Association of Indians in America - Madison

What’s happening in rural India and what the Indian American community can do to lend a helping hand to make sure that rural India catches up with the rest of the country in economic progress over the next decade or two.

An NGO which is very active in the villages we visited, was the DHAN Foundation with its headquarters in the city of Madurai. DHAN stand for Development of Humane Action.

The DHAN Foundation is a professionally managed development institution which has been working, for over a decade and a half, with poor communities to improve their quality of life and reduce poverty. The Foundation believes in enabling communities to bring about significant changes in their lives by themselves. The enabling process requires highly motivated professionals.

DHAN’s raison d’etre consists in:

** Mothering development innovations: Promoting and nurturing new ideas on different development themes, viz., microfinance, small scale irrigation, dry land agriculture, working with panchayats.

** Promoting institutions to reach scale: Encouraging exclusive thematic organisations to undertake development work with a sub-sectoral focus -- to ensure that quality benefits reach a large number of the poor..

** Developing human resources: Bringing young professionals into the development sector and providing them opportunities to practice and develop relevant knowledge, attitudes and skills to work long term.

DHAN’s guiding principles include:

** Engaging high quality human resources to work at the grassroots with the focus on enabling rather than delivery of services.

** Promoting people’s organisations at various levels to ensure entitlements and to build an effective demand system.

** Focusing on promotion of livelihoods to directly address poverty.

** Enriching the themes and retaining sub-sectoral focus as the strategy for growth.

DHAN’s Programmes:

Presently DHAN works with some 700,000 poor families in TEN STATES of India in the rural, tribal, coastal and urban contexts. The states are:

Andhra Pradesh in 6 districts

Assam in 1 district

Jharkand in 1 distrct

Karnataka in 5 districts

Kerala in 1 district

Madhya Pradesh in 1 district

Maharashtra in 1 district

Pondicherry in 2 districts

Orissa in 2 districts

Tamil Nadu in 19 districts. ,,

It has over 750 development staff, including 350 professionals, both men and women from varied disciplines working at the grassroots.

It has pioneered in evolving new themes for addressing poverty and livelihood which are scaled up to reach large numbers of families. It currently operates two major themes in Tamil Nadu:

**Kalanjiam Community Banking Programme with poor women and

**Vayalagam Tankfed Agriculture Programme with small and marginal farmers dependent on tanks for their livelihood.

The Kalanjiam Community Banking Programme has developed the federation model of people’s organization. The model places emphasis on establishing appropriate institutions and services owned and managed by poor women and building sustainable linkages with mainstream banking and government institutions. The women are now going beyond microfinance and are addressing other development needs such as health, education etc.

Village tanks and ponds occupy a significant position in irrigation and local ecosystem in South India. They are one of the vital water resources for rural communities. As water-harvesting structures, they were ingeniously designed by ancient rulers and traditionally managed by the local communities over many centuries. They sustained farming activities. Neglect of these precious water resources led to a decline in their performance as assets and badly affected the livelihood of the community. DHAN Foundation, through the Vayalagam Agriculture Programme, has sought to conserve these treasures by organizing the farmers dependent on them and regenerating local management by building their stakes.

One of DHAN’s important initiatives is reviving ooranis -- oorani is a dug-out pond that traps rain water run-off and stores it for drinking water purposes in rural areas where ground water is either inadequate or unfit for use (http://dhan.org/ooranis/index.php). For a list of ooranis under development now in Tamil Nadu: http://www.dhan.org/ooranis/projects.php . Another interesting oorani site:list of donors http://www.dhan.org/ooranis/donors.php .

New themes in progress include the Tata-Dhan Academy for grooming development professionals, Rainfed Farming Development to improve the livelihood of farmers, enabling the Poor through Information Technology, and Working with Panchayats. DHAN has an integrated model of livelihood restoration and rehabilitation programme in tsunami affected coastal regions for fishermen and coastal farming families. DHAN People Academy and DHAN Institute of Vocational Education cater to training and capacity building needs for the leaders and people functionaries. The Foundation is also promoting development tourism to show case art, culture, heritage and development work. DHAN is involved in developing rural tourism model in collaboration with UNDP and Government of India.

Through its work at the grassroots, the Foundation has been successful in demonstrating large scale linkages of people’s organisations with the mainstream institutions such as banks, government agencies, academic and research institutions. With experience and learning from the grassroots, it has been able to influence policy makers at different levels. It is a member of several policy advisory fora to banks and government. It is also being seen as a resource centre for the themes of microfinance and water for NGOs, bankers, government agencies, donor agencies, and researchers. The experience of over a decade and half has laid a strong and sustainable foundation for a few more decades of development innovation, institution building, human resources development, networking, development campaigns and policy impacting for pro-poor policies. It is a founder member and member of various national and international networks for promoting pro-poor policies.

As for the future, DHAN looks forward to intensifying its work in the Southern states, both in depth and scale, and further strengthening its involvement in projects in the Northern states. It proposes to give focus through specific projects to livelihood opportunities for the poor, and skill and capacity building programmes.

People within India as well as people of Indian origin living abroad, including Indian Americans, have contributed financially to the development of specific projects sponsored by DHAN. Dhan also has a volunteer programme where socially concerned and committed individuals from within India and abroad can offer their expertise in the area of health, education, water, communication, web design, content creation in local language for meeting local needs, for periods ranging from three months to a year. Volunteering could also be virtual for tasks such as web design, editorial support, writing for the web etc. There are also opportunities for donation in kind such as computers, cameras etc.

DHAN’s website is at http://www.dhan.org/ . Email: dhan@md3.vsnl.net.in , cfpdhan@gmail.com . A useful US contact: Ram Krishnan at Minnesota rkrishnan46@yahoo.com .

Cheers

Ram Narayanan

US-India Friendship

http://usindiafriendship.net/