A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

duction processes in a particular area for value added products. These
constructive efforts are complemented by struggles and resistances: to
the patent laws, to bogus climate change negotiations of the governments,
against rampant privatization; and for policies that establish rights
of people to education, food, work and so on.
Realising that education plays a vital role so that local knowledge systems
are not lost, are promoted and even brought into formal schools,
AIPSN units have been engaged in documenting, publishing and distributing
thousands of titles in rural areas, in nearly all the fourteen major
languages of India. These are supplemented by nearly two dozen magazines
and journals, in local languages. From time to time AIPSN units
have also been successful in incorporate\ing such knowledge in the formal
school curricula.
The Indian state finally gave constitutional validity to the Gandhian concept
of local governance (Panchayats) in 1994 through appropriate constitutional
amendments. Since then every five years three tiers of local
governance systems are elected in all parts of the country, the lowest
tier being at the village level. AIPSN has not only made working with the
elected Panchayats as a major focus of its work but it has encouraged
many of its volunteers to contest these elections; thousands of them
have been successful. One of the major areas AIPSN has concentrated
its work on is equipping the village Panchayat to work out its own development
plan for its area. The attempt has been to incorporate these
local plans into the state plans, so that people plan and develop the way
they determine, and not according to national planners. This resulted in
1997 for the state of Kerala to make its state plan by combining the Panchayat
plans the people had made, and forty per cent of the state funds
were allocated directly to the Panchayats to execute their own plans (a
system perhaps more elaborate than the other successful initiative of
local budgets in Port Alegre, Brazil). This comes perhaps closest to the
direct democracy principle that Gandhi espoused.
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