간장공장

본문

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOR REVITALISING RURAL AND URBAN CENTRES

Indeed it is my honor to present my humble paper on the Indian context of Community Development. Thanks to Dasom Church of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, especially to the Pastors Rev.Oh young Mi and Rev.Jang Chang Woen who are indeed concerned about the poor and the needy in their difficult circumstances.  Their ministry to the Migrant workers is remarkably salutary in the context of South Korea.

Basically I am a Pastor working in the Presbyterian Church of Korea as Ecumenical Co worker deputed by the Church of South India and sponsored by the Association of Protestant Churches and Missions in Southwest Germany (EMS). I am involved in the Ministry for the Migrants, along with Rev.Jang Chang Weon of Osan Migrant Workers Cultural Centre.

 India is a vast multi cultural, multi religious and multi linguistic country with 28 states of different languages. So this paper only can present bird’s eye view of community development. I tried to present the revitalizing factors of rural communities and intermediary urban centers.

RURAL RECONSTRUCTION

India is predominantly a rural agricultural country.  There is a vast difference between rural and urban set up.  If we are concerned about the small urban centers, they are obviously the rural in India as the targets for community development. In order to visualize the rural reconstruction programs we need to get the glimpses of its general features. In fact every village is unique.

A typical village has –

1. About 800 families or 3,000 people live as a homogenous community
2. Most men have no permanent jobs. The current official “Below Poverty Line” (BPL) is set at Rs 2,500 (65$) per month per family
3. Family planning is a growing trend now a days
4. About 80% of children attend elementary school (and have their midday meal in the school) After elementary school about 60% of them leave the village or commute for a nearby town for high school
5. Gender discrimination is predominantly compromised as a social norm
6. Caste system distinctly prevails in the village. And people live in caste-clusters practicing their caste functions. The outcaste communities who are called DALITHS live in the outskirts of the village as untouchables
7. Jajmany system prevail in most of the traditional villages
8. Normal village has limited facilities such as safe drinking water, sanitation, transportation etc
9. Housing and live stock are part of every family living together
10. Joint family system exists in most of the villages
11. Traditional unhygienic sanitation practices are compromised in all the villages.

Village Demographics

3-5% of the villagers are large farmers (land lords) with more than half the total farmlands. Almost 60% of the villagers do not own any land. They work in the fields as agricultural labor, during the planting, reseeding and harvest seasons. Rest of the year, they do some labor if there is some work. Otherwise they involve in artisan like stone breaking, bamboo work, and so on. They earn about $ 1.25 per day. Bonded labor is compromised as a relief for the debts of the poor. Women are discriminated and girl child is deprived in many ways against the male child.

Programme models in revitalizing

Hear I only sight few of the programms which contribute to the rural reconstruction in Indian situation. No one is an end in itself. All contribute a bit to the totality. No one is a guarantee for immediate and full conversion.

Predominantly the village forming depends upon monsoon.  One year deprivation of monsoon leads to three year draught and migration. Power pumping system of underground water is possible only for the land lords and intermediary formers.  Storage of rain water through Check dams is the scarce luxury of small formers that too for short period crops. Rain water preservation is the aim in many programs such as check dams.

Check dam in Rajasthan

Food Security: Food security refers to increasing crop yields, protecting harvests, ensuring good and stable prices. One example to reverse this trend and benefit the farmer is in the case of tomatoes, mangos. Instead of simply bringing and selling the tomatoes to the urban markets for less than its transportation or production cost, alternative by products need to be sought such as paste or pulp or powders and so on. Then also problem of transportation and viability arises. Small formers committing suicide for bankruptcy is common every year.

Health and Sanitation: The villager needs mostly basic health and sanitation. When food is available, they eat a hardy meal but meals are not regular and many are malnourished. Villages are usually pollution free but in most villages you will find the domestic sewage flowing in the main street creating a clear invitation to mosquitoes and diseases.. The best way to handle the sewage is to construct a soak pit and gutters.

Most villages do not have any medical clinic, doctor or a nurse. When they need medical help, they usually travel many miles to the nearest health centre or a clinic in another town.

Sewage water in the street

All the villages need to construct a multi-purpose community hall - a small building that can host many services and act as a platform.

