More Disturbing Than That Bogeyman

Within the last week, I have seen Seva Mandir’s dysfunction manifest itself in ways both more baffling and more disturbing than that bogeyman inefficiency, which, even if occasionally staggering in its scope, can, in many cases, at least be comprehended. Last Tuesday, the day after the pilot received sanction, I learned that one of its components had received particular scrutiny from the Chief Executive—namely, the plan to regularly chlorinate several of the village's wells. This, as with the overall bent of the pilot strategy, I had disagreed with from the beginning—in my strategy paper, which was intended to inform Seva Mandir's approach to the pilot, as well as its approach to the drinking water issue in general, I had written, "Ultimately, chemical treatment of wells is a largely temporary solution to a persistent and tenacious problem." Thus, the objections regarding chlorination coming from the top seemed, at first, sweet vindication of my own misgivings.

However, over the course of the next week, as the background for those objections surfaced, my smugness was transformed to something rather more like disgust. I soon learned that, contrary to what I had been told, Seva Mandir had (as I had heard rumored on more than one occasion) worked on the drinking water issue in the past—and in the recent past, no less. And it had been a high profile effort! Four years earlier, as part of a collaboration with the M.I.T. Poverty Action Lab, the organization had undertaken four "action research" projects, including one to determine whether the chlorination of wells would be an effective means of improving the safety of drinking water in its target area. This particular research project had been led by Seva Mandir's Health Unit, and it was the only one of the four that wasn't ultimately scaled up to a full-fledged field project. So why hadn't I been informed of this work previously? And why, precisely, had the chlorination effort been abandoned?

Much of the answer to the first question is tangled up in the strained relations among Seva Mandir's various departmental units. The units—Natural Resource Development (NRD), Health, Education, Woman and Child Development, GVK (Community Governance and Development), and the People's Management School—often seem to function as six independent bodies bound only by the shared name of their parent. They don't communicate, frequently behave as if in direct competition, and at times seem to harbor a scarcely concealed animosity for one another. This has obvious repercussions for the functioning of the organization—beyond issues of camaraderie and cohesion, many projects don't fall neatly under the bailiwick of a single Unit, and sharing knowledge and experience across departments is essential.

Thus, as the NRD Unit has prepared to inaugurate its drinking water efforts, it has either been unaware of, or has chosen to ignore the recent and highly relevant experience of the Health Unit on the subject. What's more, even had the Health Unit known that the NRD Unit was taking on the drinking water issue—and it almost certainly didn't—it seems unlikely that it would have shared its experiences with the NRD, given the Health Unit's belief that drinking water should be its exclusive domain. The upshot of this foolishness is that, only four years ago, a major research effort undertaken by Seva Mandir determined that a key component of the NRD's current clean drinking water strategy was not viable, and no one said anything, or possibly even knew enough to say anything, until the pilot was preparing to launch.

At the behest of Seva Mandir's Chief Executive—the first to sound an alarm—I contacted a former long-term volunteer, a Canadian man named Bruce Daviau, who had worked most closely with the chlorination research effort in 2004. Beyond shedding light on the reasons behind Seva Mandir's decision to abandon well chlorination as a drinking water strategy, he wrote:

"it is unfortunate that you have only recently been made aware of previous work done in relation to clean drinking water. in fact, there has been enough research data around for some time now for an effective clean drinking water program. and this data is specifically relevant for the udiapur (sic) region."

And now, despite what I've come to know and share about Seva Mandir's previous misadventures in chlorination, the NRD appears determined to push forward with its strategy as originally conceived; that is, chlorination and all. It seems that in an organization where communication and solidarity are weak, turnover among staff is high (both Health Unit staff who worked directly on the chlorination research effort are long gone), and institutional memory is limited, learning from the past cannot be taken for granted. Mistakes, in such an environment, are doomed to be repeated—and probably repeated again. How's that for inefficiency?