YOUTH & GOVERNANCE

2007-2008

Partner: Sir Ratan Tata Trust

This project was born out of the prevalent political system where the creation of second, third tire leadership is not fostered. This attitude combined with that of youth who seem to carry a large spectrum of negativity towards policymakers and politician has led to a continuous crisis of younger leadership in the country.

This project created a forum where the local community, the PUKAR Youth Fellows and the locally elected  policy makers (local corporators), from ward 202 and 203 came together for an open dialogue at multiple places and at multiple events. This gave the opportunity to the community to present their difficulties to the policymakers and allowed the youth to learn about the difficulties encountered in governance. In order to disseminate this interaction to all members of the community and to overcome the language and low literacy barriers, many of the findings of the research were shown in form of combination of quantitative pie charts and bar graphs combined with illustrations depicting members of the community.

All this information was successfully documented in a book called  Lok-Vyaspeeth (Public-Forum). Many of these interactions led to resolution of some of the issue while others remains unresolved due to larger policy impacts, especially related to water supply. This gave the youth insider’s view of governance and various hurdles in the governing policies, locally, statewise and centrally.