Adding steam to grassroots initiatives

An organisation is helping sustain NGOs through their initial years with funds and advocacy

Over the last few decades, India's development and NGO sector has seen many initiatives with great potential run aground due to lack of funds, training and engagement in their initial years. Back-up support, especially in the nascent years, is crucial for the survival of NGOs. This is where Delhi-based Society for Rural and Urban Initiatives, or SRUTI, steps in, having nurtured over a hundred field initiatives since it began in 1983.

"We pick the best of such initiatives and offer them financial support for their work," says Shweta Tripathi, co-director of SRUTI. "We also partner with them in doing advocacy, networking and capacity building."
 
SRUTI has 128 fellows in 13 states. "These are all people who work at the grassroots level, are not necessarily well educated but are doing tangible work," says Satyam Srivastava, SRUTI's other co-director. "We look for initiatives that are replicable and have an incremental social impact."

Here's a look at some of them.

In 2009, Sarvahara Jan Andolan, a Maharashtra-based NGO founded by SRUTI fellow Ulka Mahajan spearheaded the first-ever successful people's referendum that resulted in the de-notification of the 10,000-hectare Maha Mumbai Special Economic Zone. In 2014, Patthar Khadan Mazdoor Sangh, headed by SRUTI fellow Yusuf Beg, forced the Madhya Pradesh government to compensate the families of silicosis victims, highlighting, for the first time in India, this deadly occupational disease contracted by unprotected workers in stone quarries and mines, construction sites, glass factories and other silicon dust-producing plants.

Another SRUTI fellow, Pradeep Dash of Odisha-based Lok Chetna Sangathan, brought to light the problems of forest-dwelling tribes, enabling them to assert their rights over their forests by harnessing the power of panchayati paj. Satark Nagarik Sangathan (SNS), a Delhi-based civil society collective supported by SRUTI since 2005, was the first to publish "report cards" of members of Parliament and legislating assemblies contesting elections. They have also got the Delhi government to compulsorily display details of the utilisation of local area development funds in all municipalities under the Right to Information Act.

Tripathi says that while financial support from SRUTI is nominal and time-bound (around Rs 2 lakh annually and never exceeding 20 per cent of the field partner's budget), the organisation provides crucial help in the form of advocacy, training, resource mobilisation and capacity building. "We also extend need-based project support to them."

SRUTI functions as a networking forum for its partners. "We have annual meet-ups with partners from across the country where they discuss best practices," says Srivastava. "When we visit our fellows in the field, we advise them about methods that other fellows are successfully implementing." For example, Mahajan's successful implementation of the tool of public referendum in Maharashtra, SNS's use of the RTI Act to get slum-dwellers the ration cards they are entitled to and the idea of Jan, Jangal, Zameen (People, Forests, Land) - that indigenous tribes must be recognised as equal stakeholders in natural resources - are now themes informing the work of other SRUTI fellows.

Much of this exchange of ideas and best practices occurs when SRUTI officers visit their field partners to assess how they are doing. This has the added benefit of ensuring greater transparency and accountability.

Fellows have to submit half-yearly reports of their accounts, activities and fundraising to SRUTI. Over the years, many of the fellows and their organisations have grown to become significant agents of social change. SNS is one such example. Initially, SRUTI extended the fellowship to its founder Anjali Bhardwaj when SNS was in its infancy, helping South Delhi slum-dwellers demand their ration cards. After the organisation grew in size and scope, SRUTI extended fellowships to two of its senior-most field officers. SNS is now at the forefront of the RTI movement and has been involved in drafting anti-corruption and grievance redress legislations like the Lokpal Act, Grievance Redressal Bill and the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Raising funds to support the fellowships is an ongoing struggle. SRUTI has pioneered fundraising through scrap collection in Delhi since the early 1990s, independent and sustainable local fundraising being an important focus area for the organisation, and has collected scrap even from the prime minister's house. It attempts to independently raise at least 10 per cent of the fellowship fund through scrap collection every year.

In the next couple of years, Tripathi and Srivastava are looking to double their fellowship base across the country. "All our fellowship projects have a common underlying theme," says Tripathi. "It is the reiteration of our fundamental 'Right', as citizens of a democracy, to 'Take', or 'Demand' from our elected government."

Whether it is tribes asserting their right to take from the jungles they have inhabited for centuries or it is Delhiites demanding accountability from their elected representatives, SRUTI's fellows are demonstrating that the public sphere can be transformed simply when citizens learn to assert this right.

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To learn more, visit sruti.org.in or its Facebook page;
Next fortnight, the story of a teacher who has inspired hundreds of slum children to transform their lives through art