Poverty the yet untamed horse
POVERTY alleviation being an area of major policy thrust of the successive governments this year's Asian Development Bank (ADB) poverty figures for Bangladesh have come as a shocker. The figures show that more than 50 percent of the population are now living below the extreme poverty level. To measure extreme poverty, the amount of income of a person that the poverty researchers in the UN have agreed upon is equivalent to $1.25 per day. So, if one is to go by the ADB-supplied figures, then the progress the country has made so far is very poor given the amount of emphasis laid on the issue by the different governments and the concern expressed by the donor communities.
But it is not only the government that has been fighting poverty, the worst curse of humanity. We have also thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who are engaged in the war against poverty for decades. Where have then all the money and efforts devoted for the purpose gone?
It is really very intriguing that notwithstanding all the endeavours to contain it, poverty has been stubbornly pushing its borders.
The number of agencies including the international and the national ones employed in poverty alleviation is in a word impressive. Strangely though, they appear to be losing the fight. At this stage a layman might be tempted to question the very perception of the problem among the poverty-fighters and the method they are using to mitigate it.
In most of the literatures concerned about the issue, poverty is looked upon as a kind of ailment, which, as it were, afflicts the people in question. Poverty, according to such perception, is a problem in isolation from other social conditions within which the affected ones live. Unsurprisingly, the poverty mitigating agencies take the affected the people individually and try to help them out through creating job opportunities for them in a piecemeal fashion. Undoubtedly, such measures have helped some individual families to come out of poverty. But that such intervention could hardly make much difference in the lives of the people is clearly demonstrated by the poverty figures provided by ADB.
Most countries of South and Southeast Asia that are now bracketed with the rich nations did not always have such a glamorous status. Poverty was not a stranger to those societies even a few decades back. Their success is rather recent. How did these countries overcome their respective statuses of backwardness and poverty so quickly? What were the roles of the anti-poverty agencies in the countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, to name but a few of the East Asian tigers? International agencies and the donor countries were certainly active in those countries to lift them out the curse of backwardness and poverty. But one can hardly claim that their rise to current prominence has been due mainly to the efforts of these agencies.
In the ADB release, it has been further shown that of the 39 countries ranked according the purchasing power of the people in the Asia-Pacific region with Singapore topping list, Bangladesh lies at the fourth position from the bottom, with only three other countries -- Afghanistan, Nepal and Timor-Leste -- trailing behind. And in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head, Bangladesh's position is abysmal compared to that of Singapore at one sixtieth of the latter's status in this respect. Why this big difference so far as the purchasing power of the two peoples are concerned?
If one looks at the history of development of these countries, it would be found that Bangladesh's status vis-à-vis the more successful countries of South-East Asia was not always like this. True, since its birth, Bangladesh has been handicapped by its huge population packed within a small geographical area with few resources tucked away within Mother Nature's womb. But in spite of its high population density, the poverty was never so acute as it is now, especially in comparison to the newly rich nations like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and so on.
Oddly though, not in the remote past, this part of the world known as Bangladesh was envied by many of its South Asian neighbours for its better status in the international arena. It is, in fact, during the last three to four decades that Bangladesh's position has deteriorated in a gradual fashion. Interestingly, during this entire period, various poverty alleviation agencies had been very actively pursuing their models to rid the nation of its socio-economic woes. Unfortunately, we are still moving at a snail's pace, while our eastern neighbours have beaten us one by one in the race for economic development.
It is, therefore, time the political leaders and the development thinkers rethought their entire approach to fighting poverty and achieving overall economic development of the people. In that case, they will be required also to think of effecting a change in the overall social and economic conditions within which the "individual poor" lives.
Syed Fattahul Alim is a senior journalist.
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