In October 2019, I got an opportunity to interview Shireesh
Kedare, my hostel-mate and now a Praj Industries Professor at Department of
Energy Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. Shireesh has been working in the
area of renewable energy, sustainability, and participatory development for over
two decades. In this short interview (28 minutes) Shireesh tells us what systemic
approach to participatory development is and its roles in solving wicked
problems such as farmers’ suicide etc.
Here
is the MP3 audio of the interview (11MB) (The interview was done on October 21, 2019 at Sustainable Development Lab, Dept of Energy Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay).
The questions explored in the interview are:
0:00 Introduction
1:10 Why is participatory development relevant in
a place like Indian Institute of Technology? Technology as a bridge between
needs and resources on the pillars of science. What needs? Which resources?
6:30 What is participatory development? Who is
doing to decide the needs? Centralized body? Elected members? Remote vs direct decision
making, opinion-based vs study-knowledge based decision making, This has been
done before e.g. Anna Hazare, Systemic approach of participatory development, Can
we do this at the village level? City-level? Is it practical?
13:00 Can you give an example to illustrate the concept? Identified 6 villages in Yavatmal district
in Maharashtra state known for farmers’ suicide, didn’t go with any agenda,
started developing a dialogue, team led by Dr. Vijay Honkalaskar on a period of
3-6 months along with NGO workers, met women-men-farmers-young of the village
on a sustained basis, tremendous pessimism-depression, village suicide, noted
42 different loops affecting farming – family size, cattle availability, land
quality, atmosphere, pesticides, seeds, govt schemes etc. Documented all this
and went back to the villagers, showed them some connects are working, some are
broken (family size has become small), complete picture started evolving, once
the picture was clear they started suggesting solutions, economics, organic
farming, tinted word, people have a phobia, small farmer 1-2 acre land feels this
is not for him, changed lingo, identified basic processes, gap between practice
of organic farming and people is too much, community action needs handholding.
23:00 Key elements of the approach: Don’t go
with any agenda, Try to understand, assimilate the complete system, Go back and
show it to them, get their reaction on it, Establish collective clarity, they
decide what to do. It can backfire. Needs iteration. Need to prioritize –
people may not understand what prioritization means and how to do it. People are wise, they should be given an opportunity to understand and solve their problems.
Hope you find it useful. More details about Prof. Kedare can be found on his home page.
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