Workshop on Mediation and Advocacy in the empowerment process.

Dileep Kamats experience at Belgaum.

India has been described by the Nobel prize winning writer V.S.Naipaul as the land with a million mutinies. In a poor country with a population of more than 1 billion people it is natural to expect many conflicts, some small and a few that are very serious.

India is a country of more than one billion people, the majority of whom are Hindus. But we also have large populations of minorities, with about 150 million Muslims, making this the second largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia. There are also many millions of Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. In recent decades, the conflict between religious communities (referred to as communalism in India) have grown substantially and thousands of people have been killed in these religious conflicts. The future of India is bleak if religious conflicts tear the democratic fabric away and create conditions of civil war.

The 1991 reforms resulted in a reduction in public works programs and employment generating activities, rising input costs while the prices and support of the government declined. This affected rural India badly and lead to a falling agricultural production, and thus a reduced per capita availability of food grains, as well as a decrease in purchasing power. Employment in general is a problem as the labour force has grown faster than the growth of employment. In addition, there is a growing discrimination of women in rural labour with lower wager and a faster overall decline in women’s employment. Thus, with high unemployment rates, increased poverty, starvation deaths, and peasant suicides, rural India suffers a severe crisis

Poor children in India begin working at a very young and tender age. Many children have to work to help their families and some families expect their children to continue the family business at a young age.

India has had a sharp increase in the estimated number of HIV infections, from a few thousand in the early 1990s to around 5.1 million children and adults living with HIV/AIDS in 2003. With a population of over one billion, the HIV epidemics in India will have a major impact on the overall spread of HIV in Asia and the Pacific and indeed worldwide.

The maximum renewable fresh water resource in India is 1,869 billon cubic metres. Alarmingly, this represents only 4 % of the world’s fresh water resources for 16 % of the world’s population. With the population of India slated to touch 1.6 billion by 2050 the annual availability of water per person will further decrease from 1700m3 to 1140m3.