PRADAN is Thirty

Celebrating the journey, the challenges and the successes of PRADAN as a leader in promoting rural livelihoods for three decades, the author focuses on the way ahead.

PRADAN will be 30 years old on April 18 this year. This article traces the recent history of PRADAN, articulates the personal understanding of the author about where it stands today, touches briefly upon important issues and suggests that PRADAN reorganized itself for greater relevance.

PRADAN 2015: Vision and New Stance

In November 2004, PRADAN launched a visioning exercise—a formal initiative to identify the challenges and the opportunities in 2015, and the ways in which it could grow very fast to meet these challenges. The visioning exercise was aimed at looking 10 years ahead, namely, 2015. The Vision for 2015, arrived at in November 2005, articulated that PRADAN would be working with 1.5 million poor rural families in 100 districts in the operational areas of seven states while also exploring some adjoining areas and states.

During the visioning exercise, there was a clear shift in PRADAN’s stance of engaging with the world. PRADAN will proactively seek out partners with common areas of interest, in the context of its development task, that is, interventions of PRADAN with families in villages. PRADAN will orchestrate its web of partners, keeping the needs of the poor people in focus. It will enter into a relationship of give and take, of helping ‘others’ in order to achieve the common developmental task. Strategies to achieve this will include working directly with poor communities (as was being done earlier), non-direct action (later renamed as ‘partnership action’), policy advocacy, generating awareness of rural issues through the media and engaging in a transformational relationship with other stakeholders.