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Developing Initiatives for Social and Human Action (DISHA), is a membership based organisation of 20,000 tribal and forest workers in Gujarat, which has addressed two questions on ideological and operational levels through alternative budget analysis. These two questions are:

• How can any society be civil if it tolerates a large chunk of its citizens being without honest work or basic living conditions?
• what sort of governance is it when the most disadvantaged citizens have no direct or effective say beyond the increasingly frequent elections?

This case study tries to look at what effect DISHA's alternative budget analysis had on civil society and on governance in Gujarat. This paper enlists the impact, the challenges ahead and some broader lessons learned. It is constructed into three main sections:

• first, it tries to address what civil society and governance mean in the Indian context, where the poor are in the majority and thus influence party politics as well as resource allocation politics, even when it is for name's sake
• second, it tries to document and analyse the decade long experience of DISHA in engaging with civil society and taking up governance issues
• third, it draws lessons on what works, and what needs support to work better if civil society is to be strengthened and governance is to be improved

The author concludes the paper by developing some of the key concerns that emerge from the case study, the challenges and the key lessons learnt. Though initiated by an organisation perceived as representative of tribals and forest workers, DISHA's budget analysis work broadened its base of argument by raising issues related to the poor, all poor, who constitute 40% of the population and upto 70% of the active voters. A crucial facilitating factor was the initial and full support from the donors to give all it takes to set up the systems. Such work takes time, has huge initial upfront investments and no easy or direct results, at least in first few years.

The author suggests that areas where DISHA needs to build its strength include promoting greater interaction and engagement with the elected representatives in terms of increasing their "budget literacy"; exposing the link between budget performance and political constituency nurturing; and working on broader democratic issues of making the budgeting process more transparent, accessible, iterative and accountable. DISHA also needs to build a broader alliance of not only NGOs and POs or their federations, but of other Civil Society players or actors, such as chambers of commerce or universities or research agencies.

Lessons learnt by the case study as highlighted by the author include that in spite of all its limitations, democratic institutions and processes in India do offer a direct and possibly effective opening in governance to the citizens. The future activities of alternative budget analysis will have to focus on opportunities and tensions that emerge in public governance and budgeting at the panchayat or state or central level as India moves towards more participatory but coalition politics, a more open but profit oriented economy, and increased integration into the global market place.

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