Preconditions for an empowered India
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COMMENTS 
What are the enabling conditions for the empowerment of a billion people?
'Empowerment' has been a buzzword among development workers and policymakers for decades now. But what exactly do we mean by empowerment? Empowerment is the ability to ask questions, make strategic choices and decisions that affect and influence one's own life and environment. Empowerment is also the process that allows each human being to realise her or his sense of dignity and power 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 realisation of 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 the life of others. It is the ability to initiate, inform, influence and inspire change: acquiring a sense of vision, mission and leadership. True empowerment helps a person 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 realise what one can do.
Imagine more than a billion 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 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 every day? When millions of children are denied the right to education? When thousands of people die every day because of poverty-related causes? When a billion acts of discrimination based on gender, caste and creed happen every single day? India cannot be empowered when a large majority of Indians are disempowered.
There are five key conditions to moving towards the collective empowerment of a billion people: economic growth with distributive justice; democratisation of knowledge; social and economic justice to the most marginalised communities; responsible management of natural and energy resources; and infrastructural, agricultural and industrial development in rural areas. However, democratic and accountable governance is a necessary condition for the empowerment of the people.
An economic growth rate of 8-10% should help us ensure that not a single person in India goes to bed hungry .Economic growth and the creation of wealth are crucial preconditions for the empowerment of India. But there is a proviso: economic growth will empower Indians only if there are conscious policy choices and budgetary priorities to ensure the economic empowerment of every section of society, from urban slum-dwellers to the deprived in rural India. 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, industrialisation and sustainable development that guarantees long-term economic growth and gainful employment to millions of people.
The democratisation of knowledge necessarily involves quality, free and compulsory education for all. Quality education, from 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 society. Economic, technological and political literacy is an important step towards the democratisation 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 marginalised 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 a key pillar of governance. Political parties are the legitimising vehicles of a parliamentary democracy. So democratic accountability, transparency and ethical leadership of political parties are a prerequisite for a transformed India. Increasingly, political parties are being turned into family-owned or controlled enterprises to capture state power and to sustain the vested interests of a 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 every single day and turn that into a process of empowerment. Let us dream of an India where every Indian feels proud of India; where every single Indian can make a difference; wherein India can reach out to the world and make a 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. Such a dream is indeed worth living.
InfoChange News & Features, September 2005