My Experiences in CARE India

27 Depinder Kapur Care India Sept 1999 May 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Experiences in CARE India I am grateful to the opportunity and persuasion from Cheenu to share my story that I have taken liberty to locate in the larger development work context. Having worked with Indian NGOs for 10 years, I got an opportunity to work with CARE India as Director Agriculture and natural Resources in 1999. I joined at a time when CARE India was making a transition from its food aid based programming to a diversified non food aid programme portfolio and perhaps in the last decade of the international aid programming in India that witnessed the end of liberal western aid funding to India in the aftermath of Pokhran 1998 blasts and the emergence of a fake India Shining in the eyes of the ruling elite of India. CARE India, like most other international aid agencies, was just beginning to cope with an unending crisis of development aid that set in soon after and continues till date. The ANR sector and the Social and Economic Development Unit in CARE India were set up as the first serious effort to cope with this crisis. The four years I spent in CARE India, was in this context. However there was resistance to change, both internal and external. A well set 50 years of glorious food aid programming was not happy to see competition and not willing to believe that its days were over. The resistance was not just internal. USAID wanted us to focus only on Food Aid and perhaps Health/AIDs work, while the leadership in CARE India (Tom Alcedo and Peter Mc Allister) recognised the need of the time to diversify so as to remain relevant in India. I recall colleagues Usha and Dr. YP Gupta with his 5 star rating track record of securing big bucks for Health/Aids programme funding. Madhuri was the surf excel hai na DEMOL single lead. Food and Nutrition and Health and Aids programming survived in 2003, when I left after a programme focus effectiveness external review, followed soon after by Education sector also closing. With the government of India applying brakes to the food aid programme under the GM foods restrictions to India soon after was testimony to the contradictions the programme faced. One has seen this core competence logic in other International NGOs as well; the consultant s logic to stick to the safe option in development business is a reflection of the donor constraints as well as an over simplified managerial logic that fails to see that civil society relevance in social development cannot be judged on core competence basis. While in the corporate sector, there are

CARE Memories hundreds of case studies of businesses collapsing if they do not reinvent themselves in time, the consultants in development work keep using the strategic management tools and analysis of corporate sector, focussing on efficiency and effectiveness frameworks and core competence, and is just does not work. What this has lead to overtime in social development work is a deskilling of competence and capacity among core staff of NGOs and international development agencies like CARE India. External consultant s word is taken as a bible. Times of change are also the time of maximum learning. I learnt a lot from the senior colleagues in CARE India. The entrepreneurial, sometimes cut throat fundraising competition between departments was perhaps the most defining feature that I recall of my days in CARE India. Perhaps the recent flood of emails on Cheenu s network regarding stress related risks ex CARE colleagues is a reminder of how the development sector changed from the stable and steady food aid programming in CARE India till say the early 1990s to be replaced by an increase in fund raising and programme diversification but which came at a huge cost of unstable restricted funding regime. The sector directors in CARE India HQ worked more like internal consultants to secure funding and the state directors as managers in charge of implementation. This structure according to me worked well, with clear roles and responsibilities. The Orissa super cyclone struck the very day I joined CARE India in end of Sept 1999. It was the penultimate major emergency response initiative of CARE India (the last one was the Gujarat Earthquake response in 2001). A significant part of my time and work went into rehabilitation work in both Orissa and Gujarat. The USAID monetisation of food aid for development, the 416b funding, took us 2 years to secure and that too got tied up with the Gujarat livelihoods response programme. In Orissa cyclone response, I remember Prusty talking on the phone with Basant Mohanty, with the winds howling in the background on 1 st October. It was the first opportunity for me to see a major disaster response and be part of a 2.5 million livelihoods rehabilitation programme intervention that followed. The CARE office in Bhubaneshwar was like a war control room with a very young and motivated team that worked 24 hrs a day with Basant leading. When we went to see the worst affected Blocks and Districts, people were still in a daze and it was difficult to hear their stories of losing loved ones and seeing a clean slate where an entire village had once existed or other more fortunate villages seemed bombed and devastated. CARE India did the right thing to avoid working in Ersama where all aid agencies were flooding into and concentrate on other districts and blocks. One incident even in this disaster, however, provided some comic relief. The Orissa cycle witnessed a large outpouring of people support and charity. The small coastal roads were choc-o-block with relief material filled trucks for many days. We came to hear first hand from a government official how a truck load of food material from a gurudwara in north India had landed in Ersama block, 4 weeks after the cyclone. The district administration told the priests of the relief team that they should not start a free food kitchen as they had just started a food for work intervention, that at best they could distribute free food after the people came back from work. The gurudwara priest refused saying that the free kitchen can under no circumstances be made into a paid service for the affected people. Page 2

Page 3 CARE Memories In the Orissa livelihoods rehabilitation response of CARE, we had a challenge in designing a 3 district wide agriculture and livelihoods intervention at a scale, not done before. While going to a donor coordination meeting with Peter McAllister Asst. Country Director Development Programmes, he asked me what we should be doing in the meeting. I told him we will share our field assessment and observations. He said no, we will go there to listen to what the donors are going to fund, then we will include all that we have planned to do under their framework of things. This was a valuable lesson and we did accordingly. CARE India provided a very good on the job learning and this is always better than the many training programmes one can attend. CARE India had the unique experience and position of having worked within the government machinery at a scale no other international aid agency(except our other food aid agency), had the experience of working. Advocacy and working with the government became a fancy of DFID and other donors much later. CARE India I believe lost the opportunity to capitalise on its experience and knowledge of government systems, to transition into more relevant development programming smoothly. It is now trying to do the same at the cost of much wasted opportunity and effort. In Gujarat, the earthquake impact was very different from Orissa. In Orissa thatched roof houses were swept away under the tidal waves leading to an official estimate of close to 10,000 deaths(unofficially the number was much higher and sadly included many immigrants from other states of India and from Bangladesh who were never counted as citizens in the official death estimates). In Gujarat earthquake, most of the lives and limbs were lost due to stone walls collapsing and killing families and school children who had come out to celebrate the Republic Day. The sad part in Gujarat was the collapse of the Civil Hospital and death of patients inside. While reaching the remote villages of coastal Orissa was a challenge, especially when the water withdrew, reaching remote villages in Kutch was easy as you could drive a 4 wheeler anywhere. Within a week of the Gujarat earthquake, the army had undertaken most of the emergency medical response including amputations and air lifting. The way a local NGO called Abhiyan, became a centre of development relief work coordination was fantastic. This was what CARE used to do earlier. It showed that the national NGOs in India, at least a few of them had matured to play this role very effectively. The same NGO Abhiyan then went to Kosi floods rehabilitation in 2009-10 by becoming a modal agency for an ambitious housing rehabilitation programme of govt of Bihar using local masons and resources very effectively in 3 different model of houses that people built and used. At the farewell of Peter I remember Col. CK Pathak the Emergency Manager gave a hilarious account of how Peter taught him to write a Log Frame - by telling him to think practically. He gave the example of how Peter told him that if you want to get married then the Goal of the marriage is a higher level aim of finding a soul mate or a partner in life. And the Objectives are lower order aims of say having children or doing things together that you enjoy or share common interests. Peter was very good at logical reasoning and LFAs development and also in strategic management of projects. Since he had recently married, this was something he could explain easily to Mr. Pathak. I recall the high energy levels in CARE India in my time despite its large size of nearly 400 staff, the rushing to USAID for meetings and funding support, the SMT meetings where a battle of turf was always fought with Programme Teams on one side and the PSU on the other.

Page 4 CARE Memories Since CARE India was all about contracted funding, generating projects was a measure of success. While programme staff generated projects and funding, the Finance and Admin staff tried to cut down spending so as to generate more income from Fixed Deposit earnings. Performance indicators for both categories of staff were therefore at times contradictory. Interest earned on short term bank deposits by the PSU team was an indicator of their performance; delay in funds transfer to partners impacted the programme work! All in all it was good learning and an opportunity to pick up skills at CARE. Working on large systems, AOPs, Budgeting, Quarterly SMT meetings, 360 degree appraisals, SCALA!!. In one of the Orissa SMT meetings, it was a relief to jump into the sea in the evening of one of the hectic meetings and I had my first experience of deep sea swimming. Overall in the larger development aid agencies work, systems were becoming more and more tight. More reporting requirements, M&E and MIS requirements, more formats and new software. Resulting in less and less time to make visits, undertake research, and spend time mentoring younger colleagues. A truncated learning opportunity in terms of theory and concepts much needed to develop sectoral core competence in your programming field. This was a bane not only of CARE India but all subsequent development agencies that I joined WaterAid, Oxfam and UNOPS. Consultants and contractors replacing programming staff for not only technical and knowledge related work, but even for routine monitoring work. Local NGOs are squeezed of funding and operate as contractors on low fees. Bidding for works by local NGOs is now a norm. The professional NGO sector in India only emerged in the early 1980s and got its legitimacy with numerous civil society stalwarts who worked directly in remote rural areas. Besides Anil Agarwal, Kamla Bhasin, Ela Bhatt, Alyosus Fernandes, Ginni, Kamla Bhasin, MS Mehta, Ravi Chopra - there were so many others working in remote parts of tribal areas that provided the legitimacy for NGO work. Donor agencies like Ford Foundation, DANIDA, SDC, SIDA and CIDA and a large number of independent aid agencies including ActionAid, Oxfam, Save the Children - would run after them and provide generous grants for establishment and programme work. Small NGOs were requested to take funds so that they could become more efficient and effective, with minimal reporting. The situation now is just the opposite with NGOs becoming contractors of government and donor funding, and made to run after funding agencies for small grants. Now it is considered efficient and effective if local NGOs bid for projects, agree to compliance norms that meet the requirements of donors. To cater to this professional development market, are development consulting companies. Core competence of middle and senior level staff in international agencies is getting reduced to managerial competence of drafting good contracts, ToRs and securing compliance. Knowledge and skills are getting marginalised resulting in falling quality. In the WASH sector that I now work with, there are perhaps more consultants than regular staff working with development agencies, more fancy frameworks and programme approaches invented every year than ever before and large amounts of money spent on media and campaigns than supporting field interventions and work by NGOs. While huge financial capital investment dominated the early days of rigs and bore wells investment in drinking water sector in the 1970s, this has now been replaced by an equally high capital intensive investment in Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) based work including

CARE Memories advertising campaigns and mega events and workshops. Unfortunately there are very few filed staff being paid on the ground to do good old extension work that is needed so badly. Just as large investments in pipes and machines is wasted if there is no provision for operations and maintenance work, large investments in designing Behaviour Change Communications products, campaigns and methodologies fail when there is no follow up from the group in face to face communication. I recall with gratitude, having worked with colleagues Harish Chotani, Basant Mohanty, CS Reddy, Sunisha Chawla, Meenakshi Nath, Geetha Menon, Jitendra Sinha and Kishore Singh for their drive, energy and company. Colleagues in the SNR team Ajay Desai, Suprabha, Alok Kumar, Jayesh Rathore and Rekha Shenoy. Shikha, Sunita Gupta and MS who was always there to help in HR. CARE India offered great learning opportunity for anyone. Unlike other UK NGOs, CARE provided the best on the job learning and capacity building opportunity for anyone who joined young. You learned quickly. I will never be able to forget Avtar Kaul who was with CARE USA, their ANR Director when I was in CARE India. He was a very warm hearted and knowledgeable person having worked in Bangladesh and other Asian countries with CARE. He could motivate a young team of staff in CARE and was a big source of encouragement and support. He helped Alok Kumar in our team to study in the USA, even paying for some of his cost. In 2001 when I visited the Atlanta office of CARE, Avtar insisted on my staying at his home and not the downtown seedy hotels in Atlanta. Sadly he died of cancer in 2004. The other expat CARE colleague I remember was Claudia Chang who recently left CARE Nepal as Country Representative. She and her partner Carsten Voelz, became good friends and continue till date. Depinder Kapur May 2013 Kapur.depinder@gmail.com Page 5