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There is a move towards partnership working across the global north and south but there remain questions about how to do it most effectively. This paper reports on the findings from a project that built a partnership between women in Scotland and India in order to transfer knowledge about Indian Self Help Groups. By creating peer to peer relationships that challenged traditional roles of 'teacher' and 'learner', the project was effective in transferring learning from south to north and generating meaningful outcomes for those involved. Despite the contextual differences, the successful transfer of key components of the model, savings, and loans, has led to a sense of empowerment in the Scottish women that is comparable to their Indian counterparts. As the project continues, it will be important that the dialogue between the partners continues, so there is ongoing learning as the Scottish groups expand and develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displacement by development projects jeopardizes welfare of people living at its periphery. The acquisition of land for large industries, mines, or special economic zones gives rise to the livelihood insecurity of the poor and less privileged people. Displacement from the original habitations often means not only the physical relocation but also the loss of livelihood derived from the subsistence resources offered by the local environment. Due to displacement, people lose common property resources like forests, rivers, fields, and grazing grounds. It is estimated that some 3-5 million people have been displaced since 1950 in Odisha on account of various development projects, of which more than 50 percent are tribals (Haan, A. D and Dubey, A. (2005) Poverty, Disparities, or the Development of Underdevelopment in Orissa, Economic and Political Weekly, XL(22-23), 2321-2329). The involuntary displacement has brought imbalances in possession of land in various districts of Odisha. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore further the impact of displacement on livelihood of tribal and non-tribal communities of Odisha. It may pinpoint key challenges faced by them due to development-induced displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical community development relies on a sociological understanding of knowledge although the sociology of scientific knowledge in community development is under-researched. Literature on the public understanding of science, and even people's science movements, has tended to focus on communication between specialist scientists and a lay public who, at best, co-produce knowledge with scientists. Seldom are communities in struggle considered as generators of scientific knowledge. Even more rarely considered are the material interests embedded in scientific knowledge that result from the economic location of the generators of knowledge. This paper draws on the experience of a community in Tamil Nadu, South India, that has been mobilizing against the polluting impacts of industrial development. The SIPCOT Area Community Environmental Monitors have been generating scientific knowledge by building on indigenous knowledge through the systematization of observation. This praxis has also transformed community members' relationship with specialist scientists and increased their knowledge of science, not only as an authoritative yet contested knowledge on which conflicts over development may be resolved, but also as a social process embedded in conflicting relations of production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This qualitative case study, set in rural India, deconstructs discourses as they relate to the perceptions of power-holders on the development, establishment, and impact of self-help groups (SHGs) on women's empowerment in India. Owing to the high numbers of SHGs and the perception that SHGs offer opportunities for women to participate differently in the community, this study explores: (i) the ways power-holders react to the efforts to establish and participate in SHGs in their community; (ii) the nature and scope of the interaction of power-holders and SHG members and the evolution of this interaction; and (iii) the narratives that unfold at the community level around the involvement of SHG members through their interactions with power-holders. This paper deals specifically with four male leaders in a village where the women had been involved in an SHG for a period for six years. The women actively engaged with the gatekeepers of the community and continued with the programme even after funding for the programme had ended. The data highlight the complex nature of male/female relationships, and the dichotomies that exist for men as they reflect on their own power within families, their perceptions of women's participation in SHGs, and their awareness of authority within their communities as it pertains to women's agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study is to look at India's experience in using the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme as a core development strategy aimed to empower women. Self-help groups are seen as socially active groups that can facilitate a government's plans towards achieving the sustainable development goals. Today, the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme is the largest microfinance programme globally, covering more than 10 million self-help groups. This article uses descriptive analysis to provide an overview of India's experience. It focuses on how the program contributes to sustainable development by asking how the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme leads to the empowerment of rural women, the challenges faced in its implementation, and the initiatives implemented in India to sustain the programme. This is followed by a quantitative analysis of the economic sustainability and the equality status by