People’s Resource Centre (PRC) is being set up with an aim to provide the research and educational support to the movements around the struggle over commons and other sorts of natural and social resources. Why is this initiative needed now?
It is delusional to hope that the promised ideals of justice and freedom for all might be realized within the prevailing system. The earth’s vital ecological systems have depleted with exponential rapidity during the modern times and especially since the late 1970s. The resulting environmental crisis might trigger a violent outbreak of conflicts over resources, and threatens to tear apart the human existence itself. Communal support systems for reducing the social insecurities have fallen away. Spaces of collective consciousness and organizing have shrunk. Under the individualistic, neoliberal order that prevails, the elite have tightened their control over resources. This has meant that collective appropriation of resources to meet everyone’s needs has become virtually impossible.
Under such conditions, the People’s Resource Centre – PRC has emerged from discussions and interactions among activists, engaged scholars, communities and citizens defending their commons and advocating for another model of “development”. PRC aims to build new infrastructures of solidarity with the valuable fragments of learning derived from collective actions everywhere and the possible alternatives imagined by all people. The initiative seeks to explore the possibilities of bringing the resources back into the people’s powerful control, and to understand whether and how that can eradicate the most persistent problems such as hunger, homelessness, ambient pollution, and social injustices based on caste, gender and religion. This inevitably demands to carefully understand the power structures based on property relations, intra-group micropolitics around the resource use, historical dynamics of resistance against the corporate and the state, and, perhaps most importantly, the tendency to manage the collective resources sustainably. In terms of approach, PRC plans to take up projects particularly in regions where there is reasonable resonance with the aforesaid objective. Such regions can be places with ongoing, past or potential struggle over resources (e.g. privatization of commons/public resources; destruction of ecology of rivers, forests and other natural resources; transformation of urban commons into structures of elite consumption such as metro rail; and so on). PRC plans to intervene through policy monitoring, research and documentation, grounded networking in order to generate resources for grassroots resistance and community actions.
We invite the like-minded individuals and groups to associate with PRC. To know further, please get in touch.
Email ID: prc.india@yahoo.com
