What happens when a village says no to your programme
We arrived with a plan for a computer lab. The panchayat wanted drainage. Here is what we did.
In one of our integrated districts we sat down with the panchayat to agree a three-year plan, arriving with a fairly settled view that the priority was a school computer lab.
The panchayat's priority was drainage. Standing water in the lanes every monsoon, mosquitoes, children ill.
The uncomfortable part
We do not fund drainage. It is not a programme we run, we have no expertise in it, and a foundation that suddenly becomes a civil contractor because it was asked nicely is not being responsive, it is being undisciplined.
But neither could we tell a village that had just told us what it needed that the answer was a computer lab.
What we actually did
We said plainly that we could not build the drain. We then spent the following two months helping the panchayat access a state scheme that could fund it — which is a thing we are genuinely good at and which had not occurred to anyone as our job.
The drain was funded. The lab came in year two, once the village asked for it.
Why we tell this story
Because "the community decides" is easy to put on a website and awkward to honour when the community decides something inconvenient.
A village that is only allowed to choose from our menu is not deciding anything. Sometimes the right answer is that we are not the organisation for the job, and the useful contribution is helping them find who is.
