Sanjoy Ghosh

Sanjoy Ghose has passed away, but during his life he built a volunteer development culture in India’s northeastern states that reoriented the area’s youth away from violence and anarchy towards constructive and active social involvement.

India’s Northeast evokes impressions of ethnic strife, insurgent movements, and state repression. In Assam, the largest of the area’s seven states, a violent secessionist movement has been fought intermittently since the 1970s, leading to several phases of military rule. The region is predominantly tribal, heavily forested, and remote from the rest of India. It is home to some of the world’s most extensive tea plantations.

Prolonged dissent and violence have weakened the region’s social fabric, and political processes have deteriorated. The state and government structures have disintegrated and cannot respond to the needs of people. In response, Sanjoy Ghose is organizing an alternative process of coordinated voluntary action in the region. He is creating a model that demonstrates how, in strife-torn areas where the state does not, for all intents and purposes, exist, citizen spirit can be mobilized to assume a proactive welfare role and make use of available democratic spaces to fill in the gap; his vision highlights a shift for the region’s young people from a system of alienation to one of leadership as citizens. “Voluntary action represents the third sector of development—different from the corrupt, bureaucratic apparatus, and not motivated by the profit motive of the private sector,” says Sanjoy, who will exploit for this “third sector” an existing culture of village-oriented activism throughout the Northeast. It includes churches, monasteries, women’s groups, local councils, relief programs, and issue-oriented action groups.

India’s government has spent large amounts of money on development in the northeastern states to little effect except for the well-connected. Industry, especially the tea companies, has invested even more than the state. However, their extractive history of taking resources such as timber, oil, bamboo, minerals, and labor out, while putting little back in has created environmental damage and deep resentment among the population. While the tea industry has thrived in Assam, three generations of laborers have done backbreaking work in the gardens and are the largest—there are nearly 500,000 in the state—and most marginalized working group.

The region’s problems are complicated by continual migration from neighboring Indian states and nearby countries, especially Burma. In the past, these “outsiders” and their cheap labor were tolerated or even welcomed, but more recently have come to be seen as threats to the indigenous inhabitants. They further strain an already severe lack of health facilities and other public resources in the region.

All the states share a long boundary, which is on the heroin route of the famous “golden triangle,” and alcohol and drug abuse and a growing incidence of HIV/AIDS are tragic local realities. The drugs contribute to escalating violence, fed by increasing inequality and the growth of underground political protest movements.

Violent protest movements, some bent toward secession from India and some against each other, attract the region’s alienated youth. Many are well-educated, the products of a massive state-sponsored movement toward higher education in the mid-70s that created, in Sanjoy’s words, “a large chunk of ‘educated’ persons who had no opportunities to channelize their efficiency... faced with this dilemma, the restive youths took to the underground movement.” Inevitably the violence and protests result in state repression. While traveling in the Northeast in 1996, Sanjoy wrote of a city in the neighboring state of Nagaland that the “only thing Imphal seemed to have in profusion was governmental organizations and the Army, both unable to deal with the root causes of the tension.”

Few from the region’s wealth of voluntary organizations have been able to address issues
related to development and peace in the region, or to create mechanisms for the step Sanjoy anticipates: “More money would fatten a corrupt upper crust. What is needed is an environment in which the people avail themselves of the fruits of employment and industry and sort things out for themselves.”

Through three interweaving strategies, Sanjoy is implementing his vision of a volunteer development culture in northeastern India. (1) He is drawing all the region’s social organizations along the charity-to-development continuum into a strong web by building their capacity, research, and advocacy strength through training programs, and thus making the development sector in the region visible and proactive. (2) Especially among the region’s youth, he is promoting the spirit of constructive voluntary action and community work through a financial and fellowship support program for selected young people. (3) He aims to break the stereotypes about the Northeast region by working consistently with the media and promoting a flow of stories about positive, constructive work in the region.

In 1996, Sanjoy and a team of six development professionals chose the remote island of Majuli in the Brahmaputra River as a testing ground for demonstrating and refining their idea of invigorating the voluntary sector. The nearest city is Jorhat, Assam, and the team has a base there that gives it access to information to road and air transportation, and to both government and business, especially the tea industry. The island of Majuli is a self-contained microcosm of conditions in the region. It was once the world’s largest fresh-water island and has long been intensively farmed for rice, though floods and runoff from surrounding deforested hills have eroded it severely. The government, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the erosion, has left the islanders in nature’s hands. Many local people have become dependent on relief agencies.

