Socio-economic Conceptualization of Smart Villages: Fid-Bau Portal

Socio-economic Conceptualization of Smart Villages

Athreya, Venkatesh B.

This chapter addresses the potential of community/social mobilization and people’s participation in the pursuit of the core objectives of smart villages, with a description of two successful instances of social mobilization for the achievement of desired social outcomes in a rural context. Both case studies, one involving a literacy campaign and the other a campaign against female infanticide, are drawn from rural districts of Tamil Nadu, in south India, and involve the district administration and elected local government bodies working together with social activists drawn from civil society movements. Most importantly, both instances involve creating popular participatory structures and processes that maximise the space for the participation of ordinary people, especially those disadvantaged on grounds of gender, caste and class, the key axes of inequality in rural Tamil Nadu. Taken together, the two case studies suggest that popular participation and well-planned strategies of social mobilization, harnessing the energies of not only formal government administration but also decentralized elected local bodies and civil society activists, can be powerful democratic instruments for progressive social transformation, and thus contribute to enhancing the ‘smartness’ of smart villages.