Abstract
Information Gap Elimination Meet Series (IGEMS) is a development - communication method in making for last twelve years (1999 onwards). Its purpose is sustainable development of village through villagers own programs utilizing mostly their own resources, akin to the aim of Gram Swaraj of Mahatma Gandhi. The method aims at three broad purposes derived from seminal thoughts of three sages of India —to make villagers reach in agreement (Sadharanikaran) with reference to their pressing development needs and the consensus on action with own resources as was the function depicted in Sadharanikaran perspective in Natya Sastra of Sage Bharata; to arouse the power of self ( arousal of own power ‘atmosaktir udbodhan’ in Bengali) in villagers so that they have faith on their capability of making turn-around, as Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore defined to be the aim of rural reconstruction; and to offer labour out of love for alleviating the neighbors’ distress and to develop communities from within (with own resources and knowledge) as demonstrated by Srisri Thakur Anukulchandra in his village development activities at Hemaitpur in Pabna district, Bangladesh in the beginning of 20th century AD. IGEMS is the communication process-event duality
utilized for sustainable community turnaround from understanding own problem, identifying resources and project team formation to execution of development action. Its purpose is far more extensive than participatory rural appraisal, rapid rural appraisal and participatory action research. This article deals with the reasons of framing IGEMs and its structure.
Keywords: Information Gap Elimination Meet Series, Rapid Rural Appraisal, Participatory Rural Appraisal, Participatory Action Research
Introduction
Development is the journey towards betterment of life and living standards of human beings in a sustainable fashion. The development of a village means inclusive growth of all the segments of the village
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∗ Associate Professor, Centre for Journalism and Mass Communication, Visva- Bharati, Santiniketan-731235, West Bengal.
community while sustaining natural resources in a condition of ecological balance. Such a development to be successful from the point of sustainability (trans-generational and ecological) demands full involvement of community not only in the pursuit of development, but also creating a sense of belongingness towards every asset created. The concept of ‘Gram Swaraj’ propounded by Mahatma Gandhi emphasized on the necessity to make the villages self reliant, promoting the well being of the villagers. Villages are the sites and habitations of the indigenous culture and heritage, within themselves they comprise innumerable legacy of knowledge and well being. The village as a social entity and unit of society has sustained itself absorbing progressive human development over ages though various dimensions pertaining to economy and culture changed gradually. However, despite the initiatives taken in almost all spheres of intervention by the government and NGOs, villagers have not been mostly able to absorb the morale of development. They rather became so much confused about its whereabouts and modus operandi that the root and reason of development initiatives have not penetrated deep into psyche of the people. The result is visible in negatives in every sector with only some isolated isles of success. The case of sanitation amply illustrates the situation (Chatterjee A 2010).
Illustration of the Situation
Mahatma Gandhi envisioned an India where clean latrines and end of human scavenging mark freedom and dignity Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), India’s campaign to give its people access to improved sanitation is a demand-driven, people-centered program. 79% of our rural population and 46% of urban population lack improved sanitation facilities till now. Of 1.04 billion of global population who defecate in the open, 665 millions are Indians. Of 5000 children claimed by diarrhea everyday, most are from our subcontinent. Exposed, untreated excrement spreads disease, kills and forces huge expenditure by way of loss of lives, work days and school attendance This is estimated at $ 38 billion per year. From 1990 to 2008 TSC achieved success in several locations, reaching over 210 million citizens. At this rate of TSC progress and given the trend of increment in population, country has to go for better ways of discovering success with sustainability of utilization of
sanitary infrastructures as one prominent goal of the program. TSC, on analysis of program approach and implementation, shows some traits which are common for almost all program aimed at developing people from poorer sections of the society. “In planning circles, targets are set in terms of coverage. Coverage is normally measured by the number of latrines, hand-pumps, water pipes and sewerage system installed. Whether these are functioning properly, used and well-maintained is quite another matter. Dependency on mobilization and communication capacities at district and village levels has meant that huge outlays remain unspent. Again, TSC is not really total. It is targeted at rural India, with incentives only for those below the poverty line, a division flies and germs do not respect. Accountability is scattered and most solutions remain largely driven by engineering, not the sustainability that comes from decentralized community action. Despite rhetoric, the empowerment of women remains ignored, while experience clearly shows that unless women, as managers of household health, are put firmly on charge, sanitation simply does not happen. Hygiene education is another powerful weapon that remains devalued. Decisions on defecation take place within the mind, an area closed to the government, medical and engineering diktats unless awareness leads to acceptance, and acceptance leads onto behavior change (Chatterjee A 2010).” Add with this the absence of strategizing considering every sector as part of an integrated whole family, community and ecosystem, where imbalance in any other sector would derail all good work in one sector of development. In TSC, safe water and hygienic food practices are interwoven. Without an integrated approach for people’s action in realizing and taking their own welfare measures, scenario has turned further bleak only.
