Counterview News
In the latest episode of the podcast Unmute, hosts Gagan Sethi and Minar Pimple convened a profound conversation with two veteran development practitioners to dissect a persistent tension within civil society: the perceived divide between service delivery and the struggle for rights. The episode, titled "Beyond Service Delivery: Civil Society, Rights, and the Politics of Social Change," featured Apoorva Oza, a development practitioner with decades of experience in rural development and institution-building, and Professor Dipa Sinha, a development economist known for her work on food, nutrition, gender, and social policy.
The discussion, which the guests described as an exploration of whether these two approaches are competing or can reinforce each other, quickly moved beyond a simple binary. Drawing on their extensive experience, Oza and Sinha offered a critical examination of how professionalization, funding pressures, and managerial approaches are reshaping the development sector, often at the expense of building genuine citizenship and collective power.
From Service Delivery to a Politics of Care and Courage
The conversation began by tracing the personal journeys that shaped the guests' worldviews. Sinha, whose mother was involved in social action, credited her upbringing in a large joint family and her education at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) for instilling in her a deep interest in social change. "The student politics and activism in JNU... teaches you a lot outside the classroom on how to weather you are in civil society politics," she noted, adding that "the interest in social change doesn't go out of you whatever you do."
Oza, whose father was a left-leaning economist and mother a feminist writer, described an early career as an engineer before a moment of realization led him to join the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in 1988. His first field experience, during the "drought of the century" in Gujarat, was transformative. He recounted a pivotal encounter with a woman selling her jewelry to buy fodder for her dying cattle. When he questioned her, she replied, "Suppose you had a kid in your house and the kid was dying, would you do all this?" This experience, he said, taught him that "the cow, the bullocks, are the given us food. They are the reasons we eat. And now because there is a crisis we abandon them." This moment cemented his commitment to grassroots work.
The conversation then pivoted to the core debate, with host Gagan Sethi asking whether the sector is "falling in the trap in the name of professional" and becoming too commercial. Oza responded by outlining a three-part definition of development: "delivery of services, reaching those people whom the state could not reach, and protesting when one had to protest." He lamented that these three elements have now become disconnected, with service delivery, innovation, and protest being siloed into separate domains.
The Professionalization Paradox and the Language of "Beneficiaries"
A central theme of the episode was the critique of the sector's increasing professionalization. Sinha argued that while care and empathy are critical, they must be balanced with courage and a political consciousness. "Care without courage produces what? And courage without care also doesn't produce much," she stated, adding that the current shift has seen a loss of this balance. She defined the distinction sharply: "Care is then making people beneficiaries. And courage... helps you people make citizens."
She pointed to the pervasive language of the sector—"beneficiaries"—as a symptom of this imbalance. "The whole language is now beneficiaries because there is too much care and it's a managerial language and it's accountability language," she said. Oza built on this, critiquing the "achievement" metrics that prioritize coverage over empowerment. "I don't care. I have covered so many people and that is my achievement," he said, describing the top-down, target-driven mindset that he sees as increasingly dominant.
The guests also challenged the narrative that the sector has become more "professional" in a positive sense. Sinha argued that "this too much professionalization has not been very good for the sector," noting that older training programs like IRMA and the Ekalavya institute produced workers with a certain orientation, whereas newer "development management" trainings focus on running a project rather than engaging with communities.
Scale vs. Quality, Standardization vs. Local Context
The hosts probed the guests on how they navigate the operational polarities of scale versus quality and standardization versus local context. Oza, who led AKRSP as CEO for over two decades and scaled it to 3,000 villages, offered a nuanced perspective. "I think there is no—it's not true that you can not achieve quality with scale. But what is important is the processes," he said. He emphasized that scaling must not become a top-down, blueprint approach. "If you are empowering your field worker, then they can empower the community," he explained, warning that when a model becomes a state program, it often loses its core.
Sinha added a feminist perspective to the critique of standardization, particularly regarding self-help groups (SHGs). "The current gold standards of evidence can not deal with diversity. Right? So it's very difficult," she said, explaining that the complex, negotiated, and contested realities of women's empowerment—such as a woman facing domestic violence for becoming a sarpanch—cannot be captured in simple indicators. She also echoed a feminist critique of SHGs, noting that they can become an "additional unpaid for burden" on women and are often instrumentalized by the state for its own objectives, such as cleanliness campaigns, while men occupy the leadership positions above them.
Patriarchy, Caste, and the Missing Discourse
Later in the conversation, Oza raised a critical point: over an hour into a discussion on social change, the words "caste" and "religion" had not been mentioned. He asked what role these fundamental divisions play in the development equation and whether the sector is avoiding them. This led to a discussion on the politics of leadership. Oza outlined a framework of "grow, decentralize, devolve, and deconcentrate," arguing that today's political leadership is doing the opposite—centralizing and concentrating power. He described this as "patriarchy at its best."
Sinha agreed, stating that both patriarchy is strengthening and that the sector is dealing with it, but that the understanding of it has evolved. "Feminist movements and feminist collectives in our country have shown that patriarchy operates at many different layers," she said. This includes not just women's employment but challenging gender roles, the segregation of work, and the very processes by which organizations function. She emphasized that the personal is political and that feminist forms of collectivization—based on listening, contesting, and decentralized decision-making—are as much a part of smashing patriarchy as fighting for land rights or against domestic violence.
A New Vision Amidst Shrinking Spaces
In the closing segment, the hosts asked the guests about their hope for the future and the constructive versus destructive tensions between the state, civil society, and the market. Sinha found hope in the emergence of new leadership from marginalized communities. "Finally, people from those communities have emerged as leaders," she said, citing young women, Dalits, and Muslims who are not just raising issues of their own identity but also broader issues of education, employment, and secularism. However, she also expressed despair at the growing inequalities in sectors like education, where a two-tiered system is creating vastly different worlds for rich and poor children.
Oza's hope lies in a Gandhian belief in the power of the individual. He argued that civil society must actively engage in the political space, from the ward member to the MLA. He also stressed the importance of the principle "Nothing about us without us," a slogan from indigenous struggles globally, which asserts that communities must lead their own fights.
He provocatively added that established NGOs need to learn when to step back. "If you can not help them, keep quiet. I think that also isn't to learn," he said, acknowledging the shrinking space for activism and the need for solidarity rather than co-option.
The conversation concluded with a call to accept confusion as part of the search for meaning. Host Gagan Sethi summarized the discussion's ethos with a string of words: "Care, concern, courage, and I would say confusion. And therefore acceptance of confusion. I think that's the search for meaning."
Ultimately, the episode argued that development must be more than a technocratic project. It must be a deeply political process that combines care with courage, constructive work with struggle, and institutional effectiveness with an unwavering commitment to justice. As the guests made clear, the goal is not just to deliver services but to enable communities to shape their own agendas, challenge unequal power relations, and emerge as agents of their own change.
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