Archives

by Ponna Wignaraja

The media in South Asia compares favourably with other media, not only among the countries of the South, but also globally, in its reporting of events. Individual journalists and some sections of the print and electronic media reflect high standards. The South Asian media is, however, biased towards globalisation, economic liberalisation and structural adjustment strategies.

These strategies tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and lead to consumerism. They also lead to the wastage and erosion of the natural resource system, as well as the existing knowledge and creativity of large numbers of poor South Asians.

Moreover, on the issue of poverty, the South Asian media has, by and large, been weak and ambiguous. It reports on poverty in a fragmented and ad hoc manner. It has, on the whole, failed to be an innovative partner in the effort to eradicate the worst forms of poverty in South Asia.

Let me present here three additional challenges to which the media in South Asia has not responded adequately, when confronted with the poverty issue. It has not understood:

* the magnitude and complexity of the poverty problem in South Asia

* the inadequacy of mainstream development strategies

* the need for a paradigm shift based on lessons from the ground in South Asia Warning signals

A lack of vision has led to a sharpening of contradictions in South Asia, with poverty leading to violence and an unmanageable polity.

Warning signals have repeatedly been emanating over the past quarter-century on the increase in poverty and on the inadequacy of the strategies to fight poverty being followed in the region.

A small group of South Asian scholars under the auspices of SAPNA issued the first warning in the mid 1970s, at the height of what were regarded globally as the "golden years" of development. This group of South Asians expressed their dissent from mainstream thinking, on the basis of their understanding of the contradictions that were sharpening in South Asian economies and polities.

They pointed out, among other things, that South Asia was predominantly a rural society and yet, when South Asian countries had emerged as politically independent nations from centuries of colonial rule, they had adopted a development model that was anti- rural. They said the magnitude of the problem in the region had finally become too large to be ignored - both internally and internationally.

In 1991, the Heads of State of SAARC countries, heeding repeated warnings, established an Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation, to review the dominant development strategy being followed in the region and its impact on the poverty situation, which had been worsening in the aftermath of further liberalization, structural adjustment policies and the debt-led growth of the 1980s. The unanimous Report of the Commission endorsed the earlier warnings as follows:

"The Report reinforces the conclusion that the magnitude and complexity of the problem of poverty in South Asia is staggering. No matter how poverty was measured, there were nearly 440 million or 40% of the people who were below the poverty line.

When coupled with the multifaceted crisis currently facing South Asian countries, the problem is becoming unmanageable, not only putting democracy at risk but also posing a threat to the fabric of South Asian societies."

The Report went on to say that the dominant development paradigm was inadequate:

"The conventional development interventions over the past 50 years, have resulted in a growth rate too low to have an impact on the levels of living and human development of the large number of poor.

Though South Asia has achieved an average growth rate of 3.1 per cent over the past 10 years, while several other regions in the South have had negative growth, such growth has failed to "trickle down" or be administratively redistributed to the poor, except in a limited manner.

The magnitude of poverty remains unacceptably high and is likely to increase as a result of simplistic liberalisation and narrow structural adjustment policies being followed..

Excessive dependence on the State for every lead in development curtailed initiatives of the people. Obsessive preoccupation with capital accumulation, as the driving force in economic progress, resulted in neglecting the capacity of the poor themselves.

Concentration on industrialization/modernization, as the dominant paradigm of development, created dualities in the system and wide gaps between rural and urban levels of living as well as further polarization within these areas. The poor, wherever they lived, faced the worst consequences of these processes".

In 2000, the President of India delivered an even stronger warning linking poverty and violence in his Republic Day address. While the following statement was in relation to the Indian polity, it helped to reinforce the conviction that anti-poverty strategies needed to be rethought:

False Debates "

Fifty years into the life of our Republic we find that Justice - social, economic and political - remains an unrealised dream for millions of our fellow citizens. The benefits of our economic growth are yet to reach them. We have one of the world's largest reservoirs of technical personnel, but also the world's largest number of illiterates, the world's largest middle class, but also the largest number of people below the poverty line, and the largest number of children suffering from malnutrition.

