“Discuss the meaning and role of voluntary organizations in the efforts of transformation of society through state-action.” (1996)
After independence, the state was India’s chief agent of transformation. Planning, land reform, community development and welfare were meant to carry society from tradition to modernity. Voluntary organisations (VOs) have acted as the state’s partners, innovators and critics in that project.
Meaning
- A voluntary organisation is a self-governing, non-profit association that citizens form freely for a public purpose, independent of state and market. In India it is typically registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, under trust law, or as a not-for-profit company.
- William Beveridge (Voluntary Action, 1948) defined voluntary action as action not directed by any authority that wields state power. Its motive may be mutual aid or philanthropy.
- Features: voluntary membership, a focus on service or change, flexibility, closeness to the community, and reliance on donations, grants or volunteers.
- Place in society: VOs belong to civil society. In India they grew from Gandhian constructive work, nineteenth-century social reform and missionary work.
Roles in state-led transformation
1. Implementing partners. The Community Development Programme (1952) drew on the Bharat Sevak Samaj. The Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985–90) formally involved voluntary agencies in rural development, and CAPART (1986) channelled state funds to them.
2. Innovators whose models the state scales up. The Anand dairy cooperative became the template for Operation Flood (1970). The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad’s campaign made Ernakulam fully literate in 1990. The National Literacy Mission then adopted this model in its total literacy campaigns. Many self-help group models began with NGOs before banks and the state took them up.
3. Mobilising beneficiaries. Laws for tenants, bonded labourers or Scheduled Castes stay unused unless the poor know about them and claim them. VOs create that awareness. Rajni Kothari saw non-party political formations as the carriers of this grassroots politics.
4. Watchdogs and advocates. In the right to food case (PUCL v. Union of India, 2001), the Supreme Court ordered cooked mid-day meals in schools. In this way VOs push the state to act on the Directive Principles.
5. Reaching the unreached. VOs often arrive before the state in tribal education, leprosy care, disability and disaster relief.
The National Policy on the Voluntary Sector (2007) formalised this partnership and promised to protect VOs’ autonomy.
Limits and critiques
- Co-optation: heavy reliance on state grants turns VOs into subcontractors and blunts their critical role.
- Depoliticisation: Marxist critics argue that VOs reduce structural struggles over land and wages to projects. James Petras (1999) saw NGOs as serving neoliberal and imperial agendas.
- State suspicion: the FCRA (1976) and the Kudal Commission (1982) reflected fears of foreign or political agendas.
- Weak accountability: many VOs are small, led from cities, poorly audited and built around one personality.
Conclusion
VOs are best seen as the social arm of a transformative state. They supply the legitimacy, local knowledge and innovation that bureaucracy lacks, and they keep the state honest. Transformation works best as partnership with autonomy: VOs that grow too close to the state lose their voice, and those cut off from it lose their reach.