Comilla Model - Origins and Purpose

Origins and Purpose

The Comilla Model was Khan's reply to the failure of Village Agricultural and Industrial Development (V-AID) programme, launched in 1953 in East and West Pakistan with technical assistance from the US government. The V-AID was a governmental level attempt to promote citizens participation in the sphere of rural development.

Khan argued that for Comilla to develop rapidly, the farmers in its villages must be able to rapidly expand their production and sales. The main constraint they faced was inadequate local infrastructure – especially roads, drains, embankments and irrigation. But even if the government had the resources to build this infrastructure, Khan argued, the problem would not be solved. Once constructed, infrastructure must be regularly maintained. The benefits of it must be managed effectively based on rules that users could accept and predict. In Khan’s view it was essential to develop ‘vigorous local institutions’ capable of performing this type of local maintenance and management.

For this reason, the Comilla Model piloted a methodology for stimulating agricultural and rural development, based on the principle of grassroots cooperative participation by the people. Dr. Khan found inspiration for the cooperative development aspect of his Model from German cooperative pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, whose rural credit unions had been an early example of institution-building in predominantly non-literate communities.