How Urban Traps Derail Rural Development
By Moin Qazi
31 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org
It is tragic that rural development programmes are planned and executed in India by bureaucrats and officials based in faraway metro or urban centres. This is one reason why th development programmes and strategies for their implementation are out of sync with rural realities.
For government staff, there are similar pressures and patterns. On the first appointment, inexperienced technical or administrative officers are posted to the poorer, geographically more remote, and politically less significant areas. Those who are less able, less noticed, or less influential, remain in those outposts longer, if not permanently. The more able and visible, and those who ingratiate themselves to bosses or who have friends in headquarters, are soon transferred to more accessible or prosperous rural areas, or to urban peripheral areas which continue to be classified as rural areas, thanks to certain inept yardsticks set by government authorities. With promotion, contact with rural areas, especially the more remote districts, recedes.
If a serious error is committed, or a powerful politician offended, the officer may earn a ‘penal posting’, to serve out punishment time in some place with poor facilities—a remote area, hot and healthy, inadequately connected to the nearest town, without proper infrastructure, distant from the capital—in short, a place where poorer people will be found. The pull of urban life will remain: children’s education, medical treatment for the family, chances of promotion, congenial company, consumer goods, cinemas, libraries, hospitals, and quite simply power, all drawing bureaucrats away from rural areas and towards the major urban and administrative centres.
Once established in offices in the capital or in regional or provincial headquarters, bureaucrats and bankers quickly become over-committed in terms of their time, unless they are idle and incompetent, or exceptionally able and well-supported. They are tied down by meetings, committees, sub-committees, memoranda, reports, programme notes and urgent papers; vendors trying to get their air conditioners, furniture, computers, taxi and travel booking services organisation-approved; daily through the dossier of newspaper cuttings, staff recruitment, training programmes for staff, workshops for themselves; finalising tour itineraries with personal secretaries, discussing weekend recreation plans with liaison staff, disciplinary enquiries, and far too many investment experts with alluring investment options and opportunities. There are times of the year, during the budget cycle, performance review, preparing and approving business plans, supervising proper juxtaposition of figures on the spreadsheet, when they cannot contemplate leaving their desks. The very emphasis on agricultural and rural development creates work, which further restricts them in their offices.
If the head of the department or organisation is inactive, he may be relatively free. But the more he tries to drive his goals and introduce new management techniques that he picks up from the occasional seminars that are part of his professional circuit, the busier is our official. Post-seminar and -workshop organisation consumes further precious time: business cards sorted, emails sent to important participants with brief but pithy sentences praising their ideas, and acknowledging with appreciation emails from participants who have similarly eulogised him.
By then it will be time for the next seminar. The same formalities have to be completed again. Registration, travel and hotel bookings, a short background paper prepared by the subject expert in the organisation. The circuit continues and the networking process keeps sprawling, spawning a planet of its own. So the more paperwork is generated, the more coordination and integration are called for, the more reports have to be written and read, and the more inter-departmental coordination and liaison committees set up.
The more important these committees become, the more members they have, the longer their meetings take, and the longer their minutes grow. The demands of aid agencies are a final straw, requiring data, justifications, reports, evaluations, visits by missions, and meetings with ministers. Each member is on so many committees that it is hard to ensure that he at least marks his attendance even though he may be mentally occupied with the agenda of another meeting. The staff has to spend overtime processing data, finding logical conclusions and marshalling arguments to support their assumptions. A whole battery of staff is immersed in designing flip charts and preparing Powerpoint presentations, embellishing them with illustrations, charts and tables and drafting executive summaries of committee reports. The grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened for government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with fewer staff. Participation has risen in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty, consuming even more precious time
Moin Qazi is a well known banker, author and Islamic researcher .He holds doctorates in Economics and English. He was Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. He has authored several books on religion, rural finance, culture and handicrafts. He is author of the bestselling book Village Diary of a Development Banker. He is also a recipient of UNESCO World Politics Essay Gold Medal and Rotary International’s Vocational Excellence Award. He is based in Nagpur and can be reached at [email protected]