Type: Keynote

An Approach To Integrated Water Management

By Lisa Tsering, Staff Reporter. Dec 03, 2012.

BERKELEY, Calif., United States

Grounded and detail-driven, water activist Rohini Nilekani is committed to helping India solve its water crisis one village at a time. Nilekani, the founder and chair of Arghyam, an NGO based in Bangalore that works to improve water and sanitation in small towns across India, spoke about the reach of her work to a near-capacity audience at UC Berkeley’s Richard C. Blum Hall Oct. 30. Her talk was presented under the aegis of Urban WASH: Paradigms for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for the 21st Century South Asian City, an urban water initiative headquartered at UC Berkeley’s Center for South Asia Studies, and was facilitated by UC Berkeley water specialist Prof. Isha Ray, the lead faculty of this initiative.

If Nilekani’s name sounds familiar, that is because she is probably better known as the founder of Pratham Books (I-W, Oct. 26), a nonprofit publishing house that has provided more than 10 million high-quality, India-centric books to poor children in India. Most of the books are priced at around 25 rupees. Nilekani is a former journalist whose 1981 investment of Rs. 10,000 in her husband Naland Nilekani’s company, Infosys, has now made her one of India’s richest women. Forbes named her one of its “48 Heroes of Philanthropy” in 2010. “I call myself an ‘accidental philanthropist,’” she said at UC Berkeley. “Too many external factors made that money, so it should be shared forward. I feel that the money is not really mine.”

While Pratham Books continues to thrive, Nilekani decided to branch out in another direction. Why water, she was asked at the beginning of her talk. “I wanted to work on something that would have a strategic impact,” explained Nilekani. “I found that people were focused enough on education, but that no one was focusing on lifeline water.” Nilekani started the public charitable foundation Arghyam in 2005, “literally ‘jumping into the deep end,’” she quipped. The word “Arghyam” means “offering” in Sanskrit, she said. Arghyam is a funding agency based in Bangalore which facilitates implementation and research to support evidence-based advocacy and influence policy in cities and towns in 3,000 villages across India — located in mountains, deserts, flood plains and coastal areas. According to Arghyam’s figures, India has around 4,000 billion cubic meters of water, with around 1.86 BCM readily available for use.

Some cities may sit over aquifers yet prefer to get their drinking water from lakes and rivers farther away, which drives up costs and limits access. One key to Arghyam’s success is that the NGO doesn’t preach a methodology to its grantees — instead, its officers listen to the needs and challenges of each microeconomy it encounters on the ground. What works for one small town may not work in another, so Nilekani says it’s vital that Arghyam tailor its approach to each location it touches. In Kerala, it could be an open well designed to recharge levels of rain water. In Karnataka, it could be a fluoride mitigation project. In Bihar, it could mean installing a matka (clay pot) water filter in each home, or composting toilets to keep a community water supply clean.

“We don’t come as a patron,” said Nilekani. “We believe in creating mutual partnerships.” Arghyam is especially proud of one of its most spectacular successes, “The Mulbagal Experience,” which looked at the problems in Mulbagal, a town in Kolar district, 100 kms from Bangalore. Working with a consortium of partners from government, civil society, academic, and other water sector institutions, Arghyam transformed their water system from polluted and diseased to clean. As an added bonus, their work in Mulbagal uncovered an ancient temple tank (kalyani) in the town filled with garbage, weeds and snakes — and enlisted the townspeople to clean it up and bring it back to its ancient glory.

The NGO is also working to change policy both at the grassroots panchayat level and in the Central Government, said Nilekani. Arghyam is aware of the large-scale impact of private companies such as Coca-Cola, which is accused of creating huge water shortages in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and inciting local activism. “We are in a time of extreme transition,” she said. “People are organizing.” Nilekani’s talk at UC Berkeley was the second in a series of lectures organized by the Sarah Kailath Memorial Lecture Series on the theme of women and leadership (the first speaker in the series was California Attorney General Kamala Harris). The lecture series derives from the Sarah Kailath Chair in India Studies, which was established by award-winning Stanford engineering professor and Padma Bhushan Thomas Kailath.

