Of Deepening Democracy, Financial Inclusion and Organic Detergents: Whither Development?

Seeds of wisdom buried in jest! Categorising those who are involved in the ‘Business of Do-Gooding’, the article compels us to look at what motivates us in our endeavours to work for the rural poor

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since 1981 when I wrote a rather short and, I thought, pithy note, ‘The Business of Do-Gooding’. The Late Sanjay Ghosh and many other developmentwalahs had gone on to condemn or praise the arguments in that note. Some of them naturally raised very valid questions about the locus standi of a 25 year-old, who had then seen only a little of the country and even less of development organizations.

The argument presented was that development interveners needed to (a) get over the unnecessary debate about the ethics of intervention, (b) learn to focus more and (c) attempt only those tasks that are within the reach of their resources and implementation competence. Since then, I guess I have gained much poundage and lost much hair. The combination significantly reduces the propensity of anyone questioning my locus standi.

The intervening decades have been quite pregnant with changes. That period of the late seventies was followed by a decade when people talked much about community based, participative and sustainable development, and then by a decade when people talked about sustainability, gender and equity. We are now in an age when the heavy burden of all these words is further augmented by the weight of highminded and long-winded expressions about rights, empowerment and accountability in governance. So how does the development discourse and practice seem now?