To govern, or to be governed: That’s the question

A thousand villages in Karnataka alone are to be denied of support on drinking water programmes, thanks to the government’s unwillingness to let go on donor funds...

There is a quiet exit of a well-known institution that is now taking place across several districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. More than 3000 villages, which have benefited from development programmes that brought drinking water to these villages and to over three million people in these districts, are now going to have to look elsewhere for such relief.
Danida has been in this country now for more than 20 years. Nearly all its programmes don’t look for funds from either Governments, State or Central: nor do they look for funds from Gram Panchayats, or the villagers who benefit.
It is now known for nearly two years that a policy shift of the Government of India meant that Danida could not offer its aid funds directly to the villages. Danida was constrained from offering such funds to the government by its own avowed objective of directly enabling people who benefit from such donor funds.
Hordes of professionals in areas of water supply, health, hygiene and agriculture are now out of jobs in about a dozen districts of the southern states.
Says one of the Ex-Danida Engineers, “It is sad, but true. There is little we can do about this exit. So much work and so much trust has been built with many hundreds of people in gram panchayats over the last decade plus.”
Many such relationships built between this catalyzing agency which strove to enable people to plan for themselves, and on their own,are now unshackled. “Swaraj was something that Gandhi spoke of. Danida had sought to build such self-governance quietly with no fanfare. But...” laments another worker.
Says Lakshmana Katti, “There should have been other ways of ensuring that Danida’s good work and the large team of professionals it has built over so many years were retained with continued management inputs that Danida could provide.”
So where does the problem lie? The official version has been full of euphemisms and contrived truths. The Danish Embassy says that there has been a shift in their mandate with current strategies emphasizing a ‘Sector-programmed support approach with understanding of insulated project-based assistance so far provided by Danida.’
Translation: Danida will not directly assist with its fund any plan for improving quality of life of people in the countryside. The agency will have to necessarily, therefore, look at only research efforts (not hands-on programmes) and funds that can only go through government agencies.
Typically, Danida programmes meant that nearly 80–85 per cent of the project cost of providing drinking water was given by the agency with 5–10 per cent coming in from Government allocations. The balance 10 per cent came from the local panchayats. This funding structure held good for Health and Family welfare programs, too. The agency was always constrained to work with the government and had to carefully ensure that every programme conformed to the objectives of the state government in the region.
The effort in every Danida programme was to ensure the reduction of government intervention and the increase of community participation in the management of these utility services for any village. “I have personally worked,” says one former officer, “with panchayats, enabling them to plan their needs, selecting contractors on their own, and presiding over execution of drinking water projects in a way that they saved as much as 30 per cent over what the government would have spent on such a project, thanks to the PWD structures.”
Efficient execution has always been the bugbear of implementation by government departments. The government has only known how to seek funds from various departments or from external agencies, and have known how to disburse such funds to hosts of contractors. The government’s responsibility has ceased with the making of elaborate reports every financial year on the details of disbursals, with little expected from the departments on the quality of such disbursals.
There has simply been no accountability for funds. “Managing the project process in a way that the objective is met is not known in these departments,” avers a panchayat official who has now been left bereft of support after Danida’s exit.
So what has happened to these hundreds of officials who have lost their jobs in Watershed Projects, Health and Family Welfare programmes and Women and Agriculture programmes? The official version from Danida is that some of them have been absorbed by the Extension Services of the government. How will these former Danida workers fare in the old, lax regime of the bureaucracy is anybody’s guess.
In just four districts of Karnataka, over 1000 villages will have the plugs pulled out by this month’s end. That leaves them either dependent on governments’ plan funds for the host of schemes for alleged development that have never brought succour to the villager, or it leaves the community the choice of shaping its own destiny with economic options they carve out on their own.
The tide of change that is coming over many countries of the third world indicates clearly that the time has come for a change where village communities build their own capacity to govern, pay for such utility services. and increase their quality of management of the processes that make for change and development.
This will mean a conscious effort from every individual in the community to build review procedures and monitoring mechanisms that will ensure enhancing of the quality of expenditure on various projects.
No longer can the existing system of frenzied disbursal of allocated funds in the last months of a year continue. Even Finance Minister Chidambaram was exhorting officials recently at a meeting in Mangalore to start work on development projects of the government, right at the start of the financial year. What he did not say, or accept, was the sheer inability in the government today at every level to conduct budgetary exercises with timeframes for specific projects for the year.
It is easy to blame officials down the line of hierarchy for their ineptitude. What is needed is a bottom-up approach with across-the-spectrum training imparted to field workers, engineers, officers and administration heads in districts. What is also needed is the introduction of review formats and the training of a few nodal officers in skills of management. To be sure, all these exist, but there is not either the will or the incentive to take objectives to fruition.
Of course, this assumes that the will to do good work and to spend allocated funds conscionably exists within these ‘trustees’ in the government of public funds who we call bureaucrats. Danida’s exit offers a lesson to the government. Is the bureaucracy interested in protecting itself, or in nurturing or delivering on objectives it professes? Or will the people continue to take it lying down as those political shenanigans are played out by the rich or the stronger within communities?