Obama gets sneak-peek into India’s citizen engagement programmes

MUMBAI - From hearing about programmes on transparency and accountability in governance to those on education, the Right to Information (RTI) Act and the Unique Identification Number project, US President Barack Obama Sunday got a sneak peek into various initiatives by NGOs here for better governance.

One of the three events at the St. Xavier’s College, the Open Government and Citizen Engagement programme saw 10 organisations working on various issues participate.

Tonusree Basu of the New Delhi-basesd PRS Legislative Research, which works on governance and accountability and had Obama come and visit their stand, said: “There were about 10 booths by various organisations and the president visited each of them and spent about three-four minutes each.”

“He interacted with representatives of the organisations and listened to the kind of work that each one does,” she added.

Besides PRS, NGO Pratham which works on education, Association for Democratic Reforms and The Hunger Project participated in the programme. The ministry of Panchayati Raj and Rural Development also took part in it.

The president also interacted with villagers in Ajmer, Rajasthan through video-conference link. He later interacted with college students as well as took questions.

After Mumbai, Obama proceeded to Delhi for the second leg of his Nov 6-9 India visit.