A crucial step in fighting inequality and discrimination: the law to make India’s private schools admit 25% marginalised kids

This guest post comes from Exfam colleague and education activist Swati Narayan 

This summer, India missed the historic deadline to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. This landmark law, the fruit of more than a decade of civil society activism, has many path-breaking clauses. For the first time, it bans schoolteachers from offering private tuition on the side – a rampant conflict of interest. It also legally prohibits corporal punishment.

Most powerfully, it insists that every private school must reserve 25 percent of classroom seats for children from poorer or disadvantaged families in the neighbourhood. This quota is by no means a silver bullet. After all, eighty percent of schools in India are government-run and in dire need of teachers, infrastructure and more.

Nevertheless, this masterstroke, which aims to piggyback on the rest of the mushrooming for-profit private schools, single-handedly opens the door for at least 1 million eligible children each year across the country to receive 8 years of free education.

Despite strident opposition from school management and parents’ associations, the Indian Supreme Court last year upheld this visionary clause. Though it may not (yet) be as internationally renowned as the United States’ Brown versus Board of Education ruling, its ripple effect will be no less important in a country as socially stratified as India.

In the last three years, apart from resorting to the courts, private schools have used every trick in the book to deny children their rightful admissions (see video). Despite a ban, some have held separate evening classes to accommodate students from poorer families. Others have sent eligible parents literally in circles over admission paperwork. As a result, last year, Maharashtra state, for example, filled only 32 per cent of reserved seats.

One bone of contention is who will foot the bill? The Act is categorical that the state will reimburse private schools only based on what it spends per pupil in government schools, which is typically much less. For-profit private schools are therefore keen to pass on the burden and increase their already inflated fees for the remainder of the class. Unfortunately, this has pitched wealthy parents against semi-literate ones, further aggravating tensions across the class and caste divides.

On the other hand, many civil society activists are disappointed that the legislation only reserves 25 percent and does not embrace the more inclusive concept of a ‘common schooling system’.

But, even this diluted, watered-down 25 percent reservation clause offers an unprecedented window of opportunity to break the shackles of centuries of social prejudice, which has pigeon-holed and stymied educational, occupational and social opportunities for generations. For the first time, there is a genuine effort to ensure that that children — rich and poor, upper and lower caste — are schooled together at an impressionable age, perhaps laying the basis for India to overcome centuries of divisions.

Even today, children of marginalized castes and tribes are less likely to attend pre-primary and primary school and the quota defines them as primary beneficiaries of the new legislation. The law also supports the entry of children with disabilities. In addition, some states have devised truly progressive rules. Tamilnadu, for instance, has recognized transgender children as eligible. Andhra Pradesh explicitly includes orphans, street and homeless children. Gujarat has clarified that teachers should be professional trained and sensitized for the proper integration of children and warned that schools which discriminate could face closure.

These gems in the rulebook could revolutionize private education in India.

Sister Cyril’s award-winning elite Loreto School in Kolkata, has over the last three decades, already showcased first-hand the transformational potential of integrating street children in mainstream classrooms.

Now, the key to the success of this dream to create inclusive classrooms lies with the burgeoning Indian middle class — to support rather than oppose — this transformative initiative to build the foundation for a more integrated India.

Swati Narayan is a social policy analyst

India’s Middle Class debate continued: should NGOs be looking in the mirror? Guest post from Bipasha Majumder

On my recent trip to India, I discovered some talented bloggers – here’s Bipasha Majumder, Oxfam India’s Communications Officer in Mumbai, writing in a purely personal capacity on the Great Middle Class Debate. She also writes a personal blog.

I have had discussions and I have had heated discussions.  Sometimes I have just let the question float in the air, sat back and observed what others had to say.

Whichever way you look at it, one thing is very clear. The great Indian rising middle class is just not bothered. They are largely happy and keen to contribute to the ‘growing’ economy. But when it comes to any kind of contribution to a cause, especially those related to poverty, there is a big wall of apathy around them.

As a friend puts it – there is a bubble around them…. a bubble of ipad, iphones, AC rooms and cars and what they have achieved in life on various levels. It’s not that they are ignorant of the problems afflicting the country. It’s just that it doesn’t affect them directly. If it doesn’t affect them, then there is no point bothering about it. It’s a problem which is out there and for the government to handle.  If prodded on charity, this group will probably turn around and say, ‘I can only donate when my needs have been taken care of – I still have  bank loans to pay, a second car to buy and a trip abroad to book.’

It’s not that the entire middle class is like this. There is a growing section of people who want to give back, to do something for somebody. And they do, mostly in the form of sponsoring the education of girl children or giving out books and old clothes or giving time by teaching kids in slums or orphanages. A few believe in collecting funds and giving it directly to individuals who need help, medical attention etc. Some would go and donate old computers to schools in villages. This set of people will willingly help as long as they know its directly benefiting somebody’s life.….a change that they can see and feel good about.

But this group is also very skeptical about donating to any NGO (not just Oxfam). With so many scams around politically-connected NGOs surfacing and lack of transparency in most, they don’t want their hard earned money to go into somebody else’s pockets. There is a joke that sums up this cynicism – if you want to own land, build a temple and if you want to earn money, open an NGO. During the rise in the global concern on HIV-AIDS, many such dubious NGOs surfaced, collected hefty foreign funds and then disappeared without a trace.

