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By Arati Rao Despite the 74th Amendment which calls for ward-level committees and empowered gram panchayats, despite the Right to Information and the National Urban Renewal Mission’s requirement of citizen participation through Area Sabhas, people’s participation in urban local governance is minimal. Janaagraha in Bangalore has been attempting to change that over the past four years. An in-depth report on its processes
In 2004, a famous discount retail store wanted to set up a mega-mall in a growing community in a US desert town. Fearing a drop in property values, the local residents organised surveys and town hall meetings to determine the plan of action against this development. Consequently, they approached their town planners, strongly urging them to stop the retail store from setting up shop in their community. Instead they suggested alternative businesses that would benefit the community and improve the quality of life. The outcome: the discount retail store had to take its wares elsewhere. The community got the mix of businesses it wanted. When the Workers Party won the elections in Brazil in 1988, the new mayor of the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul province – Porto Alegre – held meetings with residents in each district. He wanted to determine what the citizens needed. While the budget was lean, he still felt that what is done with that money should be determined by the people it will benefit. It was an ad hoc process, evolving over time into participatory budgeting. And for over 13 years now, each year over 50,000 of the 1.5 million residents of Porto Alegre – including some of its poorest – have been sitting down to debate needs and negotiate projects ranging from education and health to urban development and leisure, to be implemented in the ensuing year. It needs but a seed to grow a tree and enjoy the fruits. The system for citizen participation, once set up, becomes invisible and engagement becomes easy, working to influence decision-making. “In these countries, someone perhaps in some generation before us, put systems into place enabling people to make the right choices and decisions and succeed – by design rather than accident,” says Ramesh Ramanathan, founder of Janaagraha. Janaagraha enables participatory democracy in Bangalore through various campaigns and institution-building. “Part of our obligation was to come back to India and enable people to make good choices. There was no single reason for this, just a feeling of wanting to give something back,” he says, reflecting on why the high-flying international banker and his wife, architect and urban designer Swati, decided to toss their corporate careers in the US and UK and return to their home town of Bangalore. Sowing the seeds
When the Ramanathans returned in 1998 to India, they spent a considerable amount of time reading history and literature on India, learning about civil society organisations, how they work and, more significantly, how the government functions. Travelling widely, the more they learned the more apparent it became that systems were broken – especially in the government. Ramesh’s keen finance mind (he was a fast-track banker in a leading international bank in the US and UK) quickly came to the conclusion that unless those internal systems were fixed, not much could be achieved. “The quality of decisions you take is driven by the quality of information you have. In a private sector company, if you don’t know what the numbers are, it is very difficult to make quality decisions. Here I have seen a complete breakdown of the systems. And I realised that we have to fix them in the government in order to enable even the good people in government to make good decisions.” And over the next 30 months, Ramesh, as part of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) worked to clean up the accounting and financial systems. The Bangalore Mahanagar Palike (BMP), for example, did not even know how many ward works were going on at any one time, how the budgets were being managed, how the processes were scheduled and progressing. A Herculean task by any measure, once the internal systems were stabilised in the summer of 2001, it still was only a means to a goal. Yes, financial reforms were good and important, but, questioned NGOs, how does that touch the average citizen? This set the Ramanathans exploring paradigms where citizens could be brought into the decision-making process, and that is when Porto Alegre’s efforts struck home. Ramesh says, “We found the Porto Alegre story extremely compelling. The supply-side reforms were done; it was time to bring in the demand-side participation or the citizens.” But when he mooted the point to the then Commissioner of the BMP, he was met with a cool response. Ramesh quickly realised that their dream could not be achieved through the BATF. “The people need a platform that cannot be hijacked. One that is theirs and theirs alone – independent,” proposed Swati to a despondent and frustrated Ramesh. “Start this platform, I will work with you to make this happen.” Janaagraha was born that night, as a campaign for participatory democracy. Nurturing the sapling
To start with, the Ramanathans had one campaign in mind, never imagining that it would burgeon into a movement and overwhelm them as it has. The first campaign they envisioned and worked through was along the lines of their inspiration, Porto Alegre. It was a huge education at the ward level for citizens, many of whom were unaware of the ward structure. Swati spells out the messages, “Start with understanding where the 6% allocated for improvement of roads, drains and footpaths in your ward goes. Start getting engaged and participating. It was a massive campaign and a lot of good came out of it, far more than we imagined.” In the end, Rs 10 crore out of the Rs 50 crore Ward Works budget included citizen recommendations. Once that was done, Janaagraha realised that planning is a huge part of implementation of that budget. How does one ensure people are part of the planning process? Another big campaign called Ward Vision was launched where Janaagraha identified 10 strong communities who went through a visioning campaign, looking at maps, understanding what was going on in their wards. But even as these two campaigns were successes, Ramesh was not quite satisfied, given his initial motivation of working with the urban poor. “We realised that while the first two campaigns were meant for everyone, the urban poor were not engaging as much in them. It could mean that they were intimidated by the complex ideas; their comfort zone is not in mixing with the middle class.” Janaagraha has been accused of being an elitist organisation, catering only to middle class interests. Says Ramesh, “We do not mind people saying that Janaagraha is a middle class platform. You cannot be inclusive without having the middle class. BUT it is not exclusively the middle class. Inclusive processes have to be inclusive for all. You cannot exclusively go and target the poor. Because if you do that, what you are saying is that we are separating the poor from the middle class. There is a moral question there… are you saying that the poor are nobler than the middle class? If yes, then that’s thin ice – you are saying that their poverty is making them nobler. What that means is that you are celebrating poverty. Instead, let’s make the assumption that goodness is in everyone and create spaces where there is opportunity where the poor and the non-poor can engage each other in a politically legitimate manner.” That is a fair argument as long as one can assure that the interests of both groups are adequately represented in the outcomes and one does not subvert or hijack the others’ interests.