As Nilekani explained, one of the most valuable things Arghyam can give to a community is a new sense that it can find its own water solutions — even a system as small as a single schoolhouse rainwater collecting device. “Sometimes people in deep poverty can get stuck in a cycle of helplessness,” Nilekani explained. “So a small catalyst can really make a difference.”

Address at 10th Anniversary of Akshara Foundation

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s speech on equitable quality education for all children, organised as a part of Akshara’s 10th Anniversary celebrations. Rohini spoke about the breadth and depth available today in the field of education, and pledged for social inclusion, for an equitable dispensation for marginalised and underprivileged children.

 

One decade in a country seems like such a short time, but when it comes to the education sector, so much has happened in 10 years that I feel very privileged to be a part of this sector. In this decade, we have seen the demand for education clearly and  fundamentally established. There are many reasons for that, the first being the government. Over the last few decades, the government has made significant strides. Never before has so much money been put into the education sector by the government, and we are seeing the rollout and the benefit of that. NGOs have stepped up activities in the education sector tremendously, and also deserve credit. The liberalisation of the economy has had an impact on education as well. Our population explosion has meant that people have been pushed out of old livelihoods and farms, and have had to look at new choices. Parents have begun to finally see the end of the education tunnel and what it actually means. And the education sector has opened up to market forces as never before.

In addition to this, we are seeing an explosion of demand, with private sector players asking for their own space in the public sector. The focus has shifted from enrollment to increasing the quality of education. As money flows from the public sector, a lot of opportunities and bipartisan support for the education agenda has cropped up all across the country. All of this has happened in one short decade. In a way, Akshara Foundation’s journey has echoed this, from simple things like enrolling, building the quality of the demand, getting parents to understand, getting children into schools and learning centers, to now doing supplementary work in the education sector, and working inside the system to make systemic improvements. They are also working with the private sector where the schools for the poor are concerned, and looking at technologies and ways to adapt to the changes of this decade.

But as always, in India, every time you say something positive, there’s a flip side to the coin. The fact remains that sometimes, the more things change, the more they remain the same in terms of our problems. This trickle down effect has affected the middle class, but there are still so many people to reach. The other day, I was reminded of this when I met Ganesh, a little boy from Gulbarga whose parents were construction workers. He was an intelligent child who deserved to go to the fifth standard, but the government school did not take him in because of a missing transfer certificate. This is in spite of notifications by the government that no child should be left out of our school system. The reality is that Ganesh is not in a government school or in a private school, but in a learning center in the Akshara compound. Despite all the progress we have seen, Ganesh’s story is repeated across the country every single day. We have 150 million migrants — India is now a mobile republic. But what happens to the children of migrants and their education? 

We have the Right to Education act, but normative structures and questions of quality don’t sit quite so comfortably with questions of social inclusion. There is a real opportunity here for the voluntary sector, and we must use this as a focal point to re-group our energies. We all know that the primary responsibility of education belongs to the state, and there is no dilution of that. Nowhere in the world has it been possible to progress in this sector without the government. We know that the markets have a role to play in this space as well. Today, the dominant paradigm seems to be bringing in the market to complement the state’s effort. There are some things the state can and must do. There are some things the market can do well. But there is a space below that where markets cannot go and where the state unfortunately is extremely ineffective. That is the space where civil society institutions like Akshara and philanthropists have to come together to bridge that gap, that last mile where neither states nor markets are effective.

Today, that space is growing. In the case of the migrant workers, we need to renew our efforts to work with those children who are left out in spite of everything that we have talked about. In the last 100 years, we have seen that most progressive movements have started by voices from civil society demanding and defining human rights. Now, even with the child’s right to education, there are still families who are left out. We need to introspect and push for change. It’s an opportunity for creative people to apply new ideas and explore possibilities. There are people who are interested in education for girls and want to set up hostels so they can stay and learn. Others want to step up sports infrastructure, technological innovations, nutrition, and better uniforms. An entrepreneur came to me saying we are underestimating the problem of what footwear our children wear, why it’s so toxic, and how we can create a low-cost shoe for children. So many people are engaging with questions beyond the curriculum, asking what are the values we want our children to learn and what will anchor them in our society? 

