India. First impressions.

I’ve been in India for 6 days now. I went straight from Mumbai airport to a village near Karjat, about 2 hours’ drive from Mumbai. Dusty, poor, buffalo pulling carts, women slapping their washing against rocks by the river in the 35 degree heat, mango trees, arid rice paddies awaiting the monsoon. I sweated in a simple house with no air conditioning, joined my hosts for meditation at 5am each morning, and enjoyed dahl and rice and sampling new fruits whose names I can’t now remember. I went for a soak in the river, in my clothes, as a way of cooling off. 

Then on Tuesday I came to Mumbai. I’m staying in (apparently) “India’s first art hotel”, in a room (ironically for a Quaker) which is decorated in honour of the fine tradition of gambling. The leaflet on the hotel explains: “The 7 rooms of the ‘Rajas’ floor depict vibrancy, action, passion, vivaciousness and style. ‘Life is a gamble’ and the room is representative of Life, a game of pitch and toss’.  While hearts and spades are embroidered into the cushions, chess seems to play a hefty role in the decor too, with two carved knights at the end of the bedstead and a headboard resembling the lattice of a chessboard. Perhaps strategy and control are part of this narrative alongside chance and fate.  

In this leafy suburb, Mumbai is charming. European bistros and coffee shops abound. I’m a short walk from the sea and when the tide is in, the rubbish is covered up and the mangrove trees look elegant rather than as if they are handy pegs for plastic bags. I even have a place to get my favourite drink, a decaffeinated latte, and the Indian barista serves up the milk to form a beautiful leaf shape in the froth, of the kind I first saw in a coffee shop in Washington DC.  I have failed to find any Indian restaurants and have eaten mediocre Italian food. I did manage a ‘curry fondue’ yesterday though.

I know that I’ve tucked myself into a corner of safety and security. My last trip to this part of the world was in 1998, to Bangladesh, and the one time I travelled alone there, I had a grim experience of sexual harrassment. It made me very cautious about my plans this time around. (Of course, I discovered within 10 minutes of arriving here that Mumbai is nothing like Dhaka. For a start there were no taxi touts at the airport, just an orderly row of pre-ordered cabs.) Next week, I’m joining a leadership programme in Mumbai and Hyderabad, organised by Leaders Quest, and they will do their best to broaden my perspective, and help me see the world from a much less privileged point of view.

That last statement implies I have spent the week in an ivory tower, or ‘in an AC room’ which apparently is the Indian way of saying you are not in the ‘real world’. Actually I have been busy criss-crossing Mumbai (occasionally very very slowly in the very very heavy traffic, but often quite nimbly in autorickshaws) to meet fascinating people  - for interviews about working collaboratively. Unlike the gambling concept of ‘leaving things up to chance’ I’m interested in people who are trying to influence, change, and have power over the way life works, rather than those subjected to its ‘pitch and toss’. 

Here are a few of the themes that are striking me this evening. 

The first is hierarchy. I’ve listened to a number of my interviewees reflect on the ingrained hierarchy in Indian culture, first in the caste system, and then the way this is replicated heavily in the hieararchy of government. The impression I have is that people inside government are trained to look ‘upwards’ rather than ‘outwards’. No one seems to talk about ‘citizen centric’ here. You do things because the Minister, or the ‘Additional Chief Secretary’ told you to, and you certainly don’t do it unless there’s a ‘government circular’ telling you to. You are ‘posted’ from one job to another. You are trained (according to those I have met, who are all, it must be said, on the outside of government) to believe that you are in charge, or you are subordinate. There is a Hindi phrase, ‘A Karo!’ which means ‘Do that!’. It’s an order. Command and control is how it happens. You are not ‘sensitive’ to the local issues or local needs. 

In this setting, people are reluctant to tell the truth to those in power because the truth isn’t pretty. “No, there hasn’t been huge take up of the literacy programme."  "You are rigid and hierarchical.” These are not nice messages to deliver. Those working with the ‘echelons of power’ (at least 3 people have used that phrase to me this week) pick their battles carefully.

At its worst, this results in corruption, where the bureaucracy is unaccountable and self-serving. Your electricity bill has a very odd over-charge in it, or your case needs to be moved from one desk to another in the local police office, and it is clear that unless you pay the bribe, these things will not be sorted out. In recent months, India has had several waves of national scandals revealing corruption at incredibly senior levels. (See www.corruptioninindia.com)

I wonder if somehow as an outsider I shouldn’t say these things. One interviewee this week was anxious that her view of government wasn’t repeated to government. But the question of Indian culture around hierarchy and power has come up in every interview I have done, so here I am.

Of course, the counterfactual has come up too,  that of flexibility.  “We are so many ways, so many cultures, so many languages”, said one of my interviewees. There is an inherent adaptability here: you can take a law, or a principle, and make it work in your own setting.

