Participation in real meaning…

Participation in real meaning…

Participation is a word nowadays popular not only in development sector but in corporate sector as well. Everyone is using it very easily but can’t assimilate or internalize it. Everyone means trainer, NGO workers, politicians, government high authorities etc. all are using this word ‘Participation’.

What I learnt from our watershed classes of participation (From Ms. Shilpa Vasavada, Ms. Kirtida Vora), you can’t generalize the people by saying villagers (gramloko) or all the Gujaratis or all the Indians (deshvasiyo). It becomes very raw statement if we use it like this.

Is it ambiguous? May be you can feel that way.

If we address the people as villagers or community and generalize them then the only people who are already active and aware will participate in each activity if you want or not and if you inform them or not. For example in Gramsabha – We announced gramsabha by every means like by writing on walls, by beating drum, by announcing in mike etc. but the people or community who are deprived and suppressed like poor, dalit, women, small farmers etc will not participate in gramsabha.  But, yes the politically active and aware people will surely and only participate in Gramsabha. To make deprived and suppressed people to participate, we have to work hard in terms of encouragement and strengthening them by building their capacities. By one or two visits, they are not going to believe you and going to come because suppression was going on from many years. Even they have very limited income generation activity so they will give more priority to their activity than gramsabha as they find gramsabha is not more useful for their life. Even nobody has heard them in gramsabha so how can we expect them that they will come and speak in gramsabha in your one or two trials…!

But if we say poor, dalit, small farmers, women, women farmers then we can concentrate on that particular people and community who really need. If we speak and thought villagers/all Gujaratis/all Indians then we can’t concentrate on oppressed people like above. If we think then only we can execute. Still we have big difference between poor and rich, women and men, small and big farmers. We can’t distribute benefits equally in all villagers. If we have two children, one is in good health and one is mentally retarded, to whom we are going give more love? Obviously to the mentally retarded one. Same way we have to concentrate more on these people. I have visited many villages where the work of SHGs and income generation activity, watershed, water & sanitation taken place very effectively but our brother and sisters who are poor, dalit, women, women farmers are still far behind because our social mobilizers, middle level managers and high authorities don’t have time to spend with this needy people to understand their requirement instead they are busy in finishing the targets. I remember one session of Mr. Sachin Oza, in which he said first you understand the people/community and specially the poor, dalit, women etc. But instead we want to make them understand our schemes and what they have to do in this scheme and their responsibilities for village etc. Infect we are directly blaming them without understanding them for not participating in the schemes. I like to raise the question to all of us – how many are participating in our society meeting? This is the answer.