To achieve this inclusion, Janaagraha assisted the government in a campaign for micro-lending to the urban poor called Swarna Jayanthi Shahari Rozgar Yojna (SJSRY). This government-run urban self-employment scheme was failing on several levels. People applying for these loans were often (20%) not BPL families. In disbursing loans, several loans that showed up as “granted” under SJSRY were, in fact, rejected by the banks. There were no strong community networks and neighbourhood groups identifying beneficiaries and the banks often rejected loans to individuals. In August 2002, Janaagraha facilitated the coming together of all the stakeholders of SJSRY -- government, banks, NGOs, training institutions and urban poor -- under one umbrella called ANKUR (Alliance for a Networked Kinship with Underprivileged Residents). This was an innovative and unprecedented project where civil society organisations led by Janaagraha came together to assist in a government scheme. With the neighbourhood groups getting stronger, the banks started becoming more amenable to giving loans and, according to Janaagraha, the first three months of the pilot project saw performance equal to half that of the entire first five years. How does Janaagraha choose its projects? In these four years, apart from the big campaigns, there have been many smaller initiatives prompting Swati to say, “Everybody comes with a pet peeve and we are always very open.” But Janaagraha does have a strict set of criteria in choosing projects. Ramesh is very clear and categorically states that one kind of project increases participation while another kind promotes institution-building. “You cannot evaluate Janaagraha in 2001 like in 2005. We had no clue this thing would come and engulf us. We thought it was one campaign.” But even for that they had criteria: - Mass impact: The issue must affect the lives of a significant number of people
- Sustainable solutions: Long-term results can only come from sustainable engagement of citizens with a particular issue
- Scalability: Solutions must allow for the expansion of the conduit into other fields for citizen engagement
- Replicability: Solutions being created must be models that can be taken up in other areas
- Leveraging existing platforms: As far as possible, there must be existing work that has already gone into creating sustainable solutions.
For Janaagraha, each activity has to have documentation of how it was before and have a plan for generating desired, measurable outcomes. Ramesh relates with a smile, “What we thought was a big victory in the first campaign was just the beginning.” Fertile ground
The 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution have laid the grounds for taking decentralisation in administration to the lowest level. However, in various places in India, the implementation of the same is far from complete. Nowhere is it more apparent than in Bangalore itself. The amendments call for ward-level committees and empowered gram panchayats. With the Right to Information coming into effect as a law, citizens are empowered to demand and receive information. Additionally, the National Urban Renewal Mission (NURM) includes formalising citizen participation through Area Sabhas. In the light of this and the failure of governments to implement urban local governance, is Janaagraha attempting to create a parallel governance structure? Is that hurting, rather than furthering the cause of urban local governance? Swati, in a white paper on the development plan for Bangalore, writes on the role of informal structures: “The presence of a formal structure of decentralisation to the citizen will create the appropriate participatory and accountability mechanism for the citizen. However, this does not mean that informal community structures like local resident associations, neighbourhood groups and ward-level federations will become less important. If anything, these structures can now become more effective beyond their social role, by linking their public issues at the grassroots to the appropriate platform, either the Area Sabha or the Ward Committee. The lessons from rural decentralisation indicate that while informal structures are important, parallel power structures should not be created.” Ramesh reacts to the accusation, “All we are asking citizens today [is to be] active citizens. This is one of the critical criteria. Our role is to catalyse the engagement of citizens and their government and to provide a platform for that engagement in a constructive manner.” Growth of the paradigm
Ramesh has written extensively about the approach Janaagraha has taken to enable participatory governance which is, he admits, different from several other civil society organisations. Janaagraha believes in the collective energy of the people. In fact, “Janaagraha” is a synthesis of jana, meaning people and agraha, meaning life force. Thus, Janaagraha works through networks of people – be they groups of NGOs, ordinary citizens or even a government agency involved in a particular issue relevant to the campaign or project at hand. While some people believe that the approach of constructive engagement (of the government particularly) compromises the outcome and lobbying for a more long-term solution, Ramesh maintains that an institutional mechanism for citizen participation is required. “The law will take