Published: 24 January, 2024

I chose to drop science post 10th grade and study commerce.At 17, I went to Delhi University for graduation. I chose to finance my own education.  I chose to study literature. I chose to work in an NGO. After working for 6 years, I chose to quit my job and study a program that was absolutely new in the sector. At an age when most girls get married, I chose not to. What underlies all of this and much more is the power of choice. However, having the privilege of making choices and pursuing what one wants to do is the privilege of just 1% youth in our country. This reality has been enough for me to have a burning desire to impact a social change.

I spent 12 days in Jaunpur district in East Uttar Pradesh for a rural district immersion program called ‘Realising India’. No amount of words can do justice to all that I experienced during this journey.

As much as it was about inspiration- from people and places, it also brought out indifference, discrimination (caste, class, and gender),and lack of care for fellow humans. Children are deprived of their right to education. People are surviving through unbelievably difficult living conditions, uncertainty, powerstructures, lack of voice and expression, ignorance and so much more. In the same community, there are people working endlessly to make their ends meet just so that their children can go to school. At the same place there are people who don’t send their children to school just because they thinkit’s not important. The so called higher caste community does not talk to the so called lower caste community, forget supporting and empowering them.

Interactions with people from different age, caste, socio-economic backgrounds made me re-realize my privileges and how I just take things for granted. During a conversation with a primary school principal I asked how soonthe authorities would respond if there was a problem in school? What if there was a short circuit?(I took this example as I had experienced this in the school I taught). She said the school has existed for past 4 years but there is no electricity in the school. I had nothing more to say.

I didn’t have to go to a community school where I would be made to learn books about my religion and follow it without a choice, even being, at times, oblivious to what it meant.I wasn’t indoctrinated into a blind belief system (even though there were definitely some staunch beliefs that I grew up through)andtoday I have the courage, education and support to choose what I want to believe in. Vandana doesn’t have this. My parents did make a lot of sacrifices so that I could get the best of education, because they understood the importance of education. That was my privilege.Shashidoesn’t have this privilege. He dropped out of school towork in the fields. These are just few examples of many other stories that would go unheard, unnoticed forever.

Just by the virtue of birth I have a life which is unimaginably different from children who deserve as much as I do.

At the end of the day, all I think about is my privilege and power of choice that brought me where I am today.

Should I feel happy that I am here or feel sad that I belong to less than 1% of India’s population who have all the basics in place which others don’t have?

I shudder to even think that:

I could be that girl who couldn’t study as much as she wanted.

I could be that girl who didn’t have basic sanitation facilities.

I could be one of those children studying in the school with no electricity.

I could be the one dropping out of school to work in the fields.

Because I am not, I believe that I owe my service to the betterment of these lives.

Published: 15 January, 2024

It’s been more than two months of learning and unlearning at the Indian School of Development Management now. It has been a journey of realising and exploring about my self and my perspective of a society which has eventually shaped my actions and which has begun to change.

I wish I could have experienced this space before I started working in the social sector. All this while, I was working in the sector without even realising what development meant to me. Maybe I never bothered to think about it, or perhaps, I was reluctant to question myself because I knew I didn’t have the answers. I still don’t have complete answers – but yes, I am comfortable questioning myself, my beliefs and the choices I make. For me, not having answers is a more peaceful space now – as I see it as an opportunity to learn, grow and contribute better.

I still remember the project I was working on as a core team member with four other members and a mentor in one of the organisations that work with female commercial sex workers (referred to as didis in this piece) in one of the red-light districts of the city. The vision was to provide alternate life choices for our didis and help them break free from the shackles of subjugation, and live a life of dignity and respect.

I came up with fancy financial projections in Excel and PowerPoint presentations to sell it to different donors. The idea was compelling, and we also got our initial funding from a donor, which could sustain the project for another year. And we started a project in the catering domain with two didis who signed up to own the project.

We started off well. However, after a few months, the business started to fall drastically, and the didis found it difficult to make profits. It became a money-burning project. Even then, we decided that money was not a concern and we simply wanted our didis to build their skills in entrepreneurship and develop certain key values that would help them to excel in the life choices they made. But we could never decide on the set of values that would be necessary for them to become successful entrepreneurs.

We failed to harness their commitment as role-models. Thus, we could not get more of them to join this movement of change. We had envisioned the project to be ‘owned’ by didis – but all the decisions were made by us and only a few of the meetings included voices from the didis. Soon, it became a model where they were simply employed as salaried employees – and there was very little space for them to actively participate in decision making.

Now when I look back at those decisions, I can clearly see that we missed out on realising our values. Maybe the team itself did not have a coherence in values. We never spoke about our values as a design team. We had assumed that didis would be undergoing value-based training – but there were no clear discussions on what those values would be. In fact, it now sounds strange to me that we agreed to something which would involve the team deciding what values the didis should espouse.

Also, the project lacked a most critical component – an effective manager. Amongst the two different leaders appointed at various points of time, one of them had a different full-time job – so clearly, this was not the top priority. We were all leading it as per the convenience of our so-called ‘expertise’.