Monthly visit of a health worker

Infrastructure:

Village infrastructure starts with roads, water systems, sewage collection, streetlights and so on. The farmer will appreciate the availability of a road to take his crops to the nearest market. Water is usually pumped from the ground water supply. Villagers must pump the water using a hand pump. Even in a village, where the water is pumped up to overhead storage tank and delivered with gravity.  Water is released once a day and in some cases once in two days when big crowds of women galvanize at the water tap in a precarious queue ready for any amount of altercation. Madanapalle has lost its water source permanently. The under ground water belt sank deeper than viability and people have to buy every glass of water.  This is only a sample of many such situations

Power

Most villages are totally dark at night. The villagers go to sleep at sun down. The government indicates a village as being electrified if the main high-tension wire passes though the village on its way to feeding the power for the factories in a large city. Even if power is available in a village, it is intermittent (like in the cities). Alternate non conventional energy resources need to be taped.

                                             Solar street lighting – Odamthurai

Education:

Only a minority of villages have schools and that too usually up to an Elementary school. For higher secondary school, the children have to travel to a nearby town.  General opinion in a village is that 5 year child onwards can contribute to family economy by raring a sheep or a cow or baby sitting or collecting firewood and so on. So sending a child to the school is a big decision on the part of the parents. However by the time child finishes elementary school parents feel the burden of school expenses more over,  they need this grown up child to help them in earning daily bread.  So lot of help and motivation is needed for the parents. In slums and towns private schools compete with heavy fee while the free schools offer perfunctory services to produce big number of drop outs.

Loans and bonded labour

“India is a rich country. Indians are very poor" is a slogan to show the growing disparity between rich and poor. Economic exploitation is the decease that needs to be treated in community development of urban centers.  Money lenders and money borrowers can not leave each other until one looses completely his game. Everyone knows what a loan shark or a ‘pattan’ looks like. He is the one standing next to the factory gate and collecting his interest payments from the employee as soon as he gets a paycheck. The land lord who lends money to the poor often  pave the way for bonded labor for generations, So the Self Help Groups is an emerging model to make a break through.

Self-Help Groups:

Every person, city or a village dweller, needs an income. We need to create an economic activity for the sustenance of the poor in some way or the other. Self Help Groups are playing a great role in saving money. But their role is more than that. Apart from the

Self Help Group in a village

economics the group also builds a cooperative system. They invest their savings in to a bank and take loans from the bank for their income generating programms.

Communication and media

Many villages already have satellite dishes to receive TV programs. But the question is the kind of programms for rural folk addressing to their needs and problems. News Paper is a matter of luxury in many villages even the paper is delayed for more than a day. The village folks can not understand and mean anything when we talk to them about Indian Silicon Valley, Bangalore giving modules to the global network in IT.  What a disparity in knowledge and people!

Government Ministry of rural development

Rural development implies both the economic betterment of people as well as greater social transformation.  In order to provide the rural people with better prospects for economic development, increased participation of people in the rural development programms, decentralization of planning, better enforcement of land reforms and greater access to credit are envisaged.  Initially, main thrust for development was laid on agriculture industry, communication, education, health and allied sectors but later on it was realized that accelerated development can be provided only if governmental efforts are adequately supplemented by direct and indirect involvement of people at the grass root level.  Thus a series of programms are initiated by the Government of India and NGOs are busy in advocacy and awareness programms.

URBAN REVITALISATION

Indian population lives in four stair habitat namely Cities, Towns, Villages and Hamlets. More than half the urban population in India lives in small towns with between 5,000 and 100,000 inhabitants in each. Each one of these centers depend on the other towns for trade and economy. The economic interdependence between urban-based enterprises and rural consumers and between rural producers and urban markets, and the reliance of many households on both rural and urban-based resources are often stronger in and around small and intermediate urban centers, underlining their important potential role in local economic development..

The towns are surrounded by a cluster of villages and hamlets. The life styles of these centers are very different from that of city dwellers.  Let me try to explain their limitations and how they are affected in their process of community development.

Inter dependency of Trade between villages and towns

The urban Centers can provide local markets for agricultural inputs such as machinery implements, fertilizers etc, which are the needs of small-scale farmers. But unless farmers are able to respond to the demands from urban consumers, by using natural resources, credit, labor and inputs, local markets are limited to very low-level transactions in towns. More attention to the role of small and medium-scale local traders as a major source of information and credit for farmers is also necessary, as they often play a vital role but are hampered by lack of transport infrastructure and storage facilities, and are often ignored by policy-makers.

