Children and NGOs in India

Development as Storytelling and Performance

Annie McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book is an ethnographic exploration of slum children's participation in NGO programs that centres children's narratives as key to understanding the lived experience of development in India where 50% of the population is under the age of 25.

Weaving theoretical and methodological interventions from anthropology, childhood studies and development studies with children's own narratives and images, the author foregrounds children's lifeworlds whilst documenting the extent to which these lifeworlds are shaped by the twin forces of marginalisation and aspiration. The book documents NGO campaigns targeting child marriage, sanitation and hygiene, gendered violence and bullying, and depicts and examines children's sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes reluctant, and sometimes indifferent approach to narrating and performing development. It assesses the way in which children from four slum communities in New Delhi navigate the multiplicities and contradictions of development by analysing the stories, posters and performances children produce for NGOs. Moreover, the book argues that engagement with children's narratives and performances provide valuable insights into how development attains meaning, garners consensus, fails, succeeds and circulates in a myriad of unexpected ways which consistently defy any assumptions about 'underdeveloped' subjectivities.

The first book to interrogate the substance and subjectivities produced in the development of NGO organisations offering extra-curricular programs directed towards more intangible and experiential ends, it will be of interest to researchers working in anthropology, development studies, childhood studies and South Asian studies. The book also speaks to scholars working on issues of poverty, rural-urban migration, gender justice, slums and youth.

Part I
Developing the child

1 Development

A story of countless NGOs, innumerable slum dwellers, and some wonderfully “animated” children

The preface to James Ferguson’s 1990 book The Anti-politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho began with the simple but significant question: “What is ‘development’?” I start this chapter on development with this same question, not because I propose to answer it, but precisely because I want to map the diversity of possible answers, and demonstrate how this diversity constituted the development field in which I worked in Delhi in 2013. Answers were indeed everywhere. Immediately after getting off the plane, the complementary Times of India that I received with my 30 rupee bottle of water presented several: two full-page ads for the iPhone 5 jostled with smaller ads for government initiatives like Bharat Nirman.¹ Later that day, the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, in his Republic Day eve broadcast declared: “India can double its growth rate by turning today’s disadvantage into multiple engines of economic development.” Two months later, the Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, would declare that gains in social development and human resource development had been—over her three terms in office (1998–2013)— “phenomenal and unprecedented”.

Yet another “phenomenal and unprecedented” “development” during this period—and in fact dating back to the late 1980s—had been the incredible growth of NGOs. Bornstein and Sharma (2016, 80) describe how, between 1988 and 2014, the number of NGOs in India grew nearly 17 times, from 12,000 to an estimated two million. Yet, this estimate of two million, produced in 2014 by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)² was, by the following year, increased to three million, a figure that the Indian Express (1 August 2015) noted was: “more than double the number of schools in the country, 250 times the number of government hospitals, constituting one NGO for 400 people, as against one policeman for 709 people.” While these figures remain contested,³ and this “mushrooming” of NGOs is by no means unique to India (Bornstein 2019), it nonetheless forces us, from the outset, to grapple with development in the plural.

Additionally, following Jakimow (2011), it is important to note that NGOs are by no means an “homogenous category,” and that the small NGOs that constitute the majority of those operating in India can be classified in multiple ways.⁴ While many of these small NGOs are focussed on the delivery of services such as education, health care, clean water, sanitation, and livelihood programmes, I am primarily interested in the emergence of NGOs that trade in the more insubstantial drivers of development: knowledge, experiences, aspirations, and dreams. This echoes Jakimow’s (2013, 26) conceptualisation of contemporary development as defined by three characteristics: “bottom-up, participatory and information-centred development.” Jakimow’s description of “information-centred development” is drawn from her 2011 study of small NGOS operating in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Here she observed that many small NGOs saw their work as addressing a deficiency of information: information about rights, government services, or development itself. While she notes that it was typically the remoteness of this region that was identified as the cause of this “information deficit,” a similar sentiment is observed by Kalpana Ram (2008, 136), who describes how NGOs in south India used the “English word ‘awareness’ to describe the missing dimension they hoped to inculcate in villages.” This “peddling of information” (Jakimow 2011) or, as two girls I worked with described it, “spreading the development message,” also animated many of the development initiatives I observed during my fieldwork in slum communities in Delhi.

