Looking back at some 30 years of working in the social sector, I believe that the most important milestone in my journey was the point when I started recognizing the importance of research in development.
As a freshly minted doctor in the late 1970s, I was so socially oriented that I did not take research seriously. When Rani [Dr Rani Bang] and I started working in the villages of Wardha district, in 1977, we had a lot of beautiful, innocent ideas: we thought we would help people in the villages, that people would change, and villages would change, too.
But we soon realised—after sincere attempts at bringing about change through medical care as well as through farmer and labor movements—that we could only achieve limited results through these approaches. For example, although our work with landless agricultural laborers was aimed at organizing them to demand a fair deal from the Employment Guarantee Scheme, we were unable to negotiate a substantial increase in their wages. That’s when I decided to investigate further into why this was so.
Read More: http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/05/research-for-whom/