No Observers, Only Participants

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NIKITA RAKHYANI
When you started PRIA, what was the vision you had for how you wanted the organization to be like? What kind of people were you looking for this organization,  and you coming from an MBA background, doing your research study around organization behaviour. So I’m sure you would have a particular perspective in your mind that I want these kinds of people, this flow of process that should go with these kind of policies. So what was that like?

RAJESH TANDON

Well you know we after six months of running the place from my house, on 1st of July 1982 we found a ₹700 a month cottage in Sainik Farm which became PRIA headquarters. But, my main interest in the first 4-5 years was reaching out to people where they are and doing work with them. Some of it is training, some of it is hand holding, some of it is conversations about how they are organized. And the best part in the first few years was that many of these grassroot level organizations were doing work in a way which can be classified as participatory research.

They wouldn’t call it learning, but learning by doing, learning by exposure, learning through reflections. Collectively, you know, these practices were there, but they didn’t have a theory behind it…my initial interest was the promotion of participation. Those who are called beneficiaries should become active agents in designing and implementing development programs for their benefit. And the problem was not limited to the government, by the way. Even larger NGOs were also doing the same as the government. If we have pre-designed programs, they will go and dump it and then they will say oh it’s not sustainable, nobody is looking after this etcetera, etcetera. The idea of participation was new at that time and it’s behavioural practice nobody knew. 

 So the National Primary Health care program expected community participation and a project in with Government of Madhya Pradesh and Government of Tamil Nadu … the purpose of the project was to train doctors and nurses of Primary Health Care to facilitate community participation. 1983-84 I’m talking about, you may think, what is so difficult to understand? Actually, the concept is not very difficult. The practice is a problem. Why? Because in your socialization as a doctor, you are the expert and you sitting in front of me are the patient. You don’t know, I know. I have to tell you and fix you. And when I am telling you and fixing you, you are on your knees begging for help from this almighty expert. That’s the problem, the power relations. Because I don’t value your knowledge and you don’t value your knowledge yourself. You think you’re stupid as far as medical doctors go. So they got hold of me to train these people.

I said, OK, I’ll do pilot workshops, but along with the trainees, one of you sitting in state headquarters will also attend. You will not be an observer, you will be a participant. In those days, I used to be very strict with all these people. No observer. You either participate or you facilitate. So a 5 day program, experiential learning in a residential area outside Gwalior, some health department’s training center. And every day in the afternoon after lunch we will go to the field and next morning we will discuss what happened. Then this escalated up to Mussoorie Academy. They wanted to learn community participation. 

Tumse nahin hoga tum community seh bahut door ho. Nahin nahin. Sundar Burra was the deputy director who passed away recently. So he insisted. So I went with a couple of colleagues. But you have to unlearn. You have to unlearn and you have to understand that you are sitting in a position of power and the persons in front of you have a lot of knowledge and experience. But they won’t speak till you create conditions. Nowadays we use phrases like safe space and all for conversations to happen. That’s all. It’s not very complicated, but unlearning is both complicated and painful.

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HOST 

Dr Tandon speaks of his association with the late Anil Bordia, an IAS officer , who in his own words, he calls, a champion of education and an activist civil servant. Anil Bordia was passionate about bringing education and literacy to all Indians, and worked tirelessly with academics, activists, journalists, educationists and many others from all walks of life to make this a possibility. Dr Tandon first met Anil Bordia in 1977 during his early fieldwork. 

RAJESH TANDON

My association with Anil Bordia is slightly deeper because I went to his home, his home in Udaipur and his father and Doctor Mehta are bum chums and they jointly started Vidya Bhavan, which is a teacher training institute in Udaipur and Seva mandir. So when I was hanging around Seva Mandir, my dissertation, Anil’s father used to hang around with me. And then Anil’s sister Renuka, Anil Bordia and in that same neighborhood, Kamala Bhasin used to hang around. So these are all Udaipur hangers on of that era. And then they all sort of gravitated to Delhi, but that’s how I knew them. So I knew Anil Bordia from that time and he knew the methodology of my training marginal farmers in Udaipur because of his connection to Seva Mandir. I didn’t know him and then he called me one day.

He said we are putting together a training manual for NAEP because NAEP was a first national program, fairly revolutionary in terms of perspective. 

HOST 

The National Adult Education Program was launched in 1978, as a large scale government initiative to eradicate illiteracy by educating 100 million adults in five years, focusing on literacy, numeracy, functional skills for work, and social awareness, aiming for socio-economic development and self-reliance of people. It was heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. 

RAJESH TANDON

It said awareness raising, constitutional values and functional literacy and the program ran for some time on the shoulders of NGOs and even government delivery mechanisms. It was a good program and it was you know, the change of government and usual tamasha happened and and and so the training manual was basically the training I was doing in Seva Mandir’s field area, which he came to know through his contact at Seva Mandir. 

NIKITA RAKHYANI

To bring this whole idea of working with people, trusting them, is difficult to get started. And you know, that unlearning, you said, takes a lot of time and courage and acceptance. So I just want to know what were those, some of the challenges that you would have faced and even starting an organization which is promoting this whole idea of people’s knowledge, you know, trusting them, working along with them. How did you deal with that? What were those challenges?

