By Asangba Tzudir
Nagaland continues to grapple with issues of governance, development, and inclusion and this has happened mainly because central and state schemes often fails to reach villages where it is needed the most. Against this backdrop, the recent launch of the Aadi Karmayogi Abhiyan has opened up something important on grassroots empowerment and responsive governance. Launched by India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the Aadi Karmayogi Abhiyan is a nationwide movement launched by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India, with the objective of empowering tribal communities and strengthening responsive governance. It is a large-scale, grassroots leadership program aimed at tribal communities across India which is targeting over 100,000 tribal villages and grooming 2 million "change leaders" to transform local governance and service delivery. This troop of change leaders includes serving as well as retired government officials, teachers, health workers, youth leaders, tribal elders, SHG members, social activists and volunteers. Key components include setting up "Aadi Seva Kendras" for local service access, launching "Seva Hours" and "Seva Days," and having each tribal village prepare its own “Village Vision 2030” while also giving communities ownership of their development trajectory in alignment with the broader national vision of ‘Viksit Bharat’ 2047.
Now, being a nationwide movement, how is Nagaland going to implement this program? Nagaland’s Tribal Affairs Department plans to roll the program out across a very significant 608 villages, aiming for saturation coverage in those areas. Chief Secretary of Nagaland has also described the Abhiyan as a "grassroots governance revolution and leadership at the village level." The approach is bottom-up wherein by investing in them through training and community mobilization, the state hopes to build a locally rooted leadership cannel that is capable of transforming governance system. By way of convergence, multiple government departments will pool resources to ensure that services are not fragmented but delivered in an integrated manner. Such method of coordination has been missing in Nagaland. For a state where faith in institutions is sometimes fragile and developmental imbalances are severe, this people centric bottom-up model can be seen as refreshing where there is upward rising from the villages themselves.
However, beyond the refreshing framework, the success of this ‘Abhiyan’ needs to go beyond the lofty vision statements. AS such, its success depends on coordination across departments as a way into convergence and which will require breaking the glass ceiling as well as the turf which is a challenge in any bureaucratic set up. Further, like any other movement, what is imperative is for its sustenance so that this experimentation is not sustainability must be ensured so that it does not become yet another short-lived experiment. Most importantly, there is a categorical difference between the terms output and outcome, and measuring the outcomes be it in improved school attendance or accessible healthcare etc., needs to be taken in all seriousness in accordance with the defined outcomes because output may be short-lived.
If Nagaland embraces this program with all sincerity, the Aadi Karmayogi Abhiyan can indeed become a real governance movement thereby triggering a paradigmatic cultural shift in governance where tribal identity, traditional wisdom, and modern statecraft converge to empower people at the grassroots. For long, the discourse on Nagaland’s development has been marked by dependency and delay. The Abhiyan offers an opportunity to envisage a new model of governance within a partnership model rather than one of patronage.
(Dr. Asangba Tzudir writes a weekly guest editorial for the Morung Express. Comments can be emailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
