Seva Mandir

In recent years there has been considerable increase in the use of the village funds across villages. Major uses of the village fund have included:

• Repair of damaged common resources
• Purchase of fodder, seeds, fertilizer, drinking water to meet local livelihood needs
• Payments to village level functionaries
• Covering costs involved in organizing community functions, visits to government
departments and covering basic administrative costs
• Loaning within the village to individuals, general groups and women’s Self Help Groups

Democratically elected village committees (GVCs) have the responsibility for providing leadership and managing a variety of local development activities. This includes convening village meetings, monitoring and evaluating on-going development works, making payments to village level paraworkers and facilitating interaction with the formal government bodies. Although creating the desired space has proved challenging, women’s leadership is actively encouraged, not only through a 50% reservation for women leaders but also through the gender-sensitive facilitation provided by Seva Mandir’s field workers.

Seva Mandir provides a variety of capacity enhancement inputs in order to strengthen the elected village development committees. These typically cover both theoretical and practical issues including responsible leadership, values of citizenship, how to maintain records, make payments, monitor and facilitate implementation of physical activities and handle group dynamics.

Conducting democratic elections of the village committee is central to the process of strengthening village level institutions for local self-governance as it creates opportunity for rotation of leadership and promotes accountability. In addition to providing the space for new leadership to come forward, these elections, help to establish a sense of accountability amongst committee members towards the community and a sense of community ownership of the village institution as a whole.

Although the government has developed and made available a variety of schemes for poverty alleviation, including various types of pension and social security scheme, many eligible villagers are not able to get access to these benefits. This is due to a combination of limited awareness on the availability and eligibility criteria of such schemes and also the difficulty in actually securing access to such a scheme. Thus, one of the important functions played by the village development committees is ensuring that those who are eligible for the various schemes are able to gain access to them.

The idea of Supporting People’s Initiatives (SPIs) was introduced to strengthen efforts at securing greater decentralization of the development process. Essentially, it involves working with the village development committees and help to build local capabilities and transfer greater ownership, empowerment, and accountability to the community. Under SPI, the community puts forward its proposal for all village level activities – including the payment of paraworker stipends - for sanction by Seva Mandir. As a part of this process, the sanctioning process itself has been decentralized from the head office to the block level. At present 311 (71.3%) of GVCs are under SPI as compared to 162 (42.0%) last year.

Experiences this year have revealed a very encouraging increase in participation and community monitoring of local activities. At the same time, difficulties abound and uptake of full responsibilities by the SPI committees has proved slow. Furthermore, it became clear that in many cases only two or three members from each committee are active and that many committees still have difficulty managing their bank linkages. While this has somewhat increased the work burden on the zone level staff, such emergent challenges are integral to the development process.

The new responsibilities that come with greater autonomy for the village committees have also entailed additional costs, such as those associated with travel to and from meetings or banks. These have tended to act as a disincentive to the committee members, who bear these costs themselves, to take on the responsibilities. To address this, an amount of Rs.1000 to 2000 has been made available for each committee to help cover such costs. This year, a total amount of Rs.3,63,700 was spent on this.

During the course of the last year, numerous examples have arisen of communities taking action to address their local development issues through both independent action and by linking with formal institutions of local self-governance. The various Seva Mandir-supported interventions at the village level have provided many committees and communities with the opportunity to become more involved in local development processes and to practice greater responsibility. In addition to this, the provisions of trainings focusing on panchayat and government linkages appear to have contributed significantly to changes in the relationships between communities and local government bodies. For example, a number of communities have started both calling PRI (Panchayati Raj Institution) representatives to their village meetings, and going to panchayat (local village council) meetings themselves. These efforts have also led to the increased community action on issues related to the NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) and the RTI (Right To Information Act).