Specially written for Vikalp Sangam

“Where do we begin responding to the entangled ball of yarn of crises that engulfs us and the urgency of time that is looming over us like a guillotine?” This is a question that plagues many of us who envision and want to work towards a world built on the well-being of all; the question of an appropriate intervention.

One version of a pathway can be seen in a district in India’s Gujarat state, Kachchh (Kutch). Most of our knowledge of Kachchh either comes from our school’s geography textbook telling us about the Rann of Kachchh or by their renowned fast food Kachchhi dabeli. But this district of diverse landscapes ranging from deserts to beaches to grasslands has managed to provide some workable models which sit atop a solid set of values driving their vision.

The genesis

Kachchh is an ecologically and culturally sensitive area, prone to disasters. The need for collective and coherent action arose from the need for survival. And that was only possible if everyone came together and stuck it out. A multitude of actions were needed to respond to the multitude of disaster effects. 

The 2001 earthquake in Kachchh led to the creation of SETU Abhiyan. Before this, Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan, a network of local Kachchhi organisations which had come into being since the 1998 cyclone in Kachchh was aiding and facilitating disaster relief and rehabilitation. The work was divided through coordination units across 15-20 villages, 34 sub-centres and a governing committee whose work was to visit villages and assess their disaster needs.

The government had made packages and schemes available for injury, housing, death compensation and also offered relocating  entire villages. But people wanted to build their homes where they originally were. This prompted the committee to ask for more money from the government for rebuilding of homes. The government came up with a second package for housing and asked if any NGO would want to facilitate the process. This gave rise to many NGOs from outside Kachchh to take up projects in the district between 2001 and 2005, after which they all left. Many local organisations had been set up to mobilise people but lacked collective strength. Hence, the aforementioned 34 sub-centres which continued their rehabilitation work were named SETU Abhiyan where they continued working across needs until 2005 in a facilitative role between the government, the NGOs, local organisations and the Kachchhi citizens. 

An important piece of the rehabilitation work was that the people didn’t desire just to receive help, they were adamant on rebuilding their own lives with honour. This owner driven reconstruction work was facilitated by SETU and Hunarshala where the people were given necessary training (including technical skills such as masonry, water systems, etc.) required to rebuild their own homes with some support. 

What to do after 2005?

2005 was when most of the rehabilitation and relief projects undertaken by the NGOs and organisations had concluded. SETU Abhiyan did a visioning exercise which determined that it should continue working.

SETU decided its focal point of the work would be to strengthen local government: beginning with urban local governance in Bhuj town with area ward committees and over the years intervening at rural levels with panchayats. In Bhuj, even basic civic issues around sanitation, water supply, repair and maintenance of public infrastructure like roads and street lights would have to be dealt with at the local level without the support or intervention from the municipality or ward offices.In rural areas, there were many issues that cropped up regarding policies at the panchayat level. The panchayats at that time lacked the capacity to take up these issues and advocate for them. The aim was to build capacities within the panchayats to reflect on social issues, deliberate on proposals/suggestions and create GPDPs (Gram Panchayat Development Plan) by themselves in a bid to make them self-sufficient and strengthen the 73rd Amendment of the Constitution that ensures decentralisation and democracy at the smallest unit of state governance.  Between 2001 and 2005, the money coming from the government was directly going to the committees made by the organisations for rehabilitation, hence weakening the role of the local government; the Gram Panchayat.

SETU’s work involved knowledge support, capacity building, strengthening the planning process of these panchayats with a bottom-up approach to planning, creating a newsletter, leveraging money from the government as per their plan, holding the government accountable, enabling the panchayats to generate their own funds, facilitating panchayat elections and so on.

The work is spread out across 6 blocks of Kachchh among 413 panchayats. Through the visioning exercises of the panchayats, the sarpanches decided by themselves to form a district level Panchayat Sarpanch Association. This has sarpanches from 77 panchayats currently. The idea is to not only work with the government within its framework of policies but also have their own thought processes, visioning, social sensitivity and awareness as part of the local governance. 

The most recent addition was the 6th block, Nakhatrana, two years ago. This block, which was not seen as a priority block to have worked in for some reasons during SETU’s initial days, is a self-motivated block. One of the villages of this block, Mota Angiya has been experimenting with various programmes to address the social issues plaguing it, and spread to the neighbouring villages as a ripple effect. 

“It was very difficult for us to get the higher governing bodies like Zilla Parishad and the MLA at the Vidhan Sabha to get invested in issues at our village level. And also, smaller (yet important) issues like streetlights, or repair of the village road, etc., would not be considered in our gram panchayat budget. The funds that are released are not in accordance with the Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) that we propose and also reach us much later than needed. These are issues that affect the everyday lives of people and the resolution cannot be delayed. For example, recently when the gutterline needed fixing, we couldn’t wait for the dispersal of the funds to the gram panchayat. The villagers and panchayat members took ownership and reached out for help from those who support us in their individual capacities and resolved it. It is great in terms of participatory action from the citizens themselves but this is not good practice on the administration’s part. How do we tackle these? One of the suggestions that we have been advocating for is that the funds for the whole year get disbursed to the gram panchayat in tandem with their respective GPDPs in April itself. 

Then there are larger issues with changing the mindset of people regarding women empowerment, active participation in the panchayat’s goings-on, and so on. These also are issues that the panchayat has to take ownership of and start working on. That is what my approach has been since I started my term here as the sarpanch 5 years ago: to build ownership and capacities to govern ourselves and also hold the government accountable for fulfilling its part of the bargain,” reflected Iqbal Ghanchi, Sarpanch, Mota Angiya.

