Question 2:

Critically analyze the relationship between the civil society

and government to address the issue of poverty and
livelihood.
Civil society is voluntary group of individuals which comes together
and try to work for the betterment of the members of the group or as a
public interest as a whole. One which represents the interest of public
as a whole which are categorized as public interest groups while others
are simply pressure groups or interest groups.
In any vibrant democracy, civil society plays an important role. Civil
society tries to create awareness among the people through political
demonstration and helps them to make aware about their rights and
helps in their political training. Hence it strengthens the spirit of
democracy. It also tries to represent the diverse groups and helps in
mobilizing the marginalized sections of society. It acts as a pressure
group and tries to influence the policies of the government and hence
acts as link between common people and government .Hence it brings
about pragmatism in policy of government as it is in more sync with
the ground realities.
Moreover after the dawn of entrepreneurial government, the essence
of governance has transformed from top down to governance by
networks. Now the government, private sector and the civil society
are also involved in the governance. Hence civil society is also playing
important role for effective implementation of schemes from the roll
out to grievance redressal to review of schemes.
In the Jawhar region the people mostly belong to marginalized tribal
group and the situation was very grim before the civil society activism.
There was large scale migration of people to Mumbai and the land was
totally drought prone even though it received 300 m rainfall a year.
The civil society called MITTRA first tried to mobilize the people and
tried to spread awareness about self employment opportunities
available in the village. Then MITTRA started certain development

interventions for employment generation with self finance as well as

government assistance. This involves programs like Wadi program
which involves farm based agro-horticulture and floriculture and other
activities like watershed and livestock development. It was also
instrumental in setting up Self Help Groups (SHG) of women to
establish their micro-enterprise. For the landless people it was active in
providing skills training to them like masonry, carpentary or other
service oriented activities like kirana shop or hotel attendants etc.It is
also actively involved in community health program by health
promotion and disease preventive approach. Hence in a way it was
able to build people organization that would take charge of its destiny
by its political, social and economic empowerment.
However civil societies also have certain drawbacks like many of them
are not able to attract talented human resources as a result of which
their efficiency are not very optimal and lack professionalism. As a
result of which they are not able to imbibe the best practices of the
field quickly. Moreover due lack of accounting standards many NGOs
lack financial accountability and become a medium for malpractices.
Sometimes some civil society try to keep the interests of only a certain
sections of society thereby neglecting other sections of society. Thus
they try to influence the government policy away from inclusive
growth. Sometimes some civil societies are quite close to government
which is ultimately able to influence the policy for large section of
population. Hence this becomes opposed to democracy which signifies
representation of all sections of society.
Nevertheless the civil society have been quite successful in bringing
positive change in democracy and also have been able to empower life
of people at grassroots by giving them political voice and socioeconomic empowerment.