Resource Poor
- 40% of the world’s poor live in India
- for 74% of India’s population who live in rural areas, basic infrastructure and facilities are still a dream
- 84% of the villages do not have banks, 69% have no post office and 31% don’t even have a bus service to connect them to the outside world
- only 32% of the villages can be reached by metalled roads
- 21% of the rural population does not have access to potable water supply and a stagering 86% have no access to sanitation facilities
- death due to starvation in drought prone areas are common. In ‘95-’96, 500 tribal children died of starvation in one district alone
INDIA '97:
a step away from
the 21st century,
Consensus decision-making
SAMUHA believes that enough already divides the people that we work with: caste, occupations, need, credit, politics...SAMUHA therefore works within a consensus framework in which all decisions made by the GRAM SANSTHA are taken forward only if they are unanimous. In the even that there is no unanimity on a decision, then the community is encouraged to debate the issue further till a consensus. is arrived at. As a result, all interventions taken up by the GRAM SANSTHA are need-based and provide powerful examples to the people of what they can do when they all put their shoulders behind and issue.
Tertiary organisations
SAMUHA has recently started helping the GRAM SANSTHAs in a region to come together as tertiary associations that are registered societies themselves. Two of these SANGAMA and the Ranganatha Gramin Abhivruddi Sanstah have already been registered as independent institutions of people.
SAMUHA makes its organistional services available to communities through SANGHATAN it community organisation resource group. SANGHATAN is Kannada for ‘bringing together’
Economic Development
Once the framework for people’s participation and management is institutionalised. SAMUHA helps people to create economic resources to allow them to meet their own basic needs
SAMUHA has set up specific resource groups to assist people with different land-based initiatives:
AKANSHA works towards watershed development by helping people to understand and undertake appropriate soil abd moisture conservation and land-use interventions.
SAMUHA HUSBANDRY works towards creating resource bases around milch animals , sheep and poultry
JAN SAMUHA works with people to develop open wells and surface water irrigation
‘Why are basic infrastucture and facilities not provided for the very people in the villages who grow all the food that we eat?’
Rural people in India were btter of in the past, then they are now in these modern times. As long as they had to survive on their own, Indian villages were organised as self -sufficient communities. With the 19th century, with colonialisn and the subsequent lopsided growth of democratic India, Indian villages now primarily subsist as adjuncts, as poor cousins of Urban India: the 26 % who live in India’s growing towns and metropolises absorb most of the Indian Budget toward their services and infractructure. And this discrimination exixts even when a villager migrates to the cities. S/he now becomes a slum dweller a member of the urban poor.
SAMUHA believes
....that the greates strength that an Indian village possess despite all the exixting divisions is its sense of community the village is in effect the smallest unit ot the nations state.
Organising people
SAMUHA believes that if enough people voice their concern and their determination to act, things happen. (single voice)
SAMUHA’s organisational strategy focusses on helping people to multiply their voices. (multiple voices)
People Institutions
To formalise this process, SAMUHA helps all its rural communities to come together as Village Institutions known as the GRAM SANSTHA. GRAM SANSTHAs are Woni or strret-based: all families in a street are organised into a primary or street group. Each woni/street group is assisted to unanimously select 2 woni/street representatives - 1 woman and 1 man (woma/man). All woni/strret groups are then apexed into the secondary association, the village instituation or GRAM SANSTHA.
