the established state-market systems while at the same time contesting them. The only exception to the rule being the ITCs E-Choupal model, which is an investment made by a market-based entity to expand its footprint in what could be termed as redefining the value chain.

In an initiative like this, we do not set the same standards that we set in fiduciary relationships where the conflict of interest is taken seriously. There is also great benefit in confluence of interests so that one could learn when people with similar passions come together. However, if we were to map out the personal and professional relationships between the editors, the authors and their domains, we can see that the book operates on a very familiar territory. That is the problem with the book and it is difficult to say that it is the strength of the book.

mssriram@pm.me. The reviewer is Faculty member, Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore