Human ties can be freeing and empowering; they are often enough oppressive and crippling. Much would actually depend on the consciousness one brings on to interpret and actualize them in deference to principles of access, equity and autonomy or otherwise.

The so-called paradigm shift which open learning is passing through should ensure that it becomes a protean agency for critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy, in its turn, is based on a project of empowerment, a form of cultural politics in which the
site of pedagogy extends to include, beyond teaching, such other constituted activities dedicated to reproduction of the learners'social relations. Fundamental to emancipatory politics is a basic assumption that learning for self and social empowerment is 'ethically prior to the question of epistemology' or learning of the skills which are primarily tied to the logic of the market.

Specialized knowledge is increasingly slipping out of control to the ordinary masses. With the flattening out of the knowledge-based hierarchy, power may also be redistributed. One may remember that despite all the legislated reforms, power and people in India remain disjuncted today, except in rhetorics. This presents an historic opportunity to Open Learning : the curriculum here must contest the 'historical amnesia' created by contemporary cultural forms characterized by mass inertia and dull compulsions of the routine within the dominant class bias in education. 'The culture of silence' (Paulo Freire) must give way to a critical culture of voice and difference.

But information management can also bring in politics of inequity in the global interrelationships. Power of knowledge is fundamentally a question of use and control of information. Open iearning must guard against obsessive uses of technology.

Open learning must learn to dialectically integrate in practice its essential features of intensive usage of technology with flexibilities of (i) effective course deGgning for social intervention and (ii) networking and partnering with various NGOs. Reaching the people for their own voices on (self) educating the society will remain a great challenge.

The concept of 'empowerment'belongs to the discourse of the UN initiated reforms in various segments of the civil society People are to be empowered through making them conscious against the current trend of globalization and they have to be sensitized to the tasks of 'globalization from below' animated by environmental concerns, human rights, hostility to patriarchy and a vision of human community 'based on the unity of diverse cultures, seeking an end to pave oppression, humiliation and collective violence', While such a political engagement from an
intellectual platform will set the agendas of curriculum design for an empowering Open Learning, it may not be utterly utopian to think of a 'planetary consciousness' emerging via 'electronic democracy' with the contributions coming from the networks both real and virtual which are going to constitute the kernel of Open Learning 'truth' in the 21st century.

Postmodernism characterizes the spirit of the contemporary age. In tune with this, the decline of all the disciplines/professions (including Education) started around 60s and 70s as their unifying framework 'modernization' came under assaults from diverse quarters. 'Fragmentation' of the modernist paradigm (like Education) was aided by certain organizational flexibilities and a heavy dependence on info-tech. A new motto surfaced: concern for 'others' which in itself is an emancipatory enterprise.
As a 'fragment', DE can have all the solidadvantages arising out of positive impact of post-modernism, but negative effects need to be guarded against at the same time.

The paper cautions against too much of identification with info-tech and expresses a fear that DE may lose a historic opportunity to overcome pending problems of the developing world unless it spruces itself up for humanitarian interventions. Most of the problems in human development area have been piling up for years owing to failure of 'modernist' remedies. But this would entail confronting several new implications. The organisational barriers (DE has been streamlined at the tertiary level) come up andso also, the traditional format which is inflexible to new demands in curriculum and delivery. The case of Human Rights Education at IGNOU, India offers a new instantiation of a Univer*sity doing an educational job of making people aware and active, where learning is a genuine and direct source of empowerment for the learners.