Inject some life into this organization, start responding to people's needs

["Tiwari, Umesh K" <UKTiwari@pcgb.com>]

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While the expert discussions on liberal versus conservative philosophies are
all nice and dandy, if we spend all of our time doing just that, we tend to
drift away from the basic objective of this organization. In the process, we
also tend to loose active participation of a lot of members who may just be
the ordinary non-experts, if not their voluntary membership itself.

IMHO what is needed is exactly the reverse. While the experts among us will
ensure that their expertise gets shared here, IPI needs to keep expanding
its membership and stay attractive to all of those who care about the
objectives IPI claims to champion. In order to survive and meet its
objectives, IPI needs to find support in the grassroots organizations based
in India. In addition to talking about general policy matters, it needs to
start echoing local concerns and speak about pending and proposed
legislation's and energize local organizations to force the local law makers
to vote in a certain way, or amend a legislation that would otherwise hurt
the cause of freedom and civil liberties.

Every individual legislation that IPI goes after and engages local
communities in, and succeeds, or fails successfully (after having generated
sufficient awareness on the issue), IPI will gain acceptance and popularity
and then perhaps one can imagine it being an authentic platform to initiate
political reforms in India.

A case in point: Indian parliament just passed an IT Bill, and I don't
suppose IPI even cared to analyze it let alone pointing out the problems in
it before it is already too late. Similarly, IPI has kept itself strangely
away from anything that effects people in a very significant way, and
politicians can be forced to act and do something about it. For example
national water management policy or lack thereof, the policy related to
reorganization of states, individual policy decisions taken by the
government on educational system reform. The much publicized Sankhya Wahini
Project etc.

I only hope that those of us who sincerely care about the underlying
objectives of this organization realize that survival and relevance of IPI
needs to be ensured before lofty ideals can be talked about.

Thank You.

Umesh


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