two, three, five years. It took Aruna Roy 20 years to push for the Right to Information. We will keep lobbying. In the meanwhile, projects are not going to stop. The water supply project is one example.” He is referring to the Greater Bangalore Water Supply and Sanitation Project (GBWASP) where Janaagraha has come in for a lot of flak from other CSOs for partnering with the government in a scheme which seems to underserve and, indeed, subvert basic services for the urban poor. The government is proposing (though everyone is claiming that nothing is finalised) outsourcing water services to a private operator, among other things, without much clarity on the terms or urban-poor policy. Janaagraha, for its part, is to enable citizens’ participation in the project, which some people claim is basically a smokescreen that private-sector participation can hide behind. Janaagraha, however, has threatened to withdraw from the project should the government take any decision without the active input of the citizens. “Who are we or anyone else to make that choice for citizens? We are all about participation -- let the citizens make that choice. Why don’t [the CSOs involved in the Campaign Against Water Privatisation -- CAWP] come to the citizen meetings and talk to them about [their] take on privatisation?” In the proposal that Janaagraha has put forward for citizen engagement, they have proposed a pyramid, where at each stage there are elected representatives from the wards, citizen representatives as well as at least one urban-poor representative, so that all voices are heard. Ramesh maintains that Janaagraha is nothing but an enabler, a platform for increasing awareness through debate and deliberation. The perils of forging a new path and stepping into uncharted territory – that of participatory democracy — includes much criticism and critique. All of this Ramesh welcomes. “It is good. Of course we will make mistakes; we are such a young organisation and learning as we go along. People should ask tough questions and Janaagraha should be accountable – to no one else but the citizens – both middle class and the urban poor.” There is clearly no one paradigm that holds all the answers. That is all the more reason, agrees Ramesh, why there should be more debate to determine synergies towards stronger and better outcomes. On the road to a true democracy where people have a say in decision-making and are empowered to make good choices through timely and extensive information, there lie many pitfalls and glitches. Not least is the fact that such a movement can succeed meaningfully only with the buy-in and commitment of the elected power structure. That is the big difference between Porto Alegre and Bangalore. While participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre had complete buy-in from the government, Bangalore is far behind. Janaagraha collected extensive citizen inputs for the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) that charts the development of Bangalore for the next 15 years and submitted it to the government. But that the government will include it is purely an act of faith. Similarly, the GBWASP project has citizen participation in peril because the government is ambiguous and probably back-dooring its way into decisions without citizen input. Janaagraha’s long-term goal is to get state governments to pass laws modifying the Municipalities Act to not only accommodate citizen participation at a very granular level (of the footprint of every polling station) but to implement these reforms. Janaagraha is committed to running training and advocacy programmes to politically educate the Indian citizen to enable accountability at all levels. And on the way to that goal stands the challenge of getting government to recognise the citizen as more than just a voter. “A citizen is neither just a ‘client’ of public services nor simply a vote. We want to deepen the paradigm and propose that the citizen is a partner and a political animal. But this is all theoretical. We would be delighted to take this forward on the ground to prove the idea,” says an enthused Ramesh. Sitting across from them, their passion is palpable. Money has neither been a motivator, nor luckily for them, an inhibitor. The couple has pumped over Rs 6 crore of their own hard-earned money into their dream, Janaagraha (fully funded by the Ramanathan Foundation which only manages the personal funds of Swati and Ramesh), and they are working on making it sustainable by establishing proper governance and operating structures. What drives them is purely the ability to create something that enables co-operation, active participation and inclusive outcomes. Janaagraha is a concept: To include all sections of society in conversations of governance; to enable true democracy through awakening the political citizen in everyone. It is not the only paradigm and it is not complete or perfect. It is a set of processes that can morph and adapt to particular situations anywhere in our country to effect a truer democracy and ensure those “invisible systems” are in place to allow future generations to succeed. “That is the obligation of our generation,” says Ramesh. And the ultimate goal of Janaagraha. (Arati Rao is a Bangalore-based writer) InfoChange News & Features, January 2006
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