Make it happen out there

The answer, of course, was to conduct these activities outside the government. The prescription was to let the farmer and his organisations get into the act. Cooperatives, producer organisations, panchayati raj institutions, they could all do this. The prescription was doubly blessed. Some local resources would be mobilised and services would be more efficient, since they would be demand driven.

The joker in the pack was the fact that the state withdrew, without doing the reform. In a bureaucratic, feudal setup, financial rules would not change automatically to finance local and people8217;s organisations, even if they were into useful and viable activities. Anyway, the more the state tried to withdraw, the more tenaciously did political pocket boroughs hold on to the shrinking pork barrel.

All this is beginning to change 8212; slowly, but inexorably. At present it is at the level of the rule book but, hopefully, it will get down to the grassroots. The case has been made again and again that financial rules have to provide the link to cover the last mile. Not just in community collateral but in lending through the weather or project cycle, championing rural reform, covering sectors not thought of earlier, like tree crops, infrastructure, research products and processes.

Gradually the wisdom is soaking in. The budget, as we saw last month, had a number of schemes to cover the last mile for those who would help themselves. It should have come in 1992, but better late than never. Now the monetary authorities are doing it. Lending through the weather and project cycle is being worked on in rural projects.

In a globalising economy, where everyone gives lectures on decentralisation and local initiatives, think global, act local. One would have thought that financial and institutional reform would have taken place a long time ago. This, however, was not the case. The UN set up the Zedillo Panel to work on financing for development and it said all the right things. Sustainable, gender-sensitive, people-centred development was to be financed.

All the right words were there 8212; sound policies, democratic institutions, infrastructure for poverty eradication and employment, public and private initiatives at the local level, and so on and so forth. But the crucial bottomlines were missing and this was the actual steps to cover the last mile in supporting local institutions financially.

India should carry its reform experience to the global debates. At an expert round table on strategic initiatives for sustainable development called by the UN, some of us demanded that the new architectures provide securities for local institutions involved in infrastructure development and specific knowledge based activities to support sustainable economic growth.

This could be done through, for example, the creation of collaterals, interest differentials and trading of financial papers. These processes should be targeted, among others, on artisan and producer groups linked with local and global markets, local government agencies providing social and economic infrastructure, and farming and rural communities.

There is also the need to develop new mechanisms or strengthen existing ones such as the Clean Development Mechanism CDM, to finance or re-finance community projects in rural areas aimed at land and water development, agricultural diversification and agro-processing, development of infrastructure, trade, and rural energy supply.

Strengthen international support to developing countries for efforts of sustainable agricultural practices, while the global agricultural markets are being reformed. Study for the purpose of replication, existing models for providing rural communities with access to ICTs in order to enhance the level of information in rural communities on productions, crops, markets, prices and technologies, as well as in support of medical services and education.

This column has been giving you examples on how to push these last mile reforms. We have helped place this on the global agenda. It is now for our negotiators to see this through.