TO CHANGE INDIA, WE NEED A STATENGO COLLABORATION

ETHE COLONIAL ATTITUDE THAT THE STATE SHOULD BE THE SOLE PROVIDER SURVIVES. BUREAUCRATS DON’T LIKE LETTING CONTROL SLIP OUT OF THEIR HANDS BECAUSE THAT MEANS LOSING POWER AND ALL TOO OFTEN PERSONAL PROFIT

lection time once again raises the question of power. So many promises are being made but the winners will prove powerless to fulfil most of them. When I visited Assam recently, I saw that governments would do better if they shared power.

Tiring of successive governments’ failures to fulfil promises, people living around the Manas wildlife sanctuary have founded an non-governmental organisation called The Manas Ever Welfare Society (MEWS). Their main activities: Cleanliness and employment creation. I stayed in Florican Cottage, the small resort they run, which is “the backbone of MEWS subsistence”. It’s modest, reasonably priced and staffed by very helpful local people.

The Kaliyani is one of 15 boats operated by The Centre for North Eastern Studies and Research, providing clinics for the Brahmaputra islanders from Tinsukia and Demaji in the east to the Bangladesh border in the west. The islanders are isolated, poor and under threat from floods every year. There is only one lower primary school in Laheswari, with a temporary teacher who rarely shows up.

The clinic started with one of the doctors giving an awareness lecture on cooking and the diet’s impact on health. Then the doctors examined the patients, a surprisingly wide variety of tests were done on the spot, and the nurses immunised babies and kept patients’ records. The pharmacist provided the medicines prescribed.

Almost all the patients in this area were young Bengali-speaking Muslim women. Two mothers I saw were painfully young. Many were unclear about their age. An older woman was clear about hers. “I am 35. I am having my fourth baby and this will be my last one,” she said, leaving no room for doubt that four was more than enough. The only man I saw was elderly, and suffering from general weakness and body aches. Twice floods had swept away his land and he had been forced to relocate. At the end of the day, 99 patients had been treated.

The boat clinics are a collaboration between an non-governmental organisation and the government’s money power with the National Health Mission footing the bill. There is powerful resistance among governments to this sort of partnership.

The old colonial attitude that the government should be the sole pro- tector and provider still survives. Government servants do not like letting control slip out of their hands because that means losing power and all too often personal profit too.

When I got back to Delhi, I asked three leaders of civil society about the potential for government-nongovernmental organisation collaboration. Ashok Khosla, the chairman of TARA, said: “Despite hopes and expectations, the present regime is no different and non-governmental organisations continue to suffer impediments to the genuine contributions they can make to national development, which should not be the case in a clean and corruptionfree environment.”

Ajay Mehta, president of Udaipurbased Seva Mandir and Vidya Bhavan, pointed out to me that the government does encourage non-governmental organisations to help it deliver on some of its programmes like Swachh Bharat but warned “Non-governmental organisations cannot be a substitute for government. They can’t be the only players.”

Amitabh Behar, executive director of The National Foundation for India agreed. He believed the role of non-governmental organisations in services provision should be to provide models. But at the same time he insisted that non-governmental organisations should hold government to account for its failures. The governments’ failure to deliver more effectively on human development indicates they need to look for new models and replicate them, taking advantage of non-governmental organisation initiatives and their ability to provide services as effectively as the Brahmaputra boats do.

For that to happen, governments will have to shed their mai baap tradition and allow others to share their resources more.

They will need to remove the impediments Khosla talked of.

And they must take note of legitimate criticism and listen to the message rather than shoot the messenger.