Our giant factories rise out of squalor, our satellites shoot up from the midst of the hovels of the poor. Not surprisingly, there is sullen resentment among the masses against their condition erupting often in violent forms in several parts of the country. Tragically, the growth in our economy has not been uniform.

It has been accompanied by great regional and social inequalities. Many a social upheaval can be traced to the neglect of the lowest of society, whose discontent moves towards the path of violence".

How did we come to this? Looking back, it is clear that at independence, the countries of the region did not think hard enough about what kind of democracy and what kind of development was relevant for us. We imitated colonial modes of thought and action with marginal tinkering. Then, from the 1950s, South Asians became involved in a number of false debates instead of addressing the fundamentals of poverty eradication.

At the level of global debate we were promised "one world" by the first generation of globalists, but it never really emerged. At national levels, there was a debate between neo-classical economists favouring liberalisation and structural adjustment and the Marxist approach, based on socialism and centralised decision-making. Both these ideologies were in fact somewhat alien to South Asia.

Many relevant issues such as culture, ecology and participation were missing from these debates. We allowed this debate to continue between marginal variations in neo-classicism and Marxism, as if these were the only two options that were available to us in our development strategy and polity. We vacillated between "top-down planning" and the "leave everything to the market" approach. We imitated the centralised decision-making processes in both systems - the centralised state in one and corporate boardrooms in the other. We ended up with a mish-mash of theory and practice.

Later, we embarked on a second-generation globalisation debate without learning lessons from the inadequacy of past strategies and policies. We went in for globalisation, thinking we could tranquilise the poor with unsustainable welfare safety nets and charity.

We absorbed these tranquilising process lock, stock and barrel from industrial countries, without questioning their suitability.

Even today, fundamental issues are blurred in the discourse on development. By adding "social" to narrow economics and more recently broadening it to include vague notions of human development, intellectuals and policy-makers alike think they have moved to a new plateau of thinking and action. No one quarrels with the concept of human development.

What we need to ask is: what is the message from these humanists for the 440 million poor in South Asia, now? We need to get greater clarity and agreement on fundamentals and implement a pro-poor strategy that is relevant for us before we are mesmerized and sidetracked by vague notions of globalisation and human development.

South Asian values

The false debates I described above had little relevance to our reality.

There are values and processes within South Asia that could have guided our nation-building exercises and social transitions. Let me try to put the issues in simple, though not simplistic, terms. Historically, there was a tremendous cultural resurgence and socio-political movement that led to political decolonisation and independence in most South Asian countries. It was a political movement with a holistic approach. Its goal was to lead not just to political independence but also to a good life for all. Mahatma Gandhi catalysed this social movement.

There were others as well, too numerous to mention.

We could have taken Gandhianism as a point of departure, and evolved our own coherent brand of South Asian modernity in a step- by-step manner. Gandhi never said "Do not go towards modernity" or "Go backwards to tradition". What he did offer was an alternative modernity, based on greater self-reliance at the base of our societies and in terms of our fundamental cultural values. He said "the world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed".

However, these issues became distorted through false polarisations. A debate took place in India between Nehru's assertion that big dams were the temples of modern India and a Gandhianism wrongly depicted as a romantic back-to-the-spinning-wheel and the village philosophy. In fact, Gandhianism has many strands. One is the Sarvodaya or harmony community model and another Antyodaya. Antyodaya requires distinguishing rich from poor and empowering the poor by enabling them to participate, as subjects, in their own development, and then building new institutions and partnerships. After centuries of colonial rule and the creation of a western-oriented elite, it was important to start with the people, particularly the poor.

They had held on to traditional values and kept alive a kind of a momentum in their struggles.

New social movements

Today, many of the new social movements in South Asia have reinvigorated these values. These social movements are a form of positive dissent to mainstream top-down democracy and development. They also reflect ways in civil societies in our countries are responding to deepening inequalities, the erosion of the natural resource base, gender equity issues and to the inability of our states to manage these issues.

Ecological movements such as the Chipko movement and the Narmada Andolan in India and people's movements against the commercial destruction of rain forests, and other kinds of economic development that are predatory on nature have helped build countervailing power. The women's movements in nearly all South Asian countries are equally significant.

These movements represent a new group of actors interested not in State power as such, but in creating people's power where a participatory democratic society is the persistent quest.

