It is with this spirit that Madhyanchal Forum has been working since its inception and is moving ahead with a clear and decisive understanding that promoting collective initiatives and collaborative actions is the key to addressing the challenges faced by the poor and the excluded.  Civil society organisations need to strengthen their engagement with the poor through shared or joint strategies. The past experiences have shown that strategies woven around individualistic approaches have had limited impact.  In this backdrop, forming collectives of the marginalized and the excluded and enabling them to gain the much needed institutional and individual capacities to lead and sustain their struggles, thus, becomes all the more significant. It is also vital for them to reclaim their space for dignified life. This calls for people owned and people centred processes. All MF initiatives operational on ground are in sync with this belief.  While these interventions focus on the above understanding, they simultaneously strengthen thematic areas through institutions of reference communities.

In Bastar, Kanker and Dantewada districts of Chhattisgarh, the interventions are focused on community owned and community led conservation and preservation of common forest resources (CFR). This will help forest dwellers reclaimownership of the forest. The process is led by collective intent and aims at strengthening collectives and creating local leadership. 

Similar resolve is visible in other states too. In Ambedkar Nagar, Faizabad, Jaunpur, Varanasi, Pratapgarh, Sonbhadra, Banda, Kusinagar, Jhansi, Sahjanpur districts of Uttar Pradesh and Nalanda, Sekhpura, Nawada, Gaya, Jahanabad districts in Bihar, the efforts are on to improve the lot of Musahar, Nut and other most excluded communities by enabling them to access their entitlements and rights. 

In Jhabua, Dhar, Badwani, Khargoun, Indore (Malwa Area), Indore (Ghat Section), Alirajpur, Ratlam, Mandsor, Vidisa districts of MP, MF is working extensively for promotion of organic farming by the small and marginal farmers roping in landless labourers in the process of empowerment.  Along with this, effort is also on building state-wide campaign on nutrition and preservation/promotion of food sovereignty of vulnerable tribal communities in Dhar, Barwani, East Nimar (Khandwa), Betul, Jhabua, Sheopur districts. This would soon be expanded to national level. In Punjab, MF is planning to launch mass awareness programmes on sustainable agriculture.

As far as the Rajasthan is concerned, three climatic zones (East, Western and North) have been chosen for promotion of sustainable livelihoods through improvement in agriculture and allied practices and climate smart drought resilient model in the deserts of Jaisalmer is underway.

In the Mountain states of Himachal, Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir (Leh-Ladakh region), MF activities are centered on the impact of climate change in higher Himalayas. Focus here is on mitigation, adaptation and addressing policy issues.  The issues related to space for civil society action form a major thrust area across intervention states. Planning for other states is in progress. The common thread that binds all MF intervention is collectives which provide the major plank for achievement of its objectives. MF sees all these interventions in an integrated perspective through engagement with the most vulnerable of these groups at various levels. These collectives shall also directly contribute to strengthening voluntary action, democracy and addressing the issue of shrinking space for civil society action.

An aspirational young Indian generation has found new poster boys—Sundar Pichai, the new Google CEO and Satya Nadella, his counterpart in Microsoft. The Indians heading the world’s top tech giants could have been a dream not so long ago, but if India’s newly acquired prowess in the IT sector is anything to go by, you could see many more following in their footsteps in the near future.

There are other prominent faces that are heading big businesses and are surely giving much needed fillip to India’s global image. Some of them are Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), Lakshmi Mittal (ArcelorMittal), Ivan Menezes (Diageo), Rakesh Kapoor (Reckitt Benckiser), Ajay Banga (MasterCard), Piyush Gupta (DBS Group Holdings), Sanjay Mehrotra (SanDisk), Sanjay Jha (Global Foundries), Francisco D’souza (Cognizant) and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe). And if you have patience, you could probably find more after an intense Google search. They are mesmerising the world, much in the same way as trending stories on Indian lifestyle, culture and Bollywood.

