“Public Policy Debates” - raison d'etre

Last couple of weeks, India saw an eruption of middle class anger in the form of support to the Anna Hazare led “Jan Lok Pal” movement. While the anger was justified, the many on the streets didn’t even know why they were fighting and for what they were fighting. A senior manager in the company where I work, a young achiever with a great pedigree of IIT & IIM, was vociferously supporting Anna team. When asked why he thought JLPB was the best solution, his answer was that he doesn’t know the details but believes that it would be a good one as his team was led by an ex – IRS officer who was an IIT graduate and by a maverick police officer. His answer and attitude is a classic stereotype of what us - the educated middle class. Since Independence, we had outsourced the act of framing the policies and governing us completely to the political class and since we didn’t quite like the outcome, we want to outsource it yet again to another group. Issue with the approach is that unless there is active participation and oversight, no outsourcing program will ever deliver the intended results.

Our problem is that we rarely participate in the democratic process, and when we do take part, we believe that our part ends with casting our vote and getting the election ink on our left hand index finger. To ensure that we get the policies and governance we deserve, we need to go beyond the physical act of choosing our representatives. We need to actively take part in framing the policies and need to influence the direction it takes. While it is easier said, it has its own challenges. Today public policy debates are confined to three main types of forums

1. Political Forums – where career politicians participate and formulate the policies, mainly in the closed environment of their party walls.
2. Academic Forums - where experts from academia and activists participate and debate the policies in the secured environment of academic or quasi academic walls
3. Media led public forums – where the policies are debated and dissected in popular print and visual media

The fundamental flaw in this model is that the policies are framed the those who participate in the first forum and in many a cases has reasonable feedback mechanism from those who represent the second forum but rarely do the public, who has entrusted the politicians the task of legislating on their behalf have a mechanism to participate in these debates. While the politicians do take these debates to their constituencies, very rarely do these public debates go into the details of the policy position and the media led debates focuses mainly on populist positions that earn them higher TRPs and more eyeballs. What we lack is an accessible forum for having informed debates – A virtual Hyde Park

Ram Chandra Guha quoted the famous jurist Nani Palkhivala in an article he wrote for Telegraph , that “India is a second-class democracy with a first-class Constitution”. If we want to move from being a second class democracy to a first class democracy, we need to shed the classic middle class apathy towards politics and need to participate actively in the act of governing ourselves.  “Public Policy Debates” is a small endeavor in that direction and the purpose of this place is to have, as mentioned in the mast head, unbiased, unrestrained and evidence based debates on public policy.  

01 September, 2011