Larger and larger members of people are no longer willing to accept fatalistic, exploitative, alienating or repressive regimes and state structures, or a development paradigm that excludes them and deprives them of dignity.

Through these new movements, people are also demonstrating ways to humanise the larger macro-processes and asserting that the terms of incorporation into the mainstream can be changed at all levels. Smaller development experiments in which people cope simultaneously with the multiple crises in their lives, survive and move, through their own efforts, towards dignity and a better quality of life, are also increasingly evident.

While social movements are the result of broader-based people's responses to ecological, ethnic or gender conflicts, the micro-level experiments are not homogeneous and differ in their origins.

Some experiments represent real seeds of change, others are mere ephemeral bubbles. However, both the social movements and experiments are mobilising, conscientising and organising people for social transformation in one form or another at particular levels. They have come to stay as a new socio-political force, and can no longer be ignored. There are many lessons on the fundamentals for poverty eradication that can be learnt from them.

A Holistic Approach

One fundamental is that in South Asian cultures, there are holistic value-led approaches to life and progress. When you identify with the base of our economies and polities, where the poor exist, what you see is that, if the poor do not work, they do not eat and their families do not eat and if their families do not eat, they fall sick...Dealing with this is not just a matter of improving a little health here or primary education there, and handing out some credit or charity.

It becomes a vicious cycle. The way to break out of this is to tap the creativity and knowledge-systems of the poor themselves, which contain positive, cost-effective strategies for nutrition and biotechnology, and other elements, not just related to health, but also wisdom, governance, literacy, irrigation and development. These knowledge systems and the wider range of technologies available to the poor are an integral part of the new paradigm, rather than imported capital and technology, on which the mainstream development paradigm was based.

The new social movements and coping systems of the poor, and lessons from success stories on the ground in South Asia, show that when the poor participate as subjects in the process of development, they can, at low levels of income, save, invest and move from de-humanization to dignity.

They can initiate, even in narrow economic terms, an accumulation process, where growth, human development and equity are part of the same process and not trade-offs. They show that you do not have to grow first through only public sector or private sector activities and then redistribute. The poor can also contribute directly to growth from the third sector.

The success cases I mentioned earlier show great diversity. I have in mind projects like the one initiated by an NGO called Sappros in rural Nepal, where poor women are demonstrating that without formal literacy, they can save and keep their savings account books and repay loans.

They know exactly how to calculate leakages from family earnings. They can save even when they earn little. They learn to repay, as a matter of self-respect, if they borrow. They know how to use savings wisely. If there is food in the house, the child eats first, because the mother makes sure of that. She even feeds the drunken husband before she eats.

These women organise and assert their rights and overcome gender conflicts. This comes not from western-style feminism but very strong, powerful and culturally-rooted family values.

A second such case is the Ranna project in Sri Lanka, where capital - the factor always in short supply - is not the major input. It is the creativity of the poor, local resources and local knowledge - all factors in surplus - that sets in motion the process of bringing the poor into the mainstream. A trained external facilitator helps the poor build their own organisations.

The New Social Contract

The old social contract between labour and management and the welfare state is outdated. The welfare state has become unsustainable even in the western industrial societies where it originated. We adopted that old social contract and we cannot afford it.

That social contract was dependent on an aid relationship and expectation of a massive transfer of resources from industrialised countries. It was also based on taking surpluses generated by the poor from the base of the economy, upwards through state taxation or private profit, and then redistributing it.

This is redistributive justice, another form of forcing "trickle down" administratively. In our case, our bureaucratic systems have by and large proved incapable of carrying out sustained redistributive processes. Thus, by every consideration, this form of the social contract is neither relevant nor sustainable.

The new social contract between the state and the poor in South Asia has to be based on a new pattern of pro-poor growth. It must be based on the principle that the poor are not the problem, but are part of the solution.

With the inadequacy of external resource flows to fill the savings gap in our societies, we have no option but to generate a new accumulation process where growth, human development and equity are not trade-offs. We must start by recognizing the efficiency of the poor.

If we are serious about it, we can eradicate the worst forms of poverty in South Asia, in a given time frame, leaving only residual numbers to be carried by safety nets and charity, until these residual numbers of poor also can be brought into the mainstream.

