Can tech savvy teens affect change in India?

I’ve been at a VSO strategy conference all day on the outskirts of Delhi with the aim of helping to shape VSO India’s next three year strategy. We’ve had brilliant presentations that have put why I am here into India’s political, social and cultural context. A few random and surprising facts:

• 40% of India’s population are 13-25 year olds
• 40% live in cities
• The emerging middle class of 330 million people are mostly indifferent to the poor in their country
• Young people are not engaged with their country
• The Indian government only spends 1% of its GDP on public health (in comparison to around 6% in a developed country)
• A third of the world’s poor live in India
• There are 45 million internet users
• And 330 million people own a mobile phone...
• ...with another 15 million a month sold
• There is a shortage of Indian volunteers on projects in their own country.

For a country touted as ‘Shining India’ where is the government move to engage the young and middle classes, to promote active citizenship, to encourage those that are better off to help the poor in their own country?

Looking at the stats and facts above it seems obvious to me that technology and social media should play an important role in engaging the young who are the country’s future into actively playing a part in assisting their fellow citizens. With a largely corporate media do they not hear the widespread rural poverty, of the farmers committing suicide due to falling cotton prices or the wrong crops no longer suiting their climate-changed fields? If someone were to make it cool to spread this news, to become involved, to send tweets protesting for social change, to create Facebook groups, to document the failings of the government to enact change...perhaps India’s next generation would be the ones to realise that change. To be the change that you want to see in the world? It’s what the Father of India, Gandhi, wanted.