What made the spreading of this message possible in the NGOs in which I worked was, of course, children’s participation. While I have already highlighted the ways in which children’s participation has, via the UNCRC, been enshrined as a right, Jakimow (2013, 26) describes how “the demonstration of participation has become essential for the legitimacy of development projects and agencies,” so much so that in some cases “participation has become more important than meaningful outcomes.” While I agree with the thrust of Jakimow’s argument, here I want to rephrase this quote: the performance of participation has itself become a meaningful outcome of many NGO programmes. Yet, what makes this outcome meaningful and these performances compelling? The answer to the latter question is contained in Jakimow’s three-part formula of contemporary development: to gain legitimacy, these performances must have a certain “bottom-up” or grassroots quality to them. There is, of course, a vast spectrum here that ranges from the idea that any kind of participation automatically connotes bottom-up engagement, to the kind of expansive “participatory pedagogical praxis” imagined by Paulo Freire (1970). To return to the initial question of what makes these performative outcomes meaningful, this question is perhaps harder to answer, but it sits at the core of this book.

In this chapter, in order to contextualise my research within the diverse and plural development landscape in Delhi, I will begin by introducing the media NGO’s partner organisations and their relationships with the slum communities they served. Moving further into these communities, I will introduce some of their particular characteristics, as well as interrogate the discursive construction of the “slum” that place these communities in the sights of development agencies. In order to understand how spaces of development and underdevelopment are constructed, this chapter highlights the aesthetic, affective, and moral tools used to mark the space of the NGO from the object of its programmes: “the community.” Specifically, I’m interested in how a target “community” is created by NGOs, and challenged by children in the course of their participation in NGO programmes. Finally, in order to centre children’s own understandings of development, the chapter concludes by exploring children’s answer to the question: “what would I do if I was the boss of an NGO?”

The media NGO and its partners

Although I based myself primarily with the media NGO, their practices were, at their core, collaborative and mobile. In fact, in many ways, the media NGO was totally dependent on its four NGO partners, who provided it with both the spaces to run its programmes, and the children who joined them. In return, the media NGO offered children from these organisations the chance to perform in their films and plays, and to develop skills in media production. The relationship between these organisations was not financial, but rather one of mutual convenience and recognition. This was not without its difficulties, particularly apparent on one occasion when one of their partner organisations simply closed its offices for the day without notifying the media NGO, who arrived to find the door bolted shut. The media NGO’s partners were located across South and East Delhi, and were operated by four different organisations, each of which had a particular development focus ranging from environmental activism to advocacy for waste-picking communities. Likewise, the funding sources of these partner NGOs were diverse: funds came from large international development organisations, the Indian Government, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, internal fundraising, or other internal revenue streams. These organisations also varied in size; some were fairly small single-location operations, and others worked across multiple sites in Delhi. All were staffed almost entirely by locals: a mixture of middle-class development workers, and workers drawn from the communities, with the occasional foreign intern.

These four partner NGOs, like many of the NGOs I encountered in Delhi—even those lacking a specific focus on children’s development—all had an aspect of their programming directed towards children in the local slum community. Often this took the form of remedial education, although these programmes were frequently enriched by a range of other programmes facilitated by more mobile visiting NGOs. In some communities, the media NGO was the only organisation doing this kind of “extra-curricular” development work; in others, they were part of a regular stream of mobile NGO traffic. Thus, as I travelled with the media NGO between these four organisations, I entered a larger web of organisations that included not only these four partner organisations, but their partners, as well as other NGOs operating in these communities.

My movements between these four partner NGOs (see Figure 1.1) also had a particular temporal organisation. On Monday, the boys’ media club was held in the morning to accommodate gendered school structures: here boys went to school in the afternoon, girls in the morning. The other media clubs, two of which had both boys and girls, and one of which was girls only, were held in the afternoon, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thus, from here onwards, to simplify the way I refer to the media NGO’s four partner organisations, I will give them the following pseudonyms derived from the Hindi words for the days of the week on which I visited these organisations: Somvār (Monday), Budhvār (Wednesday), Guruvār (Thursday), and Shukravār (Friday). Travel to each of these organisations began to give my week a familiar pattern, one that, in the latter part of my fieldwork, was augmented by time spent in two of the partner NGOs (Somvār and Guruvār) observing their other child-focussed programmes.

