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community, development, rural, poor, tribal, aboriginal, adivasi, sanitation, water, community-led, women, health, empowerment, MANTRA, Orissa, India, inclusion, equity, ownership, sustainability

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Institutional, Educational, Legal, Financial, Policy

MANTRA is a comprehensive habitat development and governance program, which uses the common concerns for clean water and sanitation to unite and empower rural communities. It has been deployed by Gram Vikas in over 1000 rural communities in the Indian state of Orissa, improving the lives of nearly 300,000 people. MANTRA stands for Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas.

As the first step of the MANTRA program, Gram Vikas provides assistance and guidance to rural communities in building their own toilet and bathing room facilities.

The following conditions for participation in the MANTRA program are non-negotiable:

• Inclusion: 100% of families must be included in the project, to ensure that everyone, including the poorest and most marginalized, benefit equally.
• Equity: Equal representation must be given to all community members, regardless of gender, caste, ethnicity or economic status.
• Ownership: The community must contribute 60% of the costs required to build and maintain the infrastructure, in the form of labor, materials, or financial participation.
• Sustainability: All development processes must be based on sound environmental values, to ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure during the project and beyond.

Through the implementation of hygienic sanitation and safe water facilities for everyone, MANTRA creates unity in the community by inspiring leadership and initiative. This opens the door to a number of community-driven development initiatives, in a far-ranging number of topics such as preventive and curative health, food and livelihood security (including water management), education, institutions and self-governance, and further infrastructure improvements.

The net effect is a profound, durable transformation at all levels, and transcends the critical issues of water and sanitation, to empower a community to take control of their own destiny.

MANTRA has provided sanitation and a 24-hour potable water supply to nearly 300,000 people in 943 villages in the Indian states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Jharkhand. In 2011 alone, the MANTRA project was implemented in 155 rural communities.

The MANTRA program is an initiative of Gram Vikas (“village development”), an Indian NGO based near Brahmapur, Orissa. Gram Vikas has worked with rural and tribal communities since its inception in 1979, and has implemented the MANTRA program starting in1992.

Central to the implementation of MANTRA are the village community members themselves. They are invited to participate in the planning, implementation, financing and maintenance of the infrastructure. This sense of ownership is critical in creating sustainable change in the community: as a result, establishing rapport with rural communities requires a lot of effort and time.

As MANTRA ties in with many rural development programs from the governmental sector, Gram Vikas maintains close, productive relationships with Orissa’s Department of Rural Development, Orissa’s Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, as well as the Government of India’s Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation. One important source of funding is the Government of India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC). In 2010, the TSC provided INR 4.38 million (USD $87,000) in subsidies for development work, benefiting 2015 families.

Gram Vikas maintains project offices in districts where MANTRA programs are run. They remain in touch with the communities, and monitor their growth after the project is completed.

Gram Vikas has implemented MANTRA in 943 villages throughout the state of Orissa since 1992. In the current year alone, MANTRA was implemented in 155 villages, bringing safe water and hygienic sanitation to 7307 families in 155 villages.

MANTRA is Gram Vikas’s tool for fostering social inclusion among poor and marginalized communities and establishing sustainable systems in rural areas. Through the MANTRA approach, Gram Vikas aims to address two major issues in rural Orissa and elsewhere:

• Prevalence of preventable water-borne illnesses, such as cholera and dysentery, which are especially deadly for children under 5.
• Entrenched discrimination and exclusion of certain segments of society, on the basis of class, caste and gender.

The MANTRA program directly counters discriminatory practices. The rallying cry of the entire community is for a safe drinking supply for all households. This brings the community together, building bridges across the deep divides of caste, gender, status and politics.

The MANTRA program is an exceptional approach to provide sustainable drinking water and hygienic sanitation to entire communities. Benefits include:

• Improved village health
• Reduction of infant mortality rates
• Empowerment of women, including greater access to education for girls
• Lessening of social divides along caste, ethnic, economic or gender lines

The involvement of everyone regardless of gender, caste or economic status helps alleviate social inequities that have existed for centuries. Coming together to build sanitation and water facilities is a crucial first step towards crossing a critical health threshold and an exercise in self-governance. Women are given a chance to play a role beyond the confines of their households.

As these structures are put in place and transform the community, MANTRA engages them on a number of other critical issues, including:

• Preventive and curative health
• Self-governance
• Education
• Livelihood and food security
• Further infrastructure improvements

The key element that ensures MANTRA’s sustainability is the sense of ownership that communities feel every step of the way. The infrastructure is theirs: they have financed it, worked for it, and provided materials towards its construction. This is the key first step towards the broader development of their community.