The second theme is scale. I’ve heard about ambition and idealism, on a major scale. India, of course, is huge. (“It’s easy for you,” said one of my interviewees. “I mean, the UK is so little!”) Even if we asked 100 extra people to stand next to every single person in Britain, we still would come nowhere close to being as populous as India. In fact, you and all your friends and relations and all other UK residents would each have to be joined by 200 extra people to get anywhere close to the Indian population of 1.2 billion.

In this context, legislating for universal primary education (as the Indian government has recently done), giving every child a meal, a school uniform, a school bag, free textbooks, this is a big deal. Making sure that the teachers are of a decent quality, and there are enough for all the kids? This is way beyond the current capacity of the system. Legislating that every domestic violence case must dealt with by a multiagency team including social workers, not just police officers? This is a big deal too and again, way beyond the current capacity of the system. I struggle to imagine what it must be like to be a civil servant in this scale. I used to notice the difference between cohesion between my team in Liverpool (300 staff) and my team in Croydon (500 staff). It was much easier to get joint working across teams happening in the team of 300 than 500. What must it be like to get joint working happening between millions of civil servants?

The third theme is about what citizens are up to.  When I was in Canada last year, I talked to lots of people about ‘citizen-centric’ services, with the government trying to take a citizen’s world view. Here I find I have met lots of people who talk about ‘collective action’ and advocacy, where the citizen is trying to force the government into seeing the world from their point of view. I’ve heard many stories this week about how clever advocacy has changed the way government is operating. For example:

• A group of villagers had had their grazing land taken from them in a series of illegal actions by local land owners. After one of them had some advocacy training, the villagers decided to take all their livestock (buffalos, chickens, cows) to the nearest government office and demand a re-survey of the land. The officials took notice, resurveyed their land, and they got 37 acres of grazing land back.

• A group of women were frustrated that the local school didn’t have a teacher. They rocked up to the office of ‘The collector’ (the local senior official) with all their children with them and asked the officials to teach their children. Their school got a teacher pretty quickly.

• In April, Anna Hazare, a septuagenarian, and well-known and respected social activist, went on hunger strike to demand that civil society have a role in drafting a new anti-corruption law in India. He described the current Citizen’s Ombudsmans Bill as ‘complete eyewash’. Four days later, the government capitulated, and set up a committee of ministers and civil society to draft new legislation. Anna Hazare’s campaign was aided by assiduous use of modern technology. In two days, the number of members of the India Against Corruption Facebook page grew from 500,000 to 1.2million.

There have been times, this week, when I have felt disheartened about the prospects for what I could learn about collaboration in this setting. A couple of my interviewees seemed staggered that I had come to India to look at this theme of governmental collaboration. How can you collaborate when government departments are locked in to power battles? How can you get multiagency collaboration on this scale? How can you get collaboration when collaboration requires a form of ‘letting go’ of power, of allowing local discretion, and autonomy, and apparently this is not a certainty in India? And yet... I have also found inspiration. 

Inspiration in the ways of the community advocates. They are taking a genuinely bottom up, grassroots view. This, in fact, is what David Cameron is asking the UK to do in his Big Society agenda. What might UK government look like if it was genuinely trying to promote this sort of pressure and interaction? In many ways the themes of 'choice' and 'competition' are all about people power.

Inspiration in the ways that partners with different cultures haven’t succeeded in changing each other but have found ways of working together, coexisting. Through persistent presence and non-positional power, have held the space for their partners to adapt, very slowly and very surely.  This seemed true of social workers and police officers working on domestic violence; and it was also true of two gay rights campaigning organisations I heard about, one that was run as a non-hierarchical collective, the other as a more traditional hierarchy. In both cases, their joint working was very successful, though with significant tensions and some internal conflict.

Inspiration, too, in what can happen when those at the top do endorse something. India’s Prime Minister gave the thumbs up in the early 1980s to a massive programme to eradicate preventable disability, and Impact India has been working since then, entirely funded by the private sector and charity, and making huge inroads in to polio vaccination, cataract operations, cleft palate ops, and so on. In the early 2000’s, the model of having a social worker in a police station to help women who complained of domestic violence, got picked up by the State of Maharashtra and rolled out to 20 districts. For almost18 years this model had only existed in a small area. In the next five years, it started going statewide and then nationwide - all because government had picked it up and run with it.

And there are, it turns out, heavy resonances here with themes I had already run in to in the USA and Canada last year. Once again, trust, and long-term relationships, are important. A neutral or third-party ‘holistic’ view makes a difference. A clear and shared vision is a game changer.

I also have found much of the comment about the Indian state government surprisingly familiar.  In the UK Border Agency, we liked our command and control. We were grade conscious, and we didn’t give enough autonomy to the frontline. We certainly didn’t pay enough attention to the experience of our applicants, and I know many in my caseload thought we were corrupt, useless, oblivious, unfair, even though I always knew we were doing our best. Building collaboration in this sort of hierarchy is the challenge I am seeking to crack and so perhaps India is the best place for me to learn how to do it.