Power of Skills Development on Inclusive Grow

G S Oinam *

"Being a Negro in America, means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grew up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Non violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in the history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sward that heals. Today, the choice is no longer between violence and non violence. It is either non violence or non existence.

There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing lose. People, who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it they unconsciously want to destroy the society.
If a man is called a street sweeper, he should sweep the street even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespare wrote poetry. He should sweep the streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say there lived a street sweeper who did his job well."

- Martin Luther King's gospel (I have a dream, Washington D.C. 28th August 1963)-

In spite of difficulties and frustrations of the moment, world all over cried with joy when Barack Obama become the first black President of the United States of America. The dream of Martin Luther King has become true. Today, sons of former slaves and sons of slave owners have come to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Suranjoy Singh, Manipur boxer to clinch a gold medal at the Inter Continental President's Cup attributed his success to anger management, which has helped him evolved from street fighter to a champion pugilist. The best boxer of the season ending moment said that he used to lose focus to often due to his short temper.

" I used to lose my cool very easily in the ring. For instance, if my opponent landed a good punch for fouled me, it would make so angry that I would just forget about the bout and try to beat up the other guy. Today, I adopted a calmer approach and it would fantastically well in the Asian Championship, I now, focus on scoring points and winning the bout, I don't lose my cool", he said at a press interview. He has realized how important it was to focus his energy on the real task.

Sharing information and confidence building are utmost task one has to maintain as priority before putting any agreement on long lasting solution. All efforts and initiatives may lose in vain at the moment when we use the most regrettable words "I don't believe you" or "I hate you." Tolerate the pain of discrimination and show your noble gesture of forgiveness to heal the suffering of the society at large.

Neeraj Kumar said that art of negotiation is a fun, practice it. It is a skill of every individual and social organizations must possess to focus energy on real task to achieve the goal of success. Most often, our ignorance and anger has confused the real focal point to focus on scoring and winning the game.

Finally,' Pigeons fight' or 'Bulls fight' to finish up the game and to prove that "we can win" without considering the real danger, injuries, benefits of the game and value of time wasted. World will be wonder to realized how the entire state is surviving without drawing employees salary for consecutive 4-5 months due to strikes and agitations. Why Manipur can not silent even for one month without issues and agitation?

In a successful negotiation, everyone wins. The objective should be agreement, not victory. A smart person manages to make the world eat out of his hand. The bottom line is that we need to negotiate, because the world does not behave the way we want to be. Thus, it is very important to have a well developed set of negotiation skills in order to achieve what we want. There are some powerful techniques to help us ride our way through many bottlenecks of conflicting interest.

All negotiation involve two levels- a rational decision making process and a psychological process. The outcome of the negotiation is likely function of both. In real life situations, rational arguments have their own limitation.

For example, number of times we have seen that even if we want to pay our workers extra they refuse to do overtime. Extra money does not lure them to work 'extra' for you. Therefore, negotiation treads more at a psychological level. One valuable tool in managing difficult situations like these understands, what has been called Win-Win theory and Win-Lost theory in negotiation.

Win-Win Theory: - This type of negotiation emphasis to maximize the gains for both parties. The negotiator tries to broaden the pie- maximize benefits for both, and logroll- each party makes concessions on low priority issues in exchange of things that it values highly. All negotiations must have Win-Win as their bottom-line i.e. there are infinite amount of resources to be divided and both sides can 'Win.' Dominant strategies include cooperation, sharing information and mutual problem solving. This type is also called 'creating value' since the goal here is to have both sides leave the negotiation feeling they had greater value than before.

Win -Lost theory: - In this argument, person tries to bulldoze his way through, taking advantage of others. More often, such techniques end in unmitigated failure. The benefit of one person is usually at the cost of the other. If some one wins the other side loses. There are fixed resources to be divided so that the more one gets the less other gets. One person's interests oppose the others. The dominant strategies in this mode include manipulation, forcing and withholding information.

What a Win is? Precisely know what we want out of the negotiation. Find out your best and the worst case scenario. The area in between is called our settlement range. If we can reach an agreement within our settlement range, that is a win.

Build Trust: - Negotiation is highly sophisticated form of communication Instead we will have manipulation and suspicion masquerading as communication. Be trustworthy, honor your commitments. Tell the truth, trust release positive energy which attracts the other person to work with you.

Separate people from the problem: Whenever possible address problem, not people and avoid the tendency to attack at personal level. If the other person's feels threatened you would not reach an amicable solution easily. Try to maintain a rational goal oriented frame of mind. If your opponent attacks you personally, don't let him hook you into an emotional reaction. You need not take it personally. Try to empathize with the other person.

Negotiation with open mind: Whenever there is an open mind, there is frontier. It is critical to understand that negotiation cannot be done by following a pre conceived set of principles and uniformly applying them to all situations. A preset idea might work if everyone could be counted onto behave rationally, but people are often emotional and irrational. To negotiate well, we must be prepared to use a variety of approaches and frame options in terms of the other person's interest.

Union Budget on Inclusive Growth 20010-11: Union Budget is ringing rhetoric, can not be mare statement of government account. It has reflected the government's vision and signals the policies to come in future. Budget 2010-11, reflects the vision of the government towards 9% GDP growth and then double digits growth thereafter, with a clear focus on inclusion. Pranab Mukherjee's inclusive growth, we mean "three in one models" i. e. Targeting growth, fiscal consolidation and social and economic reforms like NREGA, Women Reservation Bill, Rights to Education, Food Security Bills, and Legal Guarantees for Individuals etc.

In other word, Inclusive growth is an act of faith to achieve a "Modern State." The Budget is solid, pragmatic and it has wonderful ideas with many visions. The key thrust sectors of growth are agriculture, infrastructure and the financial sectors. Social sector has received 37% of the total plan outlay and another 25% of the plan outlay is devoted to the development of rural infrastructure. Finance Minister proposed to bring fiscal deficit down to 5.5% of GDP in 2010-11 and further down to 4.8% and 4.1% of GDP over the two subsequent years.

This budget reflects Banking licenses to private sector players, Recapitalization of regional Rural bank, Skills development, Micro finance and Social security fund for unorganized sector workers, Renewable energy sector, Lead bank scheme, administrative reforms commission, Unique identification Authority of India etc. The non plan expenditure is up only 8.5% over the last year and non plan outlays are actually down for several sectors including defence, police, subsidies, economic services and other general services etc.

The budget hope the inflation will fall to 4% over the next years in a trump of hope over experience. Resource mobilization effort and balance should not trigger away inflationary expectation. All economic activities will run fast to achieve the target. Government had announced the setting up of an independent evaluation office to undertake impartial and objective assessment of various public programmee.

To achieve the target of Inclusive Growth, Manipur state government has to prepare for timely implementation of projects under target- pressure- achievement- incentive policy of corporate governance.

to be continued...