Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in India - “May their tribe increase”: Some reflections

 A. Srinivas Rao

A few days back an old student called up to inform me that he was starting an NGO and I wasn’t sure whether to commend him or dissuade him. NGOs are complex and fragile ecosystems, with a fascinating and combustible mix of ideas, ideals, and great people and sometimes a hubris born of virtue & self sacrifice. I have often found among their ranks a strange mix of people who are inspiring and humbling as well as those profoundly sensitive and profoundly delusional. It is this often contradictory and protean image that makes them so difficult an organisational species to understand and grasp with any certainty.

India had 3.3 million NGOs in 2009 reported the Indian Express July 7^th 2010 quoting a Government commissioned study, that gives us a questionable distinction of having the largest number of NGOs in the world. In other words, India had according to this study one NGO for every 400 people in the country; a fertile breeding ground in more ways than one. That is more than what we can count for in access to schools and health centres. The figures provoke wonder and to some derision, like the recent census data that India has more mobiles than toilets (and according to World Bank poor sanitation costing the exchequer 54 billion USD or 6% of its GDP mainly through pre-mature death Hindustan Times Dec 21^st 2010). However India hasn’t followed Bangladesh where the NGOs have taken up most economic activity unlike a healthy private sector and created huge NGO corporations like the BRAC, Grameen etc; which contests the very idea of an NGO as a space within civil society that stands independent of government and the market as the third sector. The large numbers ironically are testimony to a democratic political functioning of the society, despite their many failings and that the number is driven by the size and ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of the country.

A Brief History of Disbelief in India

A Brief History of Disbelief in India


A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011

Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.

Revelation and Reason Part I

Modernisation is not Modernism

A Srinivas Rao

1^st May 2011

Sangay Lobsang of Harvard was appointed last week as the Prime Minister of the Tibetans and more than 500 years of tradition yielded to a modern view of separation of the Church ( as represented by the Dalai Lama) from the State. Somewhere along the way, the discomfiture within Islam in our times also stems from the unitary conception of Church and State and the inability to separate the two. Of course there is no hierarchically organized church in Islam (nor is there one in Vajrayana Buddhism). Yet the principle of separating the institutions of the state fashioned on reason and church founded on faith and revelation has been inexorably continuing on a secular trajectory.  All modern institutions of the state and by contagion all public institutions (except those of religion) follow this as a cardinal principle, including the separation of the domain of ethics from that of religion. Indeed the definition of modernity is often predicated on such a separation of powers; a quarantine between faith and reason. Often when as a faculty I have noticed well meaning prayer invocations in Sanskrit and celebration of religious festivals, I have felt that the school more than others must reflect on the place of religion in society and while giving it its due, keep enshrined not loyalties or traditions but reason in its prayer halls. What is the genesis of this and what are the values it assumes and makes us complicit in is what I would attempt to write.