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Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development There is a resurgence of interest in social change all over the world. This is particularly evident in those societies described as developing societies. Perhaps, the main reason for this increasing emphasis on social change is the desire of the people in the deve- loping societies to improve their living conditions as quickly as possible. In other words, planned social change in order to bring into existence a new type of society which will provide for better living conditions for the people is a fairly widespread phenomenon.
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Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development Goals for India by the end of this century: “poverty, as we have known it, will be a thing of the past. Every village in India will be electrified, assured of clean drinking water and adequate health services. Education will be available to every child. Our family planning programmes will have covered the entire population. And population growth, which in the past has eaten up much of the growth in the productions, will have been brought down to almost one percent.”
P.M. Rajiv Gandhi in New York October, 1987 ‘Look at this picture and that’ Hamlet, Shakespeare Arming himself with a prod like cart men do while driving bullock carts in sleepy villages and with a big polythene slack slung guardedly over his shoulder as if it contains a mini supermarket of goodies, the rag picker makes his appearance everyday with a cosmic punctuality on my early morning walking route. A wiry man dressed in a faded shirt and a dhoti folded up carelessly to remain at half mast over his spindly legs to facilitate unhindered mobility, he goes about his job looking for what he wants mostly from dustbins. On spotting his object of quest, he lances it like a hunter harpooning a whale on the high seas. I go for the morning walk bleary-eyed, no doubt, propelled by my doctor and compelled by my magisterial wife so I can off load on the way the over-the-limit excess of lipids-bad cholesterol, triglycerides and the resultant bulge in the middle. As I see the rag picker dipping his stick or even his hands into the yucky dustbin picking germs, viruses, bugs and such, I cannot but wonder the cross purposes of such morning outings by two different human beings. J.S. Raghavan Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development ‘But I do strongly hold ... that, as far as is possible, our beliefs should accord with facts; that unexamined ideas should be dragged into the open and made to defend themselves; and that such ideas that cannot defend themselves deserve historical interest only-which is, indeed, a serious kind of interest, but that to pretend that they are alive is either dishonesty or, worse, sloth.’
D.G. MacRae ‘The deplorable evil result of the present, “administration and management of expenditure”, in violation of solemn pledges, is so subtle, so artistic, so unobservably “bleeding”, ... so plausibly masked with the face of beneficence, and being unaccompanied with any open compulsion or violence to person or property which the world can see and be horrified with, that, as the poet says: “Those lofty souls have telescopic eyes, That see the smallest speck of distant pain, While at their feet a world of agony, Unseen, unheard, unheeded, withers in vain” Dadabhai Nauroji Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development The problem of social welfare manpower has been generally neglected by social welfare administrators and planners, social work educators, and the professional associations, though this should have been a topic of major concern to them. The first serious attempt to study the problem from all aspects, and estimate manpower requirements on the basis of sound principles and reliable, though limited, empirical data was made in 1958-59 by the Study Team on Social Welfare and Welfare of the Backward Classes (Study Team).1 They made a threefold classification of social welfare jobs:
Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development The emergence of social policy as a field of study and as an academic department in universities is essentially a British product. A comparable development has not taken place even today in the developed European countries with a comprehensive social security system such as Germany, France or Sweden (Jones, 1979). In Britain, social policy was originally taught after the Second World War in the Department of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, London University by Titmuss, Donnison and others and later it began to be taught in other British universities. Teaching and Research in Social Policy was pioneered much later in U.S.A. by Eveline Burns, Martin Rein and Alwin Schorr.
Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development The concept of social development has a long history. It has been part of western social thought for more than 2500 years. Even in India, the ideas of social change and development have been present in rudimentary form at least from the Buddhist period. The work of Manu and Kautilya have a definite bearing on this theme
Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development The term ‘Social Welfare’ has been used with a variety of meanings both nationally and internationally. It has been treated as synonymous with social policy (Mishra, 1977) which, in turn, has been viewed by Titmuss and many others in Britain as social administration. Lightman viewed social welfare as a concept and as an institution which was no longer limited to popular notions of meeting the requirements of only the poor and the needy. ‘It now relates more properly to the entire populace even when there may be no or little economic need’ (Lightman, 1963), In the same year, Nehru expressed his view of social welfare which was similar to Lightman’s concept. Speaking at the seminar on ‘Social Welfare in a Developing Economy’ Nehru (1963) said, ‘In its broadest sense social welfare is the object of economic development, maximising the welfare of all persons in the society, whether handicapped or normal.’ The seminar participants, however, arrived at a restrictive definition of social welfare. According to them ‘the term social welfare services denote services intended to cater for the special needs of persons and groups who by reason of some handicap, social, economic, physical or mental are unable to avail themselves of or are traditionally denied, the amenities and services provided by the community’ (India: Planning Commission, 1963).
Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development Recently the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) the first institution of social work which was established in 1936, in Bombay, celebrated the Platinum Jubilee year with a series of seminars and a special function. This historic event went almost unnoticed in other parts of the country. It should have been an occasion for a retrospective look to take stock of the achievements and failures of the fields of social work and social work education, and the problems that confront them by the social work practitioners/ administrators and social work educators. A few broad based observations on these issues will be made to provide a brief historical perspective.
Special Articles / Shankar Pathak / Social Policy, Social Welfare and Social Development Evolutionary theorists of the nineteenth century believed in the inevitability of social progress. They thought that social change was governed by laws comparable to the laws of nature which ensured the movement of societies in the predetermined direction. In our own country social reformers like Rammohun Roy and M.G. Ranade subscribed to this evolutionary view of social progress. The social reform movements which were initiated by them were to facilitate and hasten this process. In other words, the spontaneous social actions were to be influenced by purposive actions. Like the concept of social progress, the currently popular term social development is also an evaluational concept. Unlike the evolutionists of the last century, the modern advocates of social development do not generally believe in the inevitability of social development. Social development, according to them, has to be accomplished through purposive and deliberate social planning (including economic planning).
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