Monopolising Tendencies

As a student of Development Studies, I often end up meeting/hearing people engaged in what might be called Development Practice, the task of actually doing development (contrast them to people like me, who are supposed to study development). People from NGOs, Social Movements, Foundations, MFIs, Commercial Business, sometimes government and particularly from “social enterprises”.

IIT Madras has a very strong cell for encouraging innovation through entrepreneurship called C-Tides, has incubated several companies through RTBI, offers a minor in Social entrepreneurship – as a result, the number of lectures and events organised around (social) entrepreneurship is quite large. Often, these people are doing remarkable work, and there is much to learn from their particular experiences.

Often, in trying to gain legitimacy for the work they are doing, these practitioners tend to criticise the ‘others’. They could very well try to gain legitimacy by explaining the value of their work or by telling us the odds they face in their work. Instead, NGOs seek to talk about how the government is useless and can never deliver. Pro-privatisation people will give examples from the License Raj and how 1991 solved everything. So, we need privatisation in development.

Social entrepreneurs will have a truck with the government of course, but also with NGOs, whose work is “just not scalable”, “charity”, “perverse” even. They just want to perpetuate poverty, apparently, to keep themselves in business. SEs have also started having an issue with mainstream business now, and yesterday I saw a poster which asked, “Why Sell Your Soul, When You Can Be A Social entrepreneur?” Social movements will demonize the government, but also “funded agencies”, an euphemism for anybody in the development sector which is not government and which is not financed with members’ contributions (like movements themselves).

I am willing to accept some of these criticisms. It hardly needs to be argued that the government is corrupt and inefficient (though not irreconcilably so!). Neither do we need to prove that businesses cause much damage to the environment and people, and pull strings to get away. Many NGOs and Social Enterprises are fly-by-night operators, with bad plans and schemes. As such, NGOs and Social Movements can be inefficient and unprofessional, utterly ideological as well. What I don’t get is the next step this argument from practitioners takes – that their kind of work is the only legitimate people in development, that hence, all others should shut up and pull shutters down.

A lot of Social Entrepreneurs are libertarians, who would be happy only with the most limited government. Social Entrepreneurs, according to them, can solve any problem, from climate change to poverty to rural health care and energy, from quality education to hunger to sanitation. Thus, Prof. Anil Gupta, a pioneer in identifying rural innovations from IIMA claimed in an interview, that if the government will “tap rural innovations, you won’t need NREGA in five years”. Interesting proposition that, except that rural innovations can’t take root in such a short span of time through the course of such a large country and population (if they did, it would be some kind of a revolution the world has not seen till now), and even if they could, there will still be required some form of universal social security for people.

Similar arguments are made by Microfinance Institutions (Indeed, just two years back, Micro Finance was touted as The solution to poverty), by those who encourage vouchers and school choice (for the record, most students in Rural India go to a public school, and private schools simply don’t exist), by social entreprenuers who want everything to run on “decentralised and sustainable” energy, or who think that the solution to poverty will only come through innovation and entreprenuership, by NGOs and foundations and by social movements. Funnily, The only people who don’t have this kind of monopolising tendency is the government, which actually seems happy to privatise or outsource activities to NGOs.

And yet, it seems to me, that each of these kind of practitioners have important roles to play, and that there is a room for everyone. Our development challenges seem to be quite big, with much need for innovation in a variety of sectors, including the government. None of these kinds of development practice seem to be without problems, though none of them insurmountable. In each kind, there are some very successful examples, and a large number of failures as well.

Could these varied organisations then, please, understand that there might be a legitimate role for the government, and recognise the important role it does and can play in the lives of people? Understand that there might be different forms of organising development activity, some more effective than others, but some more equitable? Criticise where they feel there is a need to, but also learn to learn and let live?

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