A Favorite Parlor Game

Among those volunteers and interns who have been around for any length of time, it has become a favorite parlor game to dissect the many perceived failings—institutional, managerial, missional or otherwise—of Seva Mandir. Anyone who must daily navigate the organization’s strange and tangled byways soon finds that it is not a particularly well run or efficient entity, and neither has it been, by many measures, particularly successful at achieving its aims as a development organization. Theories, or pieces of theories, in the way of explaining these failures abound: the organization is too big, or it got too big too fast; upper management, such as it exists, is incompetent, out of touch, or both; the organization is plagued by a glaring absence of accountability at all levels; it is too bureaucracy-ridden; its employees are demoralized, cynical, and lazy.

Each of these accusations contains at least a glimmer of truth and in some instances perhaps a good deal more, but none is especially useful in pointing toward constructive and realistic reform of the organization. And Seva Mandir is very much in need of reform—its problems are not merely the imaginary outgrowths of the festering frustrations of volunteers. Evaluations of its projects are regularly scathing, turnover among the staff is dizzying, and within the last three years, a number of major donors, including the Ford Foundation, have cut off funding. Seva Mandir should be soul-searching, or at the very least reassessing its direction and purpose—yet it doesn’t appear to be doing either.

The standard prescription among the volunteer punditry is for a massive bloodletting (a fantasy I admit to having also voiced on at least one occasion), which would simultaneously reduce the size of the organization, improve accountability (theoretically), and jolt the staff out of its stupor (and savings could go toward supplementing the paltry salaries of those still standing), but such a step ignores an obvious truth about the not-for-profit world: unlike businesses, which may always trim fat in order to improve performance, even when already making money, non-profits don’t make cutbacks unless financial straits absolutely demand it.

But Seva Mandir isn’t a business and shouldn’t be run like one. Efficiency is a cardinal virtue for any organization, but a non-profit must be careful to always view it as a means to achieving their goals and never as an end itself. Business is as much science as art; it thrives on predictability, certainty, and the efficiency that naturally derives from the two. There’s a reason the private sector isn’t lining up to build clinics, provide clean drinking water, or organize women in the impoverished corners of the world: development isn’t an efficient, predictable process, and it isn’t profitable. Despite at least fifty years of close study, it is almost entirely art and very little science. No business would, for example, attempt to promote sustainable land use patterns among pastoral communities in the African Sahel in order to forestall desertification—not only is there no money in such an initiative, but the probability of success is too limited, and too dependent on forces beyond anyone’s control, to merit the effort, not to mention the resources. Businesses don’t want challenges, they want formulas with easy-to-plug figures, and they’re much better at exploiting existing demand for a product than creating demand for something new.

According to their natures, the private sector and the development world have both divergent aims and divergent approaches to achieving them. Are they then to be judged by the same standards for efficiency and success? One wouldn’t ask Seva Mandir to abandon its non-formal education program because it is expensive and because the majority of its students aren’t ultimately returning to the formal school system, as is the goal. It is understood that attempting to return drop-outs and never-wents to school is a worthwhile endeavor; it shouldn’t be given up simply because it hasn’t achieved a level of success commensurate with the amount of resources being invested in it, or because Seva Mandir is getting more bang for its buck in other programming. Development is like medical research: lack of progress can’t deter further trials, further investment. If a product line fails, it is discontinued; if Seva Mandir’s drinking water pilot fails, are its drinking water efforts to be discontinued as well?

Certainly development organizations should be held to high standards of both efficiency and effectiveness, and for the most part, they are. Donors favor the most effective, most cost efficient organizations—philanthropic foundations, international NGOs, and governments don’t enjoy squandering their money any more than businesses do. But quite simply, calculations of effectiveness and efficiency for the private sector and for the development world require different metrics, and we shouldn’t expect, nor should we even want development organizations to perform like corporations. That is not to say, however, that Seva Mandir has nothing to learn from the world of business, only that it won't better serve the rural poor of Udaipur District by eliminating programs that have produced disappointing returns on money invested.