Indian youth propose ideas for meeting MDGs

New Delhi: “Young people should be at the forefront of global change and innovation. Empowered, they can be key agents for development and peace,” former UN chief Kofi Annan had said, who had foreseen a deep connection between youth and development.

Unnati Features and Women’s Feature Service acknowledging the role youth can play in reaching the millennium development goals organised a contest innovatively titled “Mera India – Bridge the Gap”.

Felicitating the awardees, Shree Venkatram, director, Unnati Features, said: “India has a long distance to cover in achieving the MDGs. Youth will lead India into becoming a prosperous nation and free of discrimination of any kind.”

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta/ Photo credit: Anna Nath/ OWSA

Eminent journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta said: “It fills me with optimism to see that today’s youth understand the challenges and they are working towards building a strong and efficient society. India will have to travel a long distance before the rest of the world starts looking at us.”

He pointed out that out of six billion plus population of the world, one billion people were suffering from hunger. “Are we living the change we preach? Do we distinguish between our need and our greed?” he asked.

He exhorted the youth present there: “Today’s youth need to practise what they preach so that a humane society can be created, unlike the previous generations, which failed to practice what they preached.”

The ideas proposed by young winners to achieve the MDGs in India emphasised on building a strong sub-structure to create a composite whole.

One of the winners Neeraj Kumar Singh from Chennai focussed on health and poverty alleviation. He suggested that the existing informal health services should be formalised and telemedicine be promoted in rural sectors.

He stressed on making healthcare a fundamental right. He also said that there was a need for community insurance programmes for the poor in view of the fact that the rural poor were incurring very high expenditures on healthcare.

For environmental sustainability there should be carbon taxes instead of cap and trade, he added.

Nooreen Fatima, another winner, provided solutions to eradicate child labour. She suggested: “We need not wait for the West to provide solutions for our problems. We must find ways to help ourselves. We can sponsor a child’s education or provide the parents of the deprived children some additional sustenance amount so that they are not forced to make their children work at tender age.”

Samir Sharma, a student of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, urged to protect the Indian agricultural sector to ensure food security.

Shilpi Gulati from Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences, brought out the need for creating a holistic educational system that addressed different needs of children. Varied knowledge of people must be recognised so that participation could be eased out and maximised in the development process, she said.

Focussing on the need for proper governance, Siddharth Rajkonwar from Delhi suggested that today’s youth needed to enter the arena of governance by becoming political leaders, civil servants and grassroots leaders to forge the society towards a positive transformation.

People gathered at the award ceremony/ Photo credit: Anna Nath/ OWSA

“Integration of international agencies, civil society and cooperatives is essential for the achievement of the millennium development goals,” he added.

Shinjini Mondal from Mumbai said that while all the eight goals were interrelated with each other, the programmes and policies in India were not. She emphasised on the need for inter-sectoral approach.

Other participants and awardees who proposed creative ideas were Aparna Menon, Ambika Ghuge, Anjana Agarwal, Avni Manglik, Bharat Bhatti, Gourav Kumar Agarwal, Nupur Tiwari, Parveen Kumar, Katuri Kodanda Pani, Reenu Ranawat, Shashi Bhushan Singh and Sharanya Gautam among others.