One can keep pointing fingers at the apathy of the middle class, but the situation within the social sector is not that rosy either. Apart from the fact that many NGOs (some known ones also) do have dubious financial histories, many others are mostly a one-man show working on the whims and fancies of this individual. (For example – a leading Indian NGO on education (better known internationally than within India) has no long term strategy or clear monitoring and evaluation system. If one fine day, the founder decides to work on improving the quality of teachers through training, then the whole system  starts working only around that. Yet, this organisation has won many awards). Quite a lot of others operate without any clear strategy or goals and work only in silos. Despite rising questions from the rest of the society, most of these NGOs are not ready to change or engage with the public (read middle class).…. which only feeds into the general distrust.

I recently met a 60 years plus Sarpanch (Head of the village local governance system or Panchayat) of Lata village in Uttarakhand (a newly created Himalayan state). This not so educated person told me, “Everybody in this country wants the others to change. We all want to earn quick money, we all tell lies and yet we look at others and say ‘they shouldn’t do it’. If you want any kind of change, you have to change yourself first.”

India’s middle class might be apathetic now, but they have a huge potential to change. But for them to change, the social sector needs to change first. A few scenes from my own experience:

• An NGO working on education cannot have volunteer teachers (or para-teachers) who spell BLACK as BLECK and teaches kids that only one Emperor penguin lays egg while the rest huddle to give warmth to that egg.
• A wildlife conservation NGO cannot have staff who throw plastic on the road or forests carelessly while stopping villagers (who they work with) from doing the same.
• An NGO working on public health cannot be successful if they do not teach people how to manage waste.

Even though I am now a part of this sector and hence reluctant to pass hasty judgments on NGOs, I find it difficult to trust organizations which clearly miss out on the basics. Dealing with the over critical middle class means looking in the mirror, as well as changing middle class attitudes to philanthropy.

India’s new middle classes – friends of progress or apolitical mall-rats?

One of the topics that kept coming up during my recent trip with Oxfam India was the role of the rising middle classes. We had a great debate with Aseem Prakash from Jindal University, who is in the middle of a paper on this (I’ll link when it’s published). According to Aseem, different definitions yield numbers for India’s middle classes ranging from 5 million ($10-$20 per day) to 214 million ($2-$4 a day). What’s not disputed, however, is that the numbers are rising rapidly as India’s economy continues to boom.

Behind the numbers are some increasingly complex dynamics, as a new commercial middle class, including rising numbers of so-called ‘lower caste’ entrepreneurs, joins the post-independence middle class of mainly dominant-caste government technocrats who placed their faith in the power of the state to lead India’s rise.

But there is very little agreement over what this means for progressive movements. While Oxfam is beginning to explore working with middle class youth on sustainable consumption and other areas of cooperation, the default position among many civil society organizations seems to be that the middle classes are pretty much a lost cause – consumerist mall rats with no capacity to identify with the plight and struggles of poor people. And it may be true that the middle classes have largely given up on politics – as one slum activist put it ‘Only poor people vote – no middle class people bother’.

According to Paul Divakar, of the National Dalit Campaign for Human Rights. ‘We have not made attempts to ally with the middle classes.’ Paul claims their numbers are insignificant (5%). ‘There may be potential allies within the elites, but either they’re hiding or we just haven’t found them’.

This despite the obvious signs of rising middle class activism in the shape of a burgeoning anti-corruption movement, led by activist Anna Hazare (below left). According to Aseem and his colleagues, Hazare’s movement is build on a lower middle class that feels excluded by the state and angry at its withdrawal as part of India’s gradual liberalization process. Economic mobility has not ended vulnerability  – the Lower Middle Class are in a state of constant stress, and are more politically active than the richer strata: their voter turnout is higher than for the rich.

For Oxfam India and its partners, this frustrated lower middle class seems the most promising ally (as well as donor – more on that to follow), so what’s the best way to overcome the current level of polarization and start constructing alliances with progressive fractions of India’s rising middle class?

First, I think we need to get a better picture of both the many fractions of the middle class, and the world views of each. A decade ago, Elisa Reis and Mick Moore did a really obvious, but innovative piece of work – they went to ask elites in a number of developing countries what they thought about poverty and inequality. They found, for example, that elites care much more about the educational standards among their poor compatriots than they do about their health. Could we do something similar among the emerging middle classes?

When I asked people about this, the view was that the middle class (a lot of people still talk in the singular) is happy to take a stance on universal issues – ‘violence is bad’, or (as with Anna Hazare) ‘the political class is corrupt’. But when it comes to specific issues that affect their lives, (paying taxes, accepting dalit kids in their children’s classrooms) they are much less likely to be sympathetic.

In practice, this means building alliances by finding a way to ‘secularize’ poverty away from its Indian reality of being interwoven with class, ethnicity, caste and religion. Finding such a secular, cross class narrative means understanding where the lower middle classes are hurting the most. For example health care, via out of pocket expenditure, and unregulated private schools, which are often no better than their state equivalent.

Other strong candidates for cross class alliance-building are dealing with pollution and congestion (rich people and poor still have to breathe the same air). Ditto access to justice and judicial reform. The best way to engage with the anti-corruption movement could be to focus on corruption on pro-poor issues, eg health, nutrition – areas that ‘lift poor people up without directly threatening the Middle Class’, as one activist suggested.

