When Institutions Outlast Programmes: A Practitioner’s Rural Lesson Book
Long-term change depends less on funding cycles and more on institutions rooted in local agency
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth | SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Ministry of Rural Development | Ministry of Panchayati Raj | Ministry of Tribal Affairs
Fresh out of BITS Pilani and placed in a well-paying corporate job, R. K. Anil was trying to decide the direction of his life. Right then, an Illustrated Weekly of India profile struck him and he found himself more drawn to questions of how systems are built than how machines run.
“I didn’t set out to work in rural development,” Anil reflects. “Reading an interview with Dr. Verghese Kurien, the architect of India’s dairy cooperatives, changed my life.”
Dr Kurien’s journey crystallised something that had been forming quietly – a curiosity about how rural economies function and why some institutions endure while others fade. That instinct led him to IRMA, where the cooperative ethos gave form to what had until then been an unnamed pull toward public purpose.
“IRMA didn’t just teach us frameworks,” he says. “It showed us how India organises itself outside formal markets.”
Trust as the First Public Good
That early grounding shaped Anil’s decision to begin his career at Urmul Trust in Bikaner. The desert was demanding, and the communities cautious for reasons that were entirely rational. Development workers were unfamiliar figures in the region; no one knew why these outsiders kept taking notes, conducting meetings, or asking questions about crops and water. Anil recalls a senior colleague telling him that, in the first few months, some villagers even believed their work was a form of “jadu–tonā” – witchcraft – because they had never encountered anyone working in this way.
Suspicion was the default, not hostility. People had grown used to outsiders arriving with promises and disappearing soon after. What first began to shift this was simply showing up–consistently, without fanfare.
How Steadiness Turns Into Trust
“When you return day after day,” Anil says, “the village begins to understand you’re not passing through.”
Staying through sandstorms, crop cycles, and lean months sent a message no blueprint could deliver: that the work would continue whether or not conditions were comfortable, and whether or not someone was watching. As predictability set in, conversations lengthened, meetings became more reciprocal, and villagers started testing these outsiders with small responsibilities.
Over time, trust became a cumulative outcome–a slow build shaped by visibility, steadiness, and patience. It laid the foundation for one of Urmul’s most striking initiatives: the six-month residential programme for adolescent girls. No village hands over its daughters to an external organisation unless it believes, deeply, in the intent and integrity of the people involved.
“That programme was possible only because families felt we were part of their lives,” Anil says.
Communities contributed wheat, milk, vegetables–whatever they could spare–not out of charity but because they felt the programme belonged, in part, to them. Girls who had never stepped into a classroom left with basic literacy, confidence, and a sense of possibility their parents had not imagined.
Years later, when Anil worked in CSR-led programmes, the contrast was sharper. The money was larger but tied to annual cycles and quarterly reviews.
“Community ownership doesn’t work on those timelines,” he reflects. “What lasts in rural development is not the scale of funding but the depth of stake.”
Where Bureaucracy Misaligns
A shift to the World Bank–funded District Poverty Initiative Project (DPIP) in Telangana opened another window into India’s development architecture. Anil worked in tribal forest regions where community needs, practices, and daily rhythms did not easily align with conventional administrative systems. Bureaucratic systems arrived with standard office-based assumptions – set hours, standard formats, and a predefined sense of what “participation” should look like. Communities adjusted to these formats out of necessity, but they rarely came to depend on them.
DPIP, he explains, attempted – at least in design – to reverse this logic, by allowing greater flexibility in how interventions were delivered and by pushing decision-making closer to households and village institutions. The contrast, Anil realised, was not simply procedural but rooted in how people live and organise their time.
“The question is not about compliance,” Anil says. “It is about ownership. People stay involved because the work belongs to them, not because it belongs to a scheme.”
Where DPIP created space for facilitation rather than prescription, steady, relationship-driven work could continue – conversations under trees, late-evening meetings with women’s groups, and the slow accumulation of trust that rarely shows up in official metrics, but often determines whether institutions endure.
Why Steadiness Matters More Than Speed
As Anil reflects on his years across NGOs, multilateral projects, UNDP and CSR foundations, one insight stands out: what works in rural development is less about speed or scale, and more about steadiness. Steadiness means working at the pace at which communities think, organise, disagree, resolve, and eventually choose. It is less about executing activities and more about nurturing ownership.
“Real change comes from people deciding together,” he says. “That takes time, but is sustainable.”
What concerns Anil most is the widening gap between policy intention and field reality.
When Systems Scale Faster Than Institutions
Self-help groups, once built around thrift and collective decision-making, have expanded rapidly – India now has over seven million SHGs – but many function today primarily as loan channels. The social glue that made SHGs powerful is thinning. Watershed committees, highly active during project years, often dissolve once external funding ends because their institutional foundations remain weak. Pilot projects succeed because they are nurtured closely; scaling up dilutes this attention and weakens outcomes. He draws a parallel with the Gujarat dairy cooperative model.
“They were built slowly and with the community at the centre,” he says. “In contrast, most programmes in India now want to run before they learn to walk.”
A Different Starting Point for Rural Development
For Anil, the lesson accumulated across decades is simple but demanding: rural communities are not passive recipients. They are economic actors who do more with less than policymakers often imagine.
“If policy recognised that strength and built around it,” he says, “outcomes would look very different.”
His narrative is a reminder that much of what India needs to strengthen its development systems is already present in the places those systems are meant to serve. What remains is to build institutions that begin with community insight and stay with it long enough for trust to take root.
R. K. Anil has worked in rural and community development for over 25 years, across grassroots civil society organisations, World Bank and UNDP programmes, and CSR foundations (National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) & Sewa International). The details presented here are based on his account, reflect his personal views, and have been approved for publication. This piece was prepared with assistance from Ms. Sapna Singh, a member of the editorial team at The Policy Edge.