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Director of Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA),
Republic of India
Thank you. Thank you so much.
They have a presentation? It’s a PDF file.
Anyway, let me start. Good afternoon to all of you. First of all, congratulations
to KPI, and thank you very much for inviting us in this august gathering. Madam or
Director, fellow panelist, friends, and colleagues. It’s a tremendous opportunity and
privilege to be with you in this afternoon. I’ll be speaking mostly from an Indian
perspective, based on the experience that we have at the last two, three decades,
working with the citizens for their own empowerment and facilitating their participation
in the democratic governance.
I come from an organization called Participatory Research in Asia. This
organization believes that knowledge is power. To us, empowerment is change in
power relationship. Changing power relationship between those who have and those
who have not. Therefore, we have a positive bias towards the most marginalized
communities, everywhere in the world. So, when we talk about the empowerment we
also acknowledge the fact that not all citizens are equal. Some are more privileged
than the others. We have a tag line called knowledge, voice, and democracy. These
three are completely interlinked. The basis for changing power relationship has to be
knowledge, and there comes the relevance of Participatory Research, and how citizens
can produce their own knowledge. Based on their own knowledge, they challenge the
existing status school or working towards the power relationship in the society and
also between state and society.
So, let me take you through. I thought that the best way to start would be to
give you a glance of history of citizen participation as it evolved over decades in
India. The independence in India came in 1947. So, immediately after the
independence, there was a national fervor, new enthusiasm. And it was inspired by
Mahatma Gandhi’s call for self-reliant community building. A lot of civil society
organizations, at that point in time, they were not called civil society organizations,
they were called social movements, social organizations which work with a variety of
marginalized communities and population as a whole towards building self-reliant
community. And for Mahatma Gandhi, the starting point was the village community.
Because at that point in time, almost like 90% of Indian population lived in the
villages. Therefore, building rural economy, building village economy reminds us of the
fact that it should be self-reliant, was the political goal as Mahatma Gandhi inspired.
And that sentiment continued even in the 60s, so the whole 50s and 60s have
been relying on promoting self-reliant community building work. And in 70s and 80s ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ
almost like 10 20 years or 15, 20 years after the independence. The State started
