Indian NGOs Research Articles

Investing emotions at work: exploring emotional labour of women in Indian anti-trafficking NGOs

ABSTRACT This article studies the experience of emotional labour by women in Indian NGOs. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 11 women across four anti-trafficking organisations in Kolkata, this paper highlights how emotional labour has been rationalised as women’s work. It shares the emotional distress and vulnerability women encounter due to the under-recognition of their labour. Despite the overwhelming nature of their work, women consider it a trade-off for the empowerment they experience due to their memberships with NGOs. Concluding remarks entail the need for NGOs to support the well-being of their workers.

Strategizing the performance of Non- Government Organisations: Exploring Organisational Practices and Managerial Leadership Behaviour in Indian NGOs

ABSTRACT Organisational practices like mandatory practices, management practices, involvement in policy-advocacy-lobbying-networking practices and governance practices are considered healthy practices that contribute to organisational performance. This paper identifies some of the standard organisational practices of NGOs (N = 33) in Kerala State, India. From the study, it was evident that the NGOs were more into mandatory practices. The relation orientation of the Managerial leadership Behaviour showed a higher mean value of 2.8567 ± 0.49331SD than the task orientation. The study unravels the need for an updated policy in the voluntary sector and affirming the role of social work professionals in the organisation.

Violence against women in West Bengal: its extent and causes

Violence against women (VAW) is a common phenomenon in orthodox Indian society. Women are here trained to tolerate violence since their childhood. Although it is an age-old problem, it has come into the spotlight after the Beijing world conference. Since then, the Indian government and NGOs have started to take numerous steps to eradicate this crime, but it not only continues to persist in the society but is also increasing over time. Based on the project data of West Bengal State in India, chi square test and logistic regression are carried out to locate the factors associated with VAW in West Bengal. In addition, women are asked to specify the reasons of violence against them to unveil the important factors. Addressing the factors detected from the study and the factors from the perception of women may help the policymakers to take right and effective measures to tackle this social crime. This study confirms that most of the Bengali women face some sort of violence in their married life; sometimes, they experience multiple types of violence. They also experience neglect, isolation or restriction in their married life and among several factors; dowry is emerging as an important factor in West Bengal.

THE JOURNEY SO FAR AND THE ROADMAP AHEAD

Dear Reader, Current Covid times are introspection times, too. When the Human Genome Project was initiated in 1990, for determining the basic pairs that make up DNA and for identifying and mapping the entire genes of the human genome, the hue and cry made by the Indian NGOs kept India out of the project, at lease officially. Approximately, 20 research institutions globally, including some from China and Russia later, participated during the 13 years of the project, which concluded in 2003. The participating countries and institutions made major contributions and consequently became beneficiaries of great progress and major strides in genomic research. While China was already participating from 1990 and Russia joined in 2000, India realised the need and importance of moving into this field at the turn of the millennium. The 100K Pathogen Genome Project launched in 2012 in USA and the 100,000 Genomes Project, also of late 2012, by UK carried forward the genome project initiatives. The countries who took early initiatives were immensely benefited through major breakthroughs. For good (or bad?), China outpaced India in genomic research and was rewarded immensely through funding from major global investors. What about India? Better late than never. The DBT in India initiated the Genome India Project in January, 2020 with the aim of collecting a moderate 10,000 human genetic samples from across India to build a reference genome. Fortunately, the vociferous NGO lobbies have probably realised their folly in opposing the genome project participation by India in the 1990s and the Indian project of 2020 will hopefully progress.

Between Gender and Kinship: Mediating Rights and Relations in North Indian NGOs

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, transnational women's rights discourse has promoted the category gender as a universal tool to evaluate questions of inequality. Building on fieldwork in Jaipur, India, this article argues that the discursive economy of women's rights renders gender global by framing kinship as a local, harmful element of women's social worlds. Mid‐level staff at women's rights organizations, called “family counselors,” demonstrate the complexities of kinship in women's rights institutions. Counselors work with the constraints and possibilities of north Indian kinship systems to support female clients. Yet globally circulating representations of gender inequality as a problem of “Indian patriarchy” present them with a dilemma. Relying upon kin relations marks their work as inexpert, even as such interdependent relations are crucial to both the families they support and the women's rights institutions they serve. By analogizing kinship with local and backwards and gender with global and progressive, women's rights discourse provokes counselors to reimagine the possibilities of kinship, and then erases their efforts. [gender, kinship, women's rights, interdependence, India]

