The dominant and most practised approach to development has been primarily top-down in both nature and content. Focusing on the macro perspective, centrally planned development has been its most visible and vibrant symbol. Despite the implementation of a series of five-year plans across South Asia, the development approach and strategies are widely questioned in terms of inability to alleviate endemic poverty, widening inequality and protracted regional imbalances. For instance, the latest Economic Survey of India reveals that against Delhi's per capita income of Rs329,000, the national average is Rs115,000; Bihar's per capita is as low as Rs38,860.

Why is this so in a state where out-migrants have been quite significant and have done relatively well in both skilled and entrepreneurial occupations all across the country? At the same time, Sikkim, with the second-highest per capita income of Rs298,000 and a population of hardly 700,000, has some pathetic performance numbers. The latest NITI Aayog Report found that Sikkim has performed poorly in its index of health services. As a result, the National Health Mission decided to penalise Sikkim by giving it minus 20 points which is the lowest in India. Dadra & Nagar Haveli achieved the highest score of plus 14 followed by Haryana with plus 13 and Assam with plus 12. Despite such a small population, full immunisation coverage is found to be low, at 69 percent, in Sikkim. This is the fourth-lowest in India, and 31 percent of its newborn babies are in the danger zone of life-threatening diseases like polio, diphtheria and typhoid.

Similarly, the NITI Aayog's Report on School Education Quality Index 2019 found that in the overall performance score and rank, Sikkim with a 43 percent score is the seventh-worst performer out of the total 28 states where the study was conducted. The best performer was Kerala with an 82.2 percent score. Further, in the average rating for Class VIII students in language and mathematics, Sikkim with a 30 percent score was found to be the lowest scorer in the country out of the 35 states and union territories. How do we explain this against the backdrop that Sikkim today has at least six universities, implying the availability of one university for every 100,000 population? This is unprecedented and unparalleled. There definitely is a direct relation with the nature and conduct of the planning, monitoring and evaluation process.

In the whole of South Asia, national planning commissions have been under constant political pressure to redefine their roles in the wider context of economic reform, globalisation dynamics and rising aspirations of the masses. In India, the National Planning Commission has been uprooted and replaced by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog which now essentially plays a limited role of a think tank. It has no financial allocative role. The chief ministers and their teams from various states need not line up annually before the full team of the planning commission in Delhi for their annual plan discussion and funding. The state planning boards are now mostly defunct as the five-year plan-based funding by the central government no longer exists. In a way, the planned development process has been withdrawn before it reached some of the pertinent geographies and communities. In the same way, second-generation reforms are now designed and implemented even before the first generation reforms were understood and assimilated in the peripheries of India.

Failed approach

The failure of the traditional top-down intervention has been attributed to five glaring assessments. First, the stock of knowledge that was perfected and experimented with in the industrialised countries were forcefully transferred and imposed in a diverse political economy. Second, this approach assumed poor communities to be uniformly harmonious entities, thereby disregarding hard realities like dominance-dependence relationships in a village, and gender and equity conflicts that adversely influence the effectiveness of the delivery system. Third, in its one-size-fits-all thinking, the development programmes were designed in the corridors and glass buildings in Delhi disregarding deep-rooted and immense diversities across the country. Fourth, delivery services and institutions were inherited from the colonial regime, which actually had inbuilt resistance to a participative development process. And finally, in the absence of monitoring and evaluation at the national, state and district levels, transparency, accountability and accessibility became the biggest casualty in the entire development process.

When cumulative benefits failed to trickle down to the poor, all kinds of state mechanisms were used that paid insufficient attention to detail. Heavy reliance on the bureaucratic system and deadwood machinery got consolidated. As the magnitude of crises widened, many micro-level mobilisations and non-governmental development interventions emerged both as social movements and delivery alternatives. A new understanding began to develop, and the focus gradually shifted from tedious macro interventions to participatory micro development organisations. These micro-level success stories demonstrate that where the 'poor participate as subjects and not objects of the development process, it is possible to generate growth, human development and equity'.

Micro-level interventions like the Rural Advancement Committee of Bangladesh, Aga Khan Rural Support Programme of Pakistan, Small Farmer Development Programme of Nepal, Self-Employed Women's Association of India, Janashakti Banku Sangam of Sri Lanka and Mongar District Health Project of Bhutan are cited as successful community-centric projects. Projects like Pani Panchayats in Ralgaon Siddhi in Maharashtra led by Anna Hazare had specific inclusive features of accessibility, affordability and acceptability.

Most of the success stories are built upon participation, community effort and use of local resources. A South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation document describes this as 'incremental in nature in the sense that they rely on societal experiences, memories and mobilisation systems and outside resources are marginal. This is true of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and Pani Panchayats in India.' These initiatives invariably involve efforts at the level of a community where the basic technologies and techniques, like resuscitation of traditional practices in water harvesting and storing water at the level of an aquifer, already exist. Leadership was crucial to this success where younger people with scientific and technological training created a turning point. With local communities involved in the control and management of their resources, it has been possible to protect the environment and regenerate its productivity.

Out-of-the-box action

Therefore, the discourse is steadily shifting to micro dynamics. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a series of newer projects with much fanfare in his first five years in office. Many of them have suffered from the same roadblocks and inefficacy at the last mile and penultimate unit of delivery. A project like Swachh Bharat alone has the potential to transform India into a 21st century health leader, and make Modi a historic icon. Since cleanliness is an issue at all levels—individual, family, community, district, provincial and national—the Swachh Bharat programme should start from the lowest denominator like children, parents and the family. The first catchment area, hence, should be schools, colleges and local societies and their interconnections like festivals, markets and electoral politics.

The idea is to galvanise a new generation that understands, loves, promotes and sustains cleanliness. Can at least 50 percent of the Swachh Bharat resources be allocated to these new micro-level agents (like schools, panchayats and colleges and other community-centric institutions in the villages, towns and cities)? This was exactly what was done in the developed countries, and the last few decades, in Singapore and China. In this out-of-the-box delivery deviation, there are bound to be resistance and roadblocks. However, the very beauty of micro-level intervention lies in out-of-the-box action and not thinking alone.

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