Location And Forms Of Power

Location and forms power :

I’m going to present the notion « Location and forms of Power ». First, I would like to give a quick definition of this notion: in politics, or social science, power is the ability to influence the behavior of people. In order to live together, members of a community, accept rules, regulations and laws. This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions. Even when the authority seems absolute, there are always counter powers which question it, aim at limiting its excesses and resist it.

This year, in class, we studied the Indian country and I think it’s perfectly illustrating this notion. So from, this topic I choose to answer the question: Are all citizens on an equal footing in modern India?

Today India count more than une billion inhabitants which puts the country at the second place behind China. Because of this number there are many inequalities and they are bigger and deeper.

To begin, I think that the first reason of differences in India is the money. Indeed, the number of billionaires (55) is the fourth highest in the world for more than one billion inhabitants. For those billionaires there are no problem to live but it's really hard for the rest of the population. In 2005 almost the half of the population lived with less than 1euro a day. Because of the poverty different social phenomenon like the shanty town appear. There is already an other problem who touch the Indian society since the apparition of hindouism : the castes. The caste system is a system of stratification. It's based on the fact that people born and stay unequal. So lower people of the scale have the hardest way of life. Today this phenomenon is less mark but the gap between the poor and the rich is important. There still a lot of shanty town. But today there are differents solutions to resolve the problem, like microcredits. It was created by a bangladeshi economist. It is a concept of microfinance : smalls loans are given to poor entrepreneur who are finantilly inable to secure traditionnal bank loans. It is allowed some families to extricate themselves from the poverty.

Moreover, there are inequalities between men and women. There are less women than men in the population, because of many reason. We saw the first reason, in class, by studying a texte which name “Another Girl”. It's the history of a woman who gave birth of her second baby girl. Families want to have baby boy and fear to have a baby girl. It's because when the girls grow up, they can't work so they can't win money and they don't help their family. Instead the girl are married by force and it's complicated for her family because they have to pay a dowry to the husband. So because of these reasons the girl are victims of gendercide, infanticide and abortion. The custom of the dowry can already be a cause of death because the two family fight because of the total of the dowry and some girl commit suicide or they can be murdered by the husband's family. In three generations, more than 50 million women have been selectively eliminated from India's population.

To conclude, we can't say that all indian citizens are on an equal footing in modern india but things will change. Like, the government forbide the castes system

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