Looking for the next problem
Since 2003, OASiS has designed and developed new approaches to critical socio-economic and ecological problems. In 2017, with a time-tested process behind us, we went looking for an issue that was going to grow exponentially in the years ahead.
Climate change had started to show its ugly face and was attracting global attention. The SDGs were losing focus to climate goals. The countries doing the most damage to the planet were hiding behind developing countries, luring them into trading away their climate protection for carbon credits. Corporates were eyeing a business opportunity and CSOs were eyeing funds. Climate change was becoming an industry, crowded with consultants, producing far more advisors than doers. We sensed the clutter, and we could see the problem was going to grow enormously anyway.
What needed immediate attention was adaptation, so that the pain would be bearable. We looked for the community affected first, and it was obviously the farmers, first affected and worst affected. They were losing their yields and farming was their only livelihood. Their cattle depended on the same yields. Falling yields and lost livelihoods were driving families to migrate.
Two dead ends
Like other CSOs, we assumed better agricultural technique would reduce losses. We focused on agriculture and quickly found many agricultural scientists already there. So we shifted to addressing the loss of primary livelihood through secondary and alternate ones. That space was full too, with CSOs and CSR teams competing to create additional livelihoods.
And then something caught our attention. Despite promises of high returns, farmers were getting only their labour cost. Their livelihoods looked like they belonged to somebody else. Probing deeper, we found that almost every secondary livelihood had been designed by the CSO or CSR team, identifying the product, providing the skill training, supplying the raw material, arranging the loan, checking quality, selling online and offline, keeping the accounts. What was actually happening was this:
- Bulk buyers and urban markets were treated as premium and promising, guaranteeing higher returns.
- Rural livelihoods became dependent on urban markets and demand. When urban demand moved, rural people lost their livelihoods. Urban customers had no brand loyalty to rural products.
- Rural producers became dependent on the CSO for everything, and received only the labour cost, because the entire promised premium was consumed by packaging, outreach, selling and distribution.
- Aggregating farm produce through FPOs was supposed to fetch high prices through negotiation. Instead it reduced procurement costs for corporates, and turned FPOs into one-stop shops for selling agricultural inputs back to farmers. The corporates benefited more than the farmers did.
Looking the other way
We decided the approach was not sustainable and turned around. If sixty percent of our population still lives in rural India, how are their own needs met? A closer look at the village shops opened our eyes: they were packed with FMCG goods.
If rural markets had no demand and no money, what were all those FMCG products doing there? We scrambled for data and found that FMCG companies were drawing between thirty and forty percent of their sales from rural markets. Then we looked at their annual revenues and could not believe our eyes.
We wondered how the CSOs had missed this gold mine. Probably they had always been told that rural areas are poor, which is why CSOs are there in the first place. We also heard that data from funded studies on rural populations was somehow reaching the FMCG companies and helping them design their rural marketing strategy.
And as we wondered how the mess had been created, we found the facilitator and biggest hidden beneficiary of it, a partner in hiding, encouraging and enabling all of it, and taking its cut in the form of GST. With that we also found the real source of all the freebies. We laughed at the urban literate, who had been made to believe that their hard-earned income tax was being handed to the poor and making them lazy.
The picture became clear. It was a mess, and the CSOs probably did not know they were in it.
GLIDE on paper
The growing problem and the huge hidden opportunity pushed us to design a solution that could help rural populations and CSOs get out of the mess, regain control of rural markets, redesign livelihoods to survive climate change, conserve natural resources, build a circular rural economy, and arrest migration. Running it through our social innovation process and a series of negative brainstorming sessions, we finally had GLIDE on paper. Now it had to be piloted.
Ramarbhui
At the same time, we had won an award from Hewlett Packard and the Sri Aurobindo Society for our rural education idea, GRAMODAYA. The award went to three ideas with high potential that needed prototyping, and the money was for piloting them and sharing them with the world. We wanted the hardest possible place to test in.
Coincidentally, our friend Sikha Roy of SRREOSHI, an Ashoka Fellow based in Durgapur, West Bengal, was moving from land rights into education and livelihoods for the families whose land rights she had won, and wanted our support. We asked her to pick the most difficult zone in her geography. She chose arid Bankura district, famous for its terracotta horses.
