Dear All I can't tell you having read this inspiring write up,How delighted I am. Though, this doesn't deal with disability, so what? a disabled has dreamt something different which is beyond ordinary scheme of things. I salute this man, and would like to meet some day for sure. Are you on Access India Akul? read this and enjoy! http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130430/jsp/opinion/story_16843047.jsp Local voluntary groups, working in tandem with Central welfare schemes, can help the Sundarbans survive, writes Uddalak Mukherjee
A stretch of the forest across the Herobhanga River I had read about the volunteers of Jharkhali Sabuj Bahini from a news report in the Ananda Bazar Patrika in March. Founded by Akul Biswas, a young man blinded by glaucoma, JSB is a voluntary organization that has undertaken sporadic, but effective, afforestation drives in and around the villages wedged between three mighty rivers — Herobhanga, Matla and Bidyadhari — in Basanti block in the Sundarbans. My interest in JSB — an unregistered, virtually unknown, non-government organization with paltry resources — lay not in Biswas’s recent accomplishment. A German television company has directed a documentary film on JSB’s women volunteers, many of whom have lost their husbands to tigers, and their battle to save the local ecology. At a time when most philanthropic organizations appear only too keen, or are being coerced, to adopt an expansive, corporatized model of welfare, JSB’s minimalist vision — Biswas is only willing to replenish the mangrove cover in Jharkhali — and voluntary approach to social work raise critical questions about the asymmetry that marks donor-recipient relationships in the sphere of development. Indeed, Biswas seemed diffident when I had asked if I could visit Tridibnagar, Natun Gram and Sardarpara in Jharkhali to take a look at some of JSB’s projects. First, he warned me about the long and difficult journey. (An hour’s ride on a local train to Canning, followed by a rickety bus journey of over one-and-a-half hours and, finally, an equally bumpy ride on a motorcycle took me to my destination a week after I had spoken to Biswas over the phone.) During the conversation, he had also hinted that I would be disappointed with JSB, given its obscurity and its limited area of operation. He finally relented, but imposed a solitary condition. He enquired if I was willing to encourage the children who volunteer for JSB. Their parents, I was told, scoffed at their efforts to sensitize adults about the depredations on the environment. Local institutions like the gram panchayat, too, are dismissive of the JSB because none of its patrons include political representatives. I met Biswas and his rag-tag army of eco warriors inside a dilapidated hut on a blazing April afternoon. The children — JSB has 21 child volunteers — sweated profusely but remained patient. The solitary woman — there are over 40 women volunteers — seemed anxious because she had not yet finished cooking lunch for her family. Yet, as we sat and discussed their work and accomplishments, their sense of ownership and pride in this fledgling organization became quite apparent. Started by Biswas in 2006, JSB has remained true to its inclusive and voluntary charter. Every activity — soil testing, fund collection, the plantation of saplings, sensitization of the community to the ecological challenges, and so on — is undertaken after threadbare discussions that see women and children expressing their opinions. The other remarkable aspect about JSB is its insistence on a participatory approach. The volunteers are encouraged to conduct rudimentary experiments in their free time to develop a comprehensive understanding of ecological conditions. Significantly, the absence of a laboratory or sophisticated equipment has forced JSB’s volunteers to rely on such resources as myths, traditional rituals and local festivals that act as repositories of community knowledge. Some of the women who lost their husbands in tiger attacks Yet, the special traits that separate JSB from larger, affluent NGOs — voluntary participation, democratic functioning and its contentedness with its localized influence — have, ironically, made it difficult to obtain funds from donor organizations. Biswas recounted how, during meetings with donors — government bodies, corporate sponsors, aid organizations and suchlike — he has been repeatedly asked to increase JSB’s membership and widen its scale of operations to neighbouring villages in order to obtain funds. On other occasions, negotiations had come to a halt because of donors’ insistence that JSB surrenders its autonomy in decision-making processes regarding the nature of aid. For instance, Biswas decided not to seek assistance from the forest department when he realized that the authorities were unwilling to listen to JSB’s views on the kind of saplings that are likely to survive in the local terrain. After Aila had ravaged the Sundarbans, an entrepreneur had refused Biswas aid after JSB decided to ask for books and pencils apart from dry food and medicine. The hurdles that mark JSB’s ties with donors reveal two broader, but disturbing, facts. First, they suggest that donors are only capable of perceiving the idea of welfare/development when it is expressed in quantifiable terms. Second, the relationship between donors and recipients remains markedly iniquitous. This perhaps explains why voluntary organizations are asked to show an impressive growth in membership before donors budget their expenses. The budgeting exercise also leaves very little scope for recipients to articulate specific needs, even though