The central government appointed the J&K Interlocutors Group on October 13, 2010. The Group submitted the Report to the Home Ministry earlier this year. The Report was made public by the Home Ministry on May 24, 2012. It may be noted that under Article 370 of the Constitution special status has been granted to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The power of the Parliament to legislate is restricted to defence, external affairs, communication and central elections. However, the President may with the concurrence of the state government extend other central laws to the state. Furthermore, in 1952, an agreement known as the Delhi Agreement was entered into between the state of Jammu and Kashmir and the central government. The Agreement too provided that the state government shall have sovereignty on all subjects except for matters specified above. However, since then some central laws relating to other subjects such as environment have been made applicable to the state. This blog post divides the recommendation into two broad headings: political; and socio-economic. It also looks at the roadmap proposed by the Group to achieve these recommendations. Political recommendations:
Cultural, Economic and Social Recommendations:
In order to fulfil these recommendations, the Interlocutor’s Group proposed the following roadmap:
The full report may be accessed here. Sources:
[1] Article 371 provides certain ‘special provisions’ with respect to states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Andhra Pradesh and Sikkim
We need your ideas and inputs. Ideas on how we can inform many more people who are interested in policy about what they can access on the PRS website. The mission of PRS is to strengthen the legislative process by making it better informed, more transparent and participatory. The statement has three important components: (a) Better informed: This implies that legislators and citizens need to be better informed about the implications of legislation. For us in PRS, this implies producing easy-to-understand non-partisan analysis that can be made available to MPs and citizens. This also includes our continual efforts to personally brief MPs and political parties on the details and implications of each Bill. (b) Transparent: We mean that all proceedings of Parliament and the work of MPs in Parliament should be easily accessible to citizens. In an operational sense, this includes the effort we put into creating the Bill Track section on our website where every Bill that is pending in Parliament can be accessed, and the current status of the Bill can be tracked. It also includes the MP Track section in which we have up-to-date information about the engagement levels of MPs in Parliament. We also have a twitter page www.twitter.com/prslegislative and a Facebook presence. (c) Participatory: Which simply means that once citizens know the information, and would like to articulate a point of view, they should reach out to policy makers and get their point of view across to them. To promote this, we have had a number of workshops with NGOs and have produced a primer on "Engaging with Policy Makers". These are just some examples of what we are doing in each of these three areas. Our website has much more information. But we are increasingly of the view that we need to reach out many more people who are interested in policy -- even if it is sector specific. We would be grateful for any ideas that you might have, which you can post as responses to this post. If you also have specific ideas on what you like on our website and what can be better, do let us know. Thanks, in advance.
