Adding colour to social policy - Metamorphosis of a material

I don’t exactly remember in which year we introduced the Social Policy, Planning and Development paper, but able to recollect what triggered me to take initiative to include it as a separate paper. A feedback given by a student that she felt handicapped to perform better in her UGC JRF exam because of insufficient exposure to policy related concepts. Sensitive enough to appreciate her comment, I took initiative to prepare the syllabus without having any expertise in the subject matter.

When I referred the social work syllabi of various universities I found only in two places i.e.in TISS and DSW, social policy was included as a separate paper at that time. I prepared a concoction out of these two and the syllabus was passed in the university without questions, because it was our Director Dr.Raja then the syndicate member in MKU presented it in the academic council.

When commenting on the present education, I read somewhere that syllabus is prepared by those who do not know how to teach and taught by those who do not understand the spirit of the syllabus. It is true as far as myself is concerned.

Since I initiated, I took the responsibility to handle it. My attempt to understand the subject from the faculty of Public Administration in MK University was frustrating. I don’t want to go into the sickening politics prevailed in the department of PA some 2 decades before.

It was Dr.Narayana Raja, our present principal, who then doing his M.Phil in TISS helped me to get xerox copies of some literature and it was he informed me that TISS deputed its faculty for a six months programme on social policy in UK before introducing that paper. That is the reason TISS excel at national & international level.

With humility and curiosity, I started teaching the subject. I don’t know whether I did a justice to the subject and to my students, but the subject matter of social policy widened my horizons of thinking and understanding. Studying policy as an academic subject definitely sharpens one’s intelligence.

In order to make the subject understandable to the students I prepared transparencies and notes. Though I am not handling the subject at present for the

past several years, the material prepared by me is used by the students in various colleges. The material got metamorphosed from handwritten copy to cyclostyled copies and fortunately I retained some though I missed a lot.

Social policy has given me a lot - widened my horizons of thinking; it helped me to better appreciate and understand the PIP (Policy, Institutions and Processes) in livelihood concept, myself in turn have not contributed anything to enrich the subject matter of social policy. So, I thought of adding colour to the material that I have collected some two decades before and that is metamorphosed into An Introduction to Social Policy - A Primer.

Bret Wallach –He who said it in clear words -வெள்ளையாய் சொல்லிவிட்டார்

எழுத வழங்காத வாழ்வு கழுதை புரண்ட களம்

It was Mrs. Hema, an alumni, now teaching social work in Mannar Thirumalai Naicker College, asked me whether I have updated material to use for Rural Community Development paper. She had some material prepared by me in the 80s. It was about history of Rural Reconstruction Movements in India. The original handwritten copies even now used and circulated. History never gets old. Is it not?

The original notes got metamorphosed into several forms. From handwriting to cyclostyling to dot-matrix print. The metamorphosis stopped there because of the shift in course allotment –I opted for Regional Planning & Development.

At present, community development students and faculty are preoccupied with current issues in development – SHGs, PRA, Project Planning. .. I myself felt that sound knowledge base cannot be built if we ignore the historical past.

When the specialization was introduced, I took one or two batch of students to Marthandam as a pilgrimage, from where Spencer Hatch and his wife initiated their Light House project. We even meditated at the round shed from where Hatch conducted several training programmes. I don’t know whether YMCA is keeping that structure intact or not. I had a special regard for Hatch because it was he who used poor and poverty in his writings when other pioneers were talking about improving the standards of living and cultural rejuvenation.

How can we forget the contributions of Tagore, Brayne, Maharaja of Baroda, Albert Meyer and SK Dey and other noble souls. No doubt over the years, community development workers have sharpened their intelligence and efforts and contributed their might to “Uplift” the rural community. But the pioneers were our deities and energizers. Remembering them and acknowledging them is the real tribute that we can pay for them.

However we modernize and update the syllabus, it is impossible to take away the history of community development. So I decided to update the material on Rural Community Development, by incorporating images of the pioneers.I searched the net. Accidently I found an article “The history behind ‘Gurgaon Experiment’ in a blogspot (Shubham Basu).When I further digged it, I came to know that it was a chapter in a book “Losing Asia: Modernization and the Culture of Development” written by an American Geography Professor by name Bret Wallach. I strongly recommend that students of rural development should not miss this and I am planning to translate it in Tamil for the benefit of Tamil students.

When writing about Frank Brayne, Wallach observed that he generated more attention and publicity for his district than any other district administrator in the history of British India. Brayne declared, “I have got1200 villages, and I have visited all of them. I suppose I have been into every village once and many villages several times; I spend the whole of the cold weather and a good deal of the hot weather in the villages themselves, so that I have a very close acquaintance with the actual cultivators”. Brayne built a Town Hall in memory of his son, but told the Royal Commission on Agriculture that "a magnificent hall is being erected at Gurgaon by public subscription as the centre of all our many activities," but he had made no mention of his son. Bret concluded that the northern half of Gurgaon District today is generations ahead of anything Brayne imagined. In a way, it’s ahead of rural Ashill, where Brayne lies buried. The southern half of the district isn’t that different from the Gurgaon he knew. Bret is objective in his observation. Bret vividly narrates the other experiments as if we are reading a novel

Bret has brought great personalities Chester Bowles, Paul Hoffman, V. T. Krishnamachari, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Mayer, Arthur Mosher, Sachindra Kumar Dey (S.K.Dey) and places Etawah, Baroda, Nilokheri, Marthandam in such a way urging us to have a darshan of these people and go for a pilgrimage to those places. I felt heavy when I read the concluding remarks, “the block system remained, but it was nothing more than an input-delivery system”.

I hope that I would catch the spirit of the past in Bret Wallach words in Tamil.

Bret Wallach - Losing Asia: Modernization and the Culture of Development.

Read Introduction to Rural Community Development in Scribd & wePapers