measuring the programme's progress and the disparity between regions in the last decade. India's experience shows that the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage Programme can empower women, facilitate entrepreneurial activities, enhance confidence and trust, provide technical skills and market access. Those are part of sustainable development goals and increase sustainable livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the impact of food insecurity on the disadvantaged sections in India. While analysing the causes and consequences of food insecurity, this paper emphasizes distributional aspects and also examines the government schemes and provisions meant to secure food for the vulnerable sections of the society. Discussing the gross mismanagement and the serious loopholes in the implementation of these programmes, this paper highlights consequences which include growing number of malnourished children and recurring instances of hunger deaths. The governments initiatives of dealing with food insecurity reflect its failure to grasp the realities of exclusion faced by the marginalized communities. Paradoxically, while the food surplus statistics indicate an upward shift, so do starvation deaths in different parts of the country. The last section reiterates and illustrates the argument of this paper that the food security can be ensured through collective mobilization and sustained social action. The paper advocates the need to initiate public action through community mobilization. Some of the vibrant and robust civil society groups have taken the lead in enabling marginalized communities to assert their rights and entitlements in different parts of India. This has been substantiated through case illustration of grassroots mobilization and social action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of the last two decades, there has been a pronounced expansion of democracy, seen as the enfranchisement of dalits, the empowerment of oppressed castes, and the assertion of women. This process has also witnessed the deepening of popular commitments for ideas and potentialities of democracy. However, at the same time, various infirmities have also crept into it, such as the denial of rights of individual persons who disregard community injunctions, retaliatory politics in relation to those lower in ritual status, the humiliation of dalits, and of women who defy community norms. Instead of looking at the evolution of Indian democracy, the paper would reveal more the manner in which the democratic universals are getting transcribed in their engagement with the Indian particularities. This paper argues a need to engage in a sustained democratic struggle within communities. While respecting the identity of the oppressed communities, one must remain suspect of the congealing of these identities. Deepening of democracy, apart from substantive content, requires that dalits and women have to become bearers of entrenched rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microcredit programme initiated in the 1980s is celebrated by the Indian state and international development institutions as an ‘ideal’ poverty alleviation programme for women. It is based on the principle of activating self-help among women and is considered as being empowering. The period 1980–1990 defined a minimalist neo-liberal role of the state that allowed for the free working of the market and a belief that it will solve problems of poverty. Many have argued that the microcredit programme was influenced by this philosophy (Joseph, 2007; Swaminathan, 2007). In addition, that microcredit does not always have a positive impact on poverty alleviation because the official programme does not have the capacity to displace patriarchal structures that bind women (Goetz and Sengupta, 1996). By focusing only on ‘economic’ issues it fails to address the way deprivation of nutrition and health, increasing violence and insecurity are affecting women as economic actors. Without addressing these questions it is not possible for women to get empowered. In this paper I examine the inter-linkages between citizenship, gender and development by evaluating the design of a microcredit programme for women presented by a feminist rural womens organization called Mahila Sarvangeen Utkarsh Mandal (MASUM) in Maharashtra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and analyses the organization and functioning of subaltern peasant sanghams (grassroot associations of the poor) and their place-based as well as network-based strategies in building autonomous local communities that challenge the consequences of neoliberal globalization in general and the commodification of agriculture and food in particular. The major objective of the counter-hegemonic organizational strategies is to build self-protective and subsistence communities, to mend the metabolic rift between nature and society, and to re-reconstruct social fabric within communities. The question remains is whether place-based autonomous communities can sustain in an increasingly globalizing world. To better understand these political dynamics, I use Karl Polanyis concept of ‘double movement’ and examine the making of a double movement in Indian agriculture and its socio-political and ecological implications for the Indian peasantry. I use the organizational strategies and activities of the Deccan Development Society, a prominent non-governmental organization that has been working in Medak district for more than two decades, as an illustrative case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on fieldwork education in community organization (CO) and argues that it is distinct in many ways from the conventional social work approach to problem-solving where social work students are taught to value objectivity, neutrality and emotional detachment. Fieldwork is generally characterized as unproblematic and the belief that ‘all social work students