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Broadening Bases

By Kohl Gill '05

Parivartan is an organization in Delhi for whom I’ve been and will be volunteering for the next year. Typically, Parivartan focuses on using Delhi’s Right to Information Act to force government to follow its own regulations in the provision of infrastructure and services to a local slum community. The organization is rather small, with only about 6 full-time workers, and its impact has been rather local to the neighbourhood served. A year or so ago, Parivartan was approached with information that the water sector in Delhi would be undergoing some reforms, with questionable outcomes. Through the Right to Information Act, Parivartan uncovered some surprising and alarming facts about those proposed water reforms. The management of the water system was slated to be privatised, and due to the particular method of privatisation, the reforms would affect all Delhi citizens in a most detrimental way. To take action against the impending mismanagement of this fundamental resource, a city-wide campaign was convened: the Right to Water Campaign (RWC). While I’ve been helping Parivartan, most of my energies have been invested in this campaign.

Because I have a good command of English, and can write relatively clearly, most of my duties have involved communication – communication with the Delhi Water Board, the Delhi Government, the Central Government, Delhi and Central Legislatures, private parties involved in the privatisation scheme, the World Bank, influential public figures, and the lay public. The lay public in this case can be roughly divided into two groups: the middle- and upper-classes, organized into neighbourhood groups called Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), and the lower-class, largely disorganized, Jhuggi-Jhopri (JJ) population. These two groups face very different issues with respect to water; many folks in JJ clusters don’t have running water at all, some due to legal issues with their ‘squatter’ status, and some due to pure inattention in the cases of non-squatters.

As a participant in the Right to Water Campaign, I assisted with several public presentations of our analysis of the proposed reforms. These PowerPoint slideshows occurred in various venues, which ranged from neighbourhood meetings in parks and halls, to formal press conferences, to a city-wide public hearing. After the first few times hearing the same presentation, one has a tendency to tune out the speaker and let the mind wander. However, being something of a public speaking-buff, I always paid careful attention to the method in which the material was presented, and its impact on the audience.

Soon after I joined the campaign, I was given a set of standard documents that were used throughout our work. One of these was the PowerPoint presentation that I’d seen used, many times. As it happens, I’d taken down a few notes about the presentations I’d seen, and, in some spare time, I typed up a few constructive criticisms about the layout and manner in which the information was presented. I leaned heavily on my experience in presenting scientific data to both experts and the lay public, to try to translate this rather technical and business-oriented material into a more accessible form.

During one conversation with Arvind Kejriwal, the main spokesperson for the RWC – also the main spokesperson for Parivartan – we happened to be reviewing the file in question, and the notes that I’d typed up popped up, by chance. Arvind was very interested in any feedback I had, and encouraged me to rework the entire presentation, in any free time I had. Unfortunately, until now, I haven’t had another chance to look seriously at the presentation. But I was pleased to see that, as the weeks went on, Arvind had clearly altered the presentation in subtle ways, matching some of my suggestions.

In terms of written communication, I’ve had to carefully draft several letters stating the RWC positions on various aspects of the project. Some of these aspects are quite controversial: Is water a commodity? Is privatization a good thing? Oftentimes, the drafts I would receive to touch up were very strongly worded, taking positions on controversial issues, and even attributing corrupt motives to actions taken by proponents of the plan. I was rather troubled by these statements, and sought to find out what the campaigns true positions were.

Luckily, the campaign is rather horizontally-structured, inasmuch as nearly everyone involved meets weekly to discuss strategy and tactics. I made a point, at first, of listening carefully to everyone’s points of view. This was rather challenging, as my command of Hindi is poor to non-existent. But I managed to glean out a few important points. The most impressive was how disparate the fundamental views of the participants actually were. Some rejected the proposed reforms because they were completely against privatization in any form, while others embraced the free-market, and would only make minor changes in the proposed incentive structure. After a few such meetings, I began to bring up these fundamental issues for discussion, to see if a particular stand had been taken, so that I could reflect that in the communications. I was deeply impressed with the maturity of the participants upon realizing that no position had been taken on several controversial issues. The Right to Water Campaign was not anti-privatization, anti-World Bank, or against any other easy target group. I saw this as a wise decision, as overlap of the attitudes of the campaign participants was largest around their strongest and most basic point: the proposed reforms, in their current state, were bad for Delhi citizens, across the board.

I took it upon myself to tweak the language of communications, then, to reflect that nuanced stand. This was rather challenging, especially in letters to the RWAs. In those cases the length and detail of our message was very limited, and so it was difficult to get nuanced messages across. I had to push myself to walk a fine line: to be alarming, without being alarmist; to be exciting, spurring people to action, while still remaining completely factually true, with no statements unsupported by clear documentary evidence.

This experience, so far, has definitely broadened the base of types of communication with which I’m familiar. I expect that to be useful, even after this year of service.

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