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Dear participants
A point of view on a Proposal put forth by William
Gareth:
It is nice to observe that the debate spearheaded by
the DFID on growth and poverty has been taking
interesting turn and multitude of issues raised over
the week. Converging the debate to a manageable point,
a specific question on "How can DFID be more effective
in getting poverty-reducing agriculture going?" is
proposed by Gareth Williams
As among the initiatives of the DFID seems to have
involved (or work together collectively) many
organizations and institutions such as World Bank,
States and governments, it can play a vital role in
relooking (or looking differently) at the poverty
questions in depth. Various tools to achieve success
are suggested such as policy intervention to ensuring
accountability and transparency stressed,
retrospection of the aid organizations in terms of
ways and means and realistic ?reaching out? to the
targets. It seems contending that the impact and
achievements reports of most programmes depict the
success stories rather then analyzing the failures.
Although, the impacts of programme/schemes/projects do
not spread as envisaged often. Bureaucratic and
realistic achievement needs to be separated in right
spirit to realize the end objective of poverty
alleviation .
Most interesting over the weeks, there is tilt in
emphasis from growth and poverty to farmers?
organizations. In fact, it is not the organization
(which are numerous), but the quality of it is more
important, which matter in sharing the benefits among
all. There are enough evidences to conclude that while
dealing with the peoples? institutions is critical but
to be sustainable, funding agencies need to consider
the following:
1 There is no need to create the institutions, but to
use the existing institutions through capacity
building and empowerment. A theory of peoples?
involvement rather than imposition from top
2 Attempts to create organizations as a part of
implementing specific schemes generate very exciting
case studies of success stories. But, as soon as the
scheme (s) is (are) withdrawn, the institutions die
and organizations defunct. Under the situation (occur
often), not only the spread of benefits to others
members of the community, but its sustainability
itself becomes questionable. It is in this context,
the time bound result oriented projects need to be
examined in the light of socio political realities,
not to be in relation to successes of pre conceived
ideology of the management. The past initiatives of
the DFID may have enough data and experiences to test
the hypothesis of sustainability and wider spread. If
proven, a model of learning from failure and
replicability of success will emerge as future guide.
On the concept of using the exiting institutions, I
may like to draw the example of an existing giant
rural institution called FMC (field management
committee) in north east India. It is giant because
presently there are 26000 FMCs covering 52000 villages
and 1.8 million farmer members. Apparently 5-10% of
them are doing extremely good, but 95% of the dormant
ones are the matter of concern. If the researches on
implementation failure of schemes and the failure in
reaching out to the farmers adequately portrayed, this
institution could potentially be encouraged to act as
a motor of rural development and poverty alleviation
and a policy implementation collateral. No study has
been done on its functioning, status and role. The
point I want to raise is that instead of attempting to
create a parallel institution (usually thought of at a
phenomenally high cost), understand the working
pattern of such institutions, identify factors
governing their success (fewer though) and of failure
(larger in number) and derive modular lessons.
Prioritization of those derived parameters and
addressing them systematically, certainly takes us
along the desired direction (as is looked for here). A
huge organizations of above mentioned magnitude are
found in existence, but they need to be nurtured,
require efforts on capability building, create
awareness of the members on the emerging opportunities
and encouraging to share these new knowledge among the
peers. In doing so I believe, will result in high
achievement with a cost saving alternative. I hope the
DFID or any others have worked on such arena of
institutional development. I will be happy to know
more of such examples.
Thanking all for kind attention.
B C Barah
=====
B C Barah
Principal Scientist
National Centre for Agricultural Economics &
Policy Research (ICAR)
New Delhi 110 012, India
email: <address removed>, <address removed>
Tel: (011) 2584 2978, 2584 7628 FAX: (011) 2584 2864
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