The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : NGO celebrates 25 years of people's empowerment

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 17, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

NGO celebrates 25 years of people's empowerment

Staff Reporter

Pria seeks to create voter awareness

Chennai : Participatory Research in Asia (Pria), a non-governmental welfare organisation, is celebrating 25 years of its founding and working with NGOs in Tamil Nadu to create awareness among voters and prepare them for the forthcoming Panchayat elections.

Rajesh Tandon, President of Pria, who spoke to mediapersons recently, said citizens' forums should involve themselves in the process and new leadership should emerge.

Soon, there will be three million elected women representatives, who have occupied an elective office in public service. Even if 0.1 per cent of these continued their political role, all Assembly and Parliamentary seats could be filled by women, he said.

He said that Pria's role with grassroots women leaders was to help them get over mobility constraints and gender bias in their occupation.

"But despite the constraints, a lot of women come in as elected representatives and in five years they go through a transformation, become themselves, become assertive and ask questions," he said, pointing out that it was a slow process. Dr. Tandon said that Pria was celebrating its 25-year journey towards people's empowerment.

Voter awareness campaigns have so far been conducted in 12 States including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, where the elections just concluded. After Tamil Nadu, they will conduct similar campaigns in Gujarat and Orissa.

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