Essays

The status enjoyed by its general masses in general and the citizens, shape the structure of a society, in particular. A citizen is, in contradistinction to the nationals, the one who enjoys all the political rights apart from other forms of rights namely civil and legal rights guaranteed by state so the status of citizens of a country is to be analyzed. Not only from the socio-economic aspect of the country but also from the political structure of the state and the nature of political rights guaranteed to the citizens by the state. For instance, the status of citizens under an authoritarian regime can't be treated at par with the status of citizens of state having democratic set-up, though they are economically well off

In modern context, the status of citizens of a state is determined by many factors. One of the major determinants of it is the economic prosperity of the country. Here the concept of economic development comes into picture, as it is the measuring road of economic prosperity of a country. Economic development, in contradiction with economic growth, takes into consideration the quality of life in towns of economic prosperity enjoyed by the citizens within the boundary of a state. Different writers adopted different techniques for measuring the economic development of a country. Some of them takes into consideration the real per capita income of the citizens of the country whereas some others takes into consideration the indices like average life span of the citizens, literacy rate, percentage of employed citizens, sex rate, birth mortality rate, contribution of women section in the economic growth etc. Some western thinkers like Keynes,

Everett. Rogers, Smith, Andre Gender Frank interrupted the concept of economic development from the western societal perspective in which the developing countries are compared with the 'blue print' of western developed economy. But Indian economists like Arbind Singal spun that the contemporary theoretical approaches to development are;

(a)    pluralistic recognizing of many path ways to development and

(b)    less western in their cultural assumptions. Most of the indicators of economic development mentioned above are generally accepted as major determinants or measuring rods of a country's economic development.

Again there is still a confusion, as the reliability of these techniques can't give a true picture of the states, of citizens, of a country like India where variation of coming capacity of poor income group and higher income group is huge in nature. The social stratification in India is highly diversified, there are millions of people who spend their life in streets whereas there are again thousands who carries the amount earned by 100 persons, in one day only. The social inequality raises its ugly had without being checked in Indian society.

Another major determinant of status of the citizens of a state is the social values hold by the guard masses of the country. A society, which holds two contradictory social values by the members of the society, is often in the stage of developing society. Consequently, the status of citizens of such type of society will be of mediocre nature. Indian society is one of the classical examples of such type of society with the dawn of scientific inventions; "we, now, can unfold the most confusing mysteries of nature. We are now, in a position to explain the cause and affect of many natural phenomenas. Apart from that, with the inculcation of modern liberal thinking, our thought process has been rationalized to a great extent. However, being an Indian, we are still under the clutches of religious dogmas, superstitious beliefs castism etc. Fred Riggs called such type of society as prismatic society' (taken from 'prism') where society is not fully diffracted and the level of integration is poor. The developed nations of the world are, more or less, functionally differentiate with high degree of integration between social values. So the status of citizens of such countries is relatively high.

Last but not the least about the determinants of status of citizens is the political set-up of the country. In the present content of modern society, democratic political set-up is considered as the best form of polity. Democratic set-up not only means one vote for one person, rather it should be characterized by various beautiful liberal ideologies like liberalism, egalitarianism, rationalism, pluralism, individualism, etc. It is because of the of the lack of the concept of religious tolerance, the middle east are considered as 'not developed' countries, despite the fact that their per capita income is much higher than some developed western countries.

In fact, it is really a difficult task to evaluate the status of citizens of a country. However an intellectual discussion on various aspects of its determinants will be thought  provoking for our inquisitive mind.