What India Needs: The Role of Media and Society

Democracy

No country could be called a true democracy in 1900, but today there are approximately 120 democracies in the world. The reason for this huge success is that the democratic system is wonderfully magical and theoritically utopian in its functionality. In the simplest terms, the system works as follows. People elect their representatives based on the past performance of the candidates, their expectations from the candidates, and the promises made by the candidates. The elected representatives are answerable to the people - if they do not perform well while in office, the people will not elect them the second time around. The elected representatives in power comprise what is called the executive. The executive makes policies that are ratified by the legislature, also called the Parliament. These policies are then implemented by officials in the administrative services; the elected representatives make sure that these implementations are carried out properly. Thus, the bureaucracy is told what to do by the elected representatives, and the elected representatives are roughly told what to do by the people. If anybody in this chain of responsibility fails in their duties, they are ousted from power. It seems to be the perfect monitoring and answerability system. However, all of this rests on some fundamental assumptions, the biggest one being that the people are rational; they do a good job at monitoring the activities of the elected representatives, and make voting decisions accordingly.

Let's see to what extent this assumption holds. India is the largest and one of the most successful of all democracies of the world; therefore, let's take its example. The voter turnout is hardly over 40% - why are rest of the 60% not concerned at all about who gets elected? Politicians have discovered hacks in the democratic philosophy like the caste system, reservation for minorities, poll booth highjacking, and bribery to create vote banks for themselves - how can the people not see through this hypocracy at all? How can people who have studied for 22 years to be engineers and 25 years to be doctors not be bothered with being led by a bunch of highschool-failed politicians with large trails of crimminal records to their credit? This blindness and nonchalance of the people cannot be called rationality in any way. It simply leads to a fake democracy.

Let's see what happens when people become indifferent and stop caring. Well, obviously the elected representatives whom the people were supposed to monitor, now get a free hand. They become lax, corrupt, and the development slows down. Now, there are two ways to solve this problem.

The first approach is to chuck democracy, and do what China did. Communism. In other words, China assumes that its people are stupid and irrational and do not know what are the best things to be done. Therefore, the Communist Party makes strict laws in which it dictates who should do what, and it makes sure that the people follow these laws. The system works wonderfully. Look at the 9% growth rates of China, the foreign investment of over 50 billion $, the manufacturing facilities of China which are just operating at 10% of their capacity, the cash bids for Unocal, and now the space missions as well. Everybody is scared of China, including most of the popular democratic nations of the world.

The second approach is to assume that democracy cannot be chucked out so easily, and to see what is the best that can be done. To infer the solution, let's try to figure out why the people who fought so vigourously for independence and creation of a democratic nation, suddenly turned cold, non-caring, and stupid. In my opinion, it was because of a lack of awareness among the people on what a democracy really is, and what are the responsibilities of the people to ensure a good functional democracy.

Role of media

Adolf Hitler made everybody buy a copy of Mein Kampf so that the people could understand his vision and appreciate it. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German and wrote his own interpretation of how things should be so that the people could read about it. Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto which inspired so many people that it is almost unbelievable. But in India we missed out on the significance of the printing press big time. We wrote books like The-Discovery-of-India and My-Experiments-With-Truth which had nothing to do with teaching people about democracy. We copied the British constitution and to this day we celebrate the Republic Day each year, without knowing what the constitution really contains and what being a Republic really means. Anyhow, there is no point in grumbling over spilt milk. Let's see how things can be changed, and what is the biggest force that can help in bringing the lost awareness back to the people.

It's the media obviously. What does the media do? It supplies good content to the people via a good communication infrastructure. In other words, there are two requirements: creating content so that people can understand it, and creating the infrastructure so that people can access the content. The media brings awareness to the people, and I believe that awareness triggers thinking. Once the people are more aware, it will automatically make them think of good and better ways, which in this case will be good and better ways to create a good and better functional democracy. Look at the Internet for example, and the tremendous amount of awareness it brought to people, which triggered everybody to think of more and better ways of doing many new things. On the same hand, the media is an all powerful force to a scary extent in any democratic system, because it carries the capabilities to radically shift and influence the thinking of people, which can have severe repercussions in the very next elections. Thus, it is imperative to disperse right and unbiased information through right and unbiased channels to have most effective communication.

Role of society

The only way to do this and to avoid all biases and information hiding is to have the people themselves constitute the media. The media, in the sense in which everybody talks about it right now, then just becomes a facilitating infrastructure for propagating the content. The content itself is what the people think. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message because the medium is constituted by the people, and the message (or the content) is also supplied by the same people. The idea is to bring together media and society. Let's see what this means and what it needs.

