Voluntary organisations and rural development in India

Third World countries have been experimenting with different organisational models to achive rural development. Among these the state bureaucracy is, of course, the dominant one. Next to it are plethora of voluntary organisations. In India there have been systematic attempts to utlilse the services of voluntary organisations to promote rural development. The programmes undertaken by them and a host of others aspects connected with them have been discussed at length by many researchers. Yet, little attention has been devoted to the internal structure of the voluntary organisations and the procedures followed by them. The present study focuses on such an analysis.
The book tries to find out the extent to which bureaucratic characteristics, as enunciated by Max Weber and thinkers of the Weberian school, are prevalent in the voluntary organisations engaged in rural development. The book also obtains the data on the background, of voluntary organisations, their organisational structure, staffing patterns, personal background of their employees programmes and problems. The findings of the study haveimplications for the current attempts of the Indian federal government which has been trying to involve voluntary organisations for the delivery of services to the rural poor on a largerscale than before.