Big Society in India - Part 4
on Jana Gana Mana (India), 18/Feb/2011 10:32, 34 days ago
So where was I.....Oh yes, India:- 9% GDP growth last quarter.- Large and growing voluntary sector- Small governance- Strong history of community activism based upon extended family and community linksI'm kind of picking up from where I left off (for those still following - if not, please wait a couple of days and another blog post will be along shortly!)‘Sustained persuasion’: social sector working with and stimulating government actionBoth in Delhi and Coimbatore I've found a network of NGOs, most of them locally-founded, i.e. a social form of entrepreneurship. This network is well-established, and complements the role of government in achieving development. The public sector recognises the importance of local NGOs and creates space for them to operate effectively. With this, a tacit acknowledgment that the concept of grassroots development should ideally be undertaken by the community. Alongside this, the government is very willing to give funding and support bank loans (acting as a broker in the relationship) with the financial institutions to groups such as womens’ help groups, rural groups etc, who are looking to provide basic education, shelter, water, sanitation etc.Furthermore, they will often involve NGOs directly in policy initiatives - reflecting on the challenges which economic growth brings:“India is facing its challenges all at once” is what one government official has siad to me. As such government is prioritising infrastructure where it can and lets the NGOs undertake social activities. The social sector sees much of their work as being about what they have dubbed as‘sustained persuasion’. They state that the ‘silence of the righteous causes the chaos around us’. Thus they do not stay silent but act and cajole and lobby!However I do wonder how much of this philanthropy is driven by necessity or by a genuine social consciousness? Of course it is easy to see the huge inequalities of wealth and aggressive economic development which outstrip the natural resources. Yet on many other occasions the space between what is‘commercial’ and what is ‘social’ is blurred. It would seem that on some occasions while business is motivated by profit, it is also motivated by a social consciousness which is very deeply imbued within the way they do business. This relates to the previous collective consciousness point and a kind of embedded Corporate Social Responsibility where high levels of social consciousness penetrates how things are done, which seemed to us to be inherent in Indian culture.Will this social consciousness endure? Or will economic growth and accompanying modernity result in its loss?It could easily be thought that this social consciousness and‘public spiritedness’ is just a feature of an old society and that the forces of modernity and modern life will squeeze out this consciousness. In my view, this consciousness is too deep, too embedded in the spirituality of the people to be squeezed out and it will endure, because people wish it so. But I do also wonder if it endures as the government processes are aged and bureaucratic - Government systems that seemingly cannot deal effectively with change, and the massive economic growth that the society is undergoing (indeed it is questionable whether any political process could!). As such, aligned to an inbuilt social consciousness is the fact that the people and businesses can comprehend more quickly what needs to happen and respond and adapt accordingly. They are ahead of government, more adept to reflect what is neccessary to sustain into the future.