Yes, You Are Responsible to Make Public Policies. But How?
Akin to the postcolonial narrative contained in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, we come to encounter concerning issues since the last decade. Conventionally, we believed that national growth will automatically bring in the social inclusion. The facts are far from it, and we should question the extent to which our ideas of growth and inclusiveness correlate.
International conflicts, crony corporate interests, and sterile government policies may lead you to doubt the principles of social inclusion even more. Especially when your scope of employment and engaging with society’s production mechanism is limited, and shrinking.
After the Fourth Industrial Revolution on jobs, we know how rapidly work processes are being automated. Be it the advent of artificial intelligence, or compulsory installation of machines in almost every surveillance organisation (including schools and homes), what are we to make of it? As Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable predicts, computers, digital communication and excessive robotization are here to stay. We must then find out how our society can develop its discourse by channelling the machine influence in more inclusive and productive ways.
Trends against Social Inclusion
- Urbanisation You should not be surprised to find the demographic shift towards the cities. Small cities like Jabalpur and Bhubaneshwar, once entangled with suburbs and rural connections, are now racing against time to transform itself into big, smart cities.
- Cultural Hegemony This is compounded by the manufactured superiority of city-life culture. Meaning more consumption of packaged goods, and higher disorder in ecological balance, the modern world is under constant perils of missing out basic requirements such as pure air, fresh water, and uninterrupted energy resources.
- Political Sanity under Perils India could be the best example of how political ideology sinks deep in social behavior. All around the globe, there is a repressed anger towards the totalitarian and technocratic approach to ruling the State. From Gorakhpur hospital tragedy to Naxalite Issues, the population is swiftly led to express their distrust (or indifference) in political narratives.
- Where Freedom is Incredulous Speaking of social media, one can’t be too sure if it’s a vital phenomenon or the first catastrophe towards decadence. At one end, social media is capable of acting as amplifiers of social voices, such as gaining social inclusion for LGBT communities or cultivating a sense of association in Nirbhaya Rape case.
However, the same social media is not authentic, your neighbor can express different social concerns than you do in digital communities. Breeding self-distrust among immediate society members, fake viral news, open-and-shut cases of media biases has led our generation towards a future of threatened democracy.
- Framing policies that Combine Growth and Inclusiveness
Speaking about the remedies of existential crisis, Sartre reasons that our behavior and a sense of responsibility towards the world can do much better than waiting for external adjustments to happen. Making expression a fundamental right, not just constitutionally but also in practice, can be a good start. At the moment, public participation is often veiled in the anonymity of digital media. But when the trolls and hate-speech promoters of social media get the right platform to form virtual coalitions, structuring policies will get easier.
Naturally, this is impossible without the incentivized collaboration of larger establishments, be it Government agencies, NGO associations and larger business enterprises. Unfortunately though, sites like Twitter and Facebook has coherent interests in icon-worshipping. More the celebrities are followed, greater is the chance for these mediocre companies to stay on top of every information trade.
In contrast to corporate-led digital platforms, the development-focused platform for Indian audience will promote free speech, and allow endorsement of ideas instead of a cult- following of personalities. Combining diverse ideas from segments including trade, healthcare, education, access to purity, citizen participation can, in fact, is the only alternative towards a transparent institution-led futuristic society.
However, would it have only English-speaking Colaba guys or do we also include the slum dwellers in Mira Road is something we must think hard. This plan is worthy of practice only when we can discuss and understand what kind of healthy economy we want our nation to become.
- What we can achieve is More than GDP
Especially when the fight for social inclusion is also the fight against exploitation, depravity, sexual harassment, and human rights to life, policy making can not happen in isolations of Parliamentary government. More distant and impersonal than ever, 21st century Government is going to utilize your online data but at the cost of personal connections. So there needs to be an effort to bind public, trade, Government, and social segments together if we want the Fourth Industrial Revolution to promote economic health.
Participating in an informed policy making can have great impacts. Remember the best examples from the ancient Greek Republic where everyone in a social setup engaged in making high-end decisions for society. Likewise, we should be able to drive productivity and growth by optimizing labor and capital inputs from the society.
Without having to rely on crippling public policies like caste-based reservations, Discovery platforms can motivate online communities to rebuild social credibility. Taking the best ideas to action, the sustainable growth will automatically be aligned towards the population, thus ensuring a much wider social inclusion. As with all innovations, the cost of delaying free speech is perpetuating the existing injustice and malfunctioning distribution of wealth in the society. It is for us to think if it’s a healthy economy where 1% of Indians own nearly 60% of national wealth.
Check more about it on the blog.