But developing this approach seems like uphill work. The default model of change for most popular organizations and NGOs in India seems to be one of mass mobilization to put pressure on the state, backed up by judicial activism, with little room for building ‘vertical alliances’ with progressive fractions of the emerging middle class.

But what do I know? These reflections are based on a handful of visits and conversations. I’d really welcome the insights of Indian readers on this, as well as comparisons with other emerging powers like Brazil, South Africa or China.

Tomorrow: an Oxfam India blogger’s view of the middle class, and why they often don’t trust NGOs

India’s fight for the right to education

Still processing my recent visit to see Oxfam India’s work – posts continue next week with the great debate on India’s middle classes.

Education is fine example of the strengths and weaknesses of judicial activism in India. The Right to Education (RTE) Act was passed in 2009, arising out of constitutional amendment in 1999 that redefined the right to life as including education (!). Private schools challenged the act, especially its requirement that they reserve 25% of places for lower castes, but the Supreme Court upheld it.

To see what all this means on the ground, I duck out of my boring conference and head for Madanpur,  a colony for slum dwellers ‘rehabilitated’ in 2000 – i.e. their previous homes were steamrollered and they were shunted to the margins of Delhi. Its current population of 145,000 earns income from construction, domestic work etc – almost entirely in the informal economy.

Oxfam India’s partner, the slightly ungrammatical EFRAH (Empowerment for Rehabilitation, Academic and Health) is an RTE activist NGO working with schools to implement the Act – part support, part watchdog (‘they like us, and they are afraid of us’). There is plenty to work on, as the gap between the Act and reality is great: it mandates school management committees with equal teacher/parent representation, but there are none to be seen in Madanpur.

We visit a primary school (up to grade 5, hundreds of kids milling in a tiled playground – right) and catch the headmaster trying to beat a retreat on his motorbike. He reluctantly returns for a few minutes before heading off again, pleading a meeting. We meet the teachers in a hot staffroom with stationary fans – the electric’s been off for 12 hours. They teach 2,500 kids in two shifts – girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon; the teachers claim 80-90% attendance rates, but today it’s more like 60% (they blame the upcoming festival season).

The teachers’ big beef is not wages, but the ‘PTR’ – pupil teacher ratio. There are no classes with less than 50 kids, and many are standing room only. But they acknowledge it was worse before – at least there are more notebooks now.

An aside on service delivery v Oxfam’s ‘rights-based approach’: ‘You keep coming and asking these questions but our lives don’t improve with all these foreign visitors’, say the teachers. ‘Plan India gives us water tanks – but what do you give us?’ But EFRAH says the local government promptly diverted money elsewhere when it heard about Plan’s plan. Service provision certainly makes rights-based work more difficult. ‘Fine, you can come and talk about rights, but what are you going to give us?’

A few streets away, we meet a women’s savings group (left), arrayed in their best saris in a tiny but tidy, sweltering one room house. Their main complaint is that they don’t teach their kids anything at the school. ‘Any time you go there, the teachers are not in the classrooms, they are ‘doing paperwork’. The kids are just wandering around. We know there’s not enough teachers, but the ones there are don’t even try to teach. We have to get private classes on top’. All the women are paying for at least some private tuition – $5 per month per subject, all in ‘unrecognized’ private schools which are often no better than the public ones. The women’s big complaint is on the lack of a school management committee or any other source of accountability: ‘they never call us, never call meetings. Teachers and parents need to work together.’ Some parents are filing Right to Information cases to find out how many PTA meetings have been called and who was invited. Another recent RTI case asked how many teachers had been budgeted for, after which the school hired an extra teacher.

Next stop is a group of fifty 13-18 year old girls, in grades 7-10. When we ask what they like about school, there is a resounding silence. Instead, they have complaints – on the lack of toilets, electricity, having to sit on floor. They do like the morning shift though, because it reduces risk of ‘eve teasing’ (sexual harassment). When we ask them how much actual teaching they receive in a 5 hour shift, the average is about 2 hours.

They all want to work (doctors, teachers, police inspectors ‘so I can hit the boys when they harass the girls!’, media) and aren’t under pressure to get married, but ‘We are getting educated, but we can’t work.’ Male relatives stop them going out to work because they’re ‘afraid our character will be put into question’. They insist it’s still better to be a girl ‘we can handle households, children and outside work – but maybe we need to learn karate!’

So it all comes down (doesn’t it always?) to governance and institutions. A combination of increased spending, accountability via school management committees and improved teacher training (it’s largely privatized and ineffectual – recently only 6% of trainee teachers were able to pass a basic test) could turn things around. But that approach is under challenge by contending ‘solutions’ in the shape of private public partnerships and the pulling in of the private sector, whose consequences could include increased inequality and exclusion.

Meanwhile the government looks set to kick the RTE can down the road by postponing the deadline for its implementation from 2013 to 2015, underlining the point that in India, getting the law passed is just the start. Implementation is the real battle. Still, the week after my visit, Shashi Tharoor (right), who helped launch the new Indian edition of From Poverty to Power, was made education minister, so let’s hope he takes matters in hand.

