| Chiknayakanhalli
: A Blueprint for Sustainability
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Development Alternatives has ushered in a new era of hope and confidence into the hearts and hearths of the rural inhabitants of the 234 villages of Chiknayakanahalli Taluk in Tumkur district of Karnataka, South India, by evolving a development plan with a high level of community participation utilizing scientific planning tools like satellite imagery to help the local people build a sustainable future with their own hands.
Chiknayakanhalli is a typical case of economic backwardness coupled with extreme inequalities and a degraded natural resource base. It is spread over 28 panchayats (local governments) and has been declared a crisis zone by the Government of India. An Action Plan has been formulated by Development Alternatives, under the Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development (IMSD) programme of the Government in order to enable the local people to pull themselves up by their own shoe-strings.
With the integrated mission of economic development, equity and environmental soundness, the accent has been on evolving a multipronged strategy of sustainable rapid growth, especially for poorer sections of the society and regenerating the eroded natural resource base. Hence, the Action Plan has been the cumulative result of constant and intense interactions with communities, local authorities and state-level agencies. Incidentally, the latest amendments in the constitution of India have paved the way for panchayats to partake in the decision-making process, thus creating a groundswell of support in Chiknayakanhalli to initiate development activities.
The uniqueness of the Action Plan does not lie so much in the fact that it has used remote sensing or hi-tech planning tools like Geographic Information System (GIS) to design detailed overlay maps and carry out the entire analysis digitally but that the thematic analysis combines natural resources management issues with human and societal needs. The success of the entire venture lies in the fact that about 200,000 rural people were involved in designing their own destiny, setting up their own priorities, spelling out their constraints and arriving at their own solutions - with help from Development Alternatives as facilitator.
Over the period of a year, various assessment methods have been developed and tested at Tumkur, as a part of an IUCN coordinated programme which includes projects in Zimbabwe and Columbia. The methods developed by the India team include "System Analysis and Planning and Strategic Negotiation for Community Action". A wide range of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) techniques and tools have been field-tested and refined at Chiknayakanhalli.
While system analysis and planning were used to highlight the options for sustainable development, strategic negotiation for community action has been used to evolve consensus on action like ‘What should the development process look like and what role is each stakeholder willing to play?’ The key steps in strategic negotiation included awareness generation, perception assessment, consensus building and agreement finalization.
Mapping has been used as a major tool for formulating an Action Plan. Negotiations have taken place through small formal group meetings with gram panchayats and other agencies, and with the small farmers. Model demonstration projects, training programmes and workshops, employment of local communities and specific responses to queries helped in building public opinion, consensus, agreement and, ultimately, action.
The highlight of the Chiknayakanhalli experience has been the establishment of sustainable human development indicators through the Action Plan. The experiment demonstrates the challenges of advocating sustainability within a system dominated by the imperatives of crisis management. Dialogue with stakeholders to discover their real needs and then prioritizing their needs, skills, time and patience. This shared sense of priority has helped the Development Alternatives team assist the acceptance and use of development indicators by linking them with basic concerns. Such sharing also cements partnerships between change agents like NGOs and those they serve.
The major achievement of the venture has been bringing people together by building bridges of network and partnerships at various levels to give a momentum to the development process at the grassroots level to snowball gradually into a national movement towards self-sufficiency and realisation of the potential of people-power. q
Rajiv Gupta
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Chiknayakanhalli
- Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development |