Janaagraha: Participatory Democracy

The lines in my blog description summarize exactly what Janaagraha does. They believe that fighting literacy, poverty, hunger, and all the ills of society is good, but what is more important is to get to the root of the governance structure and improve it so that the ills can be prevented from being born in the first place. They follow a model similar to that of Viplav to ensure good governance, by increaing the involvement of the people in the system. They call this participatory democracy to create a platform for communities and governments to engage with each other. This involves many things, including transparency in functioning, decentralization of administration, and collective decision making.

The vision is correct, but in my opinion there are significant other problems to solve as well. Firstly, people need to realise their responsibilities to create a participatory democracy, which can come only with education and awareness. Secondly, they need to be intelligent enough to analyse the data that is put in front of them, which can come only with literacy if the data is presented as it is, or with a more understandable representation of the same data otherwise. It is actually a phased approach, but which needs to be started rightaway.