High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt

Reviewed by: High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt Soniya Munshi (bio) High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018, 204 pp., $90.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. In High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration, gender and women's studies scholar Amy Bhatt centers the unpaid and undervalued women's labor that sustains the circulation of Indian transnational migrant (or, transmigrant) information technology workers among different global technology hubs. Through rich ethnographic research that includes formal interviews with almost one hundred respondents, mostly women, in the understudied IT sites of Seattle, Washington, and Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, Bhatt deftly engages the complex experiences of these "embodied subjects of transnationalism" (ix) who are positioned between and across geographic locations, immigration statuses, and company affiliations. Resisting simplified characterizations that valorize or demonize temporary worker programs, Bhatt's nuanced analysis shows that Indian transnational IT workers and their spouses [End Page 177] embrace their liminality. This flexible position informs how they pursue their aspirations and claim the value of their labor while navigating the insecure conditions of the immigration, economic, and sociocultural systems within which they live and move. Bhatt's research focuses on the gendered dimensions of the H-1B work visa program. Over the past three decades, this program has significantly increased the numbers of migrants working in the information technology sector; in 2017, over 69 percent of the H-1B visa and renewal applications were for technology-based employment. Indian IT professionals—who are primarily young, heterosexual, English-speaking, upper-caste Hindu men—constitute the vast majority of applicants for the visa. Although the H-1B visas are subject to an annual cap, the H-4 visas, which are granted to spouses and dependent children of H-1B visa holders, are not limited. Despite being allowed to migrate, these family members have generally been prevented from formally participating in the labor market. Bhatt focuses on the role that their unpaid social reproductive labor plays in transmigration, specifically through the critical figure of the transnational housewife whose caregiving work enables the cross-border migration of workers. Bhatt begins her study in the suburbs of Seattle, a technology center developed by Boeing and Microsoft, two of the largest employers in the region and the main draws for Indian IT workers. Through a thoughtful discussion of identity and place-making, Bhatt shows that the transmigrants in her study aspire to be able to circulate among IT worksites. Obtaining citizenship becomes important in the flexibility and mobility that it enables for future opportunities and not necessarily for the sake of permanent settlement away from the homeland. These transmigrants claim their liminality, positioning themselves as ideal immigrants who can blend into local work cultures and leisure activities as well as ideal global workers who will adapt and sacrifice as needed for their employers. Through activities that form local social and professional networks such as volunteering in Indian development NGOs, they position themselves as bridge builders who, by sharing their lessons of neoliberal models of economic change, demonstrate that they are valuable to the Indian nation-state. In the second and third chapters of her book, Bhatt directly examines how the liminality of transmigration disrupts and reinforces gendered expectations around work, marriage, and family formation, and how women actively navigate these opportunities and constraints. She begins her discussion with examples of women who obtained their own H-1B visas—an overlooked group in discussions of workers in IT industries—and delayed marriage in order to build professional and social lives in the United States. Most women in her study, including the H-1B visa holders, report a frustrating gendered discrepancy: for both women and men, IT education is a mode to improve economic opportunity, including their chances of getting married, because education and professional compatibility are increasingly seen as important matchmaking criteria. Women, however, are expected to give up their career ambitions to follow the patriarchal norms of [End Page 178] heterosexual married life. Thus, many of them become "transnational housewives" with the primary responsibility of care work as well as the reproductive labor...