do the same thing’ through field instruction is reflected in the fact that, except for a manual or two, there is scant academic literature on fieldwork instruction in India. When the sites of practice and the nature of tasks performed by students are examined carefully, this homogenized understanding is challenged. The pedagogical objectives and the processes followed in selecting sites of practice for educational purposes, the positionality assumed by the academic department and by the fieldwork supervisor, and how these are communicated to the students, all make a significant difference to ‘the fieldwork’ experience of students and their learning. The paper presents the experience of one university (the Tata Institute of Social Sciences) where fieldwork in CO was consciously re-defined as a process of political engagement over a decade of collective work by faculty members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mumbai has historically been a home to several struggles of urban underprivileged groups. The city assured spaces to slums in the past, albeit grudgingly. Cases of displacement were few and intensely contested. However, the last decade has witnessed a considerable expansion of the nature and scale of threats to the existence of slum-dwellers in the city. Attempts to organize slum communities began in the 1960s following a trajectory of locality development and then housing rights. The earlier vision of broad-based development and struggles of urban poor has given way to fragmented, issue-based and localized struggles. Intense politicization and competition for valuable resources and opportunities have fractured this potent constituency comprising about 60 percent of city dwellers. The paper traces the slippery and challenging terrain of organizing slum communities around their rights and raises questions about the location and nature of community practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mahatma Gandhi – one of the most prolific writers amongst the figures of world history – has left us details of his growth as a thinker and activist. ‘The Story of Satyagraha in South Africa’ documents the struggle of Gandhi, still in his twenties, who confronts racism in a foreign country and is able to negotiate substantial gains for his community through a long-drawn political struggle involving the new methods of Satyagraha. This book while speaking of the development of the various aspects of Satyagraha as a political as well as spiritual weapon, also documents the complex scenario in three countries – England, South Africa and India. The context defines the lives of the Indians in South Africa, their struggle and Gandhis strategies as an organizer. The individual sacrifices, the efforts for fundraising, the intricacies of keeping together a community with members from different religions, the day-to-day concerns of Ashram life, the tough decisions at critical junctures of the movement – Gandhi offers a fascinating picture of the community organizer. The paper re-visits this tale and culls out the lessons that are important not only for the modern-day community organizer in India but are also perhaps timeless in their relevance and appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid privatization of solid waste management (SWM) across urban centers in India since the 1990s, the role of the state agencies is considerably diluted. The contract system in this sector is here to stay. This has implications for the large numbers of conservancy workers who are employees of the urban local bodies (ULBs) as well as those who perform the same functions as the ‘standard’ workers, but work on contractual basis. Through amendments in certain labour and environment related laws, SWM has been getting differently organized during the last seven to eight years in India. The labour question in the rapidly privatizing SWM sector in urban areas has several dimensions including that of job security, and conflicts between permanent and contractual workers and other groups who work with waste. All these categories of workers in urban India, whether within the formal or the informal sector, belong to socially and economically marginalized sections of society. Unionization of workers and struggles for their entitlements has been an important strategy. Several years of association with a trade union of conservancy workers in the city of Mumbai has enriched teaching of Community Organization (CO) through classroom-field interface with a focus on social action. This paper attempts to trace, through the lens of the interface between an academic institution (and its curriculum in CO) and a trade union, the struggles and success in assuring secure livelihood and entitlements for thousands of workers. Achievements of the union assume great significance as it gives others the confidence to continue with their own efforts at organizing the unorganized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the local community's support for the post-tsunami recovery of two affected places in India: one a tourist destination and the other an agrarian village. The investigation begins with the proposition that social capital is a vital influence upon local communities willingness to support tsunami recovery efforts. The underlying assumption was that the resident community at the agrarian village with its rich social capital and tradition of community activities would proactively participate in the reconstruction program and thereby make a speedier and more meaningful recovery than the resident community at the tourist destination. However, an empirical survey conducted to prove this point provided us with contradictory results: the survey revealed no significant difference in the levels of social capital across the communities. Consequently, the researchers carried out a focus group discussion with the locals at the tourist destination. The interesting conclusion is that it is