The Challenge Of Integrated Rural Development In India

A Policy And Management Perspective

Gerald E Sussman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000315172
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1952, India launched a massive and enthusiastic effort to reach the 360 million people in its 550,000 villages with a national program of economic and social reconstruction. Known as Community Development, the program provided an innovative model of rural development for both Third World nations and the aid-giving countries of the West. Although the program achieved its goal of providing service coverage to the nation, its many implementation problems and the lack of quantifiable cost-effectiveness led critics to label it a failure and resulted in its submergence into the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in 1966. More recently, however, partly as a result of the social dislocations following the "Green Revolution," there has been renewed interest in Community Development as the Indian government searches for ways of effectively implementing a strategy of integrated rural development. It is recognized that a repeat of the CD program is not the answer; but an analysis of the program allows the identification of the elements critical to good administration—and political survival. Drawing on extensive interviews with Indian and American participants, this book critically appraises the Community Development program. Dr. Sussman examines the successful pilot project at Etawah, then documents the many problems—organizational, political, and logistical—that were encountered in the attempt to replicate it on a nationwide scale, and that eventually led to its demise. From his analysis emerges the question of what kind of government strategies can best equip rural populations to participate in development. Admitting the difficulties still to be faced, he concludes on a note of guarded optimism based on recent efforts in both India and the U.S. that combine a systems approach with the use of a range of development strategies.

1
Setting the Stage: The Pilot Project-National Program Relationship

It was 1947. Independence had just been attained and with it, enormous problems of rural underdevelopment. Jawaharlal Nehru and the national leadership, in facing these problems, were strongly influenced by Gandhi as well as socialist ideas. Ideology was strong and there was a feeling of mission to improve the lives of India's millions of impoverished people. Since most of the poor lived in rural areas scattered over 550,000 villages, the question was, how to reach them? Where did one begin? While a sense of "mission" existed, it had to be defined and translated into operating programs on an unprecedented scale.

Experience with large governmental programs was limited. There had been a crash agricultural production program known as "The Grow More Food Campaign." Launched in 1943 before Independence and extending to 1951, it had viewed rural development as inducing more production. During this eight-year period, Rs. 67.5 crores (approximately 142 million dollars) were spent in an effort to attain self-sufficiency in food.

A special enquiry committee was established to evaluate the results. The findings were that the Campaign had been too narrowly focused and "had failed to arouse widespread enthusiasm for it to become a national program." Only two to four percent of the rural population was reached. The result was an inadequate increase in productivity. Although acreage increased from 167.1 million acres in 1936/1937 to 193.1 in 1950/1951, production in million tons fell from 46.2 in the earlier period to 41.7 in the later period. Even allowing for differences in reporting methods, the gross trend showed no dramatic upward movement, and this was true both in comparing the 1947 to 1951 figures with the 1936 to 1937 average, and in charting the years from 1947 to 1951. On the contrary, there had been a decline. Further, as shown in Table 1, the need for grain from abroad was rising.

There were some other more limited experiences in Gurgaon, Sriniketan, Allahabad, Firka, Martamdan, and Gandhigram which suggested different approaches.² In contrast to a massive government assistance program pressing for the mobilization of village people behind pre-established goals of national development, these projects stressed working with village people, identifying their "felt

Table 1
Foodgrains Imported

Year	Foodgrains Imported (in million tons)
1936/1937 average	2.09
1948	2.84
1949	3.71
1950	2.12
1951	4.73

Source: Grow More Food Enquiry Committee Report (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1952), p. 49.

needs" and developing local programs. While interesting, these projects tended to be sporadic, concerned only with a limited area, and were isolated from major external resources and supportive structures.

They were, however, suggestive of a new way of thinking. It came to be known as "community development"--one of the most ambiguous and misunderstood terms in the development vocabulary. Philosophically, community development stressed the self-help ideal of mobilizing local community support for overcoming commonly defined problems. The government would provide the catalyst for such action by furnishing limited resources to initiate the development process. In practice, the ideal was complicated by a lack of local organizations to carry the brunt of development, a time frame that would allow organizational growth, and a conflict between nationally established goals and locally defined needs. There was, however, a model--Etawah.

The Roots of Etawah

In Etawah an experimental project was initiated in 1948 which drew heavily from the experience of the earlier Indian community development efforts, but at the same time recognized the need for continued governmental assistance, and for establishing the kind of organizational structures necessary to reach the villagers and gain their participation. These efforts were concentrated on productivity in agriculture and local industry, although some scope was given to social welfare needs such as health, education and environmental sanitation.

