The rise of governance and global governance is a signal that we are continuously making hard efforts to pursue a good public life and political order. Today, whenpostmodernism is having more and more impact on politics, we can also perceivemodernity interwoven with postmodernity in governance theory not only through analyzing the complicated relationship between governance and the traditional political discourses such as democracy, bureaucracy, but also through discussing two branches of the governance theory itself: global governance and local governance.The debate about direct democracy and indirect democracy indicates a dilemma which has puzzled us for a long time. That is, we have to face an unavoidable tension between providing citizens opportunities to take part in politics and making timely decisions to solve problems efficiently when we are going to design any political system. The rise of the governance theory can be viewed as a trial breakthrough in such a democracy dilemma. Governance theory doesn't discard representative democracy entirely but amends it by increasing the elements of direct democracy within a framework of representative democracy. After all, representative democracy as a great achievement in the development of modernity reflects the great advances of mankind and it indicates that we can depend on our reason to organize a good public life in a large domain successfully. At the same time, governance tends to have greater esteem for direct democracy, as does postmodernism. This direct democracy mode advocated by governance theory, however, is not exactly the referendum in ancient Greece. It is such a mode that people can widely take part in the local or community affairs and make decisions or even implement decisions by themselves.As far as bureaucracy is concerned, both the governance theory and postmodernism consider it as an outdated concept of modernity. In the post industrial society, complexity, contingency and differentiation are increasing more dramatically than ever before. The idea that we ca achieve a grand goal in controlling or administrating the whole society totally only by depending on such single means as government or market is becoming more and more problematic. Bureaucracies will no longer work well. Nevertheless, governance theory and postmodernism regard complexity, contingency and differentiation as normal and given circumstances in which we establish systems and make decisions, not obstacles that must be overcome. So, decentralization, autonomy, network governance andbusiness methods in public administration are necessary. On the other hand, governance can't throw away bureaucracy absolutely, for most organizations participating in governance have to deal with specialization and cooperation, harmony and control when bureaucracy may be a good choice.Global governance that faces many unprecedented handicaps tries to build up an ambitious universal theory based on such basic concepts as global civil society, world democracy, global identity and international NGOs to develop a desirable global political mode. Such grand narrative told by global governance is one of the typical characteristics of modernity. On the contrary, local governance is a type of a small narrative, which trends to do some regional and trivial empirical researches on governance instead of exploring a uniform governance mode or governance framework that can work well in any circumstances. So, local governance reflects more characteristics of postmodernity, such as pragmatism and differentiation. Finally, governance theory that is deeply affected by postmodernism may lead to an anxious sequence such as the end of politics.
Monday 1 December 2008
Homeless and Hungry Youths of India
Sonu, Toofan, Bobby and Bhagwan are skinny boys with impish grins and the mischievious ways of children everywhere. But for them, there has been no childhood.
Wily and street smart, they live and survive in a homeless, hungry, lonely and often brutal world circumscribed by New Delhi Railway Station. They scrounge for leftovers from the garbage of incoming trains and dodge the kicks of angry porters as they hustle to carry luggage for a few cents. There are hundreds of others like them around the busy station, and millions more elsewhere in India, where the population is nearing 850 million. "About 120 million children, including those helping their parents in farms and shops, are working more than 12 hours a day to earn their own bread, 55 million of them in slavelike conditions," said Swami Agnivesh, a former civil servant who has devoted the last two decades to the cause of freeing bonded laborers. "In this country there are children branded with hot irons and made to work 18 hours a day." In overpopulated South Asia, where one-third of the children are born malnourished and there is never quite enough food to go around, childhood "is not school and play but misery and oppression," said Prem Shankar Jha, a columnist for the newspaper The Hindu and press adviser to the former Prime Minister, V. P. Singh. At New Delhi station, 30 boys from 5 to 16 years of age are getting a rare chance to change their lives. On a small roof terrace of the railway police station, Bela Sumanth, a social worker, runs the Nukkad Center, an experiment in informal education paid for by the Salaam Balak Trust, a fund set up from the proceeds of the film "Salaam Bombay" by Mira Nair, a story of Bombay street children. Nukkad means "street corner" in Hindi. From 9 in the morning, when the Nukkad day begins with a bath and meditation , until 1 P.M., when they get a free lunch, the boys are taught basic literacy, a little science and social studies. They are taken to museums and parks, and given bank accounts to encourage saving. Above all, they get care and affection, and advice against the almost inevitable temptations of criminality and drug abuse, to which many homeless children succumb. "We love this woman very much," a little parentless boy said of Miss Sumanth. The boys at Nukkad tell their wrenching stories matter of factly. Sleeping Under a Stairway "I ran away from home when they married off my brother," said Bobby, who is 12. Bobby, who like all the boys adopted a street name not his own, is an unofficial porter, or kuli, the Hindi word commonly spelled "coolie" in transliteration. "My father drinks a lot, and I wanted to go with my brother, but they wouldn't let me," he said. "So I ran away from home with some money I took from my mother. She sort of knew I would go." "I went to Nizamuddin station from U. P.," he said -- Uttar Pradesh is a state east of New Delhi -- "and worked in a biscuit factory. But after 15 days they gave me no money, and so I came here." That was nearly a year ago. He has been sleeping under a station stairway since. Toofan, a 10-year-old who took his name from an express train, said he followed an older playmate into Calcutta from one of its outlying slums five years ago because "I loved playing marbles and flying kites with him." 'Then He Told Me to Beg' "He took me to the station and told me to sweep the floor," he said. "Then he told me to beg. I felt very shy, and knew my mother would be angry if she knew, but I went. I got 5 or 6 rupees a day, and he took half." "One day, he took me on a train called the Gitanjali," Toofan said. "I was very small. I thought we were going home. But a day passed and night came, and I began to cry." Toofan was by then on the way to Bombay, at the other end of India. Since then he has stowed away on trains, hung around temples for free food and sold popcorn at stations. He wants to be a doctor. He has never seen the inside of a school. As several boys clamored to talk to a reporter and photographer, one slender boy quietly slid his copybook onto the mat in front of the visitors. Newly literate, he had written in Hindi:
"This is my story. My name is Nazir. I am 14. I came from Nepal with my father nine years ago because there was famine and we had no food. We got separated at this station. I looked and looked for my papa but never found him again. What could I do? I made my life here. I am a kuli. I want to be a mechanic and fix cars. My life at New Delhi Railway Station is completely useless."
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