Social Mobilzation for Change

This talk will address the potential of community/social mobilization and people’s participation in the pursuit of the core objective of empowering people through mobilizational interventions, with a description of two successful instances of social mobilization in a rural context. Both case studies, one involving a literacy campaign and the other a campaign against female infanticide, are drawn from rural districts of Tamil Nadu, and involve the district administration and elected local government bodies working together with social activists drawn from civil society movements. Most importantly, both instances involve creating popular participatory structures and processes that maximise the space for the participation of ordinary people, especially those disadvantaged on grounds of gender, caste and class, the key axes of inequality in rural Tamil Nadu. Taken together, the two case studies suggest that popular participation and well-planned strategies of social mobilization, harnessing the energies of not only formal government administration but also decentralized elected local bodies and civil society activists can be powerful democratic instruments for progressive social transformation.

 

 

Venkatesh Athreya (Ph D, University of Wisconsin) is a chemical engineer turned development economist. He has worked and published extensively in the areas of agrarian change, food and nutrition security, education, health policy, gender and political economy of development. He served as Professor of Economics at Bharathidasan University in Tiruchirapalli, India for over three decades. He has also been actively involved, as planner and social activist, in campaigns and interventions for literacy and gender equality and against female feticide and infanticide. Prof Athreya has published more than a hundred scholarly articles and authored/co-authored five books: Barriers Broken (SAGE, 1990), Literacy and Empowerment (SAGE, 1996), Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Rural India (MSSRF-WFP, 2008), Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Urban India (MSSRF-WFP, 2010) and Marxian Political Economy (Tulika, New Delhi, 2011).