As a matter of community development, the small and micro-enterprises are encouraged, where low-income groups concentrate. But they need access to markets, outside capital sources, basic education and technical knowledge, and institutional support to identify local opportunities and respond to competition from imports.

Slums as centers of immediate concern for urban development

A slum is defined as a compact settlement with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together usually with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic conditions. Such an area was considered as “non-notified slum”. If there are more than 20 households then that area is known as Notified Slum” by the respective municipalities, corporations, local bodies or development authorities

According to 2001 censes, the population in 640 registered Cities was 284 millions.  The population in slums of those cities was 43 millions. This constitutes 15 per cent of the total urban population of the country. In these slums 7.4 million (17.4 per cent) of the total slum population belong to the Scheduled Castes and one million (2.4 per cent) to the Scheduled Tribes. Slum dwellers are distributed into four industrial categories namely Cultivators, Agricultural Laborers, Household Industry workers and many other contingent workers

In the seventies and early eighties, the government emphasized the notion of ‘slum free cities’. What this often meant was forced or voluntary resettlement of slums in central cities. However, Very soon the Govt. realized the difficulty that the slum dwellers who were being resettled were not fully integrated in the economies of the cities. Resettling them would have adverse economic consequences.

Secondly, removing slums from central cities and transporting them to new settlements on the outskirts of the city also became a problem because of the distance for the dwellers to their contingent jobs, thus further worsening the welfare of slum dwellers. Madanapale flood rehabilitation took 5 years to compromise. This was like removal of black spots during apartheid in South Africa.  Near Osan, Seochong dong apartment planning is another example.

With this realization, the government started focusing on slum upgradation and slum rehabilitation programs. In the initial years of slum upgrading, the focus was on providing infrastructure to the slums including housing. Once the slum subsides in a vacant unused unhygienic corner of the city, the problems of child labor and social victims such as street children, boded child laborers, child beggars, child labor in bars and restaurants, child sex workers, juvenile delinquents, commercial sex workers domestic child labor and so on will be the invariable consequences.

Political exploitation of urban centers and increase of crime

The urban centers in Indian context such as slums and labor colonies are filled with vulnerable population living in many precarious conditions of poverty, easily become pray to the politicians to buy cheep votes (which commonly happen in India) thus making the slums as cheep political commodity. Different political groups compete on this count, creating dangerous tensions amongst the dwellers even to the extent of fostering the provisions to the   unemployed youth in goondaism and maphia, naxalism, radicalism, Peoples War Group and so on.

Impact of Globalization

Globalization has created opportunities to a few. But to the large majority of the poor people it has not meant anything. Deepening difference between the rich and the poor has been an immediate negative impact in many spheres of our social life. Environmental degradation is another threat of the inevitable process of globalization. We can not stop the flow of globalization but only meddle with its path. “Some claim globalization has tended to perpetuate poverty, widen material inequalities, promote consumerism and unnecessary possessions, increase ecological degradation, sustain militarism, fragment communities, marginalize subordinate groups, create intolerance and deepen crises of democracy.”(Mary Yuen Mee,Yin, “Responses of Christian Churches to Globalisation”, Pub: CCA, 2005, p2-3)

In Indian context, the villages and small urban centers are heavily affected in the process of “development induces displacement”. Urbanization and industrialization add the fuel to fire with regard to rural migration, displaced strange vocations, confused family relations, paying for pollution, increase of crime, substance abuse, alcoholism and so on.  With regard to the agro rural communities Prof.Kim Young Bok was talking to Indian delegates says that the groaning earth and groaning people are an interconnected reality. The earth is robbed by its integrity and sustainability. (Rao,BDP, “Voices of the Voiceless” CSI Pub., Chennai 2002) This is true in Indian case. For example, the chemicals that are injected in massive doses into a centuries old life giving soil for growing commercial crops like cotton seeds in Nossum is not for human sustenance but for narcotics and other chemicals. The leather industry has permanently poisoned vast areas of rice fields in Ranipet with its salty chemicals. The slum dwellers grow short crops like mint and coriander leaves with exhaust water along the DBR factory walls, and supply the greens to cheep restaurants and street venders are only passing on slow poison to the poor.  What could be the remedy for this kinds of permanent damage for life in rural and urban centers is the concern of only a silent buy passer.