One of the programmes to build communal harmony is Panetar Utsav, started in 2018, which is a mass wedding ceremony for multiple couples. A completely crowd-funded initiative, this samuh vivah (communal wedding) is unique as it does multi-faith weddings and is not limited to only one religion. This programme has helped cultivate communal harmony within the villages. 

Another initiative is for women empowerment, an experiment along with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, consists of girls in the ages 10-21 years  electing their own Balika Sarpanch. This was first started in 2018 in Kunariya village with a view to curb child marriages, empower women from a young  age, include them in the conceptualisation of active citizenship and governance and inculcate independence. This experiment has led to a policy change which has mandated the presence of a Balika Panchayat in every village in Gujarat. The training of these Balika Panchayat members is facilitated by SETU. 

SETU also set up Panchayat Resource Centres (PRC) in 2020 to facilitate the people receiving the benefits from the various government schemes. They help in the end-to-end process from form filling to submitting and following up to see if the benefits have reached the respective people. 

Creation of the weave

Being a disaster prone area, it has been imperative for the Kachcchi society to stay close knit and cultivate a sense of helping others in times of need. This necessity has also seeped into the civil society that has been constantly working on different aspects of social-ecological-cultural transformation in the district. 

“The Homes in the City (HIC) programme was initiated after years of working on the issues of governance, women’s empowerment, environment, infrastructure and housing by five civil society organisations in villages around Kachchh.” – Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, SETU Abhiyan, Hunarshala, Arid Communities and Technologies (ACT) and Sahjeevan. All the organisations working in their respective areas realised that they needed a consolidated effort to ensure decentralised decision making and rightful access of citizens to civic amenities and dignified life in Bhuj city,” (Bajpai and Kothari, 2020).

Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan has been working on women’s issues vis a vis transformational livelihoods, violence against women, female sex-workers’ rights, legal support for women, leadership, youth participation and much more. 

Hunarshala which got registered in 2003 works extensively on owner-driven house building, building onto the efforts of collective organizations post the earthquakes. They started understanding local ecology, while discovering that the locals possess a lot of knowledge about mud house building. Thus deepened their work of exploring vernacular practices and documentation in rural and urban areas of Kachchh.

ACT (established in 2004) has been working on water security and independence with technical processes parallel to social process (awareness). Working in clusters of 10-15 villages each, they carry out study research projects to enable in depth understanding of geology and geohydrology along with groundwater recharge situation analysis, water budgeting and water balance. They offer training for capacity building and knowledge dissemination and also create livelihood options to get the youth interested in pursuing this cause.

Sahjeevan has focussed on environment and biodiversity related issues including work with pastoralism.

Apart from the organisations that are part of the HIC programme, there are many other civil society organisations like Satvik- Promoting Ecological Farming that works on rain-fed agriculture, seed sovereignty, agro-biodiversity and knowledge building. 

These organisations and many more have been relentlessly working in Kachchh on different issues and also collaborating where necessary to form an interconnected response to the multi-fold crisis in the region. 

For instance, in 2006, under the Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojna, Hunnarshala Foundation along with Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan members were leading the movement of decent housing for slum-dwellers, and ACT was looking at the water and sewage-related technologies, resulting in 314 houses being built in three slums.

The urban cell of KMVS organised urban poor women under the umbrella of ‘Sakhi Sangini’ (SS, a female friends’ collective) that work towards mobilising women through SHGs.  There are around 3000 women SS members (as of 2020). These members, through mobilisation, have also become an active part of their respective ward committees. 

In a bid to strengthen the decentralised urban planning process through active participation in the ward committees in Bhuj, various transformative collaborations have taken place on ground to create a multi-dimensional approach. In this, the work of the five CSOs listed earlier, as also others like Sakhi Sangini (a collective of poor women), Shahri Seri Pheriya Sangathan (of street vendors), Bhuj Shahar Pashu Uchherak Maldhari Sangathan (of pastoralists), and Jal Strot Sneh Samvardhan Samiti (of water conservation activists) are of crucial significance.

A more recent (2024) show of this solidarity was also seen and experienced at the National Vikalp Sangam, an event celebrating 10 years of a network of 95+ organisations working on alternatives to mainstream development held in Khamir in November 2024 supported by 12+ local Kachchhi organisations. 

Challenges

Along with the widespread work with a social justice lens embedded, the challenges are innumerable too. As in the case of Mota Angiya Panchayat, they lack resources for infrastructure and adequate support when it comes to policy reforms expected from the government with more prevalent social issues in the village. There is a constant tussle between the local,  state,  and central governments, where the panchayats don’t have enough autonomy to work by themselves and are limited by the lack of resources to be able to do even the most basic work necessary in the village. 

The PRCs have replaced the government officials in helping the citizens claim their rightful benefits and are now overburdened with work. The digitisation of the government portals has made it even more difficult for many people in the villages to access the benefits. These PRCs also lack enough human resources to meet the demands. The centres are also not centrally funded or have a constant source of funding; they are funded by individuals who want to support the process. 

Despite the Balika Panchayats being mandated in all panchayats in Gujarat, the Integrated Child Development Service is responsible for facilitating the process. But its staff  neither understands the genesis of the Balika Panchayat, nor do they know the visions behind it. SETU facilitates the training for these panchayats yet it is time consuming to cover the length and breadth of the entire state.  There are capacity challenges even across blocks. Nakhatrana block was added two years ago only after many requests from the sarpanches from that block. “Our (block’s) population doesn’t form a valuable constituency for the district elections and mainstream politics. Hence, we have learnt to be as strategic as the politicians are,” says Iqbal Ghanchi, Sarpanch, Mota Angiya.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges, the continued efforts at overcoming them along with community efforts and organisational solidarity, ensure that the district keeps striving to respond in a multitude of ways.

One can take inspiration from the interwoven model of responses across an entire district and that too done with so much love and compassion and an unending spirit of seva (service).

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