For me, this is extremely exciting because it means that the question of how to engage our young people is occupying a wider set of people. We need to welcome these ideas, whether we’re going to do incremental change or whether we’re trying to achieve disruption, because the societal mission before us, of every child learning well in school, is not yet over. We have some ways to go. We have understood the urgency of what is called the demographic dividend. In 15 years, a population begins to age, so what we do in these next 15 years with our young people, 50% of our population, matters a great deal. What have we equipped them with, in terms of education and values, is going to determine how India looks in 2025. A school is the miniature look into a nation’s future. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole nation to educate the last child. 100 million children are waiting, but we are all ready to get to work. 

 

Emerging Challenges for Civil Society in India

A keynote speech delivered at the 25th Anniversary of Rotary club in 2008

The Indian third sector – as the non-profit sector is sometimes called, is one of the largest and certainly the most diverse in the world. There are civil society organizations in virtually every area of human endeavour, including community bee-keeping!

As for size, a sample survey of the sector showed that there are about 1.2 million organizations in India, which engage more than 6 million people. And this number is growing steadily as new non-profits get registered every other day.

Civil society remains the vehicle of choice for social change. And in fact, we can safely say that civil society organizations have been very effective on many fronts in India. Not only have they filled social services delivery gaps left by the government, they have succeeded in generating awareness, driving new legislation, uncovering scams and malafide intentions and in fact, done everything that the civil sector –as the conscience and the ombudsman of the nation’s agenda is supposed to do.

In the seventies, there was a sudden upsurge in the setting up of NGOs, perhaps echoing the greater community activism that emerged in the West as part of the green movement and the peace movement. Today, many of those organizations, just like your Rotary, are close to their 25th anniversaries. To name a few, Myrada, Development Alternatives, CSE and TERI and the Narmada Bachao Andolan. 

They all emerged out of a sense of dissatisfaction at the way things were going in a state-controlled economy, and which was not catering to our democratic vision of equal opportunity and a decent quality of life for all.

 Each organization founds its own model of resistance to or partnership with the state in order to meet societal objectives. And each has evolved tremendously over the past two decades, though they began with the traditional idea of working in the community and for the community.

 Arguably, the 90’s saw another great push in the number of civil society organizations. This was a new breed of NPO – and they were in a sense reacting to the increasing presence of the private sector in India post economic liberalization.

 The beginning of this century has seen the emergence of yet another kind of non-profit organization – one that is taking advantage of the new media, the new economy and new technology. Akshara Foundation could be an example of this time of organization as could Janaagraha and e-Governments Foundation all home grown right here in Bangalore.

 The hallmark of these kinds of organizations is that they prefer to work with the government where ever possible, prefer to push the ideals of a modern democratic state, see the market as a possible ally and not necessarily an enemy, and are driven by specific goals and desired outcomes. They use modern management techniques, attract professional talent, and pursue scale through the use of modern technology. These organizations are often funded by the new wealth that has been created by the post liberalization economic boom.

 While it may be a little early to judge their overall effectiveness, they have brought about a whiff of fresh air into the third sector and are being watched with great curiousity by observers around the world.

 And yet, with all these thousands of organizations of all shapes and sizes and beliefs and objectives – all working by and large for the goal of an equitable, effective, sustainable society – we have not yet seen that goal actually being realized. If anything, social commentators are lamenting the increase in inequity in India despite good growth and despite an abundance of material wealth creation.

 So what can civil society DO to increase its effectiveness? What are the major challenges before us?