Migration

Regional rural–urban migration, especially of the poorest groups, often concentrates in those small and intermediate urban centers where there are employment opportunities. But constraints on access to housing and land can severely limit possibilities for poor migrants to diversify their income sources through subsistence agriculture and home-based income-generating activities.

Migrants move to small and intermediate urban centers rather than to larger cities depends on the income-generating opportunities available locally and on the reasons why migrants move in the first place.

Reasons for migration

1. Expelled from rural areas because of increasing concentration of mechanized commercial farms
2. Natural calamities
3. Draught
4. Development Induced Displacement
5. Industrialization
6. communal strife
7. Sanscrtization

Hoon Seol explains the notion of a 'migration transition’. ( Dong, Hoon Seol, A review of international migration in North East Asia UNESCO-CIMS, 2005 Seoul pp 11-12) The migration transition is seen as a result of 'industrial transition' and 'demographic transition.' At the beginning of the industrialization process there is always an impromptu influx of migrants from rural areas who eventually caught up in social stress and economic crisis in their new roles and work. It is alarming to note the effect of migration on children. Children of migrated parents in urban centers face precarious situations and mal adjustments because of which they are vulnerable to become social victims. Church has a greater responsibility to care for such children particularly of Dalit parents who are mostly the Christian members. "Church needs to awaken to, move away from its conventional approach and open up its corridors to meet the new and emerging needs of the social victims by utilizing the resources, time, and influence of its privileged members (Arun Kumar, Banyan-"Models of ministry for social victims"; Christian Education for social victims, Church of South India 1999. pp 82 - 84)

Commuting population of urban Centers

Many rural residents prefer to commute rather than migrate, as this helps them to retain a foothold in farming. Investments in transport facilities that respond to the needs of low-income groups are likely to increase their options Lack of, or limited access to, health care, education, safe and sufficient water and good quality sanitation are an important part of the multiple deprivations that most poor groups face, if they migrate. These urban commuters are also particularly important in providing rural populations with access to government services, the rule of law and the fulfillment of their civil and political rights.

Role of NGOs in community Development

There are about 20 000 NGOs in 606 districts of India working in various spheres of community development such as -

I.                    Focus on Development : -

1.      Drinking Water

2.      Education

3.      Health

4.      Agriculture

5.      Environment

6.      Conservation of Natural resources

7.      Micro finance for self employment

8.      Family planning and welfare

9.      Care for Differently abled

10.  Housing and sanitation for the poor

11.  Emergency relief in calamities

II.                 The NGOs in all their activities, formulate their goals with the following Key issues.

1.      Human rights

2.      Development induced Displacement

3.      Forest Land Rights and Tribals

4.      Child Rights

5.      Women Empowerment

6.      Right to Information

7.      Right to Food

8.      Panchayathi Raj and democratic values

9.      Communal Peace

10.  Animal  Welfare

11.  Labor Rights

III.               The NGOs mostly cover the following cultural aspects with their short term and long term programmes.

1.      Tribal and Dalit Art and Culture

2.      Cultural and Historical Heritage

3.      Religious harmony and multi-faith context.

Role of the Church in Community Development

As it is commonly understood “the church is the only association that works for its non members” In fact church is always inclusive and open for all people. It always has its concern for the poor and the needy whether they are members or non members. Community organization is inherent in all the church of gatherings. And it is a potential force of human power.  Therefore I think the church is always on the forefront to initiate or support any programme by anybody for the welfare of the poor and the needy paving the way for a peaceful and sustainable human values and dignity. Mary Yuen Mee-Yin, in her book “Responses to Christian churches to Globalization” suggests categorically the paradigms for the church to involve in a coherent and comprehensive approach in  the community development -Advocacy, Campaign and Networking, Charity, Pastoral care and Solidarity with the Marginalized, Education and formation on Social Justice and Sustainable development.

Conclusion:

Indeed the concern in Community development is that people in all circumstances must live in coherence and co operation for corporate edification. Co operation and mutual benefit need to be progressive as a community bypassing the perils of negative competition, exploitation and enculturation. Especially in these days of inevitable flow of globalism the information and knowledge are widening so fast that the agencies of community development really need lot of cautiousness in making their attempts sustainable in the rapid change of situations

I am sure this would provide models to the world for new paradigms in the contextual efforts to build communities with freedom and justice appropriate to its time and place.

Rev.BD.Prasada Rao

EMS Ecumenical Co worker from Church of South India

PCK Dasom Church, Osan

Kyonggi

S.Korea