How change happens in India – via the Supreme Court and ‘judicial activism’

With the US going to the polls today, and memories of hanging chads and lawyers swarming like flies round voting stations, it seems like a good time to talk about India’s version of judicial activism, based on my recent visit

At a national level, when it comes to rights and poverty, India seems to combine a sclerotic legislature, a fitfully interested government, and a hyperactive judiciary, which produces a rather unique brand of politics. Social activism in India often seems to involve getting the Supreme Court to rule that the government has to do X, then mobilizing around implementation of the ruling. Whether it’s on the Right to Food (right) or the Right to Education, the Court has been involved in some of the best known progressive legislation in India.

And that culture filters down to the grassroots. Activist talk is dotted with references to PILs – public interest litigation. Women in slums told me they were bringing claims under India’s Right to Information Act to find out what their children’s schools should be providing, or to get community toilets functioning again (cutting through the bureaucratic fog – who is actually in charge of these toilets, which have been shut for the last 7 years?).

In contrast, activism towards the other arms of government – legislature and executive – seems rather neglected at national level, although at state level (at least in Uttar Pradesh, where I visited) things look more familiar, with litigation seen only as a last option when lobbying the state government or parliament has failed.

Back in Delhi, one example of judicial activism is homelessness, where the Supreme Court last year decreed that there should be one homeless shelter for every 100,000 residents. Next to Nigambodh Ghat, the main crematorium in Central Delhi, on the banks of the polluted river Yamuna, I visit a homeless shelter built on land shunned by other residents, due to the clouds of smoke from burning bodies rising from the open air pyres next door, whose flames light up the night. A hundred men of all ages are sitting cross legged on their sleeping mats, talking to charismatic activist Harsh Mander (who is also the Commissioner to the Supreme Court on the right to food) about depression and drug rehab (they all seem to be drunk or high, which makes the meeting slightly nerve wracking). Harsh then ropes me in to hand out passbooks – tomorrow, clutching their proof of address (even if it does say ‘homeless shelter’) they will all go down to the bank to open their bank accounts. In a month’s time they will get their biometric UID cards, digital gateways to rations, cash transfers and an official identity. Old India and new are constantly colliding in this way.

According to Harsh ‘the Supreme Court is the most effective arm of government on social policy. I’d been talking to government for years on homelessness without result. I wrote a letter to the Supreme Court saying people were dying in the Delhi winter, and this is the result.’

Shailaja Chandra, ex chief secretary of Delhi says “if the Supreme Court doesn’t react and pull up the government, who can? But they can only hammer the government, they can’t do anything themselves. It’s like a dog, baring its teeth. But it’s well informed and does shame ministers into action, both centrally and at state level. PIL is effective; litigants do their homework, and come up with solutions to implement.”

Fine, but not all activists are as well connected as Harsh, and not all PILs are progressive – plenty of industry lobbyists use the tactic, leading to an overall environment that is volatile, characterized by abrupt and unpredictable changes in policy direction.

There is also the risk that ‘lazy campaigns rush to the courts’, instead of building a solid base in civil society. And litigants don’t always win – eg on the Narmada Dam campaign, where the Supreme Court jailed novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for contempt.

And judicial activism is an incredibly slow and clunky way to make policy. In his new book ‘India Grows By Night’, Gurcharan Das cites a Ministry of Finance study in the 1990s that revealed a backlog in India’s courts of 25 million cases that take up to 20 years to settle. That backlog would need 324 years to dispose of at the current disposal rate. I doubt things have got much better since then.

But until the other arms of India’s government become more responsive, judicial activism is likely to remain an important weapon in the progressive movement’s armoury.

(Also see my previous book review on judicial activism)

India’s slums: how change happens and the challenge of urban programming

Got back from a fascinating week visiting Oxfam India last week, so the next few days’ post will be on India, sadly the world leader in poverty (by a long way). One of the areas that Oxfam is keen to develop there is its work on urban poverty, where it already works with migrant labourers, waste pickers, domestic workers, and on issues such as housing and access to identity papers. So I spent a couple of days visiting programmes and talking to partners in the slums of Delhi and Lucknow. (I prepped by reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers – wonderful book)

I know they’re grim to live in, but I have to confess to really enjoying visits to urban ‘informal settlements’, especially at dusk, with that particular sense of intimacy as cooking smells and firesmoke drift through the air and domestic workers, rickshaw pullers and street vendors return at the end of another hardscrabble day to grab an hour or two to socialize and relax.

But today, we’re encroaching on that precious leisure time, chatting to an animated group of slum leaders, mainly women, on the edge of Lucknow (see pic). Here, an Oxfam partner, the Vigyan Foundation, is promoting community organization to demand identity papers, water and sanitation, and access to health and education.

Vigyan moved from rural to urban work in 2005, after running a slum mapping exercise by Oxfam in Lucknow & Allahabad. The work highlighted the importance of identity and visibility in Indian politics. Simply by showing the location and population of Lucknow’s many informal settlements, (the previous census had simply denied their existence), they were able to win numerous victories on access to state funding and services.

Beyond the specifics of the slum dwellers’ demands, Vigyan is working on slum dwellers’ sense of ‘power within’, when it comes to their rights and identity itself. Organizers describe it as moving from ‘we are on government land, we shouldn’t be here’ to ‘we are building the city, we have rights, we are not ‘encroaching’’.

