DO I DARE!
Development and Human Liberation
I begin with some lines from the Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carol:
"To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care
To pursue it with forks and hope
To threaten its life with a railway-share
To charm it with smiles and hope".
That is exactly how our leaders and policy makers, authoritarian or democratic, our economists and engineers have been pursuing economic growth over the past three decades and more. Sometimes with a railway-share and sometimes with a soap.
Growth has been elusive or stagnating at around 4 per cent until the last two years when it broke out into 5.6 per cent. With the recent devastating floods of the longest duration, there will be a setback this year. But the people and the government together have coped with the crisis in remarkable resilience. The problem, however, is that the Snark of Growth continues to bypass large segments of population called the poor.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee
He had softly and suddenly vanished away
For the Snark was a Boojum you see.
Numeric professionals quantify poverty in standard measures of flows of consumption and/or income. According to some estimates, around half the population in Bangladesh subsist under the poverty-line. Again, the poor and the much more numerous rural poor are not homogeneous. Some poor are like, us, only poorer than us. But the ultrapoor are different. Many and the most miserable are socially peripheral, including the landless, the low castes, abandoned women and widows, nomadic artisanal fisherfolk and migrants. There are many biases against seeing them and the invisible poor are very often the missing poor. Some estimates put the figure of ultrapoor at 22 per cent reaching above 30 per cent in the countryside.
In dealing with starvation and hunger, the focus on income or consumption flow is not entirely disastrous. But when it comes to the loss of freedom and self-respect, of control over day-to-day survival, to health and education, social equality and political participation in decisions-making and freedom from social harassment or survival opportunities of the most disadvantaged, income is miles of the target. Allow me to quote from Adam Smith's Super Money and what he calls McNamara fallacy:
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured: this is O.K. as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured or give it an artificial value: this is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to disregard that which cannot be measured: this is blindness.
The fourth step is to say that whatever cannot be measured does not really exist: this is suicide.
A robust conception of the standard of living on the other hand, must include among others, the perception of security in livelihood, the sense of freedom from harassment and abuse at home and at work the feeling of dignity in day-to-day transactions, the belief in the reliability of officialdom, the expectation or lack of it that life will improve for one's off-spring and so forth.
Allow me to illustrate very briefly the fundamentally political nature of such structural predisposition. Generally covered under Weberian social closures related to ownership and allocation of property resources, control and dissemination of knowledge and information and spatial isolation of large segments of population from the centres of political economic and cultural power, certain specific example in Bangladesh context are gender-disorientation in inheritance law and consequent intra-household distribution of assets and incomes tenurial insecurity of share-croppers and employment insecurity of landless laborers particularly during seasonal deficits; discrimination in access to credit, education, healthcare and nutrition by the poor; sudden loss of assets such as homestead or livestock; death or prolonged illness of an earning member and many others like meeting unforeseen expenditures for unfortunate social customs like dowry.
The context being as described above, I shall elaborate my perception of development as human liberation. The framework embarrass, both public and private sector initiatives, the machinery for governance and the civil society together, under a holistic ambiance of equitable access to opportunities and livelihood. Security of the less privileged and the disadvantaged. The underlying policy concerns are the four 'E's - equity, efficiency, ethics and ecology.
Access to equitable opportunities will presuppose in the Bangladesh context tenurial security of share-croppers and marginal farmless as well as employment opportunities for the landless workers.
In Bangladesh context, public action for basic education, particularly for women has definitely expanded. But allow me to quote from a recently published document, "Bangladesh 2020" (UPL, 1998).
As a result of neglect, inefficiency and wasted resources - notably high at the secondary level - in public education, Bangladesh has an adult literacy rate of only 47 per cent, significantly lower than in Sri Lanka (88 per cent). Female literacy, moreover, is only 22 per cent, compared with 34 per cent in India and 83 per cent in Sri Lanka, Dropout and repetition rates are uncomfortably high. Fifty-seven percent of the students who enter primary schools do not complete their five years of primary education (Ed Bos, 1995).
Only 200,000 students - just three per cent of the 11-15 year age group - graduated from secondary schools in Bangladesh in 1996.
Secondary and higher education credentials have little currency in the labour market because they are regarded as purely academic programs which graduate students highly trained in liberal arts and social sciences but far from able to master science and technical subjects.
With regrettably good reason, many Bangladeshi employers in industry and commerce hold public vocational and training institutions and their graduates in minimum high regard. Since private-sector entrepreneurs are not involved in the management of these institutions, it is not surprising that the graduates are not only poorly trained but untrained, in large measure, in skill areas relevant to the current or future needs of the business community".
