Philip Chacko

The target is youth and the change agent is the Centre for Civil Society, an unusual organisation that is stretching every sinew to unshackle India from the bureaucratic chains keeping it fettered

A railway porter's badge can cost up to Rs 4 lakh in Delhi. More than 80 per cent of the children who pass Standard V exams from schools run by the municipal corporation of India's capital cannot read or write their names. The 100-odd employees of the Delhi Energy Development Agency have no official work other than collecting their salaries. Delhi is not a dry state, but it has a Directorate of Prohibition with 34 staffers and a yearly budget of Rs 1.6 crore. The Delhi Public Library is a shambolic institution that, in 2001-02, received Rs 2.6 crore in government grants and spent a mere 6.35 per cent of this on acquiring new books.

These are some of the many nuggets unearthed by the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), established in 1997 by Parth J. Shah, who gave up a job teaching economics at the University of Michigan, US, to pursue his true passion, which is to exercise the realm of ideas and the potential of youth to try and transform an economic and political system that, he believes, has kept India shackled. CCS describes itself as an "independent, non-profit research and educational organisation devoted to improving the quality of life of all citizens of India by reviving and reinvigorating civil society".

What exactly is civil society? "This whole idea of civil society came about in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and it was articulated largely by Eastern European intellectuals," explains Mr Shah, the president of CCS. "The communist domination they had suffered meant that, in their countries, government had come to occupy almost every sphere of a citizen's life; there was nothing one could do that was not touched by government. They began to think about societal institutions that could occupy the space between the spheres of family and state, and these they defined as the associations of civil society. Civil society is what makes a good society."

Mr Shah says that the modern advocates of the civil society concept were merely refining what had been enunciated by people such as Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political writer famous for his analysis of US institutions, most notably in the 150-year-old classic, Democracy in America. "Civil society was what made America robust enough to sustain different points of view," says Mr Shah, whose objective is to make CCS an instrument that "encourages people to look beyond the obvious, think beyond good intentions and act beyond activism".

Mr Shah's objective for the Centre is clear. "We got our political independence in 1947 from the British state, but we still haven't secured complete social, cultural and economic independence from the Indian state," he says. "Many components of our life are still controlled to a large extent by the state. The construct driving CCS is, in a sense, to push back the state to its legitimate domain; this way you make more space for civil society."

The internship programme is one of the main planks in the Centre's campaign to limit the role that government plays in our everyday lives, and to champion the rule of law, free trade and the individual rights of citizens. The others are policy seminars and dialogues, advocacy and publishing, and essay and documentary competitions. CCS is headquartered in Delhi and much of its work is based in the city, but it has increasingly been reaching out to other parts of India, urban and semi-urban, mostly with its seminars, which have travelled well to states such as Gujarat, West Bengal and Kerala.

The internship programme, which operates for a minimum period of one month and mostly attracts fresh college graduates, helps researchers gain experience in the real-life application of economic, political, and social theories and principles, and it hones their skills in analysis and writing (some of their work with CCS has appeared as articles in newspapers). The Centre provides a stipend whenever possible and covers the actual expenses incurred as part of the programme. It has, till date, supported 55 interns doing research on various socio-economic issues.

Among the outstanding outcomes of this programme is the publication, State of Governance: Delhi Citizen Handbook 2003, a landmark and painstaking compilation of the bureaucratic jungle that Delhi's denizens have to battle against on a daily basis. The goal of the handbook, which details 23 agencies, boards, corporations and departments of the Delhi government and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, is to help the capital's residents understand the way their babus function, and it suggests methods that can improve the quality and effectiveness of governance.

Some of the handbook's findings are depressing, to put it mildly: the Prevention of Food Adulteration Department has 28 inspectors overseeing some 1.5 lakh 'registered' food establishments (at one outlet per inspector per day, an establishment will be inspected once in 17 years); the Delhi Transport Corporation employs 12 people to a bus and incurs a monthly loss of Rs 25 crore (private operators employ, on an average, six people to a bus and make profits); the Delhi Drug Control Department has 29 inspectors to 'control' more than 5,000 pharmaceutical retailers (the fake drug market here is estimated to generate more than Rs 4,000 crore a year).

One more subject that has come under the CCS scanner is licensing, not of the industrial kind, which was abolished in the beginning of the 1990s, but the regulations covering street vendors. Anybody wanting, for instance, to sell vegetables in the colonies in Delhi, needs a license, and very few of these precious pieces of paper are given out by the Delhi Municipal Corporation. "Most of the people who do this kind of business are operating illegally," says Mr Shah. "That leads to two things: one, they are always open to harassment by the police and municipal officials, and, two, they have to pay fixed bribes on a regular basis. All that these people are trying to do is earn an honest living. Instead of helping them, the state has a system that subjugates them."