This calls for a three-sector model, rather than a two-sector model.

That is where the Western economists and social scientists and their counterparts in our countries went wrong and are continuing to go wrong.

They advocated a two-sector growth model for South Asia, through the public and private sector. There has to be a three-sector model, if 40 to 50 per cent of our people are in the informal sector and poor.

An important issue, in this context, is greater decentralisation and participatory democracy, which is being talked of in all the countries of the region. This is what the Panchayati Raj (local government authority) legislation in India and decentralisation reforms in other South Asian countries are about. Yet decentralisation without devolution or pro-poor growth from below is meaningless and can exacerbate problems.

Decentralisation, devolution and pro-poor growth must be linked.

A word about "civil society", a phrase that has crept into the current discourse on governance and poverty. Civil society contains many contradictions and it is not always pro-poor. There is also a great deal of confusion when it comes to poverty strategies.

Some civil society institutions and NGOs are coming up with single solutions or single "entry point" solutions to a complex set of problems. They are confusing protest actions with development actions, redistributive justice with social justice and pro-poor growth with welfare and safety nets. Civil society organisations need to get their act together. This is a call for a new kind of coherence and partnership.

Finding regional solutions to regional problems

In 1984, SAARC started cautiously, through a series of purely inter-governmental activities, based on fragmented and sectoral issues, many of them already on the global inter-governmental agenda. For the first six years, there was insufficient attention paid to emerging national, regional or global changes and realities, and to evolving an appropriate and comprehensive response to them. The intellectual underpinnings for vigorous South Asian regional co-operation were weak.

At their Male Summit in 1990, however, the SAARC Heads of State took two important decisions, recognising that SAARC, as it was evolving, was unprepared for the globalisation scenario, for the new challenges posed by "Europe 1992" and other regional groupings and the emerging multifaceted crisis in South Asia itself.

The first decision was that SAARC should focus on core areas of economic co-operation.

Secondly, it was decided that scholars, professionals, NGOs and the media should help reinforce the official SAARC process in moving into these core areas.

The second decision, regarding the need for a new partnership between the official SAARC process and independent actors, reflected concern amongst the Heads of State that SAARC could not move forward purely as an official inter-governmental process.

Some attempts had been made earlier to involve South Asian scholars and experts as consultants in the official SAARC processes. A grouping of chambers of commerce and industry, a media association, association of parliamentarians and some sectoral specialists had also begun to emerge in an ad hoc manner.

This new decision, however, reflected the recognition that a great deal of systematic research support, innovative thinking and vigorous participation by independent groups would be required to realise the potential for a South Asian Economic Community. A real process of learning from the ground and translating the lessons into a coherent agenda for action had to be initiated to achieve this.

What is of significance for this paper is the invitation by repeated recent SAARC Declarations for independent groups of South Asian scholars, professionals, NGOs and the media to associate with the official SAARC process.

It is also important to identify what lessons emerged from these selected innovative experiments to create a real dialogue and partnership between the official SAARC process and parallel independent intellectual processes by scholars, professionals, media and NGOs in South Asia.

In 1991, SAPNA, representing South Asian scholars, professionals and policy-makers in their personal capacity, under the auspices of the United Nations University, was one of the first to respond systematically to this challenge of an innovative dialogue and partnership. An Independent Group on South Asian Co-operation (IGSAC) was established from among SAPNA members. It was composed of an interdisciplinary group of 15 South Asians, who had in-depth familiarity with the region and the SAARC process.

There were economists, physical and social scientists and historians, as well as, those who were associated with the official SAARC process at the time. The group did not undertake primary research but synthesised the conclusions of a number of relevant inter-disciplinary studies and had intensive interactions with South Asian scholars, policy-makers and some SAARC Heads of State.

The outcome of this year-long process was a report, "SAARC Moving Towards Core Areas of Co-operation", submitted to the 1991 SAARC Summit in Colombo. The priority Agenda for Action recommended was unanimously endorsed by the Summit and incorporated into the Colombo Summit Declaration. The IGSAC Report contained three powerful messages for the SAARC Heads of State, in addition to the agenda for immediate action.

