Developing Partnerships With The Poor

Moin Qazi

The perception that the poor do not have skills or would not be able to survive on their own is a myth. My experience with development finance has demonstrated that we have to encourage strategies that ensure wider participation of poor in schemes aimed at ameliorating their problems. It is the unleashing of such social energies and, not hackneyed government programmes and tiring lip service of politicians, which will make India’s development ambition a reality. All that the pro-villages rhetoric does is to pay lip service to the people who still live there without electricity and running water. All that you have to do is to provide them access to capital and opportunity and see them take off.

During all these years of my association with the rural sector, I have come to know that development is fuller when put in women’s hands, especially the poor, who know best how to use the little money they have. The first generation leaders of Independent India believed that economic justice would be advanced by the lessons of cooperation where common efforts to achieve the common good will subsume all artificial differences of caste, community and religion. Increasingly, these dreams have been dashed against the shoals of politics, bureaucracy and disregard for the fundamental principle of cooperation. They are all part of a virus sweeping the country, a malaise called dishonesty. Much of what the leaders promise is empty rhetoric and much of the harvest that false promises could reap was owing to the gullible public who saw quicksilver in mirages.

Although there is so much discussion in public forums of involving the stakeholders for appropriate development of the society in which the poor live , poor people rarely get the opportunity to develop their own agenda and vision or set terms for the involvement of outsiders. The entire participatory paradigm illustrates that people are participating in plans and programs that we – outsiders – have designed. Not only is there little opportunity for them to articulate their ideas, there is also seldom an institutional space where their ingenuity and creativity in solving their own problems can be recognized, respected and rewarded

Today the most important need for a development worker posted in a rural area is the need to listen. The best advice one could ever give to new entrants in the field of rural development is to listen to what the people want instead of trying to assume to know what the problems and solutions are. Economic development and social change cannot be imposed from without. They must be sought and grasped by the individual pursuing opportunities for self-realization. That well-meaning people should have the open mindedness to listen to those who work in the field and live the day-to-day challenges. That respect opens many doors. Lasting change comes about so slowly that you may not even notice it until one day people and Individuals don’t want to be taken care of – they need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential .If we can inspire people around the world to think differently about what it means to be poor, then we will have made a real impact. When we design solutions that recognize the poor as clients or customers and not as passive recipients of charity, we have a real chance to end poverty. And I believe we can do that in our generation. This logic comes from the importance of empathy—not one that comes from a place of superiority, but one born from a profound humility.

Rather than just facilitating and providing the mental and physical space for the poor to develop themselves, the drivers of the project make the poor puppets, not equal partners. The early 1980s taught me that the village did not need to plan its growth on the model designed by the urban intelligentsia alone. In fact, urban India needed to learn from villages as much or more than it needed to give. There was need for a genuine dialogue between two equals. Gandhiji's rural bias became clearer. The idea or principle underlying it was fully acceptable, even if the details were not.

If the primary focus is really ending poverty, we must establish partnership between poor communities so that they learn from one another and share traditional, practical knowledge and skills. Importing expensive, unworkable ideas, equipment and consultants simply destroys the capacity of communities to help themselves. That model encourages colossal falsification of figures, the excessive hiring of private consultants and contractors, conflicts of interest and a massive patronage system.

To fresh entrants in this field of development work, I can only suggest that it is important living in a village rather than dropping by for the day, if one really wants to get full insight. I think the main reason why many of our programmes have gone awry is because development workers particularly the senior bosses never had the patience to understand the problems and needs of villagers. During their official visits, they move through villages as if they are passing through revolving doors, rarely interested in dropping into a villager’s house, afraid of catching infection if they are made to taste the villager’s hospitality . Remarks like, ‘ I am a farmer myself’, ‘ you can’t pull wool over my eyes’ and ‘I was born and brought up in a village’ ‘ I know rural problems better than anybody else’ are a sign of arrogance and will not go down well with the people with whom you want to work.

It is only through long and close contact with the poor themselves and through our work with them that we are able to gain a deeper understanding and a more balanced view. In this way our experience is not that of a typical non-governmental organization (NGO) many of which work from within the confines of the project enclave or are based in urban centres from where excursions are made out into the villages by jeep. Such brief or sporadic encounters are unlikely to give any great insights into the lives of the poorest. Sadly, many NGOs are far removed from the realities of poverty and often fail to reach those most in need. For me the most surprising thing has been the simple human-to-human connection that has let me overcome both language and culture barriers.

We should not forget that poor villagers are not just statistics but people like you and me, and apart from the poverty that they share in common, there is as much variety of humankind among them as anywhere else in the world: the hardworking, the lazy, the shy, the outspoken, the honest, the devious, the intelligent and the dull, the improvident and the enterprising. Amongst the people with whom we worked, whether Muslim, Hindu or Dalit, were all of these, though, in my experience, the positive characteristics almost always stood out.

Villagers may be uneducated, but they are extremely clever and very good at telling an outsider what they think they want to hear. The truth of a village can come out only slowly, with time — time for trust to build between the villagers and outsiders, and time for the outsider to peel away all the layers to get at the truth.

In his reflections on fieldwork the doyen of Indian anthropologists, Professor M.N. Shrinivas, has talked of successful ethnography as having to pass through three stages. An anthropologist is ‘once-born’ when he initially goes to the fields, thrust from familiar surroundings into a world he has very little clue about. He is ‘twice –born’ when, on living for some time among his tribe, he is able to see things from their viewpoint. To those anthropologists ,fortunate’ enough to experience it ,this second birth is akin to a Buddhist urge of consciousness ,for which years of study or mere linguistic facility do not prepare you. All of a sudden, one is about to see everything from the native’s point of view –be it festivals, fertility rites or the fear of death.