This is great column by TS. While there may be some NGOs who are doing great work, one often comes across more rotten apples in the basket. Unfortunately, one discovers these rotten apples only after dealing with them.
IMHO, Assam seems to be somehow more vulnerable, and there are NGOs popping up all over the place for a number of years now. TS is absolutely correct, few want to produce accounts readily. --Ram Beware Our Sainted NGO’s *No. But, I am happy that you people in the media are finally discovering what she is about. It is you people who built her up just because she was the first woman to join the IPS (Indian Police Service) and not one of you noticed that she never really achieved much as a police officer* The day after the Indian Express reported that Kiran Bedi regularly fudged her travel bills I met a retired police officer at a Diwali party. I knew he had been a batch mate of hers when they joined the police force so inevitably conversation was about her. When I asked if the revelations surprised him he grinned from ear to ear and said, ‘No. But, I am happy that you people in the media are finally discovering what she is about. It is you people who built her up just because she was the first woman to join the IPS (Indian Police Service) and not one of you noticed that she never really achieved much as a police officer.’ Now that the sheen is beginning to wear off the NGOs who formed Anna Hazare’s team it is time that we asked some questions about the NGO movement in general. So allow me to share my own encounters with NGO activities. It happens that the first NGO I ever met was the late Anil Agarwal. He was a relatively obscure reporter in Delhi and I knew him from regular meetings at press conferences. It was at one of these that he told me that he planned to leave journalism to start an NGO. Anil was a passionate environmentalist and his Centre for Science and Environment soon acquired credibility. After his death ten years ago his legacy passed on to his friend, Sunita Narain, who unlike Anil seemed more interested in personal glory than the environment. So she took on Coca Cola and Pepsi by charging them with allowing more poison in their Indian products than would be allowed in Western countries. The news made headlines and the media built Ms Narain up so assiduously that she now sits on the Prime Minister’s environmental council. Nobody has noticed that the cause that made her famous was a sham. The reason why Coke and Pepsi may have a miniscule amount of poison in their Indian products is because the quality of water in our fair and wondrous land is inferior to that in most other countries. The truth is that our drinking water, especially in rural parts, is so bad that if a child were dying of diarrhea its life could be saved by a soft drink rather than a drink of water. But, Ms Narain was unbothered by this vital bit of information. When I asked her why she did what she did her response was that she could not answer my questions since I seemed ‘prejudiced’ against her. Ms Narain is not the only self-publicist in the environmental NGO business. Vandana Shiva is another star. So famous has she become because of her crusade against modern methods of farming that she is a regular on the international conference circuit and so it was that she turned up in Davos some years ago. When she expounded her theory that it was the destruction of traditional farming methods that was the cause of rural poverty in India she ended up making a complete fool of herself but in India she continues to be a star. As does her ideological sister, Suman Sahai. Ms Sahai came to see me one day many years ago and made a compelling argument against multi-national seed companies like Monsanto who at that time had just entered the Indian market. These companies, she said, were going to become major exploiters of Indian farmers by selling them seeds that they would not be able to use again. They would need to buy fresh seeds every sowing season. When I took Ms Sahai’s case to my brother who is a farmer he said, ‘Who is this woman? Does she not know that with all hybrid seeds we have to buy new seeds every time? Does she not know that at the moment we are at the mercy of state owned seed companies who sell us bad seeds and we can do nothing about it? Does she not know that we welcome the entry of companies like Monsanto because they will force government companies to improve their services?’ It is not just my encounters with our so-called environmentalist NGOs that have made me totally cynical about the NGO movement in India. I have met NGOs in the health and nutrition sector who have managed to raise millions of dollars abroad for the supposed cause of eliminating rural poverty in India. Nearly all the NGOs working in this sector spend more money on their ‘administrative’ costs than they do on eliminating poverty and disease in our villages. But, they get away with this because they never need to render accounts to those who fund them. In the days when I was more naïve about NGO activities than I am today I often persuaded my rich friends to donate to NGO causes. I stopped when I discovered that not one of my NGO friends felt that they needed to account for the money they were given. In one case when a donor asked what had happened to the money he had donated the NGO looked at him as if he had gone mad. ‘We don’t keep accounts,’ she said ‘we can’t afford to keep accounts like that because we are not in the business of making profits.’ Really? Then why is it that so many politicians these days have wives or children who run NGOs? Is it not because all you need is to start an NGO to immediately qualify for all sorts of governmental largesse like land at throwaway prices and grants of generous proportions? And, since it is with Kiran Bedi that I began this piece allow me to conclude it by asking what it is exactly that her India Vision Foundation does? From the website of her Navjyoti Foundation, started in 1988, all that I was able to glean were banalities. Her NGO appears to cover a vast range of human experience from helping drug addicts to community policing, from ‘women’s empowerment’ to rural and urban development. Now that her travel expenses are being investigated it might be worthwhile to go further and investigate what it is exactly that her NGO has achieved in the twenty years that it has been working for humanitarian causes. The same questions need to be asked of all the other NGOs that have leapt onto Anna Hazare’s bandwagon since he became the symbol of India’s fight against corruption. Ms Bedi’s fudged expenses could be just the tip of an ugly iceberg. *Tavleen Singh* (Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter@tavleen_singh) _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