The main quantitative benefit of MANTRA is the construction of a toilet for each household, as well as a 24-hour potable water supply.

Additional benefits include:

• The disappearance of the practice of open defecation, and a 85% reduction in cases of diarrhea, typhoid, jaundice, and other water-borne diseases.
• Improvement in nutrition levels, since water supplies allow for better yields in fruits and vegetables.
• Empowerment of women, reduction of hardship from water-bearing work, lowering of gynaecological problems due to an adequate bathing facility. They also benefit from greater financial independence though the setup of self-help groups.
• Transformation of community dynamics as the fault lines of gender, caste and privilege begin healing.
• Empowerment of entire communities, who learn to negotiate as one with government actors to reach their own goals.

Water and Sanitation are essential for living a healthy life with dignity. The MANTRA approach is perfectly suited for rural communities where deployment of sanitation and water infrastructure is a challenge. It is not a quick solution, as the communities need to buy into the project and support it every step of the way; but it ensures it will be sustainable in the long term, and will transform the community in a way that will go far beyond the immediate problem of sanitation.

The MANTRA approach in India has been designed to alleviate the social inequities perpetrated against the adivasi (Indian aborigines), lower castes, as well as women. It is thus ideally suited to help minority communities, whether aboriginal or not, and to promote gender equity, which remains an issue worldwide.

Factors to consider when transporting MANTRA to a new region:

• How will the sanitation and water facilities be built?
• What skilled labor is required? How will community members be trained to perform skilled labor tasks?
• What will be the water source?
• How can these facilities be built to last, and maintained past the project completion by the community itself?
• What further needs will the community express on the topics of education, health, food and livelihood security, infrastructure, and self-governance, once MANTRA has shown them the mechanisms of self-governance by which they can address them? How can MANTRA assist them?
• To ensure 100% participation and equity, what specific prejudices and inequities (ethnicity, caste, gender, etc.) must be overcome, and how?
• With what government agencies will a MANTRA project interact?
• How can the project gain their full collaboration, and what benefits or difficulties will these agencies bring?
• What sources of funding are available for projects in line with MANTRA’s objectives?

The values put forth by MANTRA are what sets it apart from a simple water and sanitation initiative, and also what makes it so effective and sustainable. They serve a purpose beyond the simple infrastructure work: they help unite communities, give them a sense of purpose, and inspire them to take development issues into their own hands.

It’s tempting to bend the rules on the values of MANTRA, especially when 95% of a community rallies behind a project and great effort must be deployed to convince the remaining 5%. But the principle of inclusion is critical to the long-term success of MANTRA, and must remain non-negotiable at all times.

There are a lot of obstacles towards total equity that require hard work to overcome. For instance, in rural societies in Orissa, women do not traditionally take part in community decisions. Involving them requires convincing the men, but also the women themselves, that they should take equal part in the decision-making process. Gram Vikas has succeeded in this endeavor by first creating separate groups for women, and coaching women to speak in front of each other, until such a time as they feel confident they can do so in front of the men.

MANTRA takes time. In many instances, the very planning and deployment of the project in rural communities that have suffered from discrimination and exploitation represents a cultural shift, and past experience may have bred cynicism and mistrust. Overcoming these attitudes requires time, patience, empathy and leadership.

Success of the project should be measured by the overall reduction of water-borne illnesses in the community, but can also be witnessed when the community starts their own projects, and manage their own communal funds to maintain the water and sanitation facilities or to address further development needs.

Once a tipping point is reached, successful villages will inspire neighbor communities to undertake the same process. In Orissa, for instance, it’s not uncommon for villages who had initially refused the MANTRA initiative, to come back to Gram Vikas once a neighbor has completed the project and demonstrated an increased quality of life. Daughters of villagers with MANTRA water and sanitation facilities will sometimes refuse to marry into families of villages that did not go through the MANTRA process.

Gram Vikas has implemented MANTRA in 943 villages throughout the state of Orissa since 1992. In the current year alone, MANTRA was implemented in 155 villages, bringing safe water and hygienic sanitation to 7307 families in 155 villages. This was made possible through a grant of nearly INR 100 million (USD $2 million) from the Government of Orissa’s Rural Development program.

Besides Orissa, initiatives have been launched in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. Efforts are underway to adapt the MANTRA program to Africa, particularly in countries such as the Gambia, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia.

Joe Madiath, Executive Director, Gram Vikas

info@gramvikas.org – gramvikas@gmail.com

+91-680-2261866

Mohuda, Berhampur, Orissa 760002, India

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