Here at ISDM, I am realising that how important it is to root your vision in the values you believe in. No one else can decide for your values except your own self. I now realise that I did not recognise my gender biases when I assumed that ‘managing the kitchen’ was a skill that all women would know, whether they be in the commercial or the domestic sector. How inappropriate was it for me to assume that our didis would be good at cooking and managing the kitchen! Maybe it was just a judgemental assumption I made for my own convenience. I think the picture would have been different had we asked the didis about what they believed – what their dreams were and what they would have wanted in life, if they hadn’t been forced into sex work.

The project was put on hold this year after a mutual decision acknowledging the fact that we weren’t ready to take it forward. It also conceded that the whole ‘kitchen and cooking’ idea needed an overhaul and that the concept itself would have to be re-imagined.

Personally speaking, I have set out on a new journey of learning and exploring of what it means to an be authentic ‘development professional’. Perhaps, a year later, I will be able to make a considerable and value-based contribution to the lives of the didis more significantly by taking a more inclusive, just and equitable approach.

Published: 30 January, 2024

Recently, I got to explore and understand the wonderful work being done by a philanthropist in his native rural area. The organisation was working across multiple domains – from sports to theatre for development, skill building and livelihood, agricultural information services, women empowerment, pre-school support, etc.

As per habit (the dangers of having been a consultant!), my first question to them was related to understanding their theory of change (TOC – a sense of what the problem is and what interventions are needed to solve those problems) and trying to figure out why they had chosen these domains and what their imagination of impact was. My host looked at me in a very amused manner and commented that folks in the social sector are obsessed with writing reports. And since he is not obliged to report to anyone, he has never thought about things in this manner or even considered evaluating his work.

The ‘main strategy’ here is not to have a very detailed one – to go with the flow of things and do interventions which make sense on an intuitive level – with the belief that at some level, at some time, some kind of impact will definitely take place, whatever that might be.

This really got me thinking about whether we were complicating (and corporatising?) an otherwise intuitive process while talking about TOC, trying to formulate causal relationships (that is, what parameters need to be worked on in which manner to achieve the desired social impact), looking at things from a more systems standpoint and working on defining and evaluating impact/change. Or, was this intuitive process really over-simplified where it does not do any justice to the social, cultural, political, economic inter-linkages and dynamics which constitute social change? I do not have a clear-cut right answer – but I am guessing it lies in between these two extremes.

These approaches also possibly represent the differences between a ‘charity-based’ and a ‘philanthropic’ approach to development, some of which are represented below. Do note that these may not be applicable in all situations.

Given the changing paradigms of the development sector and a lot more funding coming from professional high net-worth individuals and corporates, there is an increasing trend of moving towards a more strategic philanthropy-based model of work. This would necessitate a change in the way social sector organisations conceptualise, approach, plan and deliver their work.

This will only be possible if we have more and more people (development managers and leaders) who can bring this rigour and structure to the work being done. To avoid rigidity, it is important to combine this rigour with the openness and adaptability to changes in the external environment.

Published: 26 January, 2024

From a very early age, we are taught to break problems apart to study and decipher the world around us. The conventional thinking on complexity and chaos steers our minds towards parts and elements involved in the system and fosters a loss of rumination concerning linkages and influences within and between the components, and the system. It is understandably difficult when we consider that the interactions within and outside the system are constantly changing. Systems thinking is a discipline that can be used to throw light on the invisible factors governing the behavior of a system. The lectures on systems thinking and the case studies we have been working on at ISDM reinforced the importance of having this in place while approaching a development issue. Systems thinking succors in the deconstruction of a complex system and identifying the web of interdependence and adaptivity of the components and the system on the whole. The approach gives a conceptual framework to think about issues in a holistic and collaborative manner.

As development professionals, irrespective of whether the interventions are at the local level or macro level, it is important to understand a wide range of social, economic, political, ecological, and even physiological systems. Even a small action can have a butterfly effect where effect of consequences could be irreversible. For instance, there might be a tribal community who have been victims of land acquisition for a long time. There might be issues with regards to the privatization of lands or encroachment of their area. This might be a trigger for them to fight for their rights demanding for justice, and the government, after trying all means possible, could consider giving them self autonomy. Now this might have seemed to address one of the problems, but say if that particular tribal community is patriarchal, then there would be their own communitarian laws, no voice for women, no representation of women on decision making or no rights guaranteed for them. This might lead to deprivation of basic human rights and also in turn upset the development of the future generations. Any intervention of the government at a later stage to address these issues might become onerous. Dietrich Dörner writes on effective problem solving: "If we want to solve problems effectively...we must keep in mind not only many features but also the influences among them. Complexity is the label we will give to the existence of many interdependent variables in a given system. The more variables and the greater their interdependence, the greater the system's complexity. Great complexity places high demands on a planner's capacity to gather information, integrate findings, and design effective actions. The links between the variables oblige us to attend to a great many features simultaneously, and that, concomitantly, makes it impossible for us to undertake only one action in a complex system". The concept of systems thinking allows us to constantly rethink and hone our development models and rejig the components within the supra or sub-system. By adopting a model that could separate direct and adaptive challenges, and deal with layers of perspectives involved in systems, one could cope with the complexities hindering developmental approaches. 

In today's world, most of the problems that we are confronted with are repercussions of our inability to grasp the nature of convoluted systems that are present. Systems thinking along with other learning disciplines of personal mastery, social emotional intelligence and collaboration helps us to have a broader perspective, to look at the underlying structures, patterns and events, rather than just the events themselves, and also helps us to identify how to change them effectively.