Want to make a difference in politics? There's now a programme for youth

Youth can now learn about policy making to become better citizens and hold MPs to account, thanks to YLAC

You are 23, bursting with ideas and energy and infused with the enthusiasm that only youth offers. You can see things going wrong in society. It rankles. You want to make a change. But you don’t know how.

It is to convert this ‘I want’ to ‘I can’ that Aparajita Bharti, 29, and Rohit Kumar, 35, set up Young Leaders for Active Citizenship (YLAC) in 2016 in New Delhi, a platform to pull the youth into policy making and shaping their own future through better governance.

Bharti and Kumar found that an increasing number of youngsters around them were eager to engage with government policy and confront problems head on instead of saying ‘this is someone else’s problem’. Nor did they harbour the glib view of all politicians as being power hungry careerists. 

What these young people didn’t know was how to get a concrete, hands-on understanding of the mechanics of governance and how the system works and this where Bharti and Kumar had something to offer.

They had both had a chance to work closely with an MP through the Lamp Fellowships offered by PRS Legislative Research. This allows young people to be mentored by an MP for a year and work full time with him or her to understand how policies are made. After the Fellowship ended, they went on to do their post-graduate degrees from Oxford and Harvard Kennedy School. 

While assigned to BJP MP Jay Panda during the Fellowship, Kumar worked on organising one-day policy workshops in different metros with Panda aimed at getting young people excited about politics, policy making, and in seeing the human side of MPs. 

Finally, the penny dropped. Bharti and Kumar realised that while there was a lot of capacity building happening around government officers, legislators, and MPs, very little was being done to strengthen the capacity of citizens. “That was where the gap was. Democracies work only when citizens hold their government accountable,” said Kumar. 

Since older citizens tend to be more apathetic, they decided to focus on young Indians by launching YLAC. “We felt that to improve policy discourse, it is important to equip citizens to hold our government and elected representatives accountable and engage in the policy process constructively,” said Bharti.

A three-member board of advisors was set up comprising Panda, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, and Michael Walton, a professor at Harvard. 

YLAC runs three flagship programmes aimed at 15-25 year olds.  The High School Achievers’ Programme is for students in classes 9-12 and serves as an introduction to the world of policy making. The students get to interact with policy makers, think critically about social issues, and maybe even consider a career in public life. 

Middle class parents are generally opposed to a liberal arts education because they feel that engineering, medicine or the sciences will lead to better prospects. “These student minds are still being formed and they are deciding what to do and that’s when we need to open up possibilities,” said Kumar.

The second programme is the Counter Speech Fellowship (held with the financial support of Instagram) that uses arts for advocacy and is aimed at the 13-18 age group. The topics are broad in nature: mental well-being, bullying, sustainability, gender equality, among others.

The third is Policy in Action is for undergraduates, postgraduates and young professionals and provides more rigorous training in public policy. The group works on real assignments for MPs. 

Engineers, doctors, urban planners, lawyers, sociologists, and political scientists comprise this group. This year, in partnership with technology giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, YLAC conducted election awareness campaigns close to state and general elections. 

The programmes run usually once a year in seven cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad and, more recently, Kathmandu. More than 1,500 young people have participated so far. 

“What is heartening is that many students and professionals decide to make a shift into the policy space after this exposure. Many also begin to appreciate the difficulty of policy making and decide to engage more constructively instead of complaining from a safe distance. Students are often excited by their power to do more,” said Bharti. 

More recently, YLAC has started working with Oxfam to launch equality clubs in seven schools in four cities as a pilot. The goal is to familiarise students with the different types of inequalities that exist in society and help build empathy, and an appreciation of their own privilege. 

It is also working with Janaagraha to improve civic education in schools by developing lesson plans aligned with the NCERT and state board civics books used by teachers. 

While Janaagraha and another NGOs like We the People India, already do similar work with school students, very few organisations at present cover the age spectrum of YLAC. 

“None of our programmes is prescriptive or has political or religious biases. They are meant to be thought provoking without feeding any particular ideology to anyone. The further goal is that these students will then in turn sensitise others so that, in general, negativity about politics and policy making is replaced by hope,” said Kumar.