The righteous and the rightful: The technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India

ABSTRACTCivil society groups today are honored and relied on by governments, as well as tightly regulated and scrutinized for challenging state policies and agencies. In contemporary India, political dynamics of collaboration and confrontation between state and nonstate actors increasingly unfold in legal‐social fields, taking “technomoral” forms. Mixing technocratic languages of law and policy with moral pronouncements, these actors assert themselves as virtuous agents, marking their political legitimacy as keepers of the public interest. Using ethnographic research with Indian NGOs, social movements, and a political party, we show that as civil society groups interact with state bodies, they redefine institutional boundaries and claim moral authority over public stewardship. Technomoral strategies are neither depoliticized nor antipolitical, but constitute a righteous and rightful form of politics. [NGOs, state, India, morality, activist politics, neoliberalism, law]

NGOs as Intermediaries for Pro-Poor Electrification in India

Neoliberalism is generally associated with certain paradigmatic regulatory experiments, such as privatisation, deregulation, trade liberalisation, financialisation, structural adjustment, welfare cutbacks and monetarist shock therapy. Prominent observers of the global economy swiftly proclaimed the “end of neoliberalism” after the global economic crisis of 2008. This paper shares the experiences of two Indian NGOs participating in a multiple-stakeholder pro-poor urban electrification programme that was designed to demonstrate a viable alternative to neoliberal models of basic service provision. By 2008, close to 100,000 homes had been electrified in the city of Ahmedabad and the programme is currently being replicated in smaller cities in Gujarat and in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. The broader findings from this research suggest that the news of neoliberalism’s demise may be greatly exaggerated. The “alternative” practices and strategies that have emerged more recently, such as the ones documented in this article, may challenge certain aspects of neoliberal thinking even as they reconfigure and recalibrate others. Although this case study cannot in any way enable us to gauge if India is moving toward “post-neoliberalism”, it does highlight the importance of documenting and understanding sub-national scales and actors in experimenting with and testing alternatives to market-based solutions.

Book Review: Pushpa Sundar, Foreign Aid for Indian NGOs—Problem or Solution?

Pushpa Sundar, Foreign Aid for Indian NGOs—Problem or Solution? New Delhi: Routledge, 2010, pp. 363. Rs 795.

Pushpa Sundar: Foreign Aid for Indian NGOs: Problem or Solution?

Pushpa Sundar: Foreign Aid for Indian NGOs: Problem or Solution?

Understanding Psychological Theories and Etiology of Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse can be literally addressed as the most inhumane act of shattering innocence by an adult. It can be broadly defined as an act of establishing sexual relationship with a child by an adult. The growing number of child sexual abuse cases, both at the global and national level has reiterated the need to effectively combat this menace. Researches have elaborately explained child sexual abuse from its divergent perspectives. In the present paper, the author has summarized a few major psychological theories of child sexual abuse that explains the etiology of sexually deviant behaviour in human beings. The discussion is attempted for an accurate understanding of the psychological basis of sexually deviant behaviour. This in turn would facilitate to implement appropriate stringent measures to alleviate the crime and also aid in the rehabilitation of the sexual perpetrators for preventing further propagation. Introduction- Background Alarming revelations of a survey report by Ministry of Women and Child Development in association with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and a few Indian NGOs working for Child's rights found that more than 53% of children in In- dia are subjected to sexual abuse. Additionally, most cases of child sexual abuse remained unreported. The survey was con- ducted in 2007 and covered 13 states across the country with a sample size of 12,447. The key findings also indicated that more than 50% of the participants were sexually abused in ways that ranged from severe forms such as rape or fondling to milder forms such as molestation, forcible kissing etc. In 50 % of such cases, the abusers were known to the child or were holding a position of trust and responsibility. Most victims were forced to remain silent and hence the abuse remained unreported. The above mentioned survey reports have again kindled the minds and hearts of millions of people to raise and stand up for this sensitive, growing and inhumane truth of the progres- sive modern society. Parents, teachers, social workers, media, policy makers and the community at large are working to- wards alleviating this gruesome crime of bruising childhood. Relevance and inclusion of sex education in schools is emerg- ing as a crucial topic among the academic community. Social awareness is at full pace through online networks. The grow- ing number of child sexual abuse has initiated amendments at the policy level with the recently amended Protection of Chil- dren from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) passed by the In- dian Parliament in June 2012. The Act envisages a variety of offences under which an accused can be punished. One of the prime issue in the war against the butchers of in- nocence is to sensitize the target group viz. the children to be aware, understand, defend and speak up against the injustice done to them. Parents and school has a critical role in em- powering the kids against sexual abuse. The present paper is an attempt to highlight a few theories and etiology of sexual abuse. The author is trying to focus on the psychological ba- sis of child sexual abuse and highlight the need to understand this psychological knowledge. Why to understand?

