Unforgettable Prabasi

- Christopher Benninger

 Fragments of Memory is the unforgettable story of a man’s long journey in search of his own being and meaning. In many ways the book’s attractiveness is that it is the story of so many of us in the Twentieth Century who journeyed out of our villages, travelling away from our families, exploring new lands and working for great causes! Villagers became global citizens! In the process we evolved into an international nation, bound together by common values, but having no country to call our own.

 Leaving his Nepali village as a boy to study in Varanasi, Satish Prabasi matured to join the Royal Government of Nepal. As a young civil servant, he was introduced to the conundrums of development and the complexities of government. A scholarship to the United Kingdom, and later advanced studies in Holland brought Prabasi into the mainstream of international development thinking. He began dealing with issues and development strategies, leading him to important assignments within the United Nations Organization.

 Prabasi’s departure from South Asia and eventual settlement in the United States mirrors, in reverse, my own life’s trajectory. We are both adventurers and travelers, which assured that our paths would cross in the late 1970’s at a critical age of our intellectual growth and maturing abilities to act. Prabasi’s administrative and policy formulation genius with mixed well with my pension for program design and on-the-ground action. I, and Aneeta Gokhale, had recently founded the Centre for Development Studies and Activities [CDSA] in Pune, India, which was a unique venture envisioning development as an integrated set of physical, social, economic and participatory actions. We believed in “learning by dong,” while implementing our development strategies on the ground. In a chance meeting Prabasi was quick to envision the cocktail of UNICEF’s financial resources, leverage with governments, mixed with a team of on-the-ground micro-level planners, working with the people for whom they planned.

 Out of our association quickly emerged the Integrated Rural Development Program for Ratnagiri, in an ancient region of villages stretching from Mumbai south to Goa. This bottom-up, multi-sectoral approach emerged as a unique experiment in South Asia linking public banks, the UNO, State Governments and District Administrations with local citizen’s development. Communities became the agents of change and upliftment. The employment of villager and hamlet communities, coupled with the success in galvanizing local resources, became a counterblast to the top-down approaches then advocated by international development agencies. Arguments that, “Ratnagiri may be very poor, but an easy place for participatory development with its high education levels and history of coastal access to Mumbai and Goa,” lead Prabasi to take our thinking into the isolated ravines and decoit infested backward areas of Uttara Pradesh where we revived the Nehru era Etawah Community Development Program into a strategy called Social Inputs for Area Development. Seeing the success of these integrated strategies, the Government of India joined with UNICEF initiating a decal national program of development in the fifty most backward districts of India.

 This achievement for UNICEF, our institution and for Prabasi, attracted international attention, encouraging Prabasi, who had now become Regional Planning Officer of UNICEF in South Asia to introduce us to Bhutan where no development agencies, or programs, had ever been attempted. Indeed, there was no air travel, television, electricity or banking system in Bhutan in the late 1970’s. This immediately led us to the creation of a special training program for young Bhutanese government servants, allowing forty officials to live in Pune, and to study at the Centre for Development Studies and Activities, and simultaneously opening a Planning Cell in Thimphu in the new Planning Commission of the Royal Government of Bhutan. With these and many other on-the-ground successes Prabasi was chosen to open the first ever UNICEF office in China where again he pioneered joint ventures between people, government and new strategies for change. I must note that all of these successes employing “alternative development” approaches did not enhance our popularity with the old guard in the UN system. Satish Prabasi’s jump over twenty senior UNICEF bureaucrats did not bid well for him, or for the innovative programs he left behind in South Asia. Hidden behind the pages of Prabasi’s well-crafted autobiography are more telling stories of continuing racial prejudices and ethnic biases against brilliant people of color, that infects the international development system.

 I must end this small chronical by emphasizing the amazing spin-offs of Prabasi’s vision, faith in young professionals, encouragement of new ideas and finding pioneers, who would later become future leaders.

 Aneeta Benninger now spearheads the movement for bio-diversity in India and continues at CDSA as its Director. I found myself deeply involved with Bhutan’s development and the creation of a lead economic sector -hydro-electricity- that pulled Bhutan out from poverty, from being one of the ten poorest nations in the world upon my first visit, to having the highest per capita income in South Asia today. My work in the mountain kingdom led me to many advisory roles with the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the UNCHS (Habitat), the UNFAO and others. Some years ago, in 2001, I was identified by the Royal Government of Bhutan to prepare their National Capital City Plan, to design their Royal Capitol Complex, which included my designs for the Supreme Court of Bhutan, their National Ceremonial Plaza, and (ironically) the UN House in Thimphu. Then I was asked to prepare the re-development plans of the regional administrative centers of Damphu, Gelephu and Samtse and to design a new town in Eastern Bhutan called Denchi. The young bureaucrat in Bhutan who enthusiastically launched Prabasi’s Bhutan initiative, Jigme Thinley, grew to become the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Bhutan. So, Satish Prabasi sowed small seeds wide and far that grew into large banyan trees, which changed the lives of millions of people in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and China.

 Here in India, our institution, CDSA, grew into an institution of national importance, spreading its wings across India, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Africa and Europe. A lovely campus emerged, where hundreds of youngsters obtained their Master’s Degrees in Development Planning and Administration. CDSA pioneered the concept of micro-level watershed planning and other new initiatives in bottom up, people’s participatory development.

 Satish Prabasi stood tall taking risks with young professionals and innovative, new ideas, creating new programs and policies changing the lives of millions of people. Satish Prabasi’s gift to the world is his image as a role model for what the UNO system, and those who lead it, could be for the millions of people across the continents awaiting meaningful partnerships.

 Christopher Benninger is the founder of the School of Planning at Ahmedabad (CEPT University) and the Center for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA) at Pune. He is the author of Letters to a Young Architect (2011) and a co-author of Modern Regionalism: The Architecture of Sarbjit Bahga (2016).