YOUTH EMPOWERMENT

he concept and term of empowerment has been in vogue for quite some time. Different people have tried to explain this concept in different ways, but the point is that we have to fix it. Keeping the concept vague may serveindividual purposes. But concretisation too has its dangers. Here I must begin with my own experience of working with people in my organization. My organization called Nehru Yuva KendraSangathan (NYKS) is a body of the Ministry of Youth Affairs that has a country –wide network of 500 offices in as many districts and a quarter million village level youth bodies called youth clubs. Many of these youth bodies show good sustainable signs of institutions. Many others  exhibit episodic-institution-like qualities. The question of Empowerment and Development- as concepts and practice, specially in the contexts of youth and adolescents, have always been in the fore front of our concern and working. Therefore NYKS has no intention of keeping a popular and oft-quoted concept in a fluid state of understanding and individualusefulness. One may find a concept too rigid in a certain context where the available parameters and social imperatives can be prohibitive to follow the concept to its pristine meaning and  application. Many have defined the term in the older vein of giving and receiving power; or in the manner of much celebrated laissez faire type of inclusion of the poor; that is, trickle down of power in the manner the economy has trickled down to the poor and is desperate to take them above the poverty line (!!). But it is not yet visible. Some have taken the term to mean a stage of creating wherewithal for applying choice mechanism with the newly empowered person. However, universalization of a concept in a rigid form may not serve the purpose of its universal application in various cultural, economic and political contexts. For our purpose of defining empowerment as a concept and then testing its applicability on our different programmes, we cite below the learning points from three case studies—all of which belong to the knowledge and intervention areas of our mandate and related work:-

Case Study no. 1:
Different people- officers and workers were asked what they meant by the term when they used this in their contexts of work. Various things were said. By and large, reducing their statements and contents in short clauses we get to know the following understanding of the term “empowerment”:-
1.1.    Giving the subject of the exercise of empowerment, certain power to do what he wants to do;
1.2.    Upgrading his skills so that he is confident and is skilled to make his life better;
1.3.    Power means strength, therefore empowerment means strengthening a person with various qualities and skills;
1.4.    Empowerment means enabling a person for making sound decisions about himself;
1.5.    Investing some authority in the person being empowered;
1.6.    Empowerment is creation of choices and making people aware about those choices and to enable them to make use of those (Definition offered by Commonwealth Youth Programme).

Case Study no. 2:-
NYKS records from its field of 2,50,000 youth clubs, the following observations which will help in defining the concept in an empirical and categorical situation:-
1.    Community and Family are the basic and strongest units of behaviour formation for an individual. We see it happening in a routine way of our dealing with the working of a youth club;
2.    Understanding of one’s status and the connected role within the family and the immediate community is seen to be the fundamental marker for accepting, rejecting or modifying behaviour;
3.    Politics, more than governance is perceived to be the carrier of power to make changes or of obtaining certain advantages. Politics also is perceived to be a force for dealing with macro level religious, cultural and classificatory issues that shape or change shapes of identity;
4.    Youth club is a new institution and is perceived (by its members and the community) to be associated with the values of education, modernity, volunteerism and idealism. Youth Club as an institution has a friend in the institution of Panchayat. There exists a continuum between a youth club and the village Panchayat. And this is one reason that has not allowed the youth club movement to catch high speed and shape. History and politics have not helped the Panchayati Raj system as much as the latter deserved or demanded. Youth Club movement gets rub of this betrayal. An institution when finds no space for expansion tends to go convoluted or it shrinks. This is what is happening with youth clubs. To an extent they form themselves, they grow, and finding no space to expand, or to transform, they like the yellow smoke in a melancholic café curl once about the house and fall asleep.
5.    In the tribal areas mostly, the youth club serves as solidarity of the tribe behind the young persons who are members of the youth club in the village. In multi-ethnic or multi-tribe villages, as in Manipur, each ethnic group has its own youth club. So a village in Manipur may have several clubs, each belonging to a different tribe and ethnic group. Here, the youth club serves the purpose of asserting and strengthening identity of theethnic group within the larger village community that is plural in nature but is bound together by a contract of living together. Similarly, in a multi-caste village, where the population of backward caste/s or of the scheduled caste is dominant, the latter tend to have a separate youth club for the obvious reasons of inclusion-exclusion principles of castes or/and when that is not an issue, then because of the reasons of emerging exclusive leadership in the dominant groups of “backward”  castes.
6.    Except for some cases (when the youth club  is not transformed into a CBO or an NGO) when a youth club is “given” a programme of youth development or the community development by the NYK or by a sponsoring agency, it generally behaves like a reserved force, and exhibits nature of an episodic institution.
7.    Teen clubs are still very young and are formed for the adolescents. Their fate is invariably linked with the youth clubs so far as long-term sustenance is concerned. However, in the context of learning and participation of their members, the teen clubshave started off well.

Case Study no. 3:-
Under the National Service Volunteer Scheme (NSVS) of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, about 5000 young persons are selected every year as National Service Volunteers (NSVs) and are put to work in the network of 500 district level NYKs in the country. They are given formal and institutionalised training in three phases, which cumulatively comes to 28 days. They are deployed in the NYKS field to work along with youth clubs or the NYKs in all fields of its work ranging from preparation of a small-time guideline for a youth club to being a member of the task force for organizing a mega event like National Integration Camp or a special programme like the great march of 2007 in memory of 1857 war of independence. We have the following feed back from their working in the field:-
1.    Not all of them show individual strengths and aptitude for service to the people; but those who recognize their individual strengths quite early and build on those strengths; they succeed in creating certain niche for themselves in the community. After they have finished their tenure of mostly two years they:-
1.1.Enter into sustained relationships with the NYK; the network of youth clubs they had served in the tenure of their volunteer ship; political network of    local and bigger political leaders; and a particular youth club whom they turn into a Community Based Organization or an NGO;
1.2.    They keep improving their individual strengths in terms of leadership, personality up-gradation, communication skills and personal charm or assertiveness;
1.3.    They are not static. They show a lot of practising physical mobility, within the village or the community in terms of leadership in society at large; and,
1.4.    Earn money, and name, and many times certain political post at different levels of the PRIs or the legislature etc. They “feel” successful, and are considered by their immediate society as successful.
2.    Many times, the youth club leaders and the active NSVs get in close cooperation with each other and they behave in a similar manner. This is natural in view of the fact that they grow in similar circumstances, opportunity-structures and guidance.
3.    When they prefer to find a job, they get settled in the job. But when they get into a selected role of leadership, the process of their hold over the community keeps alive.