 I think the first challenge is that of enabling good governance. Most problems in this country come out of a lackadaisical attitude towards governance practices. In whatever field the CSO is engaged in, its work will have a multiplier effect if it can understand and rectify governance issues. For example, in education, taking a look at the BMP primary schools, we were able to show, that in spite of a generous per-student budget, municipal schools were completely insufficient even in the provision of simple infrastructure. How then was the money being used? Who was looking at inputs vs outcomes? Who was responsible if the money was not used properly? How were schools involved in a feedback loop to government and decision-makers? By focusing our attention on these issues we were able to achieve a small degree of success. But that experience emboldened us to take issues of input and outcomes to a larger canvas. This past year, in close partnership with the GOK , we launched the KLP to enable learning outcomes in schools. Using technology, such as GIS, using good tools to collect data at the level of every child and every school, we were able to help the government identify exactly which children in the 1400 schools of Bangalore Urban District needed help with their reading skills. And we were able to help school teachers roll out a time-bound goal-oriented reading programme to get those children – about 75,000 of them to become readers.

We think the success of this programme was in no small part because we created the framework of good governance – such as identifying the problem, the actors, the approach and the finances, and finally mapping the outcomes and rewarding good effort.

 If more CSOs could focus on better governance, I think we could all become more effective more quickly.

 Secondly, the challenge of scaling up. In India, we have a million great examples of pilots and models that have succeeded brilliantly as islands of excellent work. But we have before us in India, in the world’s most populous nation bar none, the very real issue that we need to go beyond pilots and good examples to reach the staggering number of 400-500 million people who still do not have a satisfactory quality of life. How do we reach every last citizen in this country? We need to find ways and means to effectively scale up the delivery of social services in all sectors. Civil society can take up these challenges by focusing on what parts of their work are ripe for scaling up and on the partnerships that would be required to bring that scale. At Akshara, we have tried to use good governance practices coupled with technology to enable much-needed scale. If all goes well, we hope in this academic year to take the KLP programme from 1500 to 15000 schools and then eventually to every single school in the state – 50,000 of them, and make sure every primary school child in the state is competent in the basic skills of reading, writing and math. For this, we are working with many partners and would be very happy if Rotary clubs across Karnataka could play a meaningful role as well.

 The third challenge, I think, is creating effective partnerships. Today the civil society sector operates very often in silos or in isolation from others. There is tremendous polarization in the ideologies of organizations working towards a common goal. One very good example is in the water sector – where anti-privatization groups clash routinely with those that are either pro-privatisation or simply interested in getting things done rather than in who is doing them. This leads to tremendous acrimony and a waste of time which in fact allows business as usual to have a longer run than it deserves.

 Now that the whole planet’s sustainability is at stake, we will have to find common platforms where, agreeing to disagree in some areas, we nevertheless can take the agenda forward. And learning to work with the government, which remains the single largest player in the social sector, is one of our best opportunities to create lasting change.

 The fourth challenge, perhaps, is that of the capacity building of the third sector. How can we train ourselves more, equip ourselves with better skills in finance, HR, admin, communications etc that could help us multiply our effectiveness? Today, many CSOs are trying to tackle 21st century problems with 19th century tools. Ramping up our tools, investing in better training, will go a long way to improve our effectiveness.

 The fifth challenge perhaps, is how to unleash the creativity of the civil sector. We are the the very brink of chaos, at the collapse of the natural resources base. We can no longer afford to think in the old ways. Nor can we wait for the state or the market to come up with ideas. We need to harness the passion for change that is the main driver for all civil society organizations and come up with new ideas to solve old problems.

 And last but not least, civil society needs to turn the torchlight inwards, upon itself. That is also a very big challenge. We preach but do we practice? We want the government to be transparent and accountable and give us information on demand. We want business to be accountable to all stakeholders. We want notions of equity to be the base of all decision making everywhere. How could our own mechanisms in our own organizations? Do we have fiscal transparency and accountability? Are we internally democratic? Are we measuring the outcomes of our own work? I think, if we can get our own houses in order, we may better be able to make the difference out there. Be the change you want to see, as Gandhi said.

 I think civil society organizations in India have been the backbone of this country’s democracy. And I think they are very much our hope for the future. As Marianne Williamson said, “In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.”