About PPCP

The Public Private Community Partnership(PPCP) can be understood as a business entity in which the three partners come together to eradicate poverty and improve the living standards of the community at the 'bottom of the pyramid' (with the business development approach) and in due course share mutual benefits. In this partnership model, public relates to government including PRIs, private relates to an individual entrepreneur as well as a large corporate sector firm and community relates to common people including their groups or associations.

In this win-win framework, private sector would benefit in terms of long term business propositions with new range of clients/market, public sector would benefit by getting additional resources and participation for meeting their mandate and the communities would gain by acquiring new skills, knowledge and technology (in the form of embedded services from private sector with government's facilitation). The cumulative benefits will be of the civil society wherein all the stakeholders are gaining in the nation building process.

In PPCP, the public sector includes the line departments and local governments. Private sector consists of private economic agents from both within as well as outside the local ambit. These include SMEs, traders, exporters, large corporate enterprises – public and private, banks, etc. Community includes a group of households of local business interest, e.g. a group of weavers/leather artisans/milk vendors/farmers producing a typical crop, e.g. mango, chikoo, etc. The geographic spread of ‘local’ is a function of the activity in question especially with respect to economies of scale (e.g. specialized supplier of dry ginger) and scope (technical education for ITES for literate youth).

A planned promotion of PPCP aims to create local capacity in promoting potential activities by (a) building capacity of the local community to identify and utilize such scopes, (b) promoting active role of line departments and local governments as promoters and at times also as partners of such ventures, (c) involving appropriate private sector, both from within as also from outside the district, as investor/market facilitator in this process and (d) gradually institutionalising a mechanism of self-identification of potentials by each economic agent public/private/community in such local-local/local-national/local-international ventures.

Interestingly an institutionalised involvement of the public sector into a proactive role brings in two critical dimensions to this activity. Firstly, it involves creation of appropriate capacity of the public sector agents to take such leads and secondly, being a planned economy, with highest importance on decentralized planning, it sharply points towards institutionalising the process into the prevailing decentralized plan framework. Going a step further, in view of the dual necessity of market validation of PPCP activities and need for institutionalization into a decentralized plan framework, there is need for continuous participation (of all economic agents) and market validation of developments at appropriate levels (including the private sector) at desired stages of project conceptualization and implementation.