Moving beyond education
From its inception, Seva Mandir has sought to help the poor change their circumstances of deprivation. In the early phase of Seva Mandir's work, the focus was on promoting adult literacy among poor peasants. It was believed that with literacy, the poor would become more aware of their rights and entitlements. It was not long before Seva Mandir was made to realise that this single-minded stress on literacy was not enough. The organisation, therefore, extended the scope of its work to include developmental programmes that would benefit people in economic terms. Top

Giving impetus to local governance
By the late seventies, people associated with Seva Mandir's programmes had become popular and well respected within their communities. Some of them successfully competed for elected office in the village council and other tiers of local self-government. Seva Mandir at that time felt that these developments would lead to improvements in the functioning of the village councils and also in the government agencies responsible for delivering development services. The experience subsequent to their gaining office however belied expectations. Most of the elected representatives, albeit sponsored by the community of poor peasants, could not bring any meaningful change in the institutions responsible for development. Their inability to change these structures of governance was a consequence of the fact that their substantive authority, control and negotiating power over resources was dependent on getting along with authorities in the higher echelons of the political and administrative structures. By not conforming with those in the power structure they ran the risk of losing what little support and patronage was available for development from the State, and if they conformed they became indistinguishable from the people they replaced on grounds of their being corrupt and neglectful of the poor. Top

Building village level groups
Looking to these structural problems and to the fact that the nature of people's participation (in Seva Mandir's programmes) had a patron client dimension to it, Seva Mandir tried to redress these imbalances by building village groups in the early eighties. The intention behind this was to enable villagers to demand accountability from their representatives in the village councils and to pressurise the government to expand the actual scope of people's entitlements. These groups were also encouraged to solve their (community) problems by co-operating among themselves. However, except for a few exceptions, most of these groups were not able to generate sufficient pressure to make a significant difference to their situation. Apart from the fact of acute poverty, the villages in this region are small and dispersed, which made co-ordinated action extremely difficult. Thus while people lacked the institutions and resources to bring about their own development, the hierarchical systems of the government, even with the best intentions, were inherently incapable of responding to the localised needs of the village groups.Top

Building a village cadre of paraworkers
In the late eighties, Seva Mandir undertook to create additional capacity at the level of the people. The key idea was that rather than the poor having to depend only on the State to promote their development and provide services, there should be alternative institutional support for the poor to service their development needs. Village Committees were set up to manage and monitor these programmes and Seva Mandir systems geared up to respond to village plans for development.
A cadre of village based professionals called paraworkers was slowly built up in the fields of health, education, forestry, childcare, community organisation, etc. They were provided training in the requisite skills by Seva Mandir, and were given a small stipend. Over time, many paraworkers have moved into formal leadership positions through the Panchayats. Strong paraworkers have also increased the community's ability to hold outside interveners (such as Seva Mandir) more accountable.   Top