Existing at the Interface: Indian NGO Activists as Strategic Cosmopolitans

Abstract: This paper uses life history narratives to explore the multiple and overlapping scales and sites through which the cosmopolitan subjectivities of activists in local Indian NGOs are constituted. We particularly emphasise the “intermediate” status of the activists, and the ways their positioning shapes their subjectivities in diverse ways over time and place. We draw on the idea of a strategic cosmopolitanism to consider the multiple ways their cosmopolitanism shapes the negotiation of development from their intermediate position, and to reflect on the normative and political possibilities that emerge from this process.

The ‘Politics’ of Children's Rights and Child Labour in India: A Social Constructionist Perspective

This paper explores the ‘politics’ of the children's rights-child labour debate in India. It argues that Neil Stammers' social constructionist account of human rights and power raises important questions about how rights are being used and how they ought to be used. The paper highlights the ‘voices’ of three Indian NGOs that are committed to children's rights and how they conceptualise the contemporary concern with the child labour issue in India. The paper argues that these NGOs are involved in ‘a struggle on two fronts’: international and national. This paper draws on empirical research conducted by the author in India.

Bringing Change to the Change Agents - A Look at Indian NGOs

Bringing Change to the Change Agents - A Look at Indian NGOs

Understanding the Human Resource Challenges in Not-for-profit Organisations from a Lifecycle Perspective

In the last two decades not-for-profit organisations in emerging countries like India have witnessed a phenomenal growth. This growth has been managed through a variety of organisational forms and structures. The complexity arises because the basic structure of the NGOs is a project organisation. Most Indian NGOs are externally funded and this funding is often provided only for a project. The projects are expected to deliver a set of activities and are necessarily short term in nature. An NGO often executes multiple projects simultaneously. As a consequence of this, the project tends to gain prominence compared to the organisation. The vital question that many NGOs have to engage with is: are we an organisation or are we a set of projects? An organisation by its very definition exists in perpetuity, while the life of a project is often specified and limited. This article will explore the challenges that NGOs face in their lifecycle of growth—evolving from a single project-based entity into a vision-led professional entity. The lifecycle view of organisations proposed by Greiner (1998) postulates that they move through five stages of development, and each stage is accompanied by a period of crisis. The article will present each of the five stages and the crises, and the resulting implications for organisations in terms of their vision, structure, strategies and human resource practices. The focus of the article will be on understanding the appropriate human resource strategies and practices that NGOs will have to engage with in the various stages of growth.

“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles

L'A. reprend son essai feministe Under western eyes ecrit seize annees auparavant, dans le contexte d'un mouvement feministe transnational en pleine vitalite. Apres en avoir rappele les arguments centraux, elle analyse la reception qu'a eu cet article, puis tente de clarifier le sens qu'elle donne a des concepts-cles comme l'Occident ou le Tiers-Monde. Elle reengage le debat sur la relation entre le particulier et l'universel dans la theorie feministe. Elle tente enfin d'evaluer ce qui a change durant la periode qui s'est ecoulee depuis la parution de la premiere edition de Under western eyes. Elle inscrit parmi les nouveaux defis du feminisme le combat contre la mondialisation capitaliste et ses effets de predation dont les femmes sont plus particulierement victimes. A la suite de Vandana Shiva, elle s'insurge notamment contre la confiscation imperialiste des savoirs indigenes par le biais des brevets

Commentary: Zurich Financial Services' Partnerships with Indian NGOs

Commentary: Zurich Financial Services' Partnerships with Indian NGOs

One David and three Goliaths: avoiding anti-poor solutions to Mumbai's transport problems

The paper describes how community organizations representing the inhabitants of “slum” communities living along Mumbai's railway tracks and supportive Indian NGOs demonstrated effective and propoor solutions to the need to move people to increase the speed of Mumbai's overloaded commuter rail system. In so doing, it discusses the slow and often difficult negotiations they had in seeking such solutions with the three Goliaths – the state government, the railways board and the World Bank.

Grassroots Perspectives on ‘Indigenous’ Agricultural Development: Indian Organisations and NGOs in the Central Andes of Ecuador

Grassroots Perspectives on ‘Indigenous’ Agricultural Development: Indian Organisations and NGOs in the Central Andes of Ecuador