The barefoot government

Bunker Roy in The Indian Express

Since 1947, Indians have not spoken out so strongly and clearly for a completely new brand of people running government. Mercifully, there are no ministers educated abroad. Thankfully, none of them has been brainwashed at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, the World Bank or the IMF, subtly forcing expensive Western solutions on typically Indian problems at the cost of the poor. Look what the high-powered, foreign-returned degree-wallahs have reduced this country to. They wasted opportunities to show the inner strength of what is essentially Indian because they never really knew their own people living in Bharat. In the eyes of the world, we have lost our self-respect, dignity and identity.

All the ministers now have gone through average government schools. Some have never been to college. Many have experienced poverty, exploitation, injustice and discrimination at some point of time in their lives. It is truly the first barefoot government ever to be voted into power in independent India. Where else in the world would you have a one-time tea-seller on a railway station becoming prime minister, shaping the destiny of more than one billion people?

The first example the Modi government must set is by drastically reducing the perks and privileges of MPs. Free power, food, housing, travel to those whose personal assets run into crores and a Rs 2 crore annual fund for development (read patronage) for over 500 MPs is costing the exchequer nearly Rs 2,000 crore. Only the prime minister will be able to make it happen and, at the same time, stifle any dissent from BJP MPs. The time is now.

No other government in the world has a Class 12-pass woman minister speaking as an equal to almost 120 heavily qualified, on paper, vice chancellors (90 per cent male). Today, as we judge them, the VCs are all too intellectually and morally fatigued. There is something dreadfully wrong with an education system that produces graduates from even private, expensive, snobbish schools and colleges who are still prejudiced about caste, class, religion, sex and colour. These “graduates”, who roam the streets of small towns and cities by the thousands, call themselves “educated”, practice the worst forms of cruelty, slavery and crimes against humanity, against society and in their own families. Indeed, some of them rose to the level of their incompetence by becoming ministers in previous governments, reinforcing the status quo, wasting vast public resources by implementing silly Western ideas, listening to foreign-returned “experts” and making a hopeless mess of this country. The tragedy is that they cannot see the colossal damage they have done to the very fabric of this country.

Now they will call me a “namak haram” because I went to Doon School and St Stephen’s College and I am trashing my own kind. They deserve it. Their snobbish elitist education has made them arrogant, inaccessible, insensitive and devoid of any humanity or humility. Just because they received a Western education, they think they know their country. Superficially, they may know urban India but they are clueless about rural Bharat.

Alvin Toffler, in his book Future Shock, said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be someone who cannot read or write. It will be someone who is not prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.” In the 40 years that I have lived and worked with the rural poor in Rajasthan, what have I learnt that I did not manage to make my own kind “unlearn and relearn”?

It was not for want of trying. What did the prime minister, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and finance minister of the decimated UPA government have in common? They were all “educated” abroad. They were all for subsidising the rich and cutting subsidies for the poor. They had no idea about real poverty and hunger and how the rural poor survived, expecting the whole country to be gullible enough to believe that the rural poor today could survive on Rs 27 per day.

Out of sheer ignorance of rural realities and showing extremely poor political judgement, the three of them almost managed to strangle the MGNREGA. The MGNREGA prevented migration by the millions into cities. The bungling and corruption by village officials notwithstanding, the rural poor now have more money to spend on food, clothing, housing and essentials. So, of course, prices will go up.

The prime minister is evidently serious about improving the quality of life of the rural poor, as he eloquently stated in his speech on Independence Day. So what are the out of the box solutions that need to be considered urgently?

The MGNREGA should stay with “Modi-fications”. Pay minimum wages, which the Congress’s three armchair foreign-returned economists so stubbornly and unethically refused to do, in spite of a high court order. Make it more transparent and accountable, take action against corrupt officials exposed in social audits to set an example. Pass the public grievance bill in Parliament as soon as possible. Call a meeting of respected grassroot practitioners across political ideologies who know the MGNREGA from the village level and follow up on their recommendations.

