“How do ‘Civil Society Organisations’ such as ‘NGOs’ and ‘Self-Help Groups’ contribute to grassroots-level social changes? Discuss.” (2025)
Civil society organisations (CSOs) work in the space between family, market and state. NGOs are usually professionally run bodies that work for a group of people. Self-help groups (SHGs) are small collectives of 10–20 women, owned by their members, who save, borrow and act together. Both work where the state reaches least, so their effects show first at the grassroots: in households, hamlets and panchayats.
Dimensions of grassroots change
1. Economic: credit, assets and livelihoods
- DAY-NRLM, launched as NRLM in 2010, had brought about 10.05 crore rural women into 90.9 lakh SHGs by June 2025. These groups have taken about ₹11 lakh crore in bank loans since 2013–14, and more than 98 per cent is repaid. This weakens the moneylender’s hold, one of the oldest forms of rural dependence.
- SEWA was founded by Ela Bhatt in 1972. It now has more than 37 lakh women workers from the informal sector as members, across 20 states. It is a trade union that also runs a bank, cooperatives and social security.
2. Gender relations and agency
- Weekly meetings, a bank passbook and turns at leadership give women a public role outside the family. Kerala’s Kudumbashree (1998) links about 2.58 lakh neighbourhood groups up to the panchayat level. This has made its members a political constituency, and many have contested local elections.
- Amartya Sen’s capability approach (Development as Freedom, 1999) captures the change: the gain is greater freedom to act, not just more income.
3. Social capital and collective action
- Robert D. Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993) argued that dense networks among equals build the trust that lets people cooperate. SHG federations extend bonding ties among women of one hamlet into bridging ties across castes and villages.
- Such networks lead to collective action. The anti-arrack movement began in 1992 among women in a literacy class in Dubagunta village, Nellore district. It pushed Andhra Pradesh to bring in prohibition in 1995.
4. Rights, voice and service delivery
- NGOs turn laws into claims people can make locally. They help villagers apply for their entitlements under MGNREGA and the Forest Rights Act, run legal-aid camps and connect communities to health and nutrition programmes.
- Rajni Kothari (Economic and Political Weekly, 1984) called such groups “non-party political formations”. He saw them opening a new political space around forests, health and women’s rights, outside and below the party system.
Perspectives and limits
- Functionalist and liberal view: CSOs hold society together and fill gaps left by the state and the market.
- Marxist critique (“NGOisation”): donor-funded projects turn structural issues of land, wages and caste into small projects, and take the politics out of poverty.
- Feminist critique: Aradhana Sharma (Logics of Empowerment, 2008) found that state-sponsored empowerment programmes did mobilise poor women. But they also made the women responsible for managing their own welfare, which suits neoliberal governance.
- Debt and extra work: Andhra Pradesh’s 2010 microfinance crisis showed that loans without a steady livelihood can trap women in over-borrowing. Group work also adds unpaid labour to women’s care work.
- Elite capture and co-optation: group leadership often goes to women from dominant castes or better-off families. SHGs also lose independence as they become delivery arms of government schemes.
Conclusion
NGOs and SHGs change grassroots life most when they turn members into people who make claims, not only borrowers or beneficiaries. Kudumbashree and SEWA show that change lasts when groups federate, set their own agenda and connect with local government. But without land, work and an accountable state, microfinance only softens structural inequality.