they have a far better understanding of ground realities. Given the disparate dependence of voluntary organizations on private and corporate sponsorship, it is imperative that the government thinks of widening the ambit of Central welfare programmes — specifically the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme — to extend financial aid to such groups. The MGNREGS is particularly suited in this context as it is one of the few rights-based welfare programmes that pay attention to the creation of sustainable ecological assets for communities inhabiting fragile ecological zones such as the Sundarbans. Most importantly, the inclusion of organizations like JSB in the MGNREGS would be beneficial to the voluntary groups as well as to policy-makers. How would JSB benefit through its inclusion? Notwithstanding the MGNREGS’s limitations — delays in payment, allocation of funds and job cards on political lines, and so on — JSB is likely to gain a modicum of visibility, and respectability, that may prove to be crucial to not only sustain the commitment of its volunteers but also lend it the necessary leverage while dealing with indifferent institutions like the local bureaucracy and the panchayat. Financial compensation for the JSB’s ecological initiatives would help this grassroot organization improve the quality of conservation. Central assistance should include training so that the JSB’s volunteer corps makes better use of its time and resources. The crude experiments that are now undertaken to test soil conditions and salinity, for instance, would then give way to a scientific approach that can obliterate the time-consuming trial and error method. The chances of the MGNREGS’s ecological vision coming to fruition would be brighter if it were to come to the aid of small-scale units like the JSB. In 2012-13, the ministry that has been specifically created to develop the Sundarbans had undertaken an afforestation drive on nearly 1,000 hectares of land. A subsequent investigation revealed that no sapling had been planted on almost 30 hectares in spite of the allocation of funds. Irregularities have also been reported in the purchase of expensive mangrove species like goran. Given the entrenched corruption and the ineptitude of government departments, policy-makers ought to look at viable alternatives like JSB to expedite the creation of sustainable ecological assets to replenish the green cover in these islands. Significantly, the challenges faced by JSB’s women volunteers ought to be examined closely as they mirror the loopholes that remain unplugged in MGNREGS programmes. A recent report has shown that in West Bengal, women constitute only one-third of the total workforce in the 100-days’ work programme. The state ranks eighth in India when it comes to women’s participation in the MGNREGS. One of the primary reasons behind the dismal participation of women in MGNREGS programmes is the iniquitous division of domestic labour between men and women. Many of JSB’s women volunteers I spoke to conceded that the heavy burden of domestic chores eat into the time that could be allotted for voluntary work. There is thus an urgent need to sensitize labour schemes under the MGNREGS on gender lines. For instance, women should be preferred over men in afforestation programmes that are less demanding physically. The time and energy saved would help women become equal stakeholders in community ecological projects. Child volunteers of Jharkhali Sabuj Bahini Another aspect that ought to be borne in mind is that given the regressive values that continue to determine the social milieu in both urban and rural India, women’s participation in welfare programmes, be they State-aided or voluntary by nature, remains complicated and layered. Single, divorced or aged women find it difficult to demand their rights of employment. Biswas was shocked to discover that his work to rehabilitate ‘Tiger widows’ had been questioned by local leaders on moral grounds. The MGNREGS is supposedly modelled on the doctrine of decentralization that aims at bringing prosperity to marginalized communities through minimal intervention from the political apparatus. But the decision to choose the gram panchayat — a heavily politicized institution — as the nodal agency to implement the programme has ended up compromising its decentralized character. Perhaps there is merit in the idea of evenly distributing the responsibility of monitoring and implementing the MGNREGS between elected bodies such as panchayats as well as voluntary organizations that remain apolitical. In Jharkhali, Biswas and I met a few of the women volunteers to discuss the future of JSB in the evening. A young woman narrated to us the story of her life. The wind blowing across the river drowned her voice occasionally but she seemed not to notice. Her husband was killed by a tiger when he went fishing inside a creek on Dol Purnima. The following day, she accompanied another woman to the forest to catch shrimps. She said that even though she was mortally scared — it was eerie and dark inside and she thought she heard the striped lord move stealthily among the leaves — what she remembered the most was how, for a moment, she felt sheltered from the world. I cannot say for certain that JSB will survive the odds. The possibility of its affiliation to Central welfare programmes is rather remote. But the woman and her story remain etched in my memory. For the Sundarbans’ survival depends not only on the State or donor agencies, but also on its people who call it their home. -- Avinash Shahi MPhil Research Scholar Centre for the Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
