SEVA MANDIR, UDAIPUR

Perhaps it’s just as well that we had a task beyond just looking at the organisation and attempting to understand it. The ‘forest rights’ issue provided a frame with which we were able to view Seva Mandir, its position and interplay in the complex institutional web in Rajasthan, or at least in Udaipur. Udaipur can well claim to be the development capital of Rajasthan. Along ‘Seva Mandir Marg’ in Fatehpura are the offices of some of the more prominent NGOs, several of whom owe parentage to Seva Mandir.

Organising its work on three broad planks of Capabilities, Livelihoods and Institutions, Seva Mandir, operates a unique matrix structure that brings together people with diverse skills and backgrounds to work together. The matrix structure also provides the space for young, fresh-out-of-college, professionally trained people to work along with seasoned development activists from the local areas. The traditional areas of work of Seva Mandir are organised into five blocks of Udaipur – Kotra, Jhadol, Girwa, Badgaon and Kherwara. It works as a facilitating agency to the World Bank funded District Poverty Initiatives Project (DPIP) in Kumbhalgarh in Rajasamand district. Of recent origin is Seva Mandir’s work based in the urban areas of Udaipur for women in distress, as well as the Childline service it operates for indigent and lost children.

Growth of an organisation

Till the mid-1980’s Seva Mandir had an almost exclusive focus on promotion of adult literacy in the villages. Seva Mandir looked at itself as an agency to promote awareness and capabilities among the rural population, with a view to ensuring that they get the benefits of democratic governance. It found that this position was not yielding desired results and changed its position. “Towards the mid 1980s, there was a change in government policies towards the voluntary sector. There were also leadership changes within Seva Mandir. During this period Seva Mandir decided it would go beyond organizing people to make claims on the state and try to build people's capacity to engage in development. This shift in perspective was to become a watershed in Seva Mandir’s history. It resulted in far reaching changes in organizational structure and culture .” Among other things, this change in strategy led to an exodus of a number of staff; of those, not in line with this shift in position and wanting to adopt a more vigilant role vis-à-vis the government.

Over the years, “through a process of trial and error, Seva Mandir has found programs through which people are able to free themselves from patron-client relationships and gain political and social perspectives that are oriented to promoting the common good.”

Seva Mandir’s work is based on what its staff affectionately call the ‘Complan’ or the Comprehensive Plan. Plans are made at the villages, consolidated at the block level and later as the organisational plan. Earlier these plans spanned five-years, while the recent ones are for three years each. These plans are indicative of the sustained and comprehensive focus towards development, “nurturing an emphasis on means (though ends are equally important), and engaging in constructive work towards empowered social leadership”, beyond the constraints and uncertainties of project funding cycles.

Through a process of ‘learning by doing’ Seva Mandir nurtures the formation of robust village institutions, strong on the values of social justice and equity, with the view to transferring their democratic strength to Panchayats.

In terms of activities, Seva Mandir focuses on the following in the 583 odd villages that it intensively engages with:
- Natural resource development which includes forestry, watershed development, development of common property resources like pastureland and irrigation
- Education, involving running of NFE centres in villages and village libraries
- Balwadis for pre-school children
- Health interventions involving awareness generation, support to traditional birth attendants and village health workers, maternal and child care
- Women’s development involving promotion of self-help groups for economic and social strengthening
- Promotion and management of Gram Vikas Kosh (Village Fund)

Seva Mandir also runs a fairly successful crafts programme. Its brand ‘Sadhna’ has, over the past four years, built for itself commendable equity in the handicrafts market. Sadhna is now an independent Trust, more or less self-supporting and providing regular employment to more than 300 village women.

Some thoughts

What is most unique about Seva Mandir, when one places it along side contemporary NGOs in the national firma (it is older than most non-Gandhian, non-missionary NGOs by at least a decade), is its commitment to one district in Rajasthan – Udaipur undivided. This is quite unlike the dominant tendency among contemporary NGOs elsewhere, to spread wide geographically. The intent of bringing about substantive transformation in the lives of poor people it engages with, the acknowledgement that sectoral interventions are essential, but that they need to be seen in the broader frame of improvements in people’s lives, and the realisation that these processes take time, effort, resources, patience, persistence, mark Seva Mandir’s approach to development.

The matrix structure provides an essential framework for working, weaving together sectoral interventions into a comprehensive focus to development. The structure provides its challenges especially in defining responsibility and accountability. Working together in the weave of the matrix demands enormous levels of mutuality and sometime spawns misunderstandings and tensions between the sectoral/ support teams and field teams. By consciously creating spaces for dialogue and reflection Seva Mandir takes pre-emptive measures to avert conflicts and crisis, encouraging self criticism often to a point of fault.

