More than 150 representatives of several national, regional and local civil society organisations (CSOs) attended a two-day workshop on Information and Knowledge Management for Effective Policy Advocacy, at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on 19th and 20th August 2003. This was a part of a series of Capacity Building Workshops organised under the seven-year Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) Programme, sponsored by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by Development Alternatives (DA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (P) Ltd. The PACS Programme seeks to reduce poverty in the 108 poorest districts of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh by strengthening the capacity of the civil society to help the poor realize their entitlements.

The Workshop was opened by Dr. Dennis Pain, Social Development Advisor with DFID India. He pointed out that although India has a vibrant and strong civil society, it is still amorphous, and lacks cohesion and collective power. He exhorted the CSOs to play a coordinated and proactive role in empowering the marginalised to participate in the markets, which would enhance the demand, quality and accessibility of services. The civil society needs to bridge the ‘democratic deficit’ in India by transferring power to the grassroots level.

Dr. Ashok Khosla, President, DA and Advisor to the PACS Programme highlighted the need to propagate sustainable technologies and sustainable livelihoods on a mass scale to eradicate poverty. He reminded the participants that true empowerment would happen only when people are conscious of their duties as well as their responsibilities.

Mr. Gyanam Prakasam of the National Centre for Advocacy Studies (NCAS), Pune delivered two lectures on the ‘Development Implications of the Legislative Framework’ and the ‘Role of Information and Knowledge Management in Governance’. He identified various undesirable elements like ‘culture of patronisation’, ‘culture of concentration of power’ and ‘culture of denial’ as the root causes of poverty in India. He gave a comparative overview of macroeconomic indicators relating to poverty and economic growth in India.  The data brought out the dichotomy which exists between the magnitude of problems (e.g. Poverty, food security etc.), and the strategies adopted by the government to mitigate their impact on people.

The disparity in budgetary allocation for these issues was also focused upon to demonstrate the inadequacies. Ad hoc strategies that take cognizance of neither micro nor macro issues compound the problems of the poor. As a result, indicators of growth and development continue to touch abysmal levels. Lack of sufficient budget allocation for a crucial area such as health, apathy towards gender parity issues, atrocities against women and marginalised communities, communalism and corruption were identified as some of the issues contributing towards the dismal development scenario.

Lofty vision and rhetoric at policy level and diametrically opposite realities are due to lack of participation of people at the policy formulation and implementation stages. He stated that empowerment will not occur until all the citizens of the country are united by the language of equity, equality and justice. For this to happen, one must even desist from using terms such as ‘marginalised’ or ‘backward’ that implies that certain segments of the population do not belong to the mainstream. He emphasised advocacy as being a very powerful means of bringing about the desired change. It is only when people are aware of their rights and duties as responsible citizens, that they will be in a position to raise their voice to demand accountability, transparency and responsiveness from the government.

An interactive session on understanding gender and related issues was initiated by Dr. Madhumita Sarkar from the Gender Training Institute. She busted the common fallacy that gender is only about women; rather, it is about the relationship between men and women and their different roles in society. However, within these gender relations, women are always at the receiving end. She emphasised that in order to ensure true development, we do not need special or separate development programmes for women. Instead, there is a need to integrate women’s need with larger development goals. CSOs should design their programmes in such a way that they contribute to gender equality through a holistic approach to development. At this juncture, various PACS partners took the opportunity to share their field experiences with regard to gender activities and also highlighted problems and issues they confront. What was disheartening was the flippancy with which many delegates joked about women’s roles in society and the need for empowerment.  Even more disheartening was that many women delegates themselves found such disparaging comments amusing. The session was indeed useful in taking stock of the scope of gender sensitisation that needs to be done among the PACS partners themselves before they can serve their constituencies.

Mr. M.D. Mistry, Member of Parliament, shared his personal experiences as a politician and the conflicts he had to resolve to familiarise himself with the economic aspects of his work profile as a representative of people. He made an attempt to simplify the technical blocks which overshadow the developmental purpose of budgets for the common man, who invariably possesses little knowledge of the discipline of economics. He explained the accounting structure for various government programmes and the revenue sources for the budget. He listed sources of data that citizens could access and how one should read between the lines of budgetary allocations. He also explained certain commonly used – but rarely understood issues, viz. plan and non-plan expenditure, components of the annual budget, project planning, the rationale of taxation, revenue and expenditure at state and national levels. Mr. Mistry reminded the audience that budgets are designed with the best intentions to maximise benefits from limited available resources. Budgets provide crucial information regarding the total available finances with the government and what purposes it can be used for. CSOs need to shed their inertia and complacency towards analysing and interpreting the local, state and national budgets and act to ensure that the needs of the people are represented.

CHARKHA, a Delhi-based NGO shared their experiences at the grassroots levels in communicating development issues and exchanging lessons between CSOs. This module was meant to prepare the CSO partners for grassroots level advocacy system that PACS intends to set in place.

Catalyst Management Systems (CMS) from Bangalore conducted an interactive session to introduce the Monitoring, Evaluating and Learning (MEAL) Framework that PACS is currently instituting. The session provided an opportunity for participants to gauge the purpose of the MEAL System and ensure that it represents their unique needs.

The workshop was quite successful in drawing attention to the need to manage information and knowledge appropriately to meet the development needs of the poor. Feedback from the participants indicated that the Workshop provided them an excellent setting to relate their grassroots level experiences with the bigger development picture. Many felt that they were also in a position to generate a shared understanding and identify allies within and outside the civil society to strengthen their advocacy efforts. Such alliances and collective efforts would go a long way in improving the efficacy of CSO partners to contribute to the long term outcomes of PACS.  q