Regular
subsidies, incessant handholding, perpetual spoon-feeding—that
is the route development projects in India typically take. While
this approach helps projects to survive, the over-emphasized protection
weakens the intended beneficiaries and enslaves them to a system
of handouts. Creativity, innovation, leadership and competitiveness
get stifled. The projects cease to be a means and become an end,
breeding undesirable vested interests that go on to hurt the beneficiaries.
To
move away from this beaten path was thus a conscious decision. The
idea was to empower communities with knowledge and skill sets that
would make them competitive and efficient entrepreneurs who would
be able to hold their own in the global marketplace. Non-timber
forest products (NTFPs) are perhaps the last resource available
to rural communities that they could use to better their socio-economic
conditions. Bamboo—because of its prominence as the most-used
NTFP, multiple uses, renewability, short rotation time and wide
distribution in the country—was chosen as the vehicle that
would help realize this idea.
This
decided, the rest of the design followed: to catalyse entrepreneurship,
set up community-based venture capital funds; to ensure sustained
economic development, entrust ownership of enterprises to communities;
use technology to create linkages for the communities to secure
current market information; build in a system of transparency that
makes deviations apparent; develop business tools that can be understood
even by those who are not formally schooled; to maximize effect
with minimum resources, build up networks of professionals in different
areas and locations.
Thus
was born the Centre for Indian Bamboo Resource and Technology (CIBART)—a
not-for-profit, distributed and networked organization. CIBART was
set up as an independent body by the International Network for Bamboo
and Rattan (INBAR) in December 2002, incorporated under Section
25 of the Indian Companies Act, 1956.
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