Civil Society Processes and the State: The Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti and The Literacy Campaigns

This book covers the ground of the twenty- year association of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS) with the Government of India in the shared space of the literacy campaigns. The social development activities of the BGVS have spanned the length and breadth of the country with a presence in a reported number of 22 states and 316 districts. The involvement in mobilization and organization for literacy during the initial years was followed up by addressing the contexts of literacy through various social development initiatives. The relation between this major civil society process and the state, as also between education and development, has been quite unique from a national and even global perspective in terms of scale, duration and impact with varying degrees of success over time at the level of policy and field practice. The book also draws on the author’s experience of the literacy campaigns and their social developmental objectives. The narrative, while assessing the nature of programmes over different contexts in a historical perspective and their ideological undercurrents, provides relevant theoretical and strategic insights into the contentious relation between civil society processes and the state with the possibilities and constraints to such a relationship. The study should be useful for academics, practitioners and policy makers in the sphere of the social transformatory potential of education with its democratic implications.