We were at times overwhelmed by level of planning that goes into, and the time and resources spent on capacity building. The training centre at Kaya is booked for the entire year for a range of meetings, trainings and workshops. Trainings at the block offices happen with regularity, often for more than half the month.

Among the activities that we came across in the villages of Badgaon, Jhadol and Kotra, two interventions of Seva Mandir strikes us as being particularly remarkable and innovative.

Jan Shikshan Nilayam

The Jan Shikshan Nilayams (Village libraries) are part of Seva Mandir’s education programme. In the four villages we visited three had JSNs, of which we found two to be extremely vibrant and active. In fact we got an update of Sania Mirza’s latest conquests and other lead stories from the blackboard outside the nilayam at Madla, diligently maintained by Laxmi Singh. He and Dhaniram at Medi (whose children are named America, Russia, Australia, etc) shared that there were at least ten serious visitors to the Nilayam each day while others drop by for casual conversations. On select days each week, the JSN workers take their bags filled with books to villages which are further away, to give them an opportunity to come abreast with the world outside.

Back in Udaipur several people involved with the programme were quite taken aback by our effusive praise for what we saw, the activity having come in for much criticism in internal reviews. JSNs are like the village reading rooms that one grew up in Kerala with – the hub of intellectual activity for the community; where information and knowledge is gained and shared; small shanties that contribute to the learning and growth of generations of young men (and some women). JSNs where they are functional, no doubt, are contributing to the well-being of its clients, just like the Granthshala (Library) movement in Kerala did, at least till the late 1980’s.

Gram Vikas Kosh

The Gram Vikas Kosh is a contributory fund created in each village. Families make an initial contribution to set it up. Additions are made into the fund every time there is a Seva Mandir supported natural resource development activity in the village. The value of the voluntary labour contribution made by the villagers is put by Seva Mandir to this fund. A Gram Vikas Committee, is selected by the villagers manage the fund. We found many villages that had funds of up to Rs.5 lakhs. Villagers are obviously very proud of their achievement. Over time GVCs take responsibility for all development activities in the villages. In several villages, leaders of GVCs are also members of the Panchayats. In recent years, there have been efforts to gauge the maturity of Gram Vikas Committees using a Village Cohesion Index to grade them. Financial and operations controls are transferred to GVCs with a high grade, lessening Seva Mandir’s role in a gradual and phased manner.

A critical aspect of Seva Mandir’s work is on social capital. Most of all, Seva Mandir defines the village’s common resources as its social capital. This approach has led to a number of interventions to reclaim, protect and manage common resources. Land is a very prized resource for the bhil adivasis of Udaipur, as is elsewhere in rural India. Three types of common land existed in the villages – charnot or pasture lands, bilanaam or revenue wastelands and forests. In most villages, these are in the encroached possession of villagers. Seva Mandir has succeeded in mobilising several villages to give up/get rid of these encroachments and to protect and manage them collectively. In villages like Barawa and Nayakheda, villagers showed proudly showed us plots of pastureland with boundary walls in which grass grew abundantly. They have a mechanism to harvest the grass and ensure that every family gets its share.

Seva Mandir promotes the Gram Vikas Kosh as another form of village commons. It is unlikely that many villages will rally around to get rid of encroachments on common lands. It is in these cases that the GVK will provide the village a platform to act collectively, to sit together and discuss issues of common interest.

Relating to others

A striking issue that we came across during our stay in Rajasthan and meeting with several NGOs was the near total isolation of Seva Mandir. Its positions often do not find much support among its peers. There is a sense of mutual scepticism between Seva Mandir and organisations positioned as activists and working on the ‘rights’ mode, which feel that Seva Mandir’s constructive rather than confrontational approach to development is limiting. Seva Mandir on the other hand maintains that mere enactment of laws and awareness generation are not sufficient to mobilise repressed and suppressed communities to demand their rights.

On the issue of forest rights, on which most of our interactions with people in Udaipur was focussed, Seva Mandir’s position that all encroachments cannot be viewed equally was received with stoic silence. Seva Mandir has proactively worked in the past years to mobilise communities to remove encroachments from ‘commons’ and restore community ownership over them. It continues to maintain that there is value in such efforts to build commons and sees a threat in a blanket legalisation of encroachments, in weakening the socio-economic fabric of communities. Would it be necessary for Seva Mandir to make proactive efforts in reaching out to the larger world and making the rationale of its positions known?

The situation poses a classic equation of civil society organisations across the country operating within the same region/ environment, polarised on ideological grounds and unable to relate to each other. We were able to relate to our experiences in Orissa where Gram Vikas faces similar isolation. It leaves us pondering if nurturing of collaborative spaces or leveraging mutual strengths is worth attempting at all.

To some one from a neutral background, as we did, arguments made by Seva Mandir in the forests rights issue sounded very logical. But then, not everyone is neutral.