Lukewarm Community Response
This reality in implementation of TSC is more or less witnessed in other development initiatives, be it in campaign mode (such as Total Literacy Campaign and its replacement campaign Sarba Siksha Avijan), mission mode (such as in case of drinking water or technology missions), program mode (like Integrated Rural Development program) or scheme mode (such as Integrated Child Development Scheme). Close look at various programs reveals that we lack developing and applying methods to ensure mobilizing
people, decentralizing community action, following reality of homes in action, managing mind of people in least conflict to their consciousness and village ecosystem with the aim of achieving communication success in program implementation, and sustaining development result through generations.
If we want to involve people in participatory communication we must develop capabilities of groups of people for critical analysis and assessment of their socio-economic ambience. People should be provided a forum where they can fearlessly address to themselves about loopholes of development (Chatterjee P 2000). The challenge is to integrate development initiatives into people’s own way of living and gradual growth. This requires a complete reversal in mindset of development administrators and development workers in looking at villages from an openness to learn, which the reductionist approach of education followed so far has negated.
Review of Methods
In this segment methods are reviewed with aim to find out how much these could contribute to involve people in development initiatives from need assessment stage to action stage. This review arises out of the need to understand suitability of existing methods in making people participate in every development initiative as their own on the basis of their felt need. As every method for ensuring involvement of rural people in development involves direct contact and interaction among and with them, interpersonal and group communication methods are natural. While interpersonal communication is dominantly conversational between two, group communication may take many forms and formats according to purposes and the number of persons involved.
The importance of group communication in development program has been demonstrated by use of methods such as focus group, participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and rapid rural appraisal (RRA).
Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)
Rapid Rural Appraisal (Chambers 1981) comprises a series of techniques for fast research. RRA is claimed to generate results of less accuracy, but of greater evidential value, than classic quantitative survey techniques. It is economical of the researcher’s time. Outside
researcher’s agenda here is to extract information.
To overcome limitations of large-scale social surveys or brief rural visits by urban professionals RRA (and analogs) emerged in the 1970s as a more efficient and cost-effective way of learning by outsiders, particularly about agricultural systems. It drew on many of the insights of field social anthropology of the 1930s-1950s. It stressed the importance and relevance of situational local knowledge brought to fore by a style of listening research, and a creative combination of iterative methods and verification, including “triangulation” of data from different sources - using two different methods to view the same information. Its chief techniques are:
• Review of secondary sources, including aerial photos, even
brief aerial observation
• Direct observation, foot transects, familiarization,
participation in activities
• Interviews with key informants, group interviews, workshops • Mapping, diagramming
• Biographies, local histories, case studies • Ranking and scoring
• Time lines
• Short simple questionnaires, towards end of process
• Rapid report writing in the field.
Some other methods with field-orientation similar in nature to RRA are ‘Sondeo’ in Guatemala (Hilderbrand 1981), the exploratory survey (Collinson 1981), Informal Agricultural Survey developed at The International Potato Centre (Rhoades 1982), Informal Methods and Reconnaissance Survey (Shaner, Philipp and Schemel 1982, Diagnosis and Design (raintree and Young 1983), ‘Samuhik Brahman’ of Nepal (Mathema and Gilt 1987) and Rapid Agro-ecosystem Zoning Method (Conway, Mian, Alam, Yar and Husain 1987). A multidisciplinary team is required to follow multiple techniques used in these methods. The range of techniques are effective. But Shortcomings of RRA with reference to the objective of translating development initiatives into community action are obvious.
RRA and similar methods remain ‘extractive’ i.e. researchers observing, writing and analyzing. The field-oriented methods leave much scope for introducing greater element of participation (Mukherjee 1997). Therefore these remain as extractive, externally-driven
processes. Many researchers using standard RRA methods claim that they are using PRA, when the “participation” is restricted to provision of information to the researcher by the community. The simple test is what is the value added and who owns the product. If the community draws a map because you ask them to, it’s RRA. If they realize that the map belongs to them, and want to keep it for their own use, then it’s PRA.
Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)
The decade of 1980s recognized the futility of the development under the influence of Dominant Paradigm with reference to uplift of people from morass. The school of welfare economics led by Amartya Sen stressed on shifting approach to understand development. Development should be holistic embracing being and becoming of poorest of the poor, not evaluating economic uplift only. The reason was common sense – you may give money or create property but those don’t ensure well-being. It requires welfare of all to be recognized as the hallmark of development.
Sen identified few distinct strands of such a development approach (Sen 1988) - identifying nature of life people are able to live, stressing constituents of well-being (being disease free and in good health, freedom and choice, welfare), and expanding sphere of determinants of well-being from income to access (means of production, public goods and services).
Such an approach was accepted by several countries which necessitated instruments of enhanced levels of people participation PRA was gradually developed in 1980s for this purpose. An eclectic situational format of interaction with a group of villagers (by the humble, learning outsider), it is distinguished at its best by the use of local graphic representations created by the community that legitimize local knowledge and promote empowerment.