The foundation also wants to counter anti-slum prejudice among Lucknow’s better-off residents by highlighting the extent to which the slum actually subsidises the city (eg by supplying cut-price domestics and street vendors, paying sales taxes, rubbish recycling). Anybody know of research on this in India or elsewhere?

Talking to local activists, as well as Vigyan’s staff, I am struck by how little we/they work with the many sources of social capital in informal settlements. They seem to think there is no savings activity taking place other than formal microfinance schemes (Portfolios of the Poor suggests there are numerous more indigenous ways of saving among poor urban people); anxious to maintain their secular impartiality, they largely avoid religious groups and leaders, despite their enormous presence and importance in the slums; they don’t seem very curious about networks based on place of origin (eg waste pickers from Assam), or moneylenders or the role of local teachers. Yet all these are part of an ecosystem of power and relationships that plays a huge role in how people in slums interact. If well-intentioned activists go into a slum and start organizing as if on a blank canvass, they are at best going to miss opportunities. At worst, they are more likely to fail.

We talked about how the slum interacts with the external world of state officials and elected officials. Government-recognized ‘notified slums’ are ‘politically empowered’, so the first hurdle as slum dwellers start to organize is to get their slum notified, so it appears on the political and fiscal map.

Their least worst allies in this are the lowest tier of elected officials, the ‘corporators’ (what a great word). After notification, they distribute voting cards and see the slum as a ‘vote bank’, but at least that means the residents have a degree of leverage. Political parties have been visiting for years – lots of slum dwellers get voter cards long before they get formal i/d papers.

Seen from the bottom up, the corporators are the most engaged, but the least powerful links to the political world. Above them, few members of the higher tier state assembly (MLAs) are interested. Officials largely ignore city politicians anyway, as they answer to the state government. ‘The officials are worse, especially the low level ones – they ignore us or demand bribes. At least corporators listen, even if they don’t do anything.’

I ask the women why they get organized in this way: “Because we’ve got confidence, the people at the top listen to us now. When we had a water crisis, we approached the water department and got hand pumps. We used to work alone in our employers’ houses, but now we know how to talk. We want our children to assert themselves, not be like us.

Why vote? “We’re positive if our candidate wins, they will provide basic services. When it doesn’t happen, we’re disappointed, we wait five years and vote for someone else – what else can we do?

Why do so many women become leaders?: “The men are away earning money, so women have more time. And anyway, we suffer more: when there is no water, women are hit hardest. Women care about the kids, whereas our husbands just drink. If I have a problem (eg domestic violence) the other women help – that’s what an organization means. We’re illiterate (the attendance sheet has as many thumbprints as signatures), and we’d never gone outside before, so meeting and interacting like this feels good.”

The women and Vigyan organizers are inspiring, the sense of energy and personal and political progress palpable. In contrast,

Opening a new seed bank

conversations in villages often seem more static, with a few organizers, usually men, hogging the airtime. But if the urban world is so much more promising (and its population rising so much faster than in rural areas), why is it proving so hard for international NGOs to overcome their rural bias and develop a greater level of urban work? Is it the greater difficulty of establishing attribution in the chaos of the slums, in our logframe-dominated world? Or do we prefer the ceremonies of rural work (the songs, garlands and, yes, ribbon cutting – see pic) to the gritty urban reality of minding where you step and dealing with drunks?

Your thoughts, as ever, appreciated.

Building Active Citizenship and Accountability in Asia: case studies from Vietnam and India

Last week I attended a seminar in Bangkok on ‘active citizenship’ in Asia, part of an ‘Asia Development Dialogue’ organized by Oxfam, Chulalongkorn University and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. It brought together a diverse group of local mayors, human rights activists and academics, and discussed a series of case studies. Two in particular caught my eye.

In India, Samadhan, an internet-based platform for citizens to directly demand and track their service entitlements under national and state government schemes, is being piloted in two districts in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The pilot is supported by the UN Millennium Campaign and implemented by the VSO India Trust. Here’s the blurb from the case study:

‘The way Samadhan works is simple. Citizens can file a complaint into the Samadhan system through phone calls, SMS, or the web about any delayed entitlements owed by the government. Once their complaints are filed, the computer registers it by location, time, date, type, and other classifications. A local administration official then reads the complaints and deems an appropriate course of action. Citizens can then track these complaints through their registered number via website or SMS. Once it has been resolved, the citizen receives a message indicating that action has taken place.

The key contribution of Samadhan is that it saves time and increases efficiency for both the citizens and the district administrations. Traditionally, the process of grievance redressing was a lengthy and tedious undertaking. Citizens were required to submit a written application in person at the district headquarters during weekly public hearings. The onerous cost of travel alone can be burdensome to citizens who often have limited resources and time. Now, through Samadhan, citizens can file a complaint with a click.’

It’s early days yet – the complaints are coming in, but the investigations are just getting going (see screengrab from the website). The obvious question is ‘why should officials take more notice of an online complaint than they do of poor people turning up in person?’ There is a huge assumption inherent here that the state wants to hear and redress complaints. When asked about this, Praveen Kumar G, VSO’s India programme manager, said that the primary pressure is political – the fact that the complaints are in the public domain fosters scrutiny and pressure, because bureaucrats are pulled up by their elected bosses if they’re underperforming. But he conceded ‘If we have district leaders who want to do this, it’s easy. If they’re opposed, it’s very difficult.’ Quite. I also assume there is UN dosh funding the government staff required to read and respond to the online complaints, which raises issues of replicability.

