Anil C. Shah

Founder

Founder of Development Support Centre (DSC)

Anil C. Shah is the founder of Development Support Centre (DSC) (1994)[1], an Indian non-profit working on water & sanitation and rural & agriculture from Ahmedabad.

Anil C. Shah, who is deceased, was an Indian civil servant and rural development practitioner who founded the Development Support Centre (DSC) in Ahmedabad in 1994. DSC's own website records that the organisation "was established by Late Shri Anil C. Shah in the year 1994"; it does not publish a date of death. DSC is a resource organisation that supports non-governmental organisations, government agencies, community-based organisations and companies working on participatory natural resource management and rural livelihoods in Gujarat and neighbouring states.

He is particularly associated with participatory irrigation management in India, in which the running of canal irrigation systems is transferred to water users' associations of farmers. Under his leadership DSC became one of the largest Indian non-governmental organisations working in the irrigation sector.

Career

Shah joined the state government service and began his career as a block development officer, where he started experimenting with participatory approaches in work with farmers and other rural people. He was strongly influenced in his early life by Mahatma Gandhi's thought.

Before founding DSC he served as chief executive of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India). As chairman he took the initiative that led to the setting up in March 1994 of a high-level working group on participatory irrigation management, chaired by the Chief Secretary of the Government of Gujarat.

He founded the Development Support Centre in 1994 in response to demand from individuals and institutions concerned with rural development in Gujarat, and served as its founder-chairman. His conviction was that rural communities had the capacity to solve their own problems but needed an external agency to help them assess those problems collectively and explore solutions. DSC's resource centre at Visnagar is named the Anil C. Shah Resource Centre in his memory.[2][3][4][5]

Development Support Centre (DSC)

DSC is a resource organisation providing knowledge-based support to NGOs, government agencies and communities on participatory natural resource management, watershed development and sustainable livelihoods, based in Ahmedabad.

Development Support Centre (DSC) reports the following, on its own site:

Reached more than 1.45 lakh households across 1,061 villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, covering over 2.54 lakh hectares (2024-25)
Since inception has directly reached 1,649 villages, benefiting 3.23 lakh households and 4.78 lakh people across 54 blocks in 20 districts of four states