In retrospect, the initial steps leading to the Etawah experiment were almost accidental. The steps revolved around three men: Jawaharlal Nehru, Govind Ballabh Pant (the then Chief Minister of the United Provinces), and a New York architect-town planner, Albert Mayer. The latter was introduced to India during the Second World War when he served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building airfields. Already well established pro-fessionally,³ the status he enjoyed as a "foreign expert" and his genuine regard for India and Indians gained him entree into the highest Indian social circles.

In 1945, these social contacts resulted in a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru.

As Albert Mayer recalls the meeting, Nehru was "desperate for things to do."⁴ In the series of three or four talks that followed, Nehru was convinced that the talented and energetic Mayer had ideas and drive that could prove useful in India. Further, Pandit Pant, as Chief Minister of the United Provinces was interested in having the experimentation take place in his State. As Mayer states, he had doubts how a city-bred New Yorker would fare in the villages of northern India, but agreed to give it a try when Nehru wrote him in the spring of 1946.

Probably because of his lack of specific knowledge, Mayer was willing to learn, to try new approaches, and to synthesize them with processes that had worked elsewhere. He seems to have drawn from two major sources: the experience of the various development projects in India, with special attention to the work of Brayne, the Gandhians, Hatch, the Wisers (medical missionaries whose village study Behind Mud Walls is a classic); and the American experience in extension and rural sociology, with special attention to the work of Loomis, Ensminger, Brunner, Sanders, Taylor, M.L. Wilson, and Mosher at Allahabad.⁵ Also influential were his experiences with peripatetic medical personnel during World War II, and the four months he spent in the field in Western U.P. before making his recommendations.

In December 1946, he presented his "Preliminary Outline for Village Planning and Reconstruction" which was accepted officially early in 1947. Mayer became the Planning and Development Advisor to the State Government of the United Provinces in 1948, and later that year the Etawah Project began in 64 selected villages. Mayer and others labeled it the Pilot Project.

In 1951, however, the Ford Foundation began its experimental work in 15 area projects, and in October of 1952 the Government of India launched the national program of community development. Two periods need to be distinguished in the Indian community development program. The first, from 1952 to 1956, was the early period of the national program when community development was under the direction of a supraministerial coordinating agency known as the Community Projects Administration. The second, beginning in 1956 saw community development become a full-fledged ministry. Although the national program was expanded, by 1959 it was in serious trouble as there was a growing concern about low agricultural production. In 1966, it was absorbed by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Thus over a period of less than 20 years, a pilot was tested, a major social engineering program emerged, peaked, and gradually lost its vitality.

The Pilot Project Relation

Was Etawah a pilot project? Did it, in fact, serve as an experimental prototype which tested something new? (This does not mean that it had to start from scratch, but that there was something which substantially distinguished its efforts from others.) If there is the basis for believing Etawah was an experimental prototype, did it consciously work towards results that could be generalized? In other words, were its procedures and results replicable?

If experimentation and replication can be established, did a causal relationship exist between the pilot project and the national program? In other words, how do we test the proposition that what happened in the pilot project was essential or even useful to the later national program? While those who built the pilot project may have been concerned with replication, it does not follow that those in the national program were influenced by or even knew that such experimentation was occurring. Since Etawah only covered 360 villages at its height, one might more reasonably ask, what influence could such a small project have in such a large country?

Establishing the Pilot Project Relation

A pilot project may be defined as a means "to test out on a pilot basis, the various schemes proposed to be put into effect on a national or statewide scale."⁶ Implicit in the definition are three criteria: first the need to test something that has not yet been tried, or at least to add something new to that which already is in use; second the establishment of a test vehicle of more limited scope than later programs building on the pilot's experience; and third, the employment of a flexible as opposed to a standardized administrative pattern which allows for experimentation.

Excluded by this definition are the initial stages in a national program, but not the intensive or crash project. Accordingly, we add to the definition the element of replication. This means that the formulators of the pilot project consciously consider and, to the extent po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Glossary
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the Stage: The Pilot Project-National Program Relationship
• 2 Why Replication of a Pilot Project is Not Possible
• 3 Program Expansion Nevertheless
• 4 Thresholds in Program Development
• 5 A Rural Development Strategy
• Appendix 1: Pilot Project-National Program Relationship
• Appendix 2: Extension and Panchayati Raj Organization
• Appendix 3: 34 Respondents Interviewed Intensively for Study
• Bibliography