Towards yet another major step to have more participation of the people in the process of governance in Jammu and Kashmir, a mega programme captioned as “Awaam Ki Aawaaz” has been launched which went on air on April 18 on all channels of All India Radio. The programme denotes the importance being given to ‘Jan Bhagidari ‘ in an attempt to translate the aspirations and expectations of the people in formulation of developmental plans and policies to usher in an era of participative governance. At the outset, we appreciate the initiative taken by the UT Government, perhaps a novel one of its nature, which we understand is two pronged in aim and content. One – to provide a platform to the people to air their grievances and two-more importantly, to receive the necessary feedback in respect of the quality of governance as also how things should have been managed which means receiving suggestions and ideas which again would be of heterogeneous nature. It is heartening to note that in the maiden programme, there were participants who instead of demanding anything have volunteered to give “something” valuable. Taking the instance of one participant from Baramulla, Kashmir; promising to spreading message and sharing stories of Maqbool Sheerwani, the one daring who was martyred by Qabayalis in 1947 in that town as also another participant from Rajouri promising to sharing of 75 books on freedom struggle with the underprivileged students or yet again, a civil services aspirant from Jammu pledging to share 75 heroic tales of freedom with the children, are quite encouraging. We are overwhelmed over a woman participant from Basholi promising to composing 75 poems on the “Azaadi Ka Amrut Mahotsav” in next 75 weeks. There were many valuable suggestions , offers of help , sharing valuable suggestions, appreciating various schemes and programmes, village centric policies etc which all shows the enthusiasm, zeal, sense of belongingness and duty to participating by the people in novel and innovative programmes and ideas like the one under reference . Needless to add, changes, innovations, new ideas and solutions, reforms, improvements etc in the system and various structures are very important as the obverse of all these means a stagnant status-quo and even dormancy. Prudence demands to keep on giving all these newer experiments full chances to operate but with fuller cooperation and participation of the people. Prospects of getting more people deeply involved and in an ongoing basis would be the acid test of such initiatives. Results could be encouraging hopefully as it is the characteristics of human behaviour to respond to a new experiment or a new idea with lot many hopes especially where governance has been found not up to the mark in Jammu and Kashmir, in various ways.
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