PRA is essentially a methodology to offset biases of Rural Development Tourism (RDT) and the survey method. It aims at offsetting such biases by being relaxed and not rushing, listening and not lecturing,probing and not speeding indifferently and looking for participation of rural poor and other weaker sections of the rural communities (Chambers 1992).PRA “proper” was built on RRA but went much further. To RRA it added some activist concerns arising in South Asia. These are:
• Empowerment. Knowledge generated from the process and results of the research involving people’s active participation come to be shared with and owned by local people. Thus the professional monopoly of information, used for planning and management decisions, is broken. PRA can build confidence in community by showing the community ownership of information.
• Respect. PRA success depends on understanding of the
culture of the locality. The process transforms the researchers into learners and listeners, respecting local intellectual and analytical capabilities. Respecting the people in earnest is a must for success of the method.
• Localization. The extensive and creative use of local materials and representations encourages visual sharing. External representational conventions are generally avoided.
• Enjoyment. PRA, well done, is, and should be, fun. The emphasis is no longer on “rapid” but on the process.
• Inclusiveness. The process includes marginal and vulnerable
groups, women, children, aged, and destitute for enhancing sensitivity towards its purpose.
• The formalization of community knowledge through participatory techniques can generate an impressive amount of information in a relatively short span of time, leaving time for more selective structured formal surveys where they are necessary and of value. Neela Mukherjee differentiated among various purposes (exploratory, topical, deductive, research-training-statistics, planning- implementation, and monitoring-evaluative) for which PRA is still used by development bureaucracy and NGOs (Mukherjee 1997).
The criticism of PRA is often based on how the GOs and NGOs are utilizing it to fulfill their project mode agenda. There are risks of:
• “Hijacking”. When this occurs, the PRA agenda is externally driven, and used to create legitimacy for projects, agencies and NGOs.
• Formalism. The “PRA hit team” arrives in a local
approach is all too common in project-based PRAs where there is a deadline to meet, or in scheduled training courses.
• Disappointment. Local expectations can easily be raised. If nothing tangible emerges, local communities may come to see the process as a transient external development phenomenon.
• Threats. The empowerment implications of PRA, and the
power of its social analysis, can create threats to local vested interests, although less so than with Participatory Astion Research.
• Notion. Researchers have to learn a new “style”. Researchers must avoid at all costs an attitude of patronizing surprise that local people are so clever they can make their own bar charts etc. The “ooh-aah” school of PRA works against its own principles of empowerment and indicates shallow naivete on the part of the researcher.
PRA is a better option than RRA to raise relevant information through social and resource mapping and other techniques. The variations of utilizing techniques according to situation of the village has given flexibility to PRA. Primary and secondary data review, and direct observation of an activity in the village are often taken by outsiders as helps in facing villagers in PRA interaction later. Methods at direct participation phase (diagramming, semi-structured interview, do-it-yourself, mapping and modeling, transect walk, food calendar, ranking and scoring, grouping, chappati or venn, historical profiling and several other techniques) are as varied and responding to different situations as possible. However it’s direct implementation agenda lacks in some crucial aspects such as implementation prominence to participants, matching action at every phase with sequence of techniques employed. Rather it serves the agenda of partial satisfaction of the development executives in GOs and NGOs that they involved people in the initiative.
Participatory Action Research (PAR)
Participatory Action Research (PAR) owes more to a radical activist tradition from the work of Paulo Friere and others in Latin America. It emerged from an awareness that PRA, despite all its emphasis on participation, capability building, ownership of knowledge and empowerment is basically an extractive and intellectual exercise. PAR
works to empower the local community, or its representatives so that they are able to manipulate the higher level power structures. Its success depends on the extent of awareness and limit of willingness of the supporting outside organization. Two mention- worthy PAR interventions were World Bank-supported credit unions for the relatively under-privileged and Grameen-type rural banks in Bangladesh for the very poor.
The benefits PRA brings to local communities can be intangible and sometimes even disappointing. PAR, by contrast, works directly with local political and development capacities to bring real, visible organizational structures, effective local advocacy, and a durable change in power relations with the center. It has the potential to secure the resources for sustainable livelihoods, provided action researchers can avoid the danger of entrenching a self-interested local elite, and address honestly the long-term choices that must be made on resource utilization. The IISD project demonstrated more than one example of country project teams moving beyond a PRA approach to see that a PAR-type approach was desirable, seeking to mobilize actual resources in a follow-up exercise to produce durable change. PAR is fine if one understands the local power structure and the issues. It is best suited for situations where the external agent is aware of the potential for damage due to action- both to themselves and, more importantly, to the disempowered in the community. It also works best where the external agency has a clear status and relationship with the community and can command resources for a long-term commitment.
PAR, therefore, is restricted in achieving the aim of participation of the village on sustainable basis due to its radicalist, exclusionist approach. Its success stories are not exclusively its own, but for utilizing it with other interventions. World Bank projects depended on resources from outside more. Sometimes one group’s development action by PAR activists have been considered by others as anti to their interest. So PAR is low in the quotient of resolving conflict towards development goals and ways. This is natural as the main purpose of PAR is often understanding and documenting the dynamic process of action in different spheres.
Ensuring Full Participation in Long Term
initiatives by GOs and NGOs led to the search of a method much more effective to ensure developing communities from within. Emerging approach to development also necessitated such a search.