A major shake-up through the second phase of the People’s Plan campaign is necessary for the governance structure of the State, which is incapable of meeting the challenges posed by modern development in its present form, Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac has said.
Twenty years after the first phase of the campaign was launched in 1996, the governance in Kerala has stagnated, with a decline in participation and transparency, and rise in corruption.
Important needs such as provision of quality employment for the highly educated young generation and the mainstreaming of marginalised sections, including Adivasis, and women cannot be met without remedying this stagnation, he said.
Dr. Isaac was speaking at the inaugural session of the three-day international workshop on ‘Unpacking Participatory Democracy - From practice to theory and theory to practice,’ hosted by the Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University, Canada, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and the Institute of Management in Government here.
In its second phase, the People’s Plan campaign will be centred on implementation instead of planning, unlike in the previous phase. The public will be mobilised in order to achieve fixed targets in areas such as health care, sanitation, housing, organic cultivation and water conservation. Efforts will be undertaken to integrate the different tiers of government activity, in a departure from a strict hierarchical order that reduces possibilities for popular intervention.
Public participation has to be sustained, and not just mobilised, he said, adding that women’s neighbourhood groups have proven to be one possible way of achieving this.
Aruna Roy, social activist and 2016 ‘Professor of Practice’ for Global Governance at ISID, is organising the workshop, which brings together practitioners and theorists of participatory democracy to reflect on the contemporary crisis in democratic practice.
S.M. Vijayanand, Chief Secretary; Satyajeet Rajan, Director General of IMG; Sania Laszlo, Director, ISID; and Naurti Devi, Vice-President, School of Democracy and ex-sarpanch from Rajasthan; attended the inaugural session.
