A life lived on the edge: An account of the first ten years of the Foundation for Social Transformation
09 Feb 2015
A region on the fringes of the nation’s consciousness
On a map of India, the north-east territories look like an afterthought – precariously attached by a narrow strip of land, no wider than two kilometres in parts, called the ‘chicken neck’. This geographical side-lining is a feature of the region’s history and politics, too. Central government has never really known what to do with north-east India: the British colonialists classified this cluster of states as either ‘excluded’ or ‘partially excluded’ areas, thereby making it possible for officials and tribal leaders to rule as virtual dictators; and ever since the Independence of India (a particularly painful experience for the region), the north-east has been considered problematic.
Successive legislative initiatives have been introduced in an attempt to respect the distinguishing characteristics of the region and to maintain north-east India within the republic. In recognition of the diversity of the region, and of the number of tribal communities living alongside each other, the Sixth Schedule was introduced in the aftermath of Independence as a means of ceding a certain amount of administrative autonomy to the region and of promoting economic development. Economic development failed to follow, however, and the administrative autonomy was only partially successful, in some instances leading to individuals using district or regional councils to promote the narrower interests of families, friends or themselves, rather than acting on behalf of the whole community.
Separately, in a bid to stem the violence in the region, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) was introduced, giving the armed forces a range of powers (which many human rights groups have challenged), among them the right to shoot a person on the suspicion that they might pose a threat or be a militant intent on an act of violence or sedition. Again, the introduction of the Act has had as many negative as positive effects – the armed forces, for example, have been held responsible for mass rapes of women, and for a number of acts of violence against citizens (among them, the Manipur massacre).
The region has constantly faced conflict, it’s always struggling for basic needs, security of life, basic human rights. Security has always been a priority.
Gayatri Buragohain, Executive Director, Foundation for Social Transformation
This is a politically volatile and fragile region, bordered on all sides by other countries (Bhutan, Tibet, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh). These borders are notoriously porous, and there is considerable migration to and from adjoining countries as well as between states. There has also been constant conflict since Independence, involving struggles between different ethnic groups, between militant groups and the state, between different militant groups, and between communities.
Rich in resources – poor in the management of resources
The sense of being at the far end of central government’s concerns extends to the manner in which the region’s rich flora and fauna are being exploited. The rich resources of this part of India – coal, petroleum, bamboo and timber – are of real interest to big business and national government, more so, it seems at times, than the people who live there. But the move to exploit these resources has led to massive degradation to the environment and caused problems for its people. There is a proposal currently, for example, to harness water and provide power by building a huge network of 168 dams across Arunachal Pradesh, one of the world’s six most seismically active regions. This project, thought to be India’s largest ever hydro-power initiative, is in complete defiance of the best advice of experts and others, who have said that such a programme would be unstable.[1]
All such developments have been of benefit to only a small minority of people; these privileged few have contrived to gain from these developments financially, while for almost everyone else living in the area the effect has been almost entirely negative. In Meghalaya, for example, a state rich in rivers and seasonal rivers, many of the rivers have become polluted through the waste from mining and from contaminants leaching into the water – as a result, the fish stocks have declined drastically, the fishermen who depended on fish for a living have been deprived of their livelihood, there is no fresh drinking water, and the locals have to walk long distances to get to a secure water source.
Coyness of external funders, and a changing community base
North-east India is a particularly extreme example of a region on the fringes of a nation’s consciousness, considered something of an irritant, were it not for the financial advantages to be made from its natural resources and for the danger that its political instability might spill over into the rest of the country. Regions of this kind rarely benefit from central government funding, and their instability and potential for conflict frequently scare off external funders and developers, too. In the case of the north-east, the volatility and insecurity of the region were factors making it a region that funders approached with the greatest of reluctance. Other issues had also, however, contributed to this reaction over the years. As Gayatri Buragohain, the current executive director of the Foundation for Social Transformation (FST), says, there were some NGOs that had effectively been blacklisted by funders because of their inability to maintain the appropriate channels of communication with their funders:
Something we know in the world of non-profit work is that it is important that you manage your account properly, you follow the rules and regulations, you maintain each and every receipt, you have every detail of your programme organized – when, why, how many people, all of that. This was not happening. So the basic assumption grantmakers had was that they would get a report in this particular format … which most of the NGOs, the people receiving the grant, didn’t know how to do and didn’t understand the importance of, either. Because of this a lot of questions have been raised about the credibility of non-profit organizations in the region.
