IOS SILVER JUBILEE – V

Going Beyond Slogans

In this second and concluding part of his article on issues of development, Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam presents some points to be considered in judging whether development is being meaningful and humane.

As a person trained in economics and raised as a practising Muslim, I see a lot to be desired in our economic development strategy.

That we have progressed economically over the last 15 or so years is beyond doubt. The impressive rate of progress (barely a single percentage point behind China’s) is also undisputed. Yet, this is not the solution to our woes.

A UNDP report of 2009 said that the decade marked by the highest rate of economic progress also happened to be the years of expanding inequality and deprivation. Another earlier report said that “inequality has increased across regions of India and within regions across various socio-economic groups”.

As newspapers, glossy magazines and TV advertised costly cars and watched for the new billionaires, the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) reported that between 1995 and 2007 as many as 184,000 farmers committed suicide. The suicide rate has increased manifold since then. How do we account for this?

What kind of a development model are we following for a society where the people growing food for us are killing themselves in desperation in such large numbers?

Is the human cost of such development affordable? I say, no, it is not. A recent Inter Press Service Report said, in the areas where farmer suicide rates are high one comes across young widows trying to raise children as single parents in conditions of extreme helplessness. Such environment promotes a series of suicides in a single farmer family.

The prestigious Navdanya Trust that works on food security, plant diversity and indigenous knowledge says, “every fourth person in India is hungry”. It is not empty blabber, as whatever the Navdanya head, Dr Vandna Shiva, says is based on hard facts.

On one hand we are developing (which is a fact), on the other India still remains home to the largest number of poor, the largest number of malnourished women and children (which also is a fact). So, how do we reconcile the two?

My idea of development, rooted in Islamic values, is pretty close to the human development model first prepared by the late Mahboobul Haq and backed by economists like Amartya Sen.

Development means enabling people to have a healthy, happy life, free from the want of basics, to realise their natural potential. It means widening of choice across the board: political choice, economic choice, career choice and myriad choices in personal life.

The model of development presently being followed has excluded almost one-third of our people from all this. We must rethink development.

Many of us have seen the Hollywood film Avtaar that was a hit worldwide. It finds an uncanny resonance in the misanthropy of “development” in our own tribal areas where over the last few decades hundreds of thousands of poor, voiceless tribals have been dislocated and impoverished just because of development projects.

Let us decide that henceforth development must not further impoverish the poor, must not drive them out of their habitat away from their sources of sustenance and their familiar environment.

Development must be inclusive, its fruits reaching the weakest of the weak and poorest of the poor. It must not be confined to the top 20 percent of the society, but must be accessible to us all. That kind of economics will need a different kind of politics, different from the elitist politics we have seen so far. The shift has to begin now, for tomorrow could be too late.  g