The Majuli team is part of a large national community-based citizens’ organization, the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD), of which Sanjoy is a leader. On Majuli they have begun a three-year project. The first phase is to document and understand local realities on the island. Their observation instrument includes family norms—how work is allocated and decisions made, for example; community norms; livelihoods—what people do to earn a living and what non-market activities take place; status of women—how much work they do, their involvement in decision-making; health status—what illnesses exist, how people are treated, costs, and education—how it is perceived, attendance, dropout rates, girls’ participation. Sanjoy notes that there has already been significant research work, although most of the studies languish in state departments. His team will review the information already available, a task with which the Assam government is cooperating.

Meanwhile, Sanjoy has organized a series of workshops for members of existing grassroots organizations to develop a village institution familiar in the region, called a “kebang,” which administers justice in the community and settles disputes. The kebang workshops include media coverage about human rights and development and help to promote Sanjoy’s goal of “strengthening civil society, encouraging constructive dissent, and gradually weaning youth from violence.”

From 1997, the community-based research data is being used to define an action plan to further empower communities economically by forming and strengthening voluntary organizations around livelihood issues. Two areas offer especially intriguing possibilities. One is the weaving that virtually every woman on the island knows how to do and which, with some skilled marketing, could be an alternative to the land-based livelihood options that are so vulnerable to erosion. A second is the possibility of sensitive tourism development. The island possesses a rich culture and history and is home to numerous ancient Hindu monasteries; its wetland environment attracts such birds as the Greater Adjutant Stork and the Whistling Teal, and thus birders as well.

All of Sanjoy’s strategies converge in his goal to develop out of the Majuli project a training program for youth from the region, a fellowship of “development entrepreneurs.” He will recruit young people who would otherwise be ripe candidates for protest movements and reorient them to engage constructively with the problems of the region. The training program has begun with an information center near Jorhat where young people have access to information about technologies, government policies, and recent rural development news. Sanjoy is an expert in communications, including the use of the Internet, where his ideas appear in several homepages related to Majuli Island, and one of his goals is to change negative stereotypes of India’s Northeast through regular publicity of constructive work being done in the region. He facilitates this goal by an ongoing relationship with CHARKA, a media advocacy organization through which he sensitizes various media groups to development issues. By the third year of the Majuli project, there will be classes and fieldwork for the young Northeast trainees. Trainees will also visit and learn from similar experiments with youth in different parts of the country. The development entrepreneurs will receive financial support as part of the fellowship for a period of two to five years. Sanjoy is writing a training manual, which his trainees will test and which can be adopted by other groups.

Sanjoy has attracted many national-level organizations as sources of technical and financial support for his program. The northeast is one of the largest tea producing areas in the world, and this industry has made a considerable financial commitment to Sanjoy’s programs. He has also secured the expert cooperation of the Department of Applied Geology at Dibrugarh University, which has promised research support and technical help in dealing with the problem of erosion on Majuli. He is exploring whether Majuli can be classified as a World Heritage Site by United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This would entitle it to international aid, similar to the assistance given to Venice.

An unusual blend of idealism and practicality, Sanjoy has been active in the development sector since 1982. Not satisfied with the existing infrastructure, he has been associated with conceptualizing and establishing many new initiatives. He pursued studies in the field of rural development, first at Bombay and then at Anand. But he believes that the tours he took into the heartland of rural India as part of his postgraduate studies gave him an idea of what he really wanted to do. Walking and trekking through rural Rajasthan—where a major problem was water shortage—and interning with an effective grassroots program at Jawaja, Sanjoy began to realize what his life’s work could be.

After his experience in Rajasthan, he joined a dairy cooperative in Bikaner, the Uttar Rajasthan Milk Union Limited (URMUL). There, he designed and established a trust that supported projects in health, nutrition, and education. Today, that union is an independent, self-sufficient organization with different chapters concentrating on women’s groups and income generation through crafts design and sales, as well as its initial focus areas of education and health—vaccinations, birth control, etc. When the Trust attained a degree of self-sufficiency, Sanjoy moved to Delhi, where he continued working in the voluntary sector. He is the Honorary General Secretary of the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD) and a founder of the Rajasthan Voluntary Health Association.

Although Sanjoy took time off from his work to pursue further studies (first at Oxford and then at Johns Hopkins University in the United States), he never lost touch with the villages where he had worked. He lived in the villages, learned the local languages of Rajasthan and Gujuvat fluently, and sent his children to the village schools. Committed to strengthening voluntary action and deeply influenced by the nonviolent approaches of Gandhi, Sanjoy moved to northeastern India where he works to reduce the violence of that region through efforts in the voluntary sector. His wife is part of the team working on Majuli and their children live with them there.