The other project is the Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI), from Vietnam (why does everything interesting always seem to come from Vietnam?). This is a public index that ranks local government performance. It piloted in 3 provinces in 2009, but now covers the whole country.

The methodology is rigorous (a lot of international experts are advising). Local researchers are recruited and trained to interview a carefully selected sample of 13,000 people all over Vietnam on their experience in dealing with local government in areas such as health and education, the level of petty corruption, and participation.

According to Giang Dang, of CECODES, one of the organizers:

‘The researchers arrive at the village and show a list of names to the village head and say ‘we want to talk to these people’ – they insist on those names, even when the leader says ‘he lives a long way from here, why don’t you talk to this guy who lives closer and is more knowledgeable’.

‘When Vietnam opened up, the two things that arrived first were beauty contests and Coca Cola. So we decided to organize beauty contests. Most opposition came from the contestants in the beauty contest – the public servants.’

Besides the rigour of the research methodology, the secret of PAPI’s success lies in the way it actively recruits champions inside thesystem. Its advisory board has representatives from the National Assembly, ministries, government inspectorates and academia. A key role is played by the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF), a mass organization of the Party which supports the project, and ‘opens doors – the VFF goes all the way down to commune level’.

The results are already impressive: ‘higher ranking provinces are keen to keep their position and feature their ranking in all their documents. Some of the lower ranking provinces are starting to set up task forces, and asking us for advice on how to improve performance.’

USAID in Thailand visited PAPI last month and are interested in replicating the project in Thailand (an interesting transfer from a less to a more open political system).

Dr Dang thinks another key to PAPI’s acceptance is that it is run by local researchers, and so is not subject either to the whims of the aid industry, or accusations of foreign meddling in Vietnam’s internal affairs (the project was initiated by UNDP, which is seen as fairly neutral). He thinks this kind of intra-Vietnam comparison between provinces exerts more traction than cross country comparisons, which can be dismissed on the grounds of Vietnam’s unique conditions.

‘There has been a positive response from the public, but we do get some hostile phone calls from officials – ‘who the hell are you to do this!’. At the end of the day, it’s about pressure, and the naming and shaming gets media and creates pressure. We have to make a wave big enough to move the province.’

The interesting question here is why hasn’t this model replicated more? According to Dr Dang, China has something similar, but run by the Party, and Mexico has a comparable project, but that’s about it. He says it took two years of piloting to get the methodology right, find out what way to ask the questions etc and that that approach would have to be repeated in any new country. Funding may be an issue – in this case it comes from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which seems particularly good at these kinds of long term experiments. Given the response from local government, I wonder if PAPI could become self financing, offering to help the laggards catch up in exchange for a consultancy fee? That raises issues of neutrality/money contaminating the research, but I imagine these could be resolved.

Tackling a cinderella issue – lethal indoor pollution

In this guest post, Oxfam’s Ian Bray (left) looks at the latest developments in getting clean cookstoves to the world’s poor (and saving two million lives a year)

The recent massive electricity blackout across India received a great deal of media interest and comment. The coverage, with the exception of the ever excellent Onion, masked a deeper problem that for too long has been a Cinderella in the list of issues the aid world tries to address.

In India 500,000 people die each year because they don’t have access to modern energy sources. Globally nearly 2 million people, primarily women and children, die each year due to high levels of smoke in their homes from burning wood, animal dung or crop waste. It is a death toll greater than that of malaria. Yet while a great deal of effort has gone into tackling malaria, relatively little has been done on combating this ‘killer in the kitchen’.

One reason why this problem has not been so high on the development community’s agenda is a lack of knowledge about the crisis. So a quick romp through the issues:

Some 2.7 billion people, 39 percent of humanity, are reliant on biomass (wood, dung, crop waste etc) for cooking. Levels of smoke in the home from these fires are many times higher than safe recommendations. The smoke is a noxious mix of “carbon monoxide, particles, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides.” It also “contains many organic compounds considered to be toxic or carcinogenic, such as formaldehyde, benzene, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons.”

The resultant health problems include acute lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, low birth weight, cataracts, and asthma. In the countries with high mortality rates it constitutes the fourth greatest risk of death, disease and injury.

The burden falls heavily on women. They are not only exposed to massive levels of pollution in the home, but also have to walk miles carrying firewood. In many places this exposes them to the risk of violence.

Indoor air pollution is a problem caused by poverty. As people become wealthier they tend to cook on cleaner fuels such as kerosene, gas and electricity. The challenge is to find “ways to make people healthy before they become wealthy.”

Another reason why so little had been done is that there has not been sufficient scientific evidence to convince policy makers of the extent of the link between indoor air pollution and ill health. After a great deal of work that link is now generally accepted. Finally there is also little scientific evidence that relatively affordable technologies can reduce levels of smoke in the home that in turn leads to lower health risks. Last year the results of a study in Guatemala showed that simple chimney stoves could significantly reduce severe pneumonia in children.

