Mr Nitai Mehta

Mr Nitai Mehta (India)

2 Civil society and political/institutional change

SPEAKER'S QUOTE

The government has become the enemy of people.

The inefficiency of the governments has led to the rise of NGOs.

The role played by the NGOs is directly related to the type of government you have in a society.

Mr. Nitai Mehta pointed out that the civil society had always existed in these regions even though it was developed on modern lines primarily through the British education in the last century.

Before independence, India contributed 2% to world economy which has now been reduced to 0.5%. The founding fathers of India were aware of the role of the civil society but the governments that followed them were inefficient and devised wrong policies. Instead of learning any lessons from their own mistakes they vested their interest in pursuance of such wrong policies so that eventually the state assumed the role of a super-employer, and nothing more.

Today, we can see the governments enacting laws that they do not have the power to implement, such as the laws against caste prejudice. In fact such matters require much more than enacting laws but the governments are incapable of doing all those things. As a result a huge number of NGOs (around 80,000) has come up to provide people what the governments cannot.

In a developed country the role of the NGO is to aid the government and not to replace it. Whereas in our societies NGOs are taking over to do jobs that should actually the governments should have been doing. For instance, in Bombay, the failure of the judicial system to provide justice has led to cases where people have taken help from the so-called NGOs to get back their money through extortion. Another example is the caste-armies in Bihar formed to save people of certain caste – a job that should have best been done by the government.

Mr. Mehta observed that it is imperative for the NGOs to add one extra item on their agendas: to develop a stable civil society. In such a society the NGOs would be left only with the role they should actually be doing in a developed country: to be the watch-dogs for the society.