Development....from inside India By Andrew Howard, volunteer
It was mid-July and I was preparing excitedly for my first ever trip to India – bug spray, check.... loose linen clothing, check.... Immodium, CHECK! But this was not to be a journey along the well-trodden tourist trail of famed Indian cities and sites – Varanasi, the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, Mumbai, Goa. I had instead got a place on a 4-week course on international development and was to be based in Mysore in the south of Karnataka.
The course, entitled Development from the Inside (DFTI), is arranged once a year by the London-based Charities Advisory Trust (http://www.charitiesadvisorytrust.co.uk/development/first.htm). It is designed essentially to give training and practical experience to individuals who wish to work in the international development sector. It helps participants to question and analyse what development is and how it is undertaken; it aims to impart knowledge to help redress the imbalance of power between the North and South in development thinking; and it provides a unique opportunity to learn about the history, politics, culture and society of India – a country of immense importance in the world of today and tomorrow.
On arrival in Mysore by train from Bangalore with some of my fellow course participants, I checked into the Green Hotel. Formerly the Chittaranjan Palace built for Mysore’s princesses, the hotel is run by the Charities Advisory Trust as a model of sustainable tourism and all profits are distributed to charitable and environmental projects in India. It also employs several women from the Dalit
The Green Hotel / community in the cafe, preparing and serving food - a direct and admirable challenge to the traditional association of Dalits with occupations regarded as ritually impure, such as butchering and the manual removal of human faeces. The hotel, with its lawns, shaded pergolas, trees, friendly and accommodating staff and amazing Indian food, is a real oasis of calm and a very conducive place to study.
The DFTI course is coordinated on the ground by two amazing couples – Stan and Mari Thekaekara and Ram and Rama Sastry. Stan wears many hats, but is essentially a community rights activist. With his wife Mari, a reputed writer, independent journalist and commentator on social issues, he moved to Gudalur in the Nilgiri Hills in south India in the mid 1980s and set up ACCORD, a project to work with the adivasis (tribal peoples) of the area. Ram and Rama are both educationalists and have pioneered several unique interventions in the field of education, including the Vidyodaya School in Gudalur – an alternative school for adivasi children. They also contributed to the production of ActionAid’s Chembakolli teaching resource pack for UK schools. All four were the key ingredient that made the course the incredible learning experience it turned out to be, and I am now very fortunate to be able to count them as friends.
The first two weeks of the course comprised of a series of seminars by leading Indian activists (including Stan, Mari, Ram and Rama), all of whom have extensive experience of grassroots development. The talks covered a wide range subjects including health, education, the environment, agriculture, children, human rights, gender, caste and the Dalit issue, the Indian economy, communalism, fair trade and markets, international aid, and disasters and humanitarian responses (by ActionAid’s Dr Unnikrishnan). The speakers, including street children and women with HIV, truly brought their subjects alive and made us really reassess our preconceptions about poverty and development. They challenged us with stark reality; they made us laugh; they made us cry; and they opened our eyes to different ways of tackling issues.
Children in a Mysore slum / The first two weeks also included several visits to local projects, including a home for sex-trafficked girls, a home for former street children, and a project for children with disabilities. These visits gave me a great insight into the challenges, opportunities, successes and failures of grassroots interventions and development projects. One of the most inspiring visits was to a Mysore slum, where we talked with members of the local Slum Dwellers Federation. It was
sobering to hear that this community has to fight with the powers that be for even the most basic of rights. But it was great to see that the residents of the slum had made a decision to unite as a community and were making progress in fighting for their rights and improving their lives as a result.
An integral and unique part of the course for participants is doing two placements with NGOs or projects (in Mysore or further afield) during the last two weeks. The range of projects on offer made it very hard to choose, but I eventually plumped for an environmental/livelihoods project with an NGO called Keystone (www.keystone-foundation.org), working with adivasis in the Nilgiri Hills, and for a placement with MILANA, a Bangalore-based support network for people (largely women) living with HIV/AIDS. Both placements were excellent.
Me (centre back) with MILANA staff & DFTI participants / MILANA is supported by ActionAid India and is run by an amazingly courageous woman called Jyothi Kiran. Challenging stigma and patriarchy, the women of MILANA have come together as a community and as a family and against the odds have created their own success story by reaching out to support other HIV+ people in the city and by demanding government entitlements like ration cards, medicines and bank accounts. The group also focuses on nutrition as a crucial part
of tackling HIV. Nutritional support is provided to the women and their children, many of whom also are HIV+. This joint focus on rights and nutrition has really given the women of MILANA the strength, both mental and physical, to stand up to the discrimination they face – truly inspiring.
While at MILANA I visited ActionAid Bangalore and had a Q&A session with some of the staff about HIV/AIDS. I also visited a sexual minorities group, a community health group, a care home for people dying of AIDS, and the homes of some of the MILANA women out in the far-flung slums of the city. They made us so welcome and it was very hard to say good-bye.
So, what did I learn during this experience? To list everything I learned about development and India would mean adding several more pages to the article, so I will refrain from doing that! I’ll limit myself to just a few of the key themes that we discussed during the course:
· Poverty is not caused by accident but by design;
· Poverty is linked to the unequal distribution of power; a person or community with power must be prepared to lose some of it for those without power to be empowered;
· A sense of ownership by communities leads to empowerment; this sense of ownership happens by design, not by accident;
· The barriers to community ownership must be removed;
· Interventions have to relate to and respond to the needs of the people they are intended to help;
· The way we undertake interventions and our values should be influenced by the community we are seeking to help, not visa versa;
· All interventions have consequences, both positive and negative; we must analyse what the consequences will be in advance and tackle them head-on when they happen; and
· Networks are relationships that should be used to benefit the poor;
I would highly recommend the DFTI course to anyone with an interest in international development. For more details about the course, please contact me at or . Alternatively, go to the DFTI website - www.charitiesadvisorytrust.co.uk/development/first.htm