And while the Guatemala study was in progress enter someone to take Cinderella to the ball: Hillary Clinton. In September 2010 she announced $50m seed money to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The Alliance, which is a public-private partnership, has an ambitious target of introducing 100 million clean cookstoves by 2020. Indoor air pollution is now on the agenda, not all that high up, but there, nonetheless.

The technological solutions to the problem appear fairly straightforward and include using cleaner stoves, having chimneys or hoods to get the smoke out of the home and affordable cleaner fuels.

If only problems driven by poverty could be sorted by simple technology. Alas, it is never that simple.

The results of a recent seven year study in India showed that clean cookstoves that performed well in the laboratory performed badly in ‘real world’ settings. After an initial positive take-up, usage dropped off significantly and there was no effect on family health. The results were a blow to the Alliance but to its credit it took the findings on board, publicly at least. 

Besides getting the technology right the main challenge is to have solutions that are affordable, last long enough without breaking down, are easily maintained, and most important of all, desirable to the user. A tall order.

The next big hurdle is ‘going to scale’. With nearly 40 per cent of humanity requiring clean healthy ways of cooking that means a lot of stoves, and stoves that a suitable for each different setting. Can it be done?

China has been successful in introducing 175 million improved stoves and follow-up studies showed some 70 per cent were frequently in use. There have been some notable successful attempts in Sri Lanka and Kenya, but in general improved stoves programmes have not been all that successful. Learning the lessons from these relatively successful programmes will be key.

But ‘going to scale’ will not be easy. There are precious few examples of ‘going to scale’ in the development community. Micro-finance is one example, offering cash instead of in-kind aid may become another. But I can think of few others (do please suggest some).
Clearly there does need to be better evidence of what works, but the relatively poor performance of some improved cook stove programmes should not be used as an excuse for inaction. In the developed world it has taken many decades of massive public information campaigns to reduce cigarette smoking. The initial results of those campaigns were not encouraging. However governments stuck with it and found successful ways to reduce cigarette smoking. It will need similar level of commitments from governments to tackle indoor air pollution.

But who is going to push them in this direction? The Alliance may act as a catalyst for greater action and they have the ear of arguably the most powerful woman in the world.

But what of the members of the wider development community? I have always found it puzzling that many development agencies that are so genuinely committed to improving the position of women living in poverty have been so silent on this issue.

And here’s a TED talk on cookstoves

Fighting for food security in India

Biraj Swain (right) is Oxfam India’s Campaigns Manager and Co-Editor and author of the IDS-Oxfam India Special Bulletin “Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India”, launched in Delhi this week

In India, over the past 15 years the debate about food, under a rights-based perspective, has become increasingly complex. Earlier concerns about famines, emergency relief and technology-driven green revolutions have given way to discussions on the state’s failure to deliver public distribution programs, the discriminatory biases these programs perpetuate, legal entitlements to land use and ownership by men and women farmers, climate change, domestic and international price volatility and the role of non-governmental and social actors – from the media to INGOs, farmer’s networks and social movements. In other words, the debate has shifted from starvation and subsistence to dignity and justice.

2001 saw the scandal of the country bursting at the seams with 60 million metric tonnes of food grains as starvation, death and distress migration afflicted six states of India. The People’s Union of Civil Liberties, one of the first groups to organize, sued the government, arguing that it must open its grain reserves to feed the hungry. The writ also demanded that the government provide jobs to people in drought-affected villages and support those who could not work.

Eventually, after over 150 judgments and interim orders, India’s Supreme Court agreed that the state was indeed responsible for providing nutrition and public health. The most persuasive argument to the court is that the right to food is directly related to the constitutional guarantee of a “Right to Life”. The court expanded the original writ – which covered Rajasthan only – to the entire country. When the government said it simply couldn’t afford to provide every citizen with the right to food, the court replied that lack of money was no excuse and even ordered the state to extend some of its local food programs.

The National Food Security Bill is an outcome of the 11 plus years of litigation, street protests and the continued media and public scrutiny of the Right to Food case by 2500+ civil society organisations and a trade union coalition called the Right to Campaign. In response to such pressure, the current government, when it came to power in 2009, made universalisation of food security one of its electoral promises. The draft bill was finally tabled in parliament on 22nd December 2011.  While much could be said about the omissions in the draft bill, it still marks a great step forward  and food rights champions hope that when it does get passed into legislation, it will be far more progressive and inclusive than its current avatar.

To discuss the background to this path-breaking legislation, 21 prominent authors and commentators have joined hands with Oxfam India and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex to put together the special Bulletin ‘Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India’. This will be launched at a dedicated two-day event at New Delhi’s Constitution Club on the 17th and 18th of July.

From the father of India’s green revolution, MS Swaminathan, to public intellectual CP Chandrasekhar and Supreme Court Commissioners on Right to Food NC Saxema and Harsh Mander, the contributors agree that the approval of the National Food Security Bill is an important step forward for India, but a law, alone, can do little. India is still in the top 10 for child malnutrition, infant mortality and land grabbing – a gloomy picture produced by complex institutional failures, gaps in legal frameworks and a lack of political will at the central and state level as much as the weak monitoring mechanisms of existing public distribution programs.

