Building Village Level Plans and Strengthening of Gram Sabha

MPRLP is a large scale livelihood promotion intervention in the poor tribal dominated 9 districts of Madhya Pradesh. The aim of the programme is to facilitate livelihoods opportunities for the community through the Gram Sabha. Samarthan provided support to the MPRLP team for one year for strengthening Gram Sabhas in over 2000 project villages.

 Initially Samarthan conducted a study of the area which revealed that the decision making process of the gram Sabha members was invariably with the politically powerful in the village ignoring the poor, women and dalits. Planning for the Panchayats was still done in a top-down manner as per the instructions given by the block level officials. Based on these findings Samarthan decided there was a need for the MPRLP teams at the District and PFTs to focus on capacity building of the gram Sabha and the elected representatives on governance. This would be done through trainings on Gram Sabha Strengthening and Participatory Micro Planning.

The capacity building of staff was conducted in a cascading model by organizing Training of Trainers for the Master Trainers who in turn trained the PFT members in the district. Overall 555 trainings were conducted on the theme of Gram Sabha strengthening which trained more than 21000 village level leaders on the issues concerning the Gram Sabha. The trainings helped the PFT members to identify key results that would show that gram Sabhas had become functional entities in grassroots governance.

A similar process was followed in the trainings on Micro-Planning following which the the PFT members started formation of the Planning Committee in the village. The planning committee took lead in collection and analysis of data. Different social groups were engaged in planning processes. This process helped in developing ownership of the plan among the gram Sabha members. The process of planning also deliberately created space for panches in the village. which they lacked in the Sarpanch dominated Panchayats. Formation of micro plans began from the month of May 2008 and by the end of February 2009, 1955 micro plans were prepared and approved by the gram Sabhas.