probably the richness of the very same social capital that provoked local participation at the agrarian village and eliminated it at the tourist destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to understand the heterogeneous nature of home-based cashew workers in Kerala. The article uses narrative approach to illustrate the lived experiences of the home-based workers. The evidence from the field study in Kollam district reveals that the majority of the workers engaged in the home-based processing, voluntarily or involuntarily, are women. The home-based processing is considered as an additional option to earn income by these workers. As a result, despite the ban on cottage processing of cashew, it is operating in a clandestine manner. The study shows that the enhancement of individual and collective capabilities of the women in the informal sector requires an understanding of their multiple identities, as well as an acknowledgement of the existing gender relations and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In principle, the global development discourse increasingly views people as 'agents of change' rather than 'recipients of services'. In practice, however, people's participation has been limited to project implementation and has been pursued without building people's critical consciousness about their problems, and the means of solving them. This becomes particularly relevant for marginalized communities, such as sex workers and sexual minorities in India, who face further problems of discrimination and widespread stigma. Although global policy-making spaces have sought participation to ensure representation, there seems to be a strong tendency among dominant stakeholders to maintain systems and processes that legitimize and perpetuate the exclusion of marginalized groups. This article explores how these communities have seized opportunities offered by an HIV prevention programme and a global, post-2015 participatory research process to move from addressing symptoms of their problems towards tackling root causes, while using contextual knowledge to influence global policy making. When given an opportunity, community members have demonstrated the ability to deliberate, negotiate and advocate for their own agenda in meaningful ways and to challenge beliefs held by policy makers. This article makes the case for a shift in development practice and research, such that it provides people living on the margins the space and opportunity to analyse their own situations and consider alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on research with community organizers in India. We illustrate that community organizers in India have done a thorough analysis with respect to the impact of globalization on the communities with which they work. We argue that community practitioners have a clear political understanding of their practice that is tied to the perception that global change has led to increasing marginalization of communities in India. As a result of these changes, the guiding principles of community practices in India need to be rethought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social research in eastern India illustrates a development project's problems in trying to understand livelihoods in poor tribal communities. The project first concentrated on farming constraints and their removal through agricultural innovation. Then, it highlighted community development shortfalls. Finally, it recommended 'Sustainable Rural Livelihoods' as a framework for activities. The livelihoods and community development approaches understated the critical importance of social rank, caste and power relations treating them as adjuncts to models imported from elsewhere. Implemented out of context, livelihoods and community development models became luxuriant weeds that residents must remove or bypass in their struggle to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Government by the 73rd Amendment of the Indian constitution. Topics discussed include devolution of powers and funds from the government led to attitudes and habits of dependence; creating opportunities for dividing people and incentives to acquire control of powers and resources of the government; and independent State Election Commission to conduct and supervise the elections.

The article traces out the origins and analyses the movement that led to the enactment of the Right to Information Act, 2005. It holds a mirror to the culture of secrecy pervading the bureaucratic machinery and demonstrates the utility of the Act to usher in an era of accountability with the aid of practical examples. The conceptual framework built by Kant and Shue has been borrowed to argue that right to information is a potent tool for the marginalized communities to secure invaluable democratic space and consequently, move up the social ladder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discussion on inter-community relations in India can never be comprehensive without taking certain landmarks, seen through momentous ruptures in the forms and nature of dialogue between communities. While there is ample historical evidence that the barbaric episodes of violence are not new, the communal divides visible in contemporary Indian society have been able to fan the emotions of a large section of the people in specific moments, and the implications of the same travel down to the everyday life of people. The premeditated demarcation of borders and boundaries between communities that was coincidental with the rise of the right-wing forces in Indian politics received fresh allies and social constituencies, and they have all gone in unison to produce insulting boundaries for others. In the wave of hate-mongering and spitting of venom, this article locates the challenge for community organization practices in enhancing the tapestry of plural living and tolerance in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]