The messages were:

* South Asia has a common history, common eco-system and shared fundamental values, which could provide a vision of a South Asian Community based on unity in diversity.

* Today, South Asia is facing a multifaceted crisis of poverty, slow economic growth, uneven development, population pressure, natural resource erosion, high defence expenditure and an internal arms race, social polarisation, religious fundamentalism, youth alienation and ethnic conflicts.

These conflicts and problems are becoming unmanageable. Together with external trends they are pushing South Asia further and further to the margins of both the world economy and the international political arena.

* A more complex sustainable human development strategy, than hitherto adopted, which includes greater decentralisation, social mobilisation and empowerment of the poor, could provide a transitional response to the region's immediate need, and mediate the sharp contradictions that had arisen.

The Report concluded that no South Asian country could solve the multifaceted crisis individually and collective regional co-operation must be vigorously pursued.

The Agenda for Immediate Action recommended was:

* The establishment of a High Level Independent Commission on Poverty Alleviation in South Asia.

* The establishment of a Food Security System, with the Right to Food for the Poor in South Asia.

* The establishment of a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA).

* The establishment of a South Asian Payments Union to be managed by the Central Banks of the region.

* The establishment of a South Asian Development Fund initiated by SAARC countries, initially with their own contributions. This fund could then organise a major mobilisation of global surpluses for South Asia's industrialisation, the implementation of a poverty eradication strategy and for trade and balance of payments support.

Additionally, it would provide finance for multi-country development projects. Such a South Asian Development Fund would enhance the region's capacity to take full advantage of the surpluses generated in other regions of the world.

The five core areas - poverty eradication, food security, trade co-operation, payments union and external resource mobilisation - are not only closely inter-related, but also necessary prerequisites for achieving the vision of a South Asian Economic Community with sustainable human development, real democratic political formations, good governance and poverty eradication.

Without the eradication of the worst forms of poverty, SAARC would not be able to establish a one-billion-strong South Asian mass market.

Food security is the other side of the poverty coin in a region which has a food surplus and further potential for food production. Poverty eradication and the right to food go hand in hand and could be combined with the right to work by the poor. For trade co-operation, payments arrangements are essential.

In Europe, the Payments Union preceded economic co-operation.

The mobilisation of external resources is necessary both for poverty eradication as well as for industrialisation and building South Asia's technological capabilities.

Trade co-operation was not supposed to end with the signing of a framework agreement like the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA). The report urged that since the opening up of regional trade would help expand production and employment in all countries, bring down costs of living and help reap the benefits of a larger mass market, there should be reductions across the board of tariff and non-tariff barriers within five years, i.e. a SAFTA rather than the SAPTA.

An appropriate strategy of decentralized, labour intensive industrialisation could then follow in all SAARC countries, leading to a real reduction in unemployment and improvement in the quality of life, with a better balance between work, social responsibility and leisure.

The Dhaka Consensus: A Framework for Poverty Eradication

As recommended in the IGSAC Report, The Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation was established by the Heads of State at the 1991 Colombo SAARC Summit. It was a unique innovation within SAARC, and included scholars, government officials as well as representatives of NGOs and organisations of the poor from South Asia.

The terms of reference required members of the Commission to diagnose what had gone wrong with past attempts at poverty alleviation, draw positive lessons from the ground, where the poor have been mobilised to contribute to economic growth and human development and, finally, to identify the critical elements in a practical but coherent overall strategy of poverty alleviation in South Asia.

The Report that resulted was not merely a report on poverty in a narrow sense. It conveyed some sharp political messages, an overall development perspective and practical recommendations to the SAARC Heads of State on a transitional development framework and agenda for the eradication of the worst forms of poverty, in a given time-frame of 10 years. The Report took the form of three coherent messages and one composite recommendation

Message No. 1

Structural adjustment policies, which accompany the open-economy industrialisation strategy currently being adopted by most SAARC countries, are likely to put further strains on the poor, particularly in the shorter term. The magnitude and complexity of the problem of poverty in South Asian countries not only puts democracy at risk but also poses a threat to the very fabric of South Asian societies.

