New Delhi, Oct. 5 (The Telegraph): IIT Delhi has sparked controversy by tying up with NGOs linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or Baba Ramdev, as well as with a spiritual organisation, for rural development projects under a new central government scheme.
Academics who criticised the collaborations did not overtly cite these private bodies' antecedents, one of them saying local authorities would have provided better help than any NGO and another questioning the IIT's own expertise in rural development.
The private bodies IIT Delhi has tied up with are the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, a Sangh-affiliated tribal welfare body, the spiritual organisation Gayatri Pariwar, the NGO Shivganga Samagra Gramvikas Parishad and Ramdev's Patanjali Trust.
The programme is the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, envisaged exclusively for the IITs and some other government engineering colleges, which are to provide technological solutions and equipment to improve villagers' conditions.
Vanvasi is being involved to teach food-processing, marketing and organic farming to a cluster of villages at Jashpur in Chhattisgarh and Lohardaga in Jharkhand.
The Haridwar-headquartered Gayatri Pariwar, founded by Pandit Shriram Sharma, will be involved in an organic farming project in Agra. Its website says the organisation works for "rise of divinity in human and descent of heaven on earth".
Patanjali, which specialises in yoga and alternative medicine, will help IIT Delhi carry out reconstruction in areas near the Kedarnath temple that were devastated by floods in 2013.
Shivganga is an NGO working in Jhabua and some other parts of Madhya Pradesh for over a decade. Its president Mahesh Sharma, who had been a Sangh pracharak till 2000, said the organisation sets up water harvesting structures for tribals.
Former Delhi University vice-chancellor Deepak Pental said: "The IITs need to understand the problem, develop technology and implement it on ground. There's no need to involve any NGO - they can involve local authorities."
V.K. Vijay, head of IIT Delhi's Centre for Rural Development Technology and the overall coordinator for the institute's Unnat Bharat schemes, cited these NGOs' long experience.
"Their involvement will help us learn about the issues. They will involve the people in the projects," Vijay said.
Pental questioned the IIT's expertise in organic farming.
"The Indian Council of Agricultural Research should have done the project on organic farming. I don't know whether the IIT has the expertise," Pental said.
P.M. Bhargava, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, said the IITs' expertise lay in space technology, computer science and the like and not in rural technology. "It's an incorrect choice to give such projects to them," he said.
Vijay, however, said the rural development centre had been working on rural issues for a long time.
"If anyone (NGO) is open to work in rural areas, IIT Delhi is open to working with it. Our common objective is to bring change to rural areas," he said.
Vijay stressed that IIT Delhi had worked with NGOs in the past, too. "Nearly 300 NGOs came and participated in a seminar we had organised. We selected these NGOs because of their capabilities and efficacy."
He said there was no question of paying the NGOs.
An IIT Delhi teacher said that R.K. Shevgaonkar, who quit as the institute's director last December, had disagreed with the government on involving NGOs in the institute's Unnat Bharat projects.
Several of the other IITs have decided not to involve NGOs. IIT Madras and IIT Guwahati are sending student volunteers and teachers to the villages to assess their problems and provide help.
"Our students are giving lessons in English and mathematics in rural schools," IIT Guwahati director Gautam Biswas said.
The IIT has been installing water purification facilities too, he added. "We have been able to do so ourselves; there's no need to involve any NGO."
