Anchoring Change is a collection of essays on 24 grassroots interventions, government-led and non- governmental, that are widely acknowledged to have precipitated ‘change’—understood as a narrowing of the gap between India’s robust political democracy and laggard social democracy.
The essays have been authored by current or past leaders of the selected interventions. Mehta writes in the prologue that the editors decided against third-party writers and instead “let the stories unfold” as “the protagonists of each initiative” wished. This has led to disparity in the style, and even substance, of the commentary—which has been given due acknowledgment in the opening pages. While some may feel this narrative unevenness is distracting, for this reader, it was a peek into how the individual leaders could have shaped the journey of the interventions. For instance, in the essay on Dastkar, the not-for-profit working to preserve and promote traditional Indian crafts, co-founder Laila Tybaji writes how Dastkar was born out of a few friends talking about the neglect Indian crafts had suffered, rather than the organisation being “the singular vision of one individual”. But many who are familiar with Dastkar’s journey would also know the role Tyabji, a designer “obsessed with the deterioration of the extraordinary craft and textile traditions” she had grown up with, has played in taking the NGO to where it stands today. This is not to take anything away from the other co-founders, or the personnel keeping its wheels oiled for everyday functioning, or the artisans whose resolute faith makes Dastkar a thing. But, individual imprints matter. Charismatic leadership may have its limitations, but interventions in the social sector, more than anywhere else, have heavily relied on champions—hard to imagine an Amul without a Verghese Kurien. That said, the narrative unevenness doesn’t help the reader readily evolve an understanding the common denominators of ‘significance’ of an intervention, a lodestone for the editors’ selection of interventions to be covered in the book. In that, a principal impairment.
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The decision to present the interventions temporally—from the early years of independence to the ones that were mounted this millennium—is of obvious benefit. Not only does the reader get to contextualise evident impact against gestation, it also gives a sense of history to later-day interventions that have built upon the success of predecessors. What we see as Swachh Bharat success today, owes a lot to the decades of work organisations like Gram Vikas have been doing in some of the most remote locations in the country, with some of the worst socioeconomic vulnerabilities. This reader had the opportunity to see both Gram Vikas and Pradan—two non-profits covered in Anchoring Change—in action in Ganjam and Kandhamal districts of Odisha in 2012.
Anchoring Change has also drawn a good balance between government and non-governmental interventions in the 24 it covers. Meaningful impact in many areas has come from not just government initiatives themselves—be it Tamil Nadu’s mid-day meal scheme or Kerala’s Kudumbashree—but also from how these have created an ecosystem that could foster aligned private sector interventions, including through partnerships. A Naandi Foundation would surely have benefited from Tamil Nadu’s learnings over the decades when it partnered state governments to supply hot lunches in schools—several studies have how MDM not only contributes to child nutrition, but also educational outcomes by reducing dropout rates.
While Mehta outlines the reason why movements have been excluded, there was perhaps room to talk about these by bringing in the organisations/collectives that spearheaded these. For instance, the seminal position of the women’s movement in India—especially at the grassroots around the national capital—in any discussion on the hard-fought recognition of women’s rights in the country can’t be denied. Yet, the collectives that drove it through the 1970s and 1980s, and gave it a definite shape in the 1990s, are hardly spoken of. There would be similar examples of many important interventions that have fallen through the sieve. With all selection criteria and constraints considered, these would make for a dearly-felt miss.
Anchoring Change: Seventy-Five Years of Grassroots Intervention That Made a DifferenceVikram Singh Mehta, Neelima Khetan & Jayapadma R V
HarperCollins
PP 380, ₹699
