Listening to communities: The first step towards lasting development

I made many mistakes in my early years working among the Jenukuruba and Bettakuruba communities in the forests around Heggadadevanakote. Some were mistakes of inexperience, the kind that any young doctor stepping out of medical college into a tribal hamlet would make. But the more consequential ones were mistakes of assumption. 

I had arrived convinced that I understood the problems and, more dangerously, that I already carried the solutions. It took years of quiet, patient correction from the very people I had come to serve before I began to see how much that certainty had cost us both. 

The first lesson the forest communities taught me was silence. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of attention. When I sat with an elder and stopped filling the space with my own presumptions, I began to hear something that no curriculum had prepared me for. I heard knowledge. I heard centuries of accumulated understanding about the land, the body, the seasons, and the intricate relationships between them. I heard solutions to problems I had been trying to solve with imported frameworks that had no roots in that soil. 

This is the foundational crisis in much of what passes for development work in India today. We have built elaborate systems for delivering services to communities without first learning to listen to them. Government programmes, however well-designed at the policy level, would achieve so much more if they arrived in villages as open questions rather than finished answers, genuinely seeking to understand what communities are actually asking for.  

Civil society organisations, despite their proximity to the ground, often replicate the same error in a softer way. The community becomes a beneficiary, a target group, a last-mile delivery point, rather than the primary author of its own transformation.  Working with communities is fundamentally different from working for them, and the difference begins with listening. Working for communities assumes that the practitioner, the planner, or the policymaker holds the solution and that the community’s role is to receive it gratefully.  

Working with communities begins with the recognition that the community holds knowledge that the practitioner does not, and that any durable solution must emerge from that embedded wisdom rather than override it. I learned this at considerable cost in my early years at the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement. We built a hospital because we believed access to healthcare was the primary need. The communities tolerated our hospital but kept pointing us towards their fields, their forests, their children’s schooling, and the slow erosion of their customary rights.  

The presenting problem and the root problem are rarely the same, and only sustained listening can reveal the distance between them. When we finally reorganised our work around what the communities were actually telling us, rather than what we had decided they needed, the quality and durability of our interventions changed entirely. 

Swami Vivekananda was clear on this point, though he expressed it differently. He wrote that the poor of India needed their pride restored before anything else. Any service that diminishes dignity, however materially generous, violates the spirit of genuine development. Listening is the first act of dignity restoration. It communicates to the community that their experience is valid, their knowledge is respected, and their voice will shape what happens next.  

In my subsequent work across different institutions and in diverse policy contexts, I found that the communities most deprived were rarely without understanding of their situation. They could describe with precision where the system was failing them, which intermediaries were extracting rents, and what a better arrangement might look like. What they lacked was not insight but access to the processes where decisions were made.  

The last few years are seeing this shift slowly but surely. The Prime Minister’s call for Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas, Sabka Vishwas and his repeated emphasis on Jan Bhagidhari as the cornerstone of governance signal a genuine move towards a state that listens rather than merely delivers. The aspiration of a citizen-centric government lies in opening governance processes so that community knowledge can inform policy design rather than merely validate decisions already made.  

This is not romanticism about local wisdom. Communities carry biases, internal hierarchies, and blind spots like any human institution. Listening does not mean uncritical acceptance of every expressed preference. It means treating community knowledge as a legitimate input into a deliberative process, one that has equal standing with technical expertise, financial support and administrative experience. The practitioner’s role is to facilitate that deliberation, not to predetermine its conclusion.

What changes when we listen is not merely the quality of programmes. What changes is the fundamental relationship between the citizen and the state, between the community and those who serve it. Participation becomes genuine rather than performative. Accountability becomes possible because communities  who are heard are communities who will speak when things go wrong. And the solutions that emerge carry within them the durability of ownership, which no externally imposed programme can manufacture.  Four decades of working in these spaces have taught me that the most consequential skill a development practitioner, a civil servant, or a policymaker can cultivate is not analytical rigour or institutional knowledge, though both matter enormously. It is the capacity to be genuinely present in a community; to set aside the seduction of one’s own expertise, and to listen with the openness that learning requires.  

 Every enduring change I have witnessed in the communities I have been privileged to work alongside began with exactly that moment of honest, unhurried listening. 

The communities were always speaking. We simply needed to learn to hear them.

    

The writer is a member of NITI Aayog. The views expressed are personal.