Putting grassroots knowledge at the centre of India’s development trajectory

This article is authored by Adam Khorakiwala, Group Chief Financial Officer, SwitzGroup and Deval Sanghavi, co-founder, Dasra.

In the development sector, ‘last mile connectivity’ is a familiar phrase. It captures one of the most persistent challenges in India’s development journey: Ensuring that policies, programmes and services reach the very people and communities they are intended to serve.

Non-profit (Lanfest)

While a well-thought-through policy is important, its ability to reach the most vulnerable people in the remotest parts of India ultimately enables impact on ground. A well-designed health programme matters only if the most economically disadvantaged family can access the service when they need it. A livelihood scheme has meaning only if it works for the person whose income depends on it. A climate intervention succeeds only when it responds to the realities of communities living on the frontlines of climate risk.

Time and again, designing schemes and policies for reaching the last mile has proved a critical part of successful programmes. For much of India’s development journey, governments, institutions and experts have designed policies and solutions, while grassroots organisations and civil society actors have played the critical role of taking them to communities and making them work in diverse local contexts. This model is largely owing to the fact that India’s challenges are enormous and varied and responding to them requires institutions and infrastructure capable of thinking and acting at the systems level.

But in the process, we may have overlooked something important — the knowledge, wisdom and solutions that often come from the ground.

India’s non-profit sector, with over 5,15,000 registered organisations (including religious and charitable entities) is the largest organised civil society in the world. NGOs in India work on a wide spectrum of themes and issues including education, healthcare, livelihoods, gender, climate, disability and disaster response. Most of these organisations have spent years, sometimes decades, building relationships with people and local institutions. They understand the social norms, economic pressures, power structures and everyday realities that determine outcomes of developmental interventions.

For instance, Dr Aishwarya Rao lives with a locomotor disability and leads the NGO Dorcas. With her experience as a clinician and as a Dalit woman who has navigated the same systems, she brings public health rigour into grassroots disability work and government HIV programming. Dorcas runs programmes for Dalit, tribal, queer and economically marginalised women and gender-diverse persons with disabilities in Tamil Nadu. Their work is shaped by an understanding of how disability intersects with caste, gender, sexuality and poverty and how these identities can compound barriers to health care, social protection and public services. This kind of proximity to the communities and systems they work with allows Dorcas to identify gaps that may not be visible in programme design or administrative data, while also developing responses that are grounded in the lived realities of the people they serve.

Many grassroot organisations work towards solving some of the most complex challenges by using local knowledge and wisdom which big organisations and systems often struggle to deal with. A particularly powerful example is the Ekal Nari Shakti Sansthan (ENSS) in Rajasthan, a grassroots NGO led by and for low-income single women. What began with a 1999 convention of 450 widows from 21 districts evolved into a state-wide collective that today works with nearly 1,00,000 single women. ENSS brings together widows, divorced, separated, abandoned and older unmarried women who often face discrimination, violence, economic insecurity and difficulties accessing property and government entitlements. The organisation's work contributed to the expansion of social security support in Rajasthan from widow pensions to pensions for other eligible single women. ENSS demonstrates that grassroots organisations can do much more than deliver services. They can build collective agency, generate knowledge from lived experience and create institutional change by taking what they learn from communities into systems-level impact.

Despite the scale and contribution of India’s non-profit ecosystem, grassroots organisations are often underrepresented in philanthropic portfolios. Funders may naturally gravitate towards organisations working in geographies they are already familiar with or towards larger organisations with systems and processes that feel familiar and easier to assess. In doing so, we can sometimes mistake organisational scale and formalisation for organisational strength.

Organisational systems, however, need to be appropriate to the context and scale of an organisation. A 500-person organisation may require sophisticated systems and processes that would be unnecessary, or even counterproductive, for a closely-knit organisation of 50 people whose team is deeply embedded in the community. In many grassroots organisations, proximity, trust and close relationships allow teams to make decisions quickly and adapt their work based on what they are seeing on the ground. The question should, therefore, be whether an organisation has the capabilities and leadership needed to deliver effectively, rather than whether it mirrors the structures of a much larger institution.

It is thus important for the civil society ecosystem to support organisations and local leadership over programmes and activities. These questions can help shift the role of grassroots organisations from being delivery partners to being knowledge partners. Because expertise in development does not only sit in formal systems, research institutions, consulting firms or large nonprofits. It also sits with the community worker who knows why women are not able to access a scheme, with the collective that understands the changing economics of a livelihood and with the grassroots leader who can identify an emerging problem long before it becomes visible in data. For philanthropy, this also means considering a portfolio approach — supporting a diverse set of grassroots organisations and local leaders, including smaller organisations where the potential upside can be disproportionate to the size of the initial investment: Not only through direct impact, but through the learning, innovation and locally grounded solutions they can generate for the wider ecosystem.

A more mature development ecosystem is a two-way stream in which solutions travel to communities and knowledge from the ground travels back to inform systems and policies. Not every local innovation needs to be scaled. But promising ideas can be recognised, tested, strengthened and, where relevant, adapted for use elsewhere. This also calls for a more nuanced understanding of risk. Smaller organisations are not inherently riskier investments simply because they have fewer people or operate in a smaller geography. In fact,in many cases, funders can work closely with their leadership, understand decision-making directly and see their work up close. And because many grassroots organisations have built deep, long-term relationships within a specific geography, their focus on depth rather than breadth can enable greater continuity and sustainability within communities.

India’s ambition to become a developed country will require the ability to respond to increasingly complex and interconnected challenges. Governments, large institutions, research organisations, businesses and philanthropy will all have important roles to play. But alongside them, we will need strong local institutions that can see change early, build trust, respond to emerging needs and translate lived experience into solutions. The Covid-19 pandemic offered a powerful demonstration of this as local organisations were able to draw on years of relationships and knowledge to act as first responders for communities. India’s development journey will be stronger when the last mile is not seen merely as the destination of development, but as a source of knowledge that shapes where we go next.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Adam Khorakiwala, Group Chief Financial Officer, SwitzGroup and Deval Sanghavi, co-founder, Dasra.