But we all have a strange fascination for paradoxical extremes. If the likes of Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella epitomise India’s growing clout in the world’s knowledge-driven economy, how would we define the media reportage and the recent biopic on the life a man called Dashrath Manjhi, a poor labourer in Gehlaur village of Bihar’s Gaya district, who used only a hammer and sickle to tame a 25 ft high hillock by carving a 360 ft long, 30 ft wide road through it? It took him 22 years to cut the hill, chip by chip.

We are living in times dominated by the neo-rich and bourgeoning middle classes eager to have their pound of flesh in the country’s high growth economy and any comparison between the two worlds represented by Pichai–Nadella and Dashrath Manjhi might get you labelled you as “cynical”, an equivalent of “Sickular” in contemporary political parlance.

There are compelling reasons as to why there must be a comparative analogy between these two worlds. One, it could offer a vision into socio-economic narratives around aspirational India. Second, it would lay bare the truth behind the state’s failure to provide a level-playing field to its citizens in accessing rights. And thirdly, it would dare and inspire more to achieve the unachievable, putting human capacities to test.

In Dashrath Manjhi’s case, it was sheer conviction, born out of anguish following the death of his wife while on her way to a hospital in the Wazirganj block, and the daily struggles of fellow villagers who had to take an 85-kilometre detour to reach the town which motivated him to destroy the major stumbling- block in the way of survival. But what may surprise and pain most of us is that the Indian state during the 22-year long struggle of Manjhi, could not even realise that what he was attempting would one day become the living symbol of its failure and misplaced priorities.

The man who moved the mountain, could not move the bureaucracy to build pucca roads between his village and Wazirganj and Atri and Gaya. His village falls in the Atri block. The roads were built, but only after his death in 2007. This man waited for another 25 years till his death to see those pucca roads, but unfortunately could not. The people of his village are still waiting for a small six-bed hospital promised by Nitish Kumar in Gehlaur, where a Samadhi (memorial) has come up, reminding everybody of his remarkable feat. This would perhaps alert the next generation that if you are poor and want development, you must brace up for a long battle.

So, what does Dashrath Manji symbolise today? He certainly symbolises grit and hope. But he also symbolises desperation, pain and a sense of loss. According to the figures that emerged from core network data formulated on the basis of the 2001 census, as many as 167,000 unconnected habitations are eligible for coverage under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). This includes 371,000 km of roads that are to be constructed for new connectivity and 368,000 km that are to be upgraded.

This is huge when compared to the 360 ft dug by Manjhi. But after what has appeared in the media about his exploits, it seems that every new kilometre of road that would be built will have a milestone with two words—“Dashrath Manjhi”—engraved on them, though symbolically. This may sound like a dramatised ending of a Bollywood film, but the life of the likes of Manjhi does require a drama to jolt the system out of complacency and apathy. After all, the country which takes pride in being an emerging economic giant and which has joined the exclusive club of countries after reaching Mars, has so far failed to explain as to why the Pichais and the Nadellas still have to share their nationality with the Manjhis.

The Pichais and Nadellas are the products of a well-groomed support system which is available to millions of middle class Indians in the country, who later go on to become the Diaspora. Many of them are a part of what we fondly called NRIs, the most adorable community we all look up to with awe and respect. The media have chronicled their lives which were full of “struggles”. Like how they had to face completion from peers from the West, how they graduated from a humble five-figure salary to reach where they are, how their well-off families made “sacrifices” to make sure their journey remained unstoppable.

One can go on and on with this cynical comparison. But it is the state that that actually facilitated this comparison. If it had intervened effectively in time to provide only a road, no ‘mountain’ man would have been born to challenge it and its new heroes, the Pichais and Nadellas. No one would have ever dared to dent its inflated global image by drawing this comparison.

But at the end of it all, it is the figures that tell the actual truth at a time when everything boils down to economics. Today, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are heading organisations valued at $364.99 billion (Google) and $340.8 billion (Microsoft), while the people of Gehlaur continue to live in abject penury and fight for their rights.

