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Participation may be defined as purposive interaction that helps primary stakeholders at the grassroots level gain access to decision-making processes either directly or through legitimate institutionalized bodies such as community-based organizations and/or non-government organizations that happen to represent their interests and define their stakes in development projects. The stakeholders' consultative process that emerges as a result of participatory development contends that community involvement is imperative

1. To identify the needs and perceptions of primary stakeholders.
2. To sustain and maintain civic amenities after withdrawal of
   implementing agencies.
3. To monitor and evaluate the facilities & services created during the
   project.
4. To institutionalize community-based mechanisms.
5. To develop trusteeship among the community vis- E0-vis their civic
   facilities.

Rapport at the community-level may be achieved by organizing events that mobilize primary stakeholders to share a common platform from where their concerns may be voiced. Such events serve as an entry point to address the community psyche and streamline an interactive process, utilizing which identified representative groups may adopt a proactive role in the overall decision-making process and micro-planning of project activities and their implementation.

Rapport-building would also depend on the formal and informal groups capable of impacting the community in terms of interventions. Activities undertaken for initial rapport-building should also be gender specific and depend on the willingness to organize such programs on the part of primary stakeholders. Follow-up of the events by way of community-level feedback would help re-assess needs and reorient future intervention strategies.

Community mobilization also seeks to cohere social capital at the community-level that would facilitate monitoring and evaluation of physical works undertaken during the project. Social capital would also ensure that the community continues to look after its collective assets even after completion of the project. Community participation strategies operate at

1. The communitarian level where the community is brought back into
   developmental focus in order to sustain a proprietary sense among
   primary stakeholders and
2. The neo-institutional level where actors and institutions are transformed into actors in institutions i.e. end-users of institutionalized civic services are mobilized to identify their personal agenda with community interests.

These are in effect utilitarian tools to motivate the community to become proactive and safeguard collective concerns at the corporate level. Community participation programs may be strategized to streamline developmental interventions and facilitate an interactive dialogue process between primary and secondary stakeholders. Such programs serve to build empathy at the stakeholders' level and facilitate dialogic rather than pedagogic interfaces at the project implementation, monitoring and evaluation levels.

Community mobilization is not an end but a means to secure rapport-building that - in its turn - ensures acceptance of interventions at the community level. This acceptance would finally serve

1. to assess needs with regard to civic services/assets & physical
   works, vocational training programs & income-generation,
2. to spread awareness with regard to health & hygiene and safe
   community practices and
3. to monitor & evaluate progress of physical works by the community
   itself.

The Energy & Resources Institute is an NGO consultant to the Asian Development Bank-sponsored Kolkata Environmental Improvement Project [ 02-07] jointly implemented by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the Irrigation & Waterways Department of the Government of West Bengal in association with the West Bengal Pollution Control Board. TERI is mandated under KEIP to implement the Stakeholders' Consultative Process that is expected to serve as the defining axis of the project during needs assessment exercises with regard to physical infrastructure [such as water supply and sanitation services] as perceived and prioritized by the primary stakeholders.

KEIP aims to upgrade basic urban services and ensure "affordable access" to the same on the part of project-affected persons by enhancing their livelihood and raising the material quality of their everyday life. This requires interventions on the part of TERI and its project partner Bharat Sevashram Sangha in terms of community mobilization & participation programs and awareness-generation activities related to health & hygiene, solid waste management, sewerage & drainage and poverty alleviation initiatives [such as short-term vocational training, microfinance networking and income-generation programs].

TERI and BSS have staged street theatre productions and puppet shows as part of its creative communication strategy. These combine mime as well as mass theatre techniques in a participatory manner of performance to disseminate information pertaining to safe waste disposal measures and best practices of urban good governance in the context of overall community development.

TERI and BSS also held sit-and-draw competitions for school children in slums selected under KEIP and subsequently organized community meetings with local women to discuss their specific needs with regard to water supply, sanitation and basic urban services. Vocational training needs analyses were also carried out during such exercises. TERI was able to form the first ever women's self-help group under KEIP at 99 Suren Sarkar Road [a selected slum in East Kolkata] where a short-term vocational training course sponsored by the Community Polytechnic Cell of the Government of India was launched during November 03. Other SHGs have since then been formed in the project area.

Creative communication strategies will be efficacious during participatory monitoring & evaluation of ongoing physical works. TERI and BSS' field facilitation endeavors with regard to progress of physical works at Pyarabagan Nagarpalli [KEIP's pilot project] and elsewhere helped streamline different ground-level angularities that emerged due to differences in perception between primary and secondary stakeholders with regard to priorities, designs and implementation of  physical works.

Creative communication techniques such as street theatre, nature trail events, video displays, wall painting exhibitions and sit-and-draw competitions serve to underpin TERI-BSS' SCP exercises that are generally planned in accordance with NGO's Social Action Plan. Upscaling of urban infrastructure is more often than not located in the tension between development and displacement: this is particularly reflected in KEIP's Rehabilitation & Resettlement Component. TERI- BSS' creative communication activities seek to resolve such field-level discontent in the most effective manner possible by defining development in a participatory and pro-people mode. Project-Affected Persons are conveyed the message with the help of static and dynamic tools that KEIP's development interventions are "for the people, by the people and of the people".      

June 18, 2006

Top | Kolkata Diary

The Week of June 18, 2006    
Three-handed Cut-throat: Congress, BJP & Left hold Cards... by Rajinder Puri
Afghanistan: The United States Challenged by Pakistan by Dr. Subhash Kapila
Immigration, Slavery, Apartheid, Sonia, Lula, Chavez and Bush by Gaurang Bhatt, MD  
Negotiating Globalization by Dr. Prasenjit Maiti    
Catching the Water by VK Joshi  
Dreams, Ideas and Realities by TA Ramesh  
Fate and Destiny by J. Ajithkumar 
Destiny and Hard Work by P. Mohan Chandran
Participation as Development by Dr. Prasenjit Maiti
The Mythology of Rajputism by Kusum Choppra  
Understanding Mahabharata : The Puzzle of Pandu by Satya Chaitanya 
Being and Nothingness by Julia Dutta
Bluetooth by Ruchi Gupta    
Spellbound in Seminaries by Hasan Mansoor 
Democracy Demolished by Shuriah Niazi 
Dream Girls, Real Lives by Deepti Priya Mehrotra 
The Witty Side by Melvin Durai 
On Becoming Grandparents by Rajender Krishan
Will your Kids be of "Good Character"? by Gary Direnfeld 
Internet for Kids by Garima Gupta