RAJESH TANDON

Well, you know, the biggest challenge is for us to be – who are professionally trained, academically qualified experts – to be able to have the openness to listen. Listen to other points of view, listen to other stories and not listen with an already predetermined theoretical framework. Because we listen, we collect data, but we collect data to hang it in our framework somewhere because we have a framework. So the biggest challenge was to go visit the field and learn what people are trying to do first. And we invented a tool because of the necessity of the times. It’s called writing annual reports. By the way, that need also exists today. So, PRIA must have helped write some 5-6 hundred annual reports, mostly around coastal Andhra and north of Vindhyas belt. And in the name of writing your report, you hang around 2-3 days. They will feed you, put you up because you are being useful to them and you will write a report, a version of it in English, which they can’t do. And in a way you will understand their story. And we used to train our people too because I went with them, they will come and the younger lot will learn all that, that how I ask questions and my asking of questions was to help the organization think for itself. And nowadays we call it strategic planning, when those days we just did it. I would ask questions like but why did you change from this program? Oh, you got money. All right. If you got money for that, would you do that? And we are writing their story. So this was one standard. The other was visiting and saying we’re doing a workshop on participatory methods, a participatory process, how to mobilize the community and that spending time there with, with this kind of a listening orientation, facilitative orientation, we learned a great deal about that context and there and it also began to clarify to our team that we don’t know everything. 

I’ll give you a story. This happened to me and there was a younger person in Thane district way back and we went to a local sangathan and they said today our women’s rally is taking place. And I think it had to do with access to forest rights. So you join and we will sit with you tomorrow for that other discussion. So we joined. We sort of saw, we did some narrabazi at the back. We were odd men among those women. But in the evening I asked those I said, don’t mind, but these women are dressed in their fineries, their lipstick, their, you know, jhumkas and best shining dresses. They looked like they were going in a baraat and you know what he said? He said for them, this is an even more important occasion. They are dressing themselves up to stand up for these rights. And it completely blew my mental frame. So I was used to the trade union movement who would go in phati chappal and phati shirt. So let’s go with openness.  Listen and understand from their vantage point what it means to go on a protest. We dress up to protest. It’s wonderful. 

NIKITA RAKHYANI 

I’m also curious to learn from you. You know, our name is Participatory Research in Asia. We just have one office which is in Delhi. And I want to know that we’ve worked in so many locations on so many issues. Did it never come to your mind to sort of establish, you know, field offices or having presence in different locations? You’ve sort of pushed the idea of working together with local organizations, building capacities of local organizations.

RAJESH TANDON
Partners of PRIA, catalysed by PRIA, promoted by PRIA in those locations will be more responsive to the local context and local trends and they will therefore add capacity to local context. We scale up. I always say, you have heard me, we scale up through partnerships, not by doing it ourselves alone. We have deliberately not opened branches. 

So in PRIA, our name is international and our work has been so international. Our compensation is entirely local because we can’t open our branches and yet be true to our belief system: local capacity, local leadership, local organization. An organization based in Bengal is better equipped to deal with the government’s accountability there than a branch office of PRIA. We are building capacities, the principles and frameworks of which could evolve centrally, but the practice and adaptation and rootedness will have to be locally. Local languages, local idioms, local culture, local capacities, local forces that operate. 

NIKITA RAKHYANI
And how do you enable this local capacity, this local leadership. How do you do that?

RAJESH TANDON
Well, you work with them for many, many years. The ultimate trust of partnership is trusting relationships. And trusting relationships are predominantly between people. Institutions only add a framework to it. So investing in relationships is no longer funded if you don’t believe in partnerships. If you believe in partnerships, you have to build trusting relationships over a long term. When in order to build trusting relationships, you have to invest time. 

NIKITA RAKHYANI
And what is the future vision about PRIA ? Where do you see it heading?

RAJESH TANDON
When I began talking about participatory research with that academic background I had, I already a PhD, heavy duty. Most academics said this is voodoo science, this is riff-raff, this is not knowledge. Forty years later, National Education Policy, University Grants Commission, UNESCO, UNDP and 200-300 academic institutions around the world are teaching participatory research. That vision requires practical translation. You know there are four crore young people in colleges now. Many of them are from rural backgrounds, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, minorities etc. But what are they studying in those books and how are they learning? That is what I want to influence. I want to influence that they learn by going to the community and learning with the community. Because the curriculum is not fit for purpose.

It’s not fit for who they are. If the curriculum of sociology in Dumka is the same as the  sociology curriculum in Delhi University, there’s something wrong because the Dumka students are not going to make it to Silicon Valley. It’s a mirage that they are chasing. So how do we enable the young people to learn in the context in which they have grown up, add value whatever they want to add value to, but not be dismissive of their context and the knowledge that comes from that? I’m happy it is now legitimizing policy. So now I want to push practice. You know, more and more teachers, more and more students. You know, I want tribal students who have finished their undergraduate to go back to their communities and their elders and systematize tribal knowledge about land, forestries, water and use both. 

Personally, I think PRIA  should take this principle and framework in two different ways.
And that’s a PRIA OF YOU and not PRIA of me. One is I think we should and I believe in this very strongly that we should take a lead in creating spaces for conversations. You, your generation of young people deserves that opportunity. 

And second, I think not to lose sight of the fact that even though we are a large country, diverse country, that we are part of the larger global reality. And increasingly, you know, I grew up with global connections, even though I came from Kanpur. And PRIA’s starting point we have a strong international participate research network and we have done a lot of things internationally. We still do, but we don’t relate to the rest of the world as if we belong there. And that requires a shift in the way we design our programs, our work.

I have learned that what I pride in my culture, there’s a lot of things to be proud of in other people’s culture also outside the country, from Africa, from Latin America, from other Asian countries. So that build say it’s sort of a global solidarity. It was that idea of global solidarity that I gave my blood and sweat to, found CIVICUS and ran it for the first 10 years.

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