One significant challenge in the early stages of the FST was to overturn this perception of NGOs as essentially corrupt. A surprisingly large number of NGOs operate in the region (disproportionately more than in most other states) but many of them are no longer active – there have been too many stories of money being distributed to NGOs only for them to hold on to the money themselves or to waste it in ill-conceived programmes with no likelihood of success. As a result, a considerable number of organizations are effectively no longer likely to be considered by donors.
A final, significant deficit for the north-east region is the lack of attention it receives in the media. The long-term nature of its issues, perhaps, or its geographical remoteness, means that it features rarely in the press and other media – worse still, when it does, it is not the region’s challenges and its attempts to deal with these challenges that are the story but the activity, planned or actual, of big business in the area. Among the residents of north-east India, certainly, the national media is perceived as being corporate-friendly and disinclined to focus on the real issues that confront the region.
Faced with this triple whammy – lack of interest from central government, a reluctance to intervene from funders and an apparent inability from the media to paint an accurate picture of the region – one might expect the north-east communities to mobilize themselves, as communities of regions affected in a similar way often do, and become a powerful campaigning force, securing for itself the recognition and funds that are unavailable through conventional routes. The fact that this has not happened in north-east India is partly to do with the region’s inter-community tension and conflict and partly to do with a change in culture that has diluted the communitarian spirit of the region: there is a sense nowadays that those who can turn things to their personal advantage, do, and without concern for the wider impact of such behaviour. The traditional pattern of communitarian self-help, too, has been eroded by a new focus on the importance of acquiring money. A similar development has affected indigenous life: the working lives of people living from the land, or from hunting, have been affected by the changes to the environment – hunters, for example, are now hunting to meet the needs of people who live outside the region whereas previously their activity would have been guided by issues of local sustainability and environmental husbandry.
The origins of the Foundation for Social Transformation
This is the region in which a group of visionary citizens established the FST – or the North-East Network, as it was first known – ten years ago. Sharing a common ambition, this group of academics, economists, activists and people working in civil society decided to set up a grantmaking foundation that would help to develop civil society in the region. To an external eye, this coming together of 12 founding members in a region so geographically dispersed and with so many competing agendas is in itself a sort of triumph, but for Gayatri it is these very factors that made it so easy:
These were people who constantly meet together in different forums all the time and have been working on different things together for some time. The community is small, and the community of people who are working in the social sector is so small that we all know each other. I started working in this region only last year. Last February I moved here from Delhi but within just one year I know almost everyone who’s working in the sector; it’s a small network. We meet in the same meetings, we run campaigns together, we do policy work together – whenever there’s a crisis situation, we get together.
FST is the only indigenous grantmaking organization in the north-east, unique in that it was started by, and is now run by, people of the north-east. Its founding members were clear that it should operate in contradistinction to an international donor agency or grantmaking body, either of which might attempt to graft on to the region an approach or a project that was not the region’s own. Rather than accept someone else’s agenda, the FST set out to fashion an agenda that would emerge from the region itself in response to its own particular issues and challenges. And what became quickly clear – in the course of what turned out to be an extensive consultation process, involving everyone engaged in civil society in the seven states – was that most of the issues of the region flowed back to the years of conflict and to the continued political instability. The years of conflict had given rise to other changes, however, that were not immediately obvious: for example, many of the tribal societies in the region had prided themselves previously on the fact that there was more gender equality in north-east India than elsewhere in the republic, but that was no longer the position – indeed, violence against women is currently a highly significant issue throughout the region. A similar transformation has changed a community that used to look out for others, ensuring things were shared out equitably, into one in which people and communities have unequal access to resources, which are in any case managed inefficiently. The cultural context in which the emerging FST was to operate, therefore, was more challenging even than had at first been imagined.
This consultation process helped to identify not just the main thematic areas in which the FST would work but also its organising objects. It is a testament to the thoroughness of the process that, more than ten years later, both of these are unchanged, as are the main operating principles of the organization.
The four main thematic areas in which it was agreed that the FST would work are:
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