The sorry case of cycle-rickshaw operators has also been researched by the Centre's scholars, and this has opened another can of regulatory worms. The trickle of licenses issued for these people has resulted in a whole lot of them plying their trade illegally. Mr Shah says CCS's research showed that traffic policemen and officials squeeze a whopping Rs 6 crore in bribes every month from these unfortunates. "We argued against this inhuman structure and finally the Prime Minister's Office issued guidelines to the Delhi government to abolish the licensing system for street vendors and cycle-rickshaw operators. Two months later, the decision was reversed."

CSS's 'Liberty & Society Seminars' (LSS) are a crucial element of its civil society agenda. A four-day residential programme open to students doing their graduation and post graduation, its format includes lectures and discussions, working groups, documentary videos and field trips. The objective is to provide college students a greater understanding of the larger world — society, economy and culture — within the classical liberal framework that emphasises limited government, rule of law, free trade and individual rights. Open at a time to about 45 students, selected through an application process, the seminar recently won the Templeton Award for Student Outreach, instituted by the Atlas Foundation, US. "To be bombarded with so many new ideas in such a short period of time is exasperating, yet, I feel I am a more enlightened person, more liberalistic in my view than before," says Ramu S., who attended this seminar in Kochi in 2003.

The Centre's 'Liberty, Art & Culture Seminars' (LACS), which grew out of the LSS experience, are focused on young media professionals and those from the artistic community. Additionally, the Centre conducts an 'economics in one lesson, law and economics seminar' for students, teachers, professionals and officers of the Indian Administrative Service. Taken together, these seminars have, since they began in 1998, attracted and informed more than 4,400 students and others in 23 small and large cities across the country. "Our best ambassadors are those who have come through these seminars," says Manali Shah, a programme coordinator with CCS. "In 2003 we had nine applications from around the world, places like China and Finland, and we accept one or two foreign interns every year."

The Centre's endeavours in publishing have produced a bunch of impressive and well-received titles that enrich and entrench the civil society hypothesis. Jeevika, the documentary competition that CCS got started in 2003, is designed as a forum where young filmmakers can showcase works on legal and regulatory restrictions, bureaucratic processes, social and cultural norms, and religious practices that prevent or constrain people from earning a straightforward living. Jeevika offers winners cash prizes and financial support for subsequent ventures on a related theme.

The youth tack that dominates the Centre's discourses and initiatives is a deliberately taken one. Mr Shah elucidates the Centre's focus on youth in terms of their potential to change society as they grow into maturity. "We decided to focus our efforts on the younger generation because these are the people who will be in positions of power — in industry, in the arts, in entertainment and in government — 10-15 years down the line. If they understand these policies better at this point of time, they will be able to implement changes when they are in a position to. We want to create new leaders with new ideas."

While English is the principal medium through which its projects are conducted, the Centre has been striving to reach out in other languages as well. "It is one of the biggest hurdles we face," says Mr Shah. A bigger problem, at least in the beginning, was finding the resources to support the Centre's activities. "It's easier to get money to build a temple. I approached quite a few people initially, even business houses, and the response would be: 'Oh, you want to do research and seminars? Why should we fund it? That's the government's job.'" Mindsets and outlooks are changing, but the Centre's efforts, unlike programmes in, say, health or education, are impossible to quantify through results.

The Sir Ratan Tata Trust has been one of the Centre's most significant backers. In 1999 and 2000 the Trust sanctioned two consecutive annual grants totalling Rs 5.4 lakh. In March 2003 the Trust went many steps further, bestowing just over Rs 1 crore for CCS to expand its programmes over a three-year period. "This is a professional organisation with a focused vision," says Arun Pandhi, a programme officer with the Trust. "Their thinking is unusual, since they tend to concentrate more on individuals and, through them, on sparking change in institutions." Mr Shah is comfortable with the unusual tag; he does not even like the 'non-governmental organisation' moniker. "Why should you define yourself in opposition to something else?" he asks. "Secondly, this sort of branding gives too much importance to government. I prefer the term private voluntary organisations."

Nobel laureate and free-market guru Milton Friedman is one of the Centre's many admirers. "CCS is serving a vital role in facilitating India's movement from a centralised economy to a free, private-enterprise economy…" he states in a ringing endorsement. "Its imaginative projects are guiding and affecting policy." High praise for an organisation and an idea whose time, at least in this country, has been late in arriving.

Uploaded in March 2005