Talking of content, the relevant kind of information is about awareness of the past performance records of politicians, knowledge of the infrastructure for roads/schools/power/hospitals needed by the people, and the status of development activities initiated by the politicians. Such content is singularly absent from the media today. A first step has been taken by my seniors from IIT Kanpur who recently started a company called Viplav Communications. Viplav reaches out to the people, listens to them, and communicates their issues to the representatives. For the representatives, they let them know what people want them to do, and help them in making future plans for the constituency. Although they are currently looking at this from the latter point of view, that is, acting as a management consultancy for the politicians and political parties, but their long term goal is exactly what was mentioned. That is, to help people themselves closely monitor the performance of their elected representatives, and to convey their requirements to the representatives. The same vision is also partially entertained by President Kalam. The challenge lies in how to bring people together to do this, which is what I mean by merging the concepts of media and society.

However, meeting this challenge is not easy at all, and I do not have one single answer to it. All that I will try to do is to point out various ways in which this can be facilitated.

Urban India

Even if we just talk about the educated urban class, it is clear that magazines, articles, and news reports are just an incomplete answer unless the people themselves read them and write or supply more information for them. This is closely related to the idea of a global brain idea which I talk briefly in another post. Although the societal change necessary for this is coming about slowly as I wrote in my previous article, I will write more on how and why the history and civics curriculum taught in high school needs to be revised to make youngsters aware of their responsibilities from day one and be an integral part of the process.

Rural India

Talking about extending this to people in the rural areas, the problem is much more difficult because firstly the the right kind of an infrastructure and environment should be built to somehow bring the people together and inform each other of the realities, and secondly, economic sustainance of this infrastructure becomes an additional issue. The Viplav solution of making political parties their clients is good but not exaustive because it relies on the clients themselves to support the very same infrastructure that monitors them! Due to this, the solution raises issues of the clients restricting access to the information and its dissemination. Furthermore, the solution cannot be scaled nationwide unless everybody adopts it.

Talking of this rural infrastructure necessary to share information, especially in the rural areas, I strongly agree with the vision of Kentaro Toyama from Microsoft Research Bangalore, Ashok Jhunjhunwala from the TeNeT group of IIT Madras, the ITC e-Choupals, and Drishtee. Their idea of a village kiosk was inspired by the PCO revolution spear headed by Sam Pitroda. Currently there are over 1 million PCOs in India, and the reason for the PCO success lies in having created a sustainable business model. Each PCO owner got a marginal share of money for phone calls made from his booth, which gave him the incentive to maintain the PCO properly, and led to the creation of a nationwide telecommunication infrastructure now used by over 300 million people of India. The role that communication can play in development is so ridiculously huge that it is not even debatable to the tiniest extent.

The village kiosk is similar to a PCO; however, it will serve as not just a telephone hub and Internet cafe, but as a community center for children, women, and men alike. Coupled with a library and encyclopaedia CDs, it will be a small education center for children, and a best-practices resource for farmers to select fertilizers and watering levels based on the temperature. Farmers will also be able to access the latest weather information and market prices for their produce. For those who do not know how to operate computers themselves, the kiosk owner or other educated farmers can help them understand the information. The kiosks will carry portable blood testing devices that are small enough like handhelds and can detect most pathogens in the blood. Medical advise can be sought by placing a VoIP call to a nearby doctor. Video conferencing can be used to do eye testing remotely or to seek aid for treatment of wounds or anything requiring urgent medical attention. The kiosks will also serve as e-governance centers for filing taxes and negotiating land records. Any automation in the bureaucratic process will reduce corruption and streamline the system as well. Maybe they can even serve as day care centers with the women of the villages coming together around these kiosks. And lastly, the kiosks will also be the centers for information exchange, somewhat like the Panchayats in villages. Such kiosks will be run by local entrepreneurs who will get a share of the revenue generated through the various services offered by the kiosk. Amazingly, there is no derth of entrepreneural talent in India who are also socially motivated and want to make a difference. Since the infrastructural resources are already available, the people are willing, and the purposes are many, surely we will see such village kiosks blossoming all over the country very soon.

My vision is to grow these village kiosks into centers of political awakening to bring people into the mainstream of democracy through tools like those of Viplav. Both of them are very small first steps towards bringing about a social change in the entire community. People will be able to report information, activities, incidents, and requirements in their areas, and get back status and development updates which they can share with other villagers through the community created by the village kiosks. And best of all, these kiosks will be self sustainable as well!

Vision

All of this is tough no doubt, but it is doable. It is about bringing information to the people, bringing people to the information, getting them to think, and getting them to realize their responsibilities towards the nation. This change cannot occur overnight, but it can be initiated overnight for sure. The initiation is through your own hearts and minds, to understand what is missing, and take a determined step towards the belief of a better land, and to learn to dream.