CIVIL SOCIETY PROCESSES AND THE STATE: The BGVS and the Literacy Campaigns

This book covers the ground of the twenty- year association of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS) with the Government of India in the shared space of the literacy campaigns. The social development activities of the BGVS have spanned the length and breadth of the country with a presence in a reported number of 22 states and 316 districts. The involvement in mobilization and organization for literacy during the initial years was followed up by addressing the contexts of literacy through various social development initiatives. The relation between this major civil society process and the state, as also between education and development, has been quite unique from a national and even global perspective in terms of scale, duration and impact with varying degrees of success over time at the level of policy and field practice. The book also draws on the author’s experience of the literacy campaigns and their social developmental objectives. The narrative, while assessing the nature of programmes over different contexts in a historical perspective and their ideological undercurrents, provides relevant theoretical and strategic insights into the contentious relation between civil society processes and the state with the possibilities and constraints to such a relationship. The study should be useful for academics, practitioners and policy makers in the sphere of the social transformatory potential of education with its democratic implications.

Denzil Saldanha is Professor, Centre for Sociology of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His research interests have been in the areas of social movements; voluntary social action groups and development organizations; and elementary, non-formal and adult education. He has been teaching, researching and contributing to policy in these areas for about three decades. He has served as a member of state and national level committees such as the National Literacy Mission Authority and planning sub-committees and as a consultant to government, funding agencies and international organizations. His publications cover the interest areas mentioned above.