As for healthcare, there is no doubt that expanded programmes of immunisation has attempted to reach poorer sections of the population. But till recently public sector health interventions reach only 12 per cent of the rural population. The maternal mortality rate at 449 per 100,000 live births is one of the highest in the world. Infant mortality rate though declining is still very height at 75 per 1,000 live child births. Roughly seven out of ten children in Bangladesh are underweight. Over 90 per cent of all children suffer from some degree of malnutrition. More than one quarter of them are measurably stunted.
Add to that the subservience of women in family and social structure and inspite of the best efforts of socially responsible - the inadequacy of micro-credit for resource poor women. One could say that the social opportunities which are necessary for unleashing the dormant creativity of many, are just not available to them. How can they participate in the growth process?
A closely related factor is a plural and more enhanced form of democracy without any overarching mediations. And the key to that is decentralised participatory institutions created and owned by the people themselves. In the specific socio-cultural dynamics of the subcontinent and Bangladesh, the least reference point is Rabindrabnath Togor's thoughts on 'Samaj' - an egalitarian community based assembly where stimulating debates evolve into emergence of some consensus. To quote Tagore, "if a community wants the state to perform its jobs, it will surely become idle and inefficient. This was never the case in our society. We have gone through the reigns of various alien kings, but the community never stopped to play its role. Never it allowed external interference for conducting its activities big or small". Within that framework the state and the samaj exist in harmony. The state creates the enabling environment for the communities to take their own decisions as those affect their lives without any undue prescriptive interference and in accordance with their diverse interests and security. The samaj or civil society in today's parlance acts as a watchdog for the state to perform positively in ensuring human rights.
It is only in the context of the social opportunities and free political participation including the right of dissent that it is possible to make the benefits of a liberalised and open economy accessible to the majority population. As I stated earlier in this column: in order to make economic reforms universal and open up a country's economy to the global market place, it is important that social and political opportunities are more broad-based which can bring the different segments of population to a level playing field.
But such an endeavor pre-supposes, the two other 'E' s, ethics and ecology. It is not only a question of efficiency of governance alone, it is a question of procedural transparency, fairness in trade and exchange and normative values both in administrative transactions and inter personal behavior.
Why should a share-cropper invest in land productivity when his uncertain tenure does not generally exceed one year and sometimes is limited to a single cropping reason? How can a marginal farmer or a bargadar have access to credit when either the land-title is inadequate and the terminal status, only a verbal arrangement? Even credit against crop hypothecation is not possible when a bank requires guarantee either from the absentee land-lord or an affluent person of the locality.
As for employment opportunities for the landless temporary measures like food or cash for work to rehabilitate rural infrastructure has been resorted to. Important as it is during seasonal deficits, perhaps more sustainable instruments will be providing them with seed capital for rural and periunban trades and services; setting up of small market-towns to facilitate such opportunities; facilitating rural and agribased industries and the like.
Equally important is the equitable access of the majority population, particularly women and children, to basic and technical education, to health care and nutritional security as well as an affirmative programme for women's access to jobs, professions, credit and market. Finally a social security net for the most disadvantaged must be in place.
Ecological deficits are already becoming too high and unsustainable. Hence perhaps is the search for a balance between human beings and their environment, between nature and culture, projecting paradigmme shifts in a more horizontal organization of agriculture, industry, energy, infrastructure and of knowledge itself. Coalescing generational knowledge of people who practice with frontier knowledge of the theoreticians and scientists is perhaps the only way of creating common wisdom.
In the end, I would like to emphasise once again certain ritualistic traditions and cultural practices that consider women as lesser human beings, mentally and morally inferior than men and even unclean. The subaltern status of women is quite evident in discriminations under inheritance law, in grossly restricted access to education, capital resource, markets, jobs and professions. Also important is to ensure the enforcement of law and justice. Are the court-systems or mediators in village-salish who dispense justice, fair and unbiased? Faith that women have in the fairness of the system can offer insights into how well justice is administered in a society.
Let us remember that women know the pains of creation and therefore they hate destruction most. This is why in struggles to save forest, struggle against pollution, in movements against militarisation, women have been and still are at the forefront. If ecological integrity and community control over local resources rather than preachings from the pulpit are considered as prerequisites for sustainable and equitable development, we must learn from women who live closest to nature and who produce and reproduce life not only biologically but also through their caring role in nurturing and providing sustenance.
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