Rationing Kruti Society (RKS) – an initiative on Right to Food in Maharashtra

Rationing Kruti Society (RKS) – an initiative on Right to Food in Maharashtra

Rationing Kruti Samiti (RKS) is a network of NGOs and CBOs, which as a common platform for about 180 organisations in Maharashtra to work on issues related to PDS and food security. The network was formed in 1988. The nation wide campaign on Right to Food has been very well conceived by the organization to work on the issue of food security. RKS is a key player in the campaign at state and national level. The organizations involved in the campaign at the Maharashtra level have selected Rationing Kruti Samiti as its convenor organization for Anna Adhikar Abhiyan – a network of organizations, forum, and other federations from Maharashtra concerned about food and livelihood security of communities.

following are extracts from a world bank report om RKS
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2004/Resources/22489_jenkinsgoetzWDR.pdf

The RKS: Origins, Structure and Main Activities

3.1. Origins and Structure

?? Rationing Kruti Samiti (RKS: Action Committee on Rationing) is a federation of around 50 core community- based NGOs (and roughly 40 other types of civil society groups that are more loosely affiliated ). Based in the city of Mumbai, the RKS was formed in 1992-93 in order to improve access by poor people (primarily slumdwellers) to food and other essential commodities. The involvement of civic groups in basic commodity delivery was initiated in response to a perceived lack of government capacity to cope with the severe
disruptions in food-availability triggered by the intense Hindu-Muslim rioting that shook the city in late 1992 and early 1993. The groups involved in this emergency work recognised their ‘negotiating strength as a collective’ and agreed to take a more durable organisational form under the name of RKS.13 Relations between the RKS and the state and local authorities have ranged from ‘continued co-operation, through disinterest and opposition to downright rejection [by the government] of the credibility of the RKS as a networking
group’.14

??The RKS, by virtue of its base among groups working with slum dwellers, is able to amplify the voices of the poor and the socially excluded, including particularly vulnerable groups such as tribals, homeless people, eunuchs, street children, new migrants (particularly Muslims), nomadic populations, commercial sex workers and others in need of food security. The defining feature of the RKS approach is the focus on those excluded from ‘pro-poor’ programs by virtue of their extreme social marginality, domicile insecurity
(dwelling in illegal settlements), insecure citizenship rights (recent Muslim immigrants), and lack of awareness about their rights.

RKS was not the only organisation in Mumbai to have become overly-reliant on relations with specific government officials . A report issued in late 2001 discussed the fate of another partnership involving the city’s Deputy Municipal Commissioner, (DMC) who ‘brought city agencies, NGOs and CBOs together in a…collaboration in order to unravel a series of conflicts over the legal rights and responsibilities of tenants, chawl [tenement] owners, and various municipal authorities…’. The DMC had begun issuing orders
favourable to the tenants, strengthening tenure rights. However, ‘the DMC was transferred not long after making his ruling which, eight years later, has yet to be implemented. While this suggests that implementation may have been too dependent on the DMC, it also highlights a more serious problem: the absence of accountability for the civil service to follow through on its own decisions or rulings. ’18 This is equally true in the case of the RKS’s relations with PDS officials.

The fact that RKS is made up of local NGOs engaged in constructive work (running clinics, schools, etc) has ambiguous implications for its capacity to achieve its objectives, and this may well be true for other NGOs that seek to combine advocacy/activism with service provision.

On the one hand, service-provision work gives the NGOs a legitimacy with both local people and to some degree government officials that is helpful in allowing it to play its additional role as policy advocates and organisers of protest activity. On the other hand, NGO leaders must constantly worry – as many RKS affiliates do – that their very important service-delivery work will be disrupted by officials and political figures upset by their work as confrontational activists .

 Threats have been issued on numerous occasions, and some have been carried out. As Leena Joshi, the RKS convenor argued, this limits the RKS’s ability to pursue larger objectives: The RKS can only ‘take action that we can sustain. If we strike terror in the hearts of the administration, we will have to prepare for retaliation and we are at present not ready for that… We don’t have the resources to deal with “big” corruption’, meaning corruption that affects truly powerful figures, whether they reside in the upper reaches of the state government or in the mafia dens of slum politics.