For GRAMODAYA we chose a village with a middle school and access to government welfare departments. For GLIDE we chose a Maoist-affected forest village called Ramarbhui, precisely to test whether GLIDE would work where even the government could not.
The village had 141 households, one tubewell and a primary school with a local teacher. Being a forest village, land was limited, and generations of division had left each household with about an acre and a half. The small ponds dried up a couple of months after the monsoon. Being Maoist-affected, neither the government nor the Maoists were doing anything. Two trucks came every day and the villagers queued to rush them, because getting on a truck meant a day's wage. During the day only the very old, the children and the cattle remained. The nearest weekly market was three and a half kilometres away, and villagers went in the evening to buy unsold vegetables cheap.
We started testing GLIDE with a few interested young men and women. Slowly others joined, including newly married women. We worked with them for five or six months, with six active groups producing and selling locally, handholding at every step. Once we were confident they could manage, we asked whether they could continue without us, and promised to come back in a year. The real test of sustainability is whether the community can do it alone. We stayed reachable by phone for accounting questions and encouragement.
The trucks had stopped coming
We went back full of scepticism and quiet fear. The first surprise was that the trucks were not there, they had stopped coming because the number of people boarding had dwindled. The bigger surprise was that migration had fallen to zero. We pinched ourselves, because we knew of no model that had arrested migration completely. When we asked the young people what had happened, they simply said: why go with the trucks and get exploited, when we earn the same and more from these livelihoods without leaving the village? Simple for them. A milestone for us. We decided not to celebrate, and to come back one more year later.
From customer to seller
No phone calls came during the year, so we returned with even more scepticism. The news of our visit brought smiling faces together. The livelihoods were continuing and growing in volume, value and number. And that weekly market, where they had once bought unsold produce cheap? The groups were now selling their own products there, having gone from being its poorest customer to being an active seller. Only one boy had left the village, having taken a job as a Patwari in a neighbouring Panchayat. There was no other migration. What was more exciting was that the boys were now getting married easily, and their new brides were being encouraged to join the work.
GRAMODAYA worked too
Our rural education pilot had completed two years as well, and its successful students were finding local employment in welfare departments, NGOs and local private hospitals. Both pilots had worked. Much of the credit belongs to Sikha and her SRREOSHI team, who handheld both and acted as a support system throughout. She finally had both an education and a livelihood answer for her land-rights families.
Then COVID
Elated at having two successfully piloted models at once, we wanted to document both frameworks immediately and share them with every CSO. We documented GRAMODAYA first, because we owed utilisation reports to the Sri Aurobindo Society and Hewlett Packard. Then we settled down to document GLIDE and spread it. And then COVID struck, bringing everything to a halt, and forcing all of us to shift to local needs and problems. Successive waves kept us busy, but left gaps in between to think about the pending work.
In those gaps we reflected on the GLIDE journey and realised something important. This was a model that created a mindset shift, in villagers and in CSOs alike. And a mindset shift does not happen by handing someone a framework and expecting them to work through it alone. It needs handholding. So during the lockdown we curated a workshop around the model, designed to trigger that shift and carry it right through to implementation on the ground. After several iterations the modules were ready, but the workshop itself now had to be tested.
When restrictions eased, our friend Vijay Bharatiya offered to find an organisation to pilot it. Jeevan Teerth, a CSO founded by the senior Ashoka Fellows Raju bhai and Deepti ben and headquartered in Gandhinagar, ran the pilot workshops in two places: the village of Golana in Khambhat, and a tribal forest village in Dediapada. Both went well, with a few impromptu tweaks that we documented. Originally designed as two days, we extended it to three, and then added a field visit so it could be anchored in local context.
After that we offered the workshop to all CSOs. The design was kept simple and inexpensive, and run on a gift economy basis, so that it could reach rural communities through CSOs of any size. The remaining problem was how to manage the travel and the workshops alongside our existing work. So one of us stepped down from the executive body and gave himself to this cause.
From August 2023, GLIDE started gliding across the country.