HISTORY
PIDT traces its roots to the Rural Action Project of the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM), established in the 1970’s to spread the impetus of National development to the primary agricultural sector. The Rural Action Project (RAP) encompassed 29 districts in eight northern states including Assam, Bihar (now Bihar and Jharkhand), Haryana, Madhya Pradesh (now also Chhattisgarh), Orissa, Rajasthan, Utter Pradesh, and West Bengal.

The rural social workers trained by the NIBM met extreme challenges in the rural communities, both in terms of barriers encountered with local power structures and bureaucracy, and in the minds of the oppressed people themselves. RAP Spearhead Teams sought to align themselves with the poorer sections of the rural communities in which they worked by living among them and serving their causes. As they did not observe caste taboos and associated on equal footing with the lowest members of society, their presence in the villages disturbed the social equilibrium and initially strong resentment from the higher castes who had vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Police and other local government officials in the villages, unfamiliar with the NIBM, also viewed the Spearhead Team members with suspicion, often investigating them as potential radical revolutionaries. Yet, such identification with the poor was crucial to gaining the people’s trust as their understanding of outsiders had been circumscribed by repeated exploitation at the hands of government officials and moneylenders alike.

Negotiating the tensions between disparate segments of society and harnessing the productive potential that arises in disrupting oppressive hierarchies in order to open the minds of the people to consider alternative ways of living emerged as major prerequisite tasks to any development work in these rural contexts.

Based on this experience and on concomitant social analysis of oppression, 45 rural activists from RAP undertook to research alternative forms to facilitate people’s true participation and development. The activist founders of PIDT studied and were influenced by the Indian freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Phule and Paolo Freire. The ideals of these great thinkers blended with the experiential learning of the rural activists who imbibed them, creating embodied values and methods of praxis.