CAPART: Promoting Rural Technology and Voluntary Action

Behind most grassroots rural development work in India, there is usually a small, unassuming government body writing the cheques and setting the rules. The Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology, better known as CAPART, has played exactly that role since the mid-1980s. It does not build roads or dig wells itself. Instead, it funds and guides the thousands of voluntary organisations that do. Understanding how CAPART works tells you a lot about how India tries to make rural development a shared responsibility between the government and civil society.

What CAPART actually does 🔗

CAPART was registered in 1986 as an autonomous society under the Ministry of Rural Development, formed by merging two earlier bodies: the Council for Advancement of Rural Technology (CART) and People’s Action for Development India (PADI). CART had focused on appropriate technology for villages, while PADI worked more directly with voluntary organisations. Bringing them together under one roof made sense because rural development in India was increasingly being carried out through a partnership between the government and non-governmental organisations, and someone needed to coordinate that partnership.

Its core job is twofold. First, it acts as a bridge between the Government of India and voluntary organisations working on rural prosperity. Second, it works as a catalyst for rural technology, meaning it funds and promotes low-cost, locally appropriate solutions rather than expensive, imported ones. A rainwater harvesting structure built with local material and labour is a more typical CAPART-funded project than a large capital-intensive scheme.

Direct funding, not routed through the state machinery 🔗

One structural feature that sets CAPART apart from most government rural development schemes is how it disburses money. Its funds do not pass through state departments or district administrations. CAPART sanctions grants and releases them directly to the voluntary organisations implementing the project. This was a deliberate design choice, meant to reduce bureaucratic delay and keep NGOs somewhat insulated from local political interference. Over the decades, CAPART has extended support to well over ten thousand voluntary organisations across the country for projects ranging from watershed development to skill training.

Schemes and funding under CAPART 🔗

CAPART itself is not a single scheme. It is closer to a funding channel that supports voluntary organisations working within several national rural development programmes. Three names that appear repeatedly in this context are the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (ARWSP), the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP), and the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP).

Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (ARWSP) 🔗

ARWSP was the Centrally Sponsored Scheme meant to provide safe drinking water to villages that either had no source or relied on water that was chemically contaminated or otherwise unsafe. CAPART’s role here was to fund voluntary organisations that identified problem villages and built small-scale water supply infrastructure, especially in areas the formal state machinery had not yet reached. Parliamentary records show ARWSP as one of the schemes under which CAPART’s regional committees sanctioned dozens of projects to voluntary organisations across northern states alone.

Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) 🔗

CRSP focused on improving rural sanitation coverage, primarily through low-cost latrines and awareness generation around hygiene. Sanitation was, and in many pockets still is, a harder sell than water supply because it involves behaviour change, not just infrastructure. CAPART funded NGOs to run the awareness and construction components of CRSP at the village level, since voluntary organisations were seen as better placed than government departments to build trust and shift habits.

Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) 🔗

IRDP, launched in 1978 and extended across the country by 1980, was a self-employment scheme aimed at raising the income of rural poor households, mainly small and marginal farmers, agricultural labourers, and rural artisans below the poverty line. It reserved a substantial share of benefits for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, women, and persons with disabilities. Under CAPART, voluntary organisations helped identify eligible beneficiaries and supported them in setting up small income-generating assets. IRDP was eventually merged with other schemes such as the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) and the Million Wells Scheme into the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana in 1999, which reflects a broader pattern in Indian rural policy of consolidating overlapping schemes over time.

How the money actually moves 🔗

CAPART’s funding process is fairly structured. A voluntary organisation submits a project proposal, which is appraised and, if approved, sanctioned with clear terms and conditions. Funds are then released in instalments rather than as a lump sum, with the pace depending on the nature of the project, the total amount involved, and how much of the cost is being met from other sources, including contributions from the beneficiaries themselves. This staggered release is meant to ensure accountability at each stage rather than handing over the entire grant upfront.

Beyond ARWSP, CRSP, and IRDP, CAPART has also supported programmes like the Advancement of Rural Technology Scheme (ARTS), watershed development projects, and initiatives promoting Panchayati Raj institutions, along with organising Gram Shree Melas that give rural artisans a market for their products alongside buyer-seller meets in cities.

Regional committees and their impact 🔗

Running a pan-India funding body entirely from Delhi is impractical, particularly when the whole point is to stay close to grassroots realities. To fix this, CAPART decentralised its operations by setting up nine regional committees and regional centres located at Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Guwahati, and Dharwad. Each regional office covers a cluster of states, appraises project proposals from that region, and recommends or sanctions funding based on local needs.

How sanctioning actually works 🔗

Each Regional Committee has its own composition, generally including representatives from the government, voluntary sector, and subject experts, though the qualifications for membership are not rigidly fixed in CAPART’s Memorandum of Association. Parliamentary responses on the subject show, for instance, that the Regional Committee based in Chandigarh sanctioned projects across Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Chandigarh under multiple schemes including ARWSP, CRSP, IRDP, and rural technology grants. This kind of state-wise, scheme-wise data is publicly available and gives a sense of how widely CAPART’s reach extended, even into regions with difficult terrain and dispersed populations.

Grassroots impact, in practice 🔗

The value of decentralisation shows up most clearly in specific, local outcomes rather than aggregate numbers. The regional centre at Dharwad, for example, is documented as having taken up a project to bring drinking water to a village that had no water source at all in Dharwad taluk, working directly with a voluntary organisation rather than through the usual state water department channel. Multiply this kind of intervention across nine regions and thousands of sanctioned projects, and you get a rough picture of CAPART’s practical footprint: not headline-grabbing mega-infrastructure, but a large number of small, locally led interventions in water, sanitation, livelihoods, and rural technology.

That said, CAPART has also faced scrutiny over the years. Depending entirely on government funding, frequent changes in leadership, and questions about how effectively the CART-PADI merger was integrated have all been raised in institutional reviews of the organisation. This is a useful reminder that a well-designed structure on paper, such as decentralised regional committees, still depends on consistent implementation to deliver results on the ground.

Why this model still matters 🔗

CAPART’s basic idea, funding voluntary organisations directly rather than routing money through multiple layers of state bureaucracy, remains relevant to how India thinks about rural development even today. Programmes may get renamed, merged, or replaced, as IRDP itself was, but the underlying logic of using civil society as an implementation partner, backed by a dedicated nodal agency with regional presence, has persisted in various forms across India’s rural development architecture.

What do you think? Does routing government funds directly to voluntary organisations, bypassing state and district administration, make rural development schemes more effective, or does it create its own accountability gaps? And with programmes like IRDP eventually merging into schemes such as SGSY, what does that tell you about how India adapts its rural development strategy over time?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/erelcontent.aspx?relid=28933
2. https://rural.nic.in/en/sanctionorders/department-rural-development/capart-1
3. https://eparlib.sansad.in/bitstream/123456789/394323/1/12100.pdf
4. http://www.preservearticles.com/2012020322532/short-notes-on-integrated-rural-development-programme-in-india.html