If India’s second green revolution is to contribute to an accelerated reduction of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, it undoubtedly has to be a state-led project: far from being old-fashioned, the state’s pricing policies, legal entitlement system, public distribution and natural resource management programs are key to reaching the poorest of the poor. There are currently no quick-fix alternatives to a desirable good-quality universal Public Distribution System (PDS) and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). What’s more, the current food, nutrition and agriculture programmes are failing to tackle deep-seated discriminatory practices (in society as much as within state institutions), but rather re-inforcing them. Stronger, transparent monitoring by accountable state agencies is an absolute must.

If food security is about having certainty about the future, the common goal must also be that of a gendered growth in agriculture and food security that gives the same rights on the land to men and women farmers. A complete halt on any new land acquisition is required until a way of calculating and compensating social, economic and environmental costs is in place, particularly with regards to tribal communities for whom the right to the land is still particularly uncertain. National mainstream media also have a crucial role to play: the most common references to food by them still revolves around restaurant reviews, food festivals and cooking and dieting (!) books.

Finally, India must realize that any global climate policy will be shaky without solid domestic foundations, reflecting the concerns of poor people, including farmers and fishermen, in India as elsewhere. In sum, putting access and equity at the heart of debates on climate, natural resources, institutional accountability and agriculture must be a priority. In this regard, India could play a pioneering role, as it has in areas such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or the Right to Information legislation.

The future will belong to nations with grains and not guns. We have enough grains for all  – we need to open and expand our thinking on what can be done, and how to build a future where everyone on the planet always has enough to eat.

And edited version of this blog also appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters site today

The state of India – an advocacy masterclass from Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze

Jean Dreze (right) and Amartya Sen (left) are a longstanding partnership that produces brilliant analysis of India’s development path. Their recent piece ‘Putting Growth in its Place’ draws you in with some great questions, and then uses league tables to taunt India’s decision-makers into action – So you think we’re an emerging world power? Think again. We’re at the bottom of the South Asian table on life expectancy, sanitation and underweight and unvaccinated children (and close to the bottom on most other things), and falling further behind with each passing year. It’s ten pages, and worth the read, but here are some highlights:

“Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like this. “After decades of mediocrity and stagnation under ‘Nehruvian socialism’, the Indian economy achieved a spectacular take-off during the last two decades. This take-off, which led to unprecedented improvements in income per head, was driven largely by market initiatives. It involves a significant increase in inequality, but this is a common phenomenon in periods of rapid growth. With enough time, the benefits of fast economic growth will surely reach even the poorest people, and we are firmly on the way to that.” Despite the conceptual confusion involved in bestowing the term ‘socialism’ to a collectivity of grossly statist policies of ‘Licence raj’ and neglect of the state’s responsibilities for school education and healthcare, the story just told has much plausibility, within its confined domain.

But looking at contemporary India from another angle, one could equally tell the following—more critical and more censorious—story: “The progress of living standards for common people, as opposed to a favoured minority, has been dreadfully slow—so slow that India’s social indicators are still abysmal.” For instance, according to World Bank data, only five countries outside Africa (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen) have a lower “youth female literacy rate” than India (World Development Indicators 2011, online). To take some other examples, only four countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar and Pakistan) do worse than India in child mortality rate; only three have lower levels of “access to improved sanitation” (Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti); and none (anywhere—not even in Africa) have a higher proportion of underweight children. Almost any composite index of these and related indicators of health, education and nutrition would place India very close to the bottom in a ranking of all countries outside Africa.

So which of the two stories—unprecedented success or extraordinary failure—is correct? The answer is both, for they are both valid, and they are entirely compatible with each other. This may initially seem like a bit of a mystery, but that initial thought would only reflect a failure to understand the demands of development that go well beyond economic growth. Indeed, economic growth is not constitutively the same thing as development, in the sense of a general improvement in living standards and enhancement of people’s well-being and freedom. Growth, of course, can be very helpful in achieving development, but this requires active public policies to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are widely shared, and also requires—and this is very important—making good use of the public revenue generated by fast economic growth for social services, especially for public healthcare and public education.”

Dreze and Sen attack what they memorably brand the ‘unaimed opulence’ of India’s economic path, contrasting it with the much more pro-poor growth path of South Korea and (recently) Brazil. Then they get stuck into the South Asian league tables (see below) and wrap up with an unflattering comparison with China (guaranteed to wind up your typical Indian decision-maker).

All that, and a couple of intriguing asides:

First, some cash transfer scepticism:

“Cash transfers are increasingly seen as a potential cornerstone of social policy in India, often based on a distorted reading of the Latin American experience in this respect. There are, of course, strong arguments for cash transfers (conditional or unconditional) in some circumstances, just as there are good arguments for transfers in kind (such as midday meals for school children).

What is remarkably dangerous, however, is the illusion that cash transfers (more precisely, “conditional cash transfers”) can replace public services by inducing recipients to buy health and education services from private providers. This is not only hard to substantiate on the basis of realistic empirical reading; it is, in fact, entirely contrary to the historical experience of Europe, America, Japan and East Asia in their respective transformation of living standards. Also, it is not how conditional cash transfers work in Brazil or Mexico or other successful cases today.”

And second the news (to me, anyway) that Kerala is no longer alone. Tamil Nadu, and now Himachal Pradesh, are catching up with India’s flagship state on the universal provision of essential services.

[h/t Steve Price-Thomas]