Empower People, Transform India.

Empower People, Transform India.

John Samuel
I


Empowerment is the ability to ask questions, make strategic choices and decisions that affects and influences one’s own life and environment. Empowerment is also the process wherein each human being can realize her or his sense of dignity and power within to make change possible. It is the process of unleashing the creative potential of human beings to imagine, to think, to communicate, to act and to be in communion with others. Empowerment is the power to challenge oneself and make change possible and the power to resist injustice.

There are two stages of empowerment. The first stage is the realization freedom from fear and freedom from want: acquiring a sense of security and rights. The second is acquiring a sense of confidence to make choices in one’s own life and the ability to go beyond oneself to make a positive difference in other’s life; ability to initiate, inform, influence and inspire change: acquiring a sense of vision, mission and leadership. True empowerment helps a person to be both humble and confident: a critical self awareness wherein one is humble enough to know what one does not know and confident enough to realize what one can do.

Imagine more than a billion of such empowered people in India. Imagine an India wherein more than a billion people are in communion with a shared sense of dignity, dreams, purpose and vision: an India that can be creative, democratic, confident, humble and driven by values of freedom, human rights, pluralism, diversity and justice. Imagine one billion people who can afford to dream and make others to dream of a just and peaceful world. India is empowered when even the last person in this country is educated and enabled, and celebrates the art of living, beyond mere survival.

How can we think about an empowered India, when one in every four of us goes to bed hungry everyday? When millions of children are denied the right to education? When thousands of people are made to die everyday due to poverty related causes? When a billion acts of discrimination based on gender, cast, and creed that happen every single day? India can not be empowered when a large majority of Indians are disempowered


There are five key conditions to move towards the collective empowerment of a billion people: Economic growth with distributive justice; Democratisation of knowledge; social and economic justice to the most marginalized communities; responsible management of natural and energy resources; and infrastructure, agriculture and industrial development in the rural areas. However, democratic and accountable governance is a necessary condition to empowerment of the people.

The economic growth of 8 to 10% should help us to make sure that not a single person in India goes to bed hungry .Economic growth and creation of wealth is a crucial conditions for empowerment of India, provided that there are conscious policy choices and budget priorities to ensure the economic empowerment of every sections of the society, from urban slums to the rural deprivation. This means conscious policy choices to develop rural infrastructure as well as employment. Employment guarantee can only be sustainable when the whole scheme can create rural infrastructure, industrialization and sustainable development and environmental protection that guarantee long term economic growth and gainful employment to millions of people.

Democratisation of knowledge necessarily involves quality, free and compulsory education for all. Quality education, from the village schools to universities and centres of higher learning, needs be more accessible, available and affordable. People should be able to make use of information, knowledge and technology at every level of the society. Economic, technological and political literacy is an important step towards democratization of knowledge.

We need public policies to sustain and manage natural resources in a way that would help us achieve energy independence , without dislocating and displacing the poor and marginalized from their habitat. We should make sure that every person in this country can enjoy the right to water, food, education and health.

Accountability is key pillar of governance. Political parties are the legitimizing vehicles of a parliamentary democracy. So democratic accountability, transparency and ethical leadership of political parties are a prerequisite transform India. Increasingly political parties are being turned into family owned or controlled enterprises to capture state power and to sustain vested interest of few. Our parliament and legislative assemblies are increasingly looking like family clubs, wherein inheritance, rather than capability or political conviction, is the key to power. When most of our political party leaders and parliamentarians are not truly empowered, how can we dream of creating enabling conditions for the empowerment of a billion people?

We need collective conviction and commitment to challenge the process of discrimination and disempowerment that happen in the midst of us every single day and turn that into a process of empowerment. Let us dream of an India where every Indian feel proud of; where every single Indian can make a difference, where in India can reach out to the world and make difference to less privileged peoples and countries, where India can initiate, inform and inspire the world. Let us imagine that our children and grandchildren wake up in such a land of ours. Such a dream is indeed worth living.