Selective privatisation and changing civic spaces in India:

The government takeover of an erstwhile NGO-run child helpline

Abstract

Much scholarship has critiqued the fact that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as a result of global neoliberalism and consequential state retreat, have become private service providers of children’s protection rights. But how can we explain the situation when neoliberal states also undergo autocratisation and take back service provision from NGOs, while at the same time preserving the privatisation to for-profit companies? This tendency, I argue, can be conceptualised as ‘selective privatisation’. To make this point, this article draws on ethnography and policy analysis and showcases how India’s national helpline for children went from being an NGO-state partnership to a fully state-controlled service. When CHILDLINE was a state-NGO partnership, its employees experienced challenges such as limited job security and advocacy restrictions, but they still considered the partnership positive in terms of its ability to influence the state’s child protection policies. In the new state-controlled set-up, however, civil society is diluted to ‘volunteers’ and ‘communities’ who, without formal organisation and funding, do not have the means to walk the difficult but useful tightrope between being implementers and advocates. Instead, they are de facto silenced. The article thus contributes to the literature on ‘changing’ civic spaces by concentrating on the roles of non-profit private service providers for children in neoliberal and autocratising India.