Participation for change
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COMMENTS 
PRIA has trained over 120,000 elected panchayat representatives and intervened in 116 municipalities, boosting participatory development and helping citizens access better services in vital areas like water supply and sanitation
Shakuntala Meena, a young woman pradhan in Rajasthan's Karauli district, hit upon an ingenious idea to stem corruption in the execution of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in her district, in 2005. The 25-year-old cobbled together a 21-member block-level monitoring committee to assess the scheme's progress and plug its loopholes.
The committee achieved a double whammy -- it helped local panchayats become more responsive to the villagers' needs and assisted local youth in snagging plum jobs after addressing their complaints against corrupt officials. Meena also organised NREGS job application forms for the local women and ensured their acceptance by the panchayat secretaries.
Helping Meena in her endeavour was PRIA, or the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, a Delhi-based NGO whose mandate involves enhancing the capacities of elected representatives and panchayati raj institutions (PRI) for the benefit of citizens.
For PRIA, the NREGS has been an area of special interest. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) 2005 -- which came into force in 200 districts of India on February 2, 2006 -- guarantees 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to any rural household whose adult members are willing to do unskilled manual work. Local panchayats monitor the planning/implementation of the Act, which is generating employment opportunities for millions of villagers.
"We see the NREGA as an opportunity for panchayati raj institutions to have access to resources to meet the local villagers' expectations. This will generate wage employment for the poor and create useful community assets to catalyse rural socio-economic welfare in the long term," says Rajesh Tandon, an IIT/IIM alumnus who co-founded PRIA in 1982.
Among other things, PRIA's interventions have helped municipalities become more accountable to marginalised sections of society in Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. It has also enabled local people to get birth registration certificates for their children; in the process, local municipalities have since simplified the procedure. Mohalla samitis in many municipalities have been able to organise sanitation and water services by putting pressure on elected councillors/municipal staff.
The most interesting outcome of PRIA's interventions, however, has been in the area of access to water in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. This was made possible through the active participation of citizens in gram sabha meetings, and constant pressure on elected sarpanch/block-level officials.
"In addition," says Tandon, "we also ensure that only deserving households get below the poverty line (BPL) cards and women/the elderly get enrolled in jobs under the rural guarantee programme." By stressing women's empowerment, PRIA encourages more women to play leadership roles as elected representatives in panchayats and municipalities.
As Tandon puts it, India's eco-political landscape in the '80s and '90s had made local authorities dependent on the Centre to finance their development activities. This led the central government to introduce the 74th Constitutional Amendment Bill that gave enormous powers to local authorities for development by involving citizens at every level.
But even though most constitutional institutions are in place in India, they aren't citizen-friendly points out Anju Dwivedi, Regional Manager, PRIA, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. "This is where we step in to assist local outfits in asking public institutions to fulfil their mandates through transparent and accountable functioning."
Over the last 26 years, PRIA's emphasis has been on empowering the poor through social mobilisation and awareness campaigns to tackle the entitlements of the poor vis-à-vis natural resources -- land, water, forests and minerals. They have supported local struggles for the prevention of land alienation/displacement and for greater transparency in the procedures of land acquisition and rehabilitation in 81 locations across the country.
However, it is in the arena of strengthening panchayati raj institutions that the NGO has done the most commendable work. The organisation believes that although panchayats are mandated to be institutions of local self-governance, the cornerstone is the gram sabha, which ensures the accountability of elected panchayat representatives. To this end, PRIA has campaigned for the proper conduct of gram sabha meetings in 6,865 panchayats in 17 Indian states involving the youth, women, dalits and tribals to ensure that the decisions of the gram sabha impact the entire community positively.
"In addition, PRIA has assisted in the preparation of micro plans at the panchayat level in 685 villages around the country to address the real issues of local people," says Rambha Tripathy, Manager, PRIA. To help and empower elected panchayat representatives, PRIA has pioneered several innovative approaches. The NGO has trained over 120,000 elected panchayat representatives, of whom 66,514 are women panchayat leaders and 17,570 dalit representatives.
Till date, PRIA has intervened in 1,269 wards of 116 municipalities, helping its citizens access better services in vital areas like water supply, sanitation and birth/death registration. To ensure this, it has provided orientation to 3,385 newly-elected municipal councillors on their responsibilities in urban governance, prompted the use of citizen-centric birth registration procedures for the urban poor in 17 municipalities, and carried out 353 campaigns on sanitation and solid waste management.
PRIA also launched a pre-election voters' awareness campaign in 14 states during the last two rounds of panchayat/municipal elections. "Nearly half the gram panchayats -- about 60,757 in 234 districts of these states -- were covered during the campaign, reaching out to millions of voters," says Dwivedi.
Likewise, the NGO's 'Governance Where People Matter' initiative -- launched in 2005 -- has been working for qualitative improvements in rural governance by building the capacities of elected representatives and enhancing local people's participation. "Bottlenecks like lack of finances for rural panchayats and insufficient internal resource-generation have created constraints for panchayati raj institutions to be agents of social and economic development," says a PRIA volunteer. "This is where we come in -- to catalyse things."
As Tandon puts it, reforming institutions of governance is a process of sensitisation, orientation and capacity-building of elected representatives and government officials so that they can respond better to people's needs. To this end, PRIA's endeavours have helped strengthen linkages between the people and governance institutions for a more holistic development.
Contact:
PRIA
42, Tughlakabad Institutional Area
New Delhi 110062
Tel: 011-29956908, 29960931/32/33
Email:
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Web: www.pria.org
-- Neeta Lal
(Neeta Lal is an independent journalist based in Delhi)
InfoChange News & Features, March 2008