Message No. 2

Conventional development interventions with their dependence on "trickle down" effects and "top down" administrative redistribution to the poor, over the past 50 years, are inadequate. The resulting growth rate is also too low to have a significant impact on the levels of living and human development of the large number of poor. In a few exceptional cases where low growth was redistributed to produce a high human development index, it could not be sustained.

Message No. 3

The eradication of poverty in South Asia requires a major political effort in which social mobilisation and empowerment of the poor must play a critical role. In the past 10 to 15 years a sufficient body of new experience has matured at the micro- level in the South Asian countries, which demonstrates that the poor are efficient. Where the poor participate as subjects and not as objects of the development process, it is possible further to generate additional growth, human development and equity, as complementary elements in the same process.

Recommendation to SAARC

There should be a pro-poor second leg in the overall development strategy. The perspective that should inform this plan must be unambiguously pro-poor and culturally relevant. The new premise for action is an overall pattern of development, which initially moves on two fronts:

* the open-economy industrialisation front with pro-poor reforms; and

* the poverty eradication front with rigorous social mobilisation.

These two parallel strategic thrusts, having long and short-term time frames, can be harmonised as the two processes evolve. The recommendation elaborated how the pro-poor plan can generate pro-poor growth, with a lower capital output ratio and complement growth in the formal public and private sectors, to reach a growth rate even of approximately nine percent. These recommendations were shared with the media, before being finally submitted to the heads of State of SAARC.

At the Seventh SAARC Summit in Dhaka, in April 1993, the Heads of State unanimously endorsed the Report of the Commission on Poverty Alleviation and reiterated their commitment to accord the highest priority to the eradication of poverty, preferably by the year 2002.

This commitment was repeated in the Summits of 1995 and 1997. In other words, the SAARC Heads of State have accepted ownership of this strategic thrust. The Dhaka Consensus constituted a coherent response to a critical element in the multifaceted crisis in South Asia and reflected strong compulsions to bring poverty to the centre-stage of national and international concern with innovative action.

It also opened up a new political space in South Asia for an approach to poverty eradication through social mobilisation and participation of the poor in development. Understanding social mobilization

The Report described in some detail what it meant by social mobilization and participation of the poor and pointed to a number of lessons that could be learnt from experiences on the ground:

* "Building organisations of the poor is an essential pre-requisite for poverty alleviation. Through these organisations, the poor can save and invest efficiency.

* Empowerment of the poor is the means to poverty eradication. Through empowerment, the poor can also assert the right to resources intended for them and enhance their dignity and self-respect.

* Poor women can effectively overcome their double burden through the same process.

* The need for sensitive support mechanisms to catalyse the process of social mobilisation. A new kind of animator/facilitator who is identified with the poor and committed to poverty eradication needs to be a part of these support mechanisms.

* Participatory monitoring and evaluation have to be built into the process so that self-corrective action can take place as the process evolves."

The experience on the ground and the new social movements in the region, which I have described in some detail above, indicate the need to consciously expand existing organisations of the poor and create new institutions through which they can participate in development. They need their own institutions as well as the support mechanisms because there are serious systemic obstacles to their becoming the mainstream.

The sensitive support mechanisms could be varied, e.g. non-governmental organisations, banks for the poor, co-operatives and even decentralised government agencies working with new norms.

The state would provide the enabling policy framework, resources and devolve power to the poor.

Initiating a Positive Response

I shall conclude these reflections on the challenges and responses to poverty in South Asia by saying that we all have to keep challenging ourselves anew, as the magnitude and the complexity of the poverty problem increases, the contradictions in our societies sharpen, and our societies become unmanageable.

Let us take a few simple steps together towards learning from the ground. The media also can learn and help raise awareness, reinforce the warning signals and be a part of the solution by helping advocate the fundamentals in the paradigm.

SAPNA will be willing - in collaboration with others committed to reducing poverty by 50% by 2015 in South Asia - to take media representatives that accept this challenge, through a series of exposure dialogues and deep immersion training exercises in micro-level "success cases" of and macro-level "best practices" for poverty eradication.

South Asia can be ahead of the game if we are serious.

The Poverty Commission Report said that we can cost effectively reduce the worst forms of poverty in South Asia in 10 years.

There are several locations in South Asia where this is already being done in five years.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager