I was talking to Indian development economists at Oxford University on this particular transparency challenge and my recollection is that they nominated Jean Dreze as a pivotal collaboration entrepreneur in this field? Are you in touch with him? Or who do you suggest we bookmark as being the greatest collaborator in your context mosaic?
As far as I can see when I search http://www.ashoka.org , there is no mention of Dreze. I find this confusing because he's seems to be quite a pivotal figure in your mosaic area
I think ashoka profiles would be much more informing the rest of the world if they added one question - who in your whole practice mosaic do you most admire . Of course I am not meaning to assume that Dreze is the most connected person in your mosaic
and I am not meaning to criticise any of the deepest work that any particular ashoka SEs do- but I come from the reverse direction; when research of some people outside of ashoka who care a lot about eg India keeps coming up with a name like Dreze; I search ashoka.org and by not finding any connections assume that the whole area he's intersted in is not represented by ashoka...
it's sad how one missing information link can lead to huge amounts of duplicated efforts when people are trying to map links between networks and the clusters of grassroots contexts they serve
If you could wish for 8 people meeting around the same table (which you are the 9th person hosting) who could do most to change the world of the people you are concerned with , who would you choose?
In doing this networking and social entrepreneur leadership exercise, a few clues:
there is no point in choosing 2 people who have access to the same networks, same influences - that wastes one of the seats; you need people who are prepared to put all their reputation and collaboration trust on the line because they believe this issue merits/sustains/compounds the same human and entrepreneurial system urgency as you do
would I be correct in assuming that one of the seats is for dreze? (because he knows what funds are actually getting through to the grassroots)
a second seat could be for Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi or perhaps the President of India - which could pull the most strings from the top
a third seat might be for someone with international influence and currently active empowerment mediation - would it be Yunus, Eigen, Stern, Sen?
I don't know if the other 3 seats need to represent more grassroots diversity stories of the whole area you work in or more of those who have responsibility for the channels of power; is there any media person in the whole country who would cover the story?
I am not necessarily saying that you should answer this question, but I am very surprised that it is not debated at the ashoka web; and similarly there are probably another 50 roundtables that merit debate where transparency and social entrepreneur mosaics interface. Indeed, instead of a catalogue of 2000 separate individuals links within and across such roundtable debates would help people understand/map how ashoka's work has local to worldwide scaling potential
Anyhow this would be just about the simplest exercise we can recommend from the experiences of valuetrue community's citizens worldwide open spaces on how to map transparency - see eg our website and my competition entry
technical note : I use wish in the same sense that ted.com communities practice
- eg wishmaker 1 Bill Clinton
- eg wishmaker 2 Larry Brilliant
Hello Ma'em,
I am Paritosh Tripathi from India. It's nice to find about your method but I am unable to understand what innovative methods or processes you are using? Is it innovative because no one is talking about the Employment Garuntee Act and that you have come up with some kind of campaigning which is going to help prople know about this act and then question the Govt and its channels.
How are you making things transparent, only by campaigning?
I think you misread. Campiagn is just a means. what I aim at is the empowerment of the marginalized wage earners who have recieved the Right to Work through a legislation and that too via a nationwide Advocacy and Lobbying.
It is important that the wage eraners realise work as their legal entitlement, proactively keep a vigil on discrepancies and corruption, lobby for fair and transparent implementation and now thay have a whole avenue opened up to form union and work for better work facilities, wages and social security. As you know in India to keep anything moving we should suatain the pressure on the governemnt to assign priorities and political committments lest all well intentioned leagislation will be buried in the books alone.
Though this legislation has been enacted but the top leadres including the Finnace Minister, Corporate sectors and business media has constantly criticized it as a waste. They feel the resources will go down the drains of corruption as has happenned with other schemes. They believe that more inputs into corporatization will let the benefits trickle down to the poor. We on the contrary uphold that 80% of the rural poor who contribute significantly to the GDP do have a Right to dignified living enshrined in teh Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. They have long suffered deprivations, acute household food insecurity, malnourishment and preventable deaths. It is our committmnet to make the NREGA work with all transparency and be a means to enhance the poors' purchasing power, bring in more equitable social order, provide hiterto denied collective bargaining powers to the millions of wage earners in the unorganized sector.
This is an interesting proposal, as it seems to relate tribal employment conditions to corruption. The trouble is that this link is not clearly made – how does the program affect the level of corruption or strengthen the fight against corruption? Intuitively, it seems that empowering vulnerable local communities in their dealings with the bureaucracy would have a corruption-reducing effect. The connection needs to be spelled out more explicitly.
Also it would help if the content of the work, the methodology, and its organization were spelled out more clearly. What, for example, are the legal strategies used to improve the status of these workers? How do the workers themselves contribute to this? How does this help to reduce – or at least raise awareness about and downward pressure on – corruption, as distinct from helping workers obtain better employment benefits?
We have raised the need for anti-corruption initiatives in NREGP implementation by ensuring wide publicity to our work on Biometric Tracking of Payments Received by Beneficiaries of NREGP.
He invited us to do a Proof of Concept for e-Muster for NREGP Beneficiaries. The response was positive and the Chief Minister of Bihar was keen to implement a near fool proof system. More details of the initiative can be seen at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/33365.html and http://ll2b.blogspot.com.
I am available for any further details off line at krisdev@gmail.com.
seema prakash is right in her methodology. unless we pressurise the concerned authorities on the one hand and sensitising the stakeholders through public campaigns we will not achieve expected targets.
keep doing it!
Seema Prakash
We are working on a methodology that is twin edged. On the first hand it is dealing with a challenge to let the wage earners realize that work has now become their legal entitlement under a Central Act. For decades they have been dependent on the mercy of the governemnt who ran several employment schemes that went down the drains of corruption. No one coulkd demand it as a Right. Best example is the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana a scheme with tall claims to provide adequate employment but in ultimate ananlysis it boiled down to mere averaged 7 days of work per annum per wage earners. It was an employment scheme!!
In contrast NREGA is now a Right to Work. But the wage earners at large still think that it is a dole out from the government and even in cases of exploitation keep mum. This shackle of inertia and dependency comlex has to be broken that has been ingrained in them over the decades. Sensitization thus becomes a major effort needed to let the workers demand more work and as a matter of Right. Secondly the Act has a component that provides power to the public to see the records, participate in social audits, raise question on discrepancies and corruption, demand grievance redress and better work site facilities and so on. The India rural communities reeling under casteism, ostracisms and feudalism has to muster lot of courage and collectivism to challenge the exploitation and corruption as that is equal to challenging those very authorities that kept exploitaing them : the network of corrupt politicians, feudal landlords and bureaucrats all hand in gloves.
On macro level the coterie of capitalists, business media and economists who uphold trickle down economic policies have kept critiqiuing NREGA as useless and forcast its failure. On the other hand handful of activists and economists like Jean Dreze visualize it as a great tool for empowering and enhancing the purchasaing power of the poor taht will go a long way to dignified living and more equitable society.
Our effort at both micro and macro levels are implied. Its empowerment on one hand and Advoccay & Lobbying on the other.
My name is Rich Gottbreht from Global Insights and I am one of the entrants in the competition. Our work centers on helping anyone concerned about corruption learn about the subject through my book, our board game and its associated seminars, as well as low cost consulting. To find out more about us please visit our website www.globalinsights.biz. From the home page, you can link to information about us, our products and what people say about our products and services. From the details in the initiative we submitted you should also note that some of the proceeds from our sales will eventually go to a high integrity leadership development foundation. Also, if you are interested, down the road we will be looking for alliances and contacts in every country.
We have established the proof of concept for biometric registration of citizens for biometric smart card issue, job registration, job allotment, attendance tracking and payment into biometric linked account for NREGP.
The following articles detail out to some extent the process. More off line if anyone is interested.
Gopalakrishnan Devanathan (Kris Dev)
ICT & e-Gov Consultant for RTI & NREGP Implementation
Manthan Awardee 2006 for e-inclusion & Livelihood creation.
Life Line to Business (LL2B), Chennai, India. Ph: 91 98 408 52132.
Comments
I was talking to Indian development economists at Oxford University on this particular transparency challenge and my recollection is that they nominated Jean Dreze as a pivotal collaboration entrepreneur in this field? Are you in touch with him? Or who do you suggest we bookmark as being the greatest collaborator in your context mosaic?
Yes I work in close collaboration with Jean Dreze. We have pivotal collaboration with National Right to Food Campaign led by Jean.
As far as I can see when I search http://www.ashoka.org , there is no mention of Dreze. I find this confusing because he's seems to be quite a pivotal figure in your mosaic area
I think ashoka profiles would be much more informing the rest of the world if they added one question - who in your whole practice mosaic do you most admire . Of course I am not meaning to assume that Dreze is the most connected person in your mosaic
and I am not meaning to criticise any of the deepest work that any particular ashoka SEs do- but I come from the reverse direction; when research of some people outside of ashoka who care a lot about eg India keeps coming up with a name like Dreze; I search ashoka.org and by not finding any connections assume that the whole area he's intersted in is not represented by ashoka...
it's sad how one missing information link can lead to huge amounts of duplicated efforts when people are trying to map links between networks and the clusters of grassroots contexts they serve
I am not very clear as to what your comment means. Please elaborate
Seema
If you could wish for 8 people meeting around the same table (which you are the 9th person hosting) who could do most to change the world of the people you are concerned with , who would you choose?
In doing this networking and social entrepreneur leadership exercise, a few clues:
there is no point in choosing 2 people who have access to the same networks, same influences - that wastes one of the seats; you need people who are prepared to put all their reputation and collaboration trust on the line because they believe this issue merits/sustains/compounds the same human and entrepreneurial system urgency as you do
would I be correct in assuming that one of the seats is for dreze? (because he knows what funds are actually getting through to the grassroots)
a second seat could be for Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi or perhaps the President of India - which could pull the most strings from the top
a third seat might be for someone with international influence and currently active empowerment mediation - would it be Yunus, Eigen, Stern, Sen?
I don't know if the other 3 seats need to represent more grassroots diversity stories of the whole area you work in or more of those who have responsibility for the channels of power; is there any media person in the whole country who would cover the story?
I am not necessarily saying that you should answer this question, but I am very surprised that it is not debated at the ashoka web; and similarly there are probably another 50 roundtables that merit debate where transparency and social entrepreneur mosaics interface. Indeed, instead of a catalogue of 2000 separate individuals links within and across such roundtable debates would help people understand/map how ashoka's work has local to worldwide scaling potential
Anyhow this would be just about the simplest exercise we can recommend from the experiences of valuetrue community's citizens worldwide open spaces on how to map transparency - see eg our website and my competition entry
technical note : I use wish in the same sense that ted.com communities practice
- eg wishmaker 1 Bill Clinton
- eg wishmaker 2 Larry Brilliant
Hello Ma'em,
I am Paritosh Tripathi from India. It's nice to find about your method but I am unable to understand what innovative methods or processes you are using? Is it innovative because no one is talking about the Employment Garuntee Act and that you have come up with some kind of campaigning which is going to help prople know about this act and then question the Govt and its channels.
How are you making things transparent, only by campaigning?
I think you misread. Campiagn is just a means. what I aim at is the empowerment of the marginalized wage earners who have recieved the Right to Work through a legislation and that too via a nationwide Advocacy and Lobbying.
It is important that the wage eraners realise work as their legal entitlement, proactively keep a vigil on discrepancies and corruption, lobby for fair and transparent implementation and now thay have a whole avenue opened up to form union and work for better work facilities, wages and social security. As you know in India to keep anything moving we should suatain the pressure on the governemnt to assign priorities and political committments lest all well intentioned leagislation will be buried in the books alone.
Though this legislation has been enacted but the top leadres including the Finnace Minister, Corporate sectors and business media has constantly criticized it as a waste. They feel the resources will go down the drains of corruption as has happenned with other schemes. They believe that more inputs into corporatization will let the benefits trickle down to the poor. We on the contrary uphold that 80% of the rural poor who contribute significantly to the GDP do have a Right to dignified living enshrined in teh Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. They have long suffered deprivations, acute household food insecurity, malnourishment and preventable deaths. It is our committmnet to make the NREGA work with all transparency and be a means to enhance the poors' purchasing power, bring in more equitable social order, provide hiterto denied collective bargaining powers to the millions of wage earners in the unorganized sector.
This is an interesting proposal, as it seems to relate tribal employment conditions to corruption. The trouble is that this link is not clearly made – how does the program affect the level of corruption or strengthen the fight against corruption? Intuitively, it seems that empowering vulnerable local communities in their dealings with the bureaucracy would have a corruption-reducing effect. The connection needs to be spelled out more explicitly.
Also it would help if the content of the work, the methodology, and its organization were spelled out more clearly. What, for example, are the legal strategies used to improve the status of these workers? How do the workers themselves contribute to this? How does this help to reduce – or at least raise awareness about and downward pressure on – corruption, as distinct from helping workers obtain better employment benefits?
We have raised the need for anti-corruption initiatives in NREGP implementation by ensuring wide publicity to our work on Biometric Tracking of Payments Received by Beneficiaries of NREGP.
The Manthan Award 2006 (www.manthanaward.org and http://www.manthanaward.org/Bio-metric%20tracking%20of%20payments%20unde...)
for e-Inclusion and Livelihood Creation and the news paper article
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/21904.html
attracted the attention of the Principal Commissioner, Rural Development, Government of Bihar, who was on the look out for suitable applications to plug the loop holes in the NREGP implementation.
He invited us to do a Proof of Concept for e-Muster for NREGP Beneficiaries. The response was positive and the Chief Minister of Bihar was keen to implement a near fool proof system. More details of the initiative can be seen at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/33365.html and http://ll2b.blogspot.com.
I am available for any further details off line at krisdev@gmail.com.
Gopalakrishnan Devanathan (Kris Dev)
ICT & e-Gov Consultant for RTI & NREGP Implementation.
seema prakash is right in her methodology. unless we pressurise the concerned authorities on the one hand and sensitising the stakeholders through public campaigns we will not achieve expected targets.
keep doing it!
Seema Prakash
We are working on a methodology that is twin edged. On the first hand it is dealing with a challenge to let the wage earners realize that work has now become their legal entitlement under a Central Act. For decades they have been dependent on the mercy of the governemnt who ran several employment schemes that went down the drains of corruption. No one coulkd demand it as a Right. Best example is the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana a scheme with tall claims to provide adequate employment but in ultimate ananlysis it boiled down to mere averaged 7 days of work per annum per wage earners. It was an employment scheme!!
In contrast NREGA is now a Right to Work. But the wage earners at large still think that it is a dole out from the government and even in cases of exploitation keep mum. This shackle of inertia and dependency comlex has to be broken that has been ingrained in them over the decades. Sensitization thus becomes a major effort needed to let the workers demand more work and as a matter of Right. Secondly the Act has a component that provides power to the public to see the records, participate in social audits, raise question on discrepancies and corruption, demand grievance redress and better work site facilities and so on. The India rural communities reeling under casteism, ostracisms and feudalism has to muster lot of courage and collectivism to challenge the exploitation and corruption as that is equal to challenging those very authorities that kept exploitaing them : the network of corrupt politicians, feudal landlords and bureaucrats all hand in gloves.
On macro level the coterie of capitalists, business media and economists who uphold trickle down economic policies have kept critiqiuing NREGA as useless and forcast its failure. On the other hand handful of activists and economists like Jean Dreze visualize it as a great tool for empowering and enhancing the purchasaing power of the poor taht will go a long way to dignified living and more equitable society.
Our effort at both micro and macro levels are implied. Its empowerment on one hand and Advoccay & Lobbying on the other.
Hello,
My name is Rich Gottbreht from Global Insights and I am one of the entrants in the competition. Our work centers on helping anyone concerned about corruption learn about the subject through my book, our board game and its associated seminars, as well as low cost consulting. To find out more about us please visit our website www.globalinsights.biz. From the home page, you can link to information about us, our products and what people say about our products and services. From the details in the initiative we submitted you should also note that some of the proceeds from our sales will eventually go to a high integrity leadership development foundation. Also, if you are interested, down the road we will be looking for alliances and contacts in every country.
Thanks,
Rich Gottbreht
We have established the proof of concept for biometric registration of citizens for biometric smart card issue, job registration, job allotment, attendance tracking and payment into biometric linked account for NREGP.
The following articles detail out to some extent the process. More off line if anyone is interested.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/21904.html
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/33365.html
http://www.manthanaward.org/Bio-metric%20tracking%20of%20payments%20unde...
http://ll2b.blogspot.com.
Gopalakrishnan Devanathan (Kris Dev)
ICT & e-Gov Consultant for RTI & NREGP Implementation
Manthan Awardee 2006 for e-inclusion & Livelihood creation.
Life Line to Business (LL2B), Chennai, India. Ph: 91 98 408 52132.