Neeti Habba takes off, explores 'Public in Public Policy'

Bengaluru: The Centre for Budget and Policy Studies (CBPS) kick-started its two-day Neeti Habba 2024 at the Infosys Science Foundation here on Friday. 

The public policy fest will explore the theme — 'What is Public in Public Policy?' — through game-based workshops, hands-on activities, audio-visual experiences, interactive displays, and performances. 

In her opening remarks, CBPS Director Nivedita Menon said that they wanted to create spaces where you were not just engaging in dialogue and debate, but also building some quiet spaces of contemplation and reflection because contemplation should be as treasured as dialogue. 

"It is also our responsibility as a public policy institution to ensure that the tools and frameworks that we are using are actually useful to all of you. We also want people to have fun. That's the whole point of a festival," she remarked. 

The event started with a vocal performance by Urvija Priyadarshini, entitled 'A Feminist in Fragments'. The performance interwove feminist prose with Hindustani songs, ending with a rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem 'Hum Dekhenge'. 

Uma Mahadevan, Additional Chief Secretary and Development Commissioner, delivered the keynote address about her journey from policy to action. "Policy doesn't have to be painful, academic, or serious and involve a lot of grandstanding," she remarked. 

"It should involve fun and playfulness. The thing about playfulness and fun is that it is activity-based, so that people feel that it's a safe space to participate and much better diversity in terms of the perspectives and the voices and the things that people have to say, and at the same time, there are lots of serious issues being discussed," she said.

Anganwadi system 

Mahadevan went over the various aspects of public policy involved with the Anganwadi system.

"It's a very complex scheme with multiple policy objectives. It reaches pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, children between the ages of 3 and 6 for their early education, children below the age of 3 for their immunisations, early stimulation, early nutrition. It reaches out even to teenage girls in order to prevent teenage marriage and teenage pregnancy and teenage malnutrition, it tries to break the inter-generational cycles of malnutrition," she remarked. 

The festival continues on Saturday.