OLD AGENDA WITH NEW IMAGINATION

The new government must rebuild trust by being tolerant to ideas, opinions and information.

- SUNITA NARAIN

It needs to strengthen ground-level institutions because participatory democracy can ensure development delivery. In this age of climate risk, the government also needs to re-engineer development to make it inclusive, affordable and sustainable

THE AGENDA for the next government is the old one, but with a fundamental difference. The fact is that the list of priority action areas virtually everything from energy to water and sanitation to food and nutrition to, of course, health and education. We know that the government has schemes in place and budgets allocated for all these issues. We also know that ensuring the welfare and well-being of people is a work in progress. During this election, as journalists fanned out to listen to the opinions of voters perhaps the only time when their opinions count-we heard that unemployment is a major concern; lack of clean drinking water and sanitation tops the agenda; the energy crisis is still wicked as the price of the LPG cylinder is unaffordable and electricity unreliable. Farmers are still distressed. So, a lot of work still needs to be done, and in areas that the last government said it had checked off in its to-do list.