Figure 1.1 Hand-drawn map of Delhi showing the author’s movements between her field sites

“Picturing” NGOs

Each of the media NGO’s partners offered very different arrangements for the media NGO’s clubs: while some clubs were held outside on large, blue tarpaulin mats, others took place in small, brightly coloured rooms with no windows. While three of the media NGO’s partner organisations were located in middle-class neighbourhoods bordering children’s slum communities, Shukravār’s centre was located in the middle of a slum community. My first impressions of this centre are captured in the following field note:

Walking past piles of recyclables and through a dirt lane of jhuggīs (shelters), we approach a much larger structure with walls made from bamboo in their lower portion and plastic bottles hung on wire in their upper portion. Entering this structure, I see that the rooms are divided off from each other by large plastic banners obviously scavenged from exhibitions such as those held at Pragati Maidan [a very large exhibition centre in Delhi]. We first walk into a classroom. As we enter, the children erupt with joy, rushing up to kiss and hug the NGO workers. We collect a key and open up another room with signs that say “Composting Area,” and “Waste Storage Facility.” There are a few bags lying around and a few ceramic pots with lids on. It smells pretty bad. The floor is covered with the black spots of flies that, as we enter, swarm all over us. There are several other rooms around the corner, one with a sign that says “training centre,” but despite the minimal waste stored I wonder what this space is used for.

Attending this centre weekly, I quickly acclimatised to the smell, the flies, the intermittent supply of power, and the wax and wane of recyclables that sometimes filled most of it to the brim. The primary work of this NGO was advocacy and development of kabāṛīwālās (recycling workers). The tiny classroom where we held our classes was just a very small part of their operations. Yet, for me it was here, in this tiny space with canvas and bamboo walls that, through interactions with the children, many of the convictions and contradictions of development came into the greatest focus.

About halfway through the year, the flexi-print walls of this classroom, usually covered with children’s work and educational charts, were augmented with a drawing depicting a grand building within a perfectly sculptured and walled garden (Figure 1.2: top). In the foreground of this picture stood two children in school uniforms, seemingly parting after a day at school. Some writing in the drawing made it clear that this building was a representation of the NGO centre, whose flimsy walls it now graced. Though I never managed to find out who drew this picture, the gap between representation and reality was indeed vast. Later in the year, yet another picture (Figure 1.2: middle) appeared, again representing the “school,” though this time in a totally different high-rise style. I initially attributed the peculiarity of these representations to this NGO and the stark disadvantage of the community it served that had no brick or concrete buildings. I was, however, proven wrong several months later when Guruvār erected a similarly exuberant poster (Figure 1.2: bottom): a three-dimensional representation of their centre as a castle. Though much better equipped than the former centre, this representation, with its turreted towers, seemed to equally overcompensate. These pictures both represent and perform development, specifically the kind of fairy tale development deemed appropriate to children. Given Asher Ghertner’s (2015) theorisation of contemporary world-class city making in terms of the rule of aesthetics, it is unsurprising that these NGOs—like the slum dwellers in Ghertner’s book who covered their walls with fantastical images of houses—engaged in similar aesthetic imaginings. These architectural fantasies in a childish mode invited children into a sphere of aspiration, imagination, but most importantly development. Here, development was defined by colour, manicured gardens, and large imposing school buildings.

Figure 1.2 Poster on the canvas walls of Shukravār’s classroom (top). A second poster on Shukravār’s walls (middle). Poster at Guruvār (bottom)

The extent to which these neighbourhood NGO centres fulfilled the promises canvassed in these images varied greatly. Guruvār—the only NGO whose focus was specifically on education—ran a flourishing remedial education programme as well as computer, sewing, dancing, music, cooking, and beauty classes (some of the latter were facilitated by visiting mobile NGOs). Shukravār, whose focus was on advocacy work for kabāṛīwālās, had a small school for younger children that was predominantly aimed—in this Bangla-speaking community—at developing children’s competence with Hindi. Budhvār, whose goal was clearly printed on the sign out the front—“a project of remove [sic] child labour from garment industries”—was l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on translation and transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Developing the child
• Part II Problems and solutions
• Part III Performance
• Conclusion
• Index