Recently I had an opportunity to visit Colachel - a tsunami hit area, as per government records. There was a heavy flow of relief material to the region after the disaster struck. And most of it reached the appropriate hands. But the relief operations were not with out its faults. To begin with much of the relief materials distributed in mass were totally irrelevant to the needs of the people. Many such supplies are gathering dust and rotting away in the back yards.
Today you can hardly walk the streets here with out bumping into a social worker. The place is teeming with NGO’s. They are competing with each other to win people over to their side or so it seems. Now what is wrong with that?.
Most of the people here are members in more than one self help groups. There have been hilarious instances when staff of two different NGOs reached at the same place, the same time to hold a group meeting for the same set of people. In another case a member asked the CV to pick the passbook from a pile of 10 passbooks because she didn’t know which belonged where. They take loans from all the NGOs and use the loan from one place to repay the other. Do we want to trap them in a vicious circle of debt and poverty?
I wonder whether we are fostering a trend of NGO dependency. People now wait for the NGOs to come and resolve their problems than trying to use their own capacities. Have we been too ready to provide solutions for their problems? Have we undermined their potential though many of our organizations work with the motto of ‘fostering self-reliance’? Are we too impatient to let things unfold in its own time?
Are we creating a new class of people-the NGO dependents?
PS: I work with an NGO
