| ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Evolving A Sustainable Paradigm A part of Development Alternatives operates among the poor and marginalized communities across the country, with special focus on Bundelkhand region central India, through direct interventions. It also works in the 100 poorest districts of India, through civil society partnerships under the umbrella of Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme. In Bundelkhand, the Social Action Group (SAG) of DA carries out the grassroot level activity towards creation of informed and empowered communities. It is responsible for facilitation of people-to-people interaction. The SAG focuses on building community institutions, managing natural resources, promoting livelihoods, and developing partnerships and alliances. While SAG takes care of the implementation work of the organization, one of the vehicles through which DA shares and disseminates its knowledge and experience is the capacity building unit called Training Systems Group. TSG has been making available to other development practitioners and professionals, through a series of trainings and workshops, a variety of development-based practices and concepts on several themes related to livelihood promotion, appropriate technology, organizational development and programme management. Sustainable Livelihoods’ being DA’s mission, it is trying to reach out to the remotest or, rather, the poorest regions of the country through its Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) Programme, along with various other programmes and activities in order to create sustainable livelihoods for millions and empower them to lead a life of dignity. PACS, for example, is a nationwide poverty alleviation programme working in 108 of the poorest districts of India to build the capacities of civil society organizations and empower the poor and marginalized communities to demand their rights and entitlements. The uniqueness of the PACS model is that it is not a service delivery programme, as its focus is on community empowerment through women empowerment, local self governance and livelihood creation. The programme focusses on strengthening Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to address the social, economic and other development issues in the poorest regions of the country. Currently, 172 PACS projects are in progress in six Indian states. The PACS Programme has acted as a positive catalyst to evoke CSO response in the poorer districts and develop active partnership at various levels – from the village level to block, district, state and national levels. Hence, this endeavour has certainly proved to be a development model that could be adopted for the sustainability of the nation. Antyodaya or the upliftment of the man or woman on the last rung of the development ladder has been the focus of the entire NGO movement right from its inception. The fact remains that it is not the bullish rise in the Sensex graph which indicates the development of India, but the human development index that states just the opposite. In fact, on the day the Sensex broke all records in its upward trend, the newspapers also depicted the maximum number of cotton farmers of Vidarbha committing suicide. So, without drawing any corollary to the hypothesis of the theorem, we have proved it wrong by providing proof of contradiction. So, the index of sustainable development is not the speed of the first camel of the caravan termed India, but that of its last camel which defines the actual progress of the caravan or the nation. It is with this realization of the plight of the 48 per cent of the population subsisting below the poverty line that Development Alternatives has been working since 1983 to evolve an egalitarian paradigm of sustainable development where there is sufficient food and work for each and every citizen of this largest democracy in the world. The current activities of Development Alternatives will be found in the following pages of this interesting newsletter that focuses on people-centered development. q
Kiran Sharma ksharma@devalt.org Back to Contents |