My Declaration

I want to work in the area of urban governance. This has to do with both democracy and dissent. More important, it will allow me to stick around Hyderabad and work with people I know best. Within this I have to choose an area/domain that has a potential for both for change and an impact.

The project proposal to the Ratan Tata Trust is a step in this direction. Do a scan and see what others are doing - what's interesting and what's not and more important what seems to work. Help us get an idea about the possibilities. Though we are thinking of it in a project mode and it will take more than a year to complete - the eureka moment does not have to wait that long. It could happen tomorrow or it may not happen for the whole year. My guess is it'll happen sooner rather than later. Once that happens it is away to the races.

We (I) will have ourselves (myself) a topic and maybe 2-3 years to work on it and make an impact. This harping on impact is from my present desire to be closer to the action (activist mode) rather than influencing (however marginally) through advisory/consulting roles.

Incidentally the proposal has the 'in principle' support of the Trust. We are going through some minor hassle with the documentation that needs to be submitted along with the proposal.

List them out

May be we can all begin by listing out specific themes/ areas we are interested in and discuss if we have the expertise of taking it up as a hedgehog / foxy hedgehog?

Food security: because we have been researching food security as a part of the ICRW project and also because we have been the secretariat for the food security advisors. By the way are the meetings of the food security advisors still being conducted?

Urban Migration: For the way Hyderabad is rapidly growing in population and considering we are a mega-city in the making. What is happening with the mega-city proposal with SRTT?

I am also interested in following up with the anti-pollavaram campaign thought its not in the urban space

Prospects for a Prospectus

Am posting this as a blog rather than as an addition to the comments Diia’s blog.

When we (or people we associate with) started off in development there were not many people around and it seemed natural to get into get into many topics. I think a further reason was because of our association with grass-root rural development. If you want to do something about life in a village you have to get into everything (agriculture, health, gender, sanitation, ecology etc.etc.) But lots has happened since and the whole development game has long been mainstreamed and there are specialized NGOs even in rural development. (microfinance organisations, sustainable agriculture organizations, forestry organizations, housing organizations, dalit rights organizations and so on). So one kind of thought this is leading to is that if you are a generalist it is difficult to scale up activity or even survive.

Bears thinking about. One of my gripes/critiques of what Satyam Foundation does is as follows: How can you work in five cities with seven areas of work (health, education, livelihood etc.) and hope to make an impact in all of them with a miserly budget of Rs.5 crores? You probably need to pick one area and do a really good job of it.

The other thing that bothers me is our tendency to be a boutique and not mass-production (is that the antonym?). As we get into the NGO mode it may be wise to have some service offering(s) that gives us the locus standi (beyond our individual credentials) to participate in public fora. Service offerings have a further advantage of being replicable and scalable – and so once they are designed and validated constant intellectual effort is not needed. It will be really cool if 70-80% of our work did not involve innovation and intellectual effort (but mere operational excellence!) but brought in the bread and butter.

All this in justification of choosing a domain and a niche within it on which to focus. Not that it means you dont do other things (given what we are I think that is inevitable).

Tagline Suggestions

Hello folks. Thinking of adding a tagline to the blog name. It should be a short phrase which can be appended to the title. Eg: "Barkatpura - Home of the Free and the Brave" or "Barkatpura - The End of an Era".
Also, the name can be changed as well. While the url is fixed, the name of the blog can be modified. Any thoughts on that?

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Some disconnected ramblings by Sarpvinash on Farhan Akthar's Don can be found here.

The Daily 300

I think this blog should be a team blog and everybody who gets on it must have a responsibility. And that is that we should have a target that we will contribute 300 words a day to it as new posts. Comments dont count. If this is too steep then we should create a roster and everyone should do it by turn. At the moment we are four (five if we manage to get nisha enrolled) so 300 words every fourth day.

So who is going to start? i suggest an alphabetical order so you go first anita. anita, lalita,(nisha), sarpvinash (whos that??) and sashi in that order.

Out of Africa

The per capita quantities through the PDS have been dwindling over the last year or more in Andhra Pradesh. Yesterday there were demonstrations in Hyderabad protesting that the supply of kerosene and rice was being stopped for white card holders in hyderabad. i am not sure about the rice but i can believe that about the kerosene.

Seems like more and more that happens in India is modelled after what they consider is working in Africa.

There is a big experiment going on in some southern African countries that says that direct cash transfers are the best way of subsidising or reaching welfare dollars to the poor, vulnerable, disaster stricken and so on. The thinking being that once money is in the hands of the poor then the market will take care of the supply side of welfare.

No need to bother about bureaucratic competence, corruption, supply chains and so on. Just do this one big thing right (getting the money into the hands of the poor) and the rest will take care of itself.

The model is gaining a backdoor entry into India in the form of the Rural Employment Guarantee. Once we say that 100 days of minimum wages are available to anybody who is seeking work and also establish that empirically this is true through surveys and social audits -we can also say that anyone interested in keeping body and soul together in a socially acceptable way in India (no begging, stealing etc.) can afford do so at market determined prices.

So our dependence on the elaborate Public Distribution Systems will gradually reduce and over a period of time we can dismantle it or confine it to the statistical outlier population. Stands to reason doesn't it?

Opportunity Knocks

Had breakfast with Kim Alter. Wanted to find out how the first week with the Social Impact cohort had gone on. She said they were rated well but ......... What were these buts? Course content was not contextualised; it was not pitched correctly - they were straddling both a 'professional development' curriculum as well as an 'organisational development' initiative. The attention and interest of the participants was not uniform across the sessions; quality of resource people was not up to expectation, given the available pool; mentor related issues and co-ordination etc. etc.

All in all a good program but lacking a competent grounding.

Which leads to the interesting part. Are we interested in supporting this programme - initially till January ending. Then if mutually we decide that the experience is positive in terms of outcomes and relationship we could think of a more strategic arrangement.

Should we or should we not. We are not exactly desperate for work right now!

What do you think?

welcome to barkatpura

thinking about what url to give the blog. yugantar or thinksoft but both are taken. a url is a locator and in a sense it is analogous to a physical location so thought why not call the url the physical location of where we are - so barkatpura.

also could be apt because the place has always had an identity crisis. are we a movement or an organisation; are we commercial or a charity; are we hierarchical or we flat-structured; are we radical or merely liberal; and so on.. the only thing we dont have a doubt about is our location and that certainly is in BARKATPURA

so welcome and contribute to the MPDS (multiple personality disorder syndrome)