The focus has to be on innovative job creation in the rural areas. Provide 100 days of employment at minimum wages to construct low-cost toilets for girls and rooftop rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water, tree plantations and flush toilets in rural schools by the thousands. Construct rural godowns to store food grains instead of letting nearly 5 million tonnes of grain just rot in the open. Start community colleges on Gandhian lines instead of sending delegations of “experts” on education to study the American model. There are enough indigenous examples to replicate and scale up.

Civil society is riddled with defeated politicians and retired bureaucrats who, having lost their power, influence and privileges, have started NGOs. While they were in power, they did not lift a finger to help them. When these has-beens have nothing better to do, they start NGOs. They give genuine small civil society organisations a bad name. Maybe it is time to revive the debate of the 1980s on the need for a code of conduct for NGOs. The code would expect them to have a simple lifestyle, take a living wage instead of a market wage and observe the laws of the country.

If we are fighting against crony capitalism, we should also fight against cronyism in NGOs. When the Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART) was closed down and replaced by a Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation (BRLF) in September 2013, it was done in complete secrecy. The BRLF was never widely publicised and civil society was never invited to contribute to its formation. It is designed to benefit a handful of select organisations — cronyism of the worst kind. It was so much in contrast to the open debate that galvanised the voluntary sector over the code of conduct and which preceded the merger of the People’s Action for Development India (PADI) and the Council for Advancement of Rural Technology (CART) to form CAPART in 1986.

What needs to be done? Replace the national advisory council (NAC) with a voluntary action commission (VAC). The mandate of the VAC should be to identify the thousands of genuine grassroots groups who have an FCRA registration and submit their report to the home ministry. It is not the job of the home ministry to judge the incredible work of community-based organisations. A lot of effort has gone into the formulation of the BRLF. Let it remain. But demand of the existing management if they have the self-respect to resign en masse and let the new government bring in new members.

Financial fascism

By Chan Akya

If politics were just war by another name, then economics would be the favored armory of both sides. Europe has gone one step further last week, almost unimaginably bringing back the era of fascism as it contends with the unwieldy agglomeration of financial contradictions that the euro project has now become.

The birthplace of democracy, Greece, has gone back to a managed dictatorship after the collapse of the democratically elected George Papandreou government on Sunday, to be replaced by a national unity government with a technocrat at its helm. Reading between the lines, the idea isn't hard to understand: a pliant government in Athens that is helmed by a

 
eurocrat, unable to ask any questions of Brussels and unwilling to concede over any objections from the population of Greece.

The apparent crime of the Greeks was to ask their prime minister for a referendum on the latest series of proposals from European authorities on a new bailout for their country (see The men without qualities, Asia Times Online, October 29, 2011). This set off panic in stock and bond markets mid-week and prepared the stage for an ugly showdown as well as unprecedented developments.

For the European governments, this level of panic in the markets was simply unacceptable as it showed deep "ingratitude" on the part of the Greeks; that view of course conveniently ignores ground realities of austerity that the Greeks would endure on their own so that bankers in Paris and Frankfurt wouldn't face job or pay cuts.

Greece's prime minister was invited to the Group of 20 (G-20) meeting in Cannes, making the confab G-21 for a while according to wags, although I maintain that the "G" in G-20 stood for Greece all along. After receiving suitably strong tongue-lashings from German leader Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a suitably chastened Papandreou dropped plans for a referendum and instead started work on a national unity government that would have the implementation of the eurozone bailout plan as its major (and perhaps only) policy point.

G-20 released an insipid statement that went nowhere in terms of helping the Europeans. All the fond expectations of the Europeans were dashed to the ground - be it the increased role of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to which various countries would contribute (no contributions were forthcoming in the end), or expanded powers for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help manage the crisis (ditto).

Poorer countries objected to the very notion of further contributions to bail out rich European countries, particularly when the Europeans apparently couldn't agree on priorities. While the statement describes lofty ideals of growth globally, it does little to actually suggest ways and means of reversing the problems with countries and zones in recession: in particular, Europe.

To cut the eurozone's structural drag, countries will have to improve competitiveness. This can only be done if structural constraints on growth are removed, the main one of which is the overly generous social programs. Alternatively, Europe can choose to