However, here is an interesting hypothesis. If the state had given a road to Dashrath Manjhi’s village in 1960, the year when he started cutting the hillock, someone in his generation could possibly have become a Pichai or Nadella. But can anyone in the tech giants’ world ever think of becoming a Manjhi?

Just give it a thought.

Civil society in India has thrown up many evolutionary trends since Independence. Beginning with the most prominent milestone of trusteeship and volunteerism propagated by Mahatma Gandhi to protect the dignity of the poor and the exploited, to the new phenomenon called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which many call “forced philanthropy”, the spirit and grace of the journey has changed significantly. 

The new buzzword is ‘branding’, which reflects the hubris, vanity and arrogance of the donors. This overriding passion to brand every step that the moolah takes towards the beneficiary is not only bizarre but far removed from Gandhi’s belief that rich must voluntarily part with a small fraction of their money for the poor.

As an independent observer who has criss-crossed many states as a communications consultant, I witnessed from very close quarters as to how this new malaise is not only assaulting the dignity of the poor who are called the ‘beneficiaries’ but is also putting a great amount of pressure on the non-profit partners. I can’t really suggest any equivalent of the word ‘partner’. 

Not that all donors can be put in the same bracket. But this misplaced glory is more pronounced in the CSR world as the primary purpose is the promotion of business.  So, in the donors’ world, the beneficiary carries the brand. Not just on the T-shirt but on their tongue too whenever s/he is asked to speak to the CSR personnel. He is routinely tutored to sing paeans to the donor. There is an implicit message or advertising-that his/her life was worth nothing before the donor’s intervention and his/her family must remain indebted to the former forever.  

A bit of exaggeration, but the impact of the initiative is measured by the size of hoardings carrying the logo of the donor at all vantage points along the road leading to the villages where the intervention was carried out. The smaller logo of the ‘partner’ on the board is enough to get the message across as to who rules in ‘CSR colonies’. The villages look pretty much like excavated sites of the Archaeological Survey of India, with donor-supported ponds, farms, beneficiaries’ houses, goateries, piggeries, poultry units, and all entrepreneurial spaces conveniently hiding behind the branding apparatuses of different and specific sizes.  They explain to the developmental tourists (in most cases the CSR personnel themselves), every bit of the initiative, with the ‘partner’ acting as a guide.

Things, no doubt, are changing. But at what cost, I can’t really say. May be, it is like hybrid seeds being used in farms to boost production without knowing the consequences or the rampant urbanisation usurping the rural ethos and the canvas on which rests the dignity, respect and the ownership of resources. Many residents whom I met in my recent sojourns in “CSR villages” feel that the unabashed penchant for branding has put the identity of villages in danger. Logos painted on every other wall of the villages are a bit scary for them as many points and spaces in the villages are gradually becoming synonymous with the donor, such as parks, schools, sanitation units and new crops.

The truth is that you have done only small-scale renovation or set up a smart class; you don’t own the school.  You have given seeds but you don’t own the farms. You may have given small financial support but you can’t brand the beneficiaries’ lives. You have provided the fishlings, but the pond actually belongs to the village. Unfortunately, the branding visualises it differently.

I am not very sure, but the money spent on branding is huge. In many cases, it could be a substantial part of the entire project budget. Though unwilling, the partners are coerced into spending on branding which may not be the part of their deliverables. The branding costs of a major CSR player could of mammoth proportions, so much so that many initiatives equivalent to this cost could be launched to help the poor.

But at the stake is the dignity of the poor beneficiaries, who play the ‘joker’ in the donor-partner circus. Their own perspective of development is questioned by those who come to them with a “we know everything” attitude, flouting a few clichéd social sector jargons. Yet, these beneficiaries accept this idea of development gracefully as millions accept government sops.

And yes they are the ones who wear the donor’s tag which is invariably removed the moment its visit is over. Some wear it with pride, others with disdain.   

The author is a senior journalist with a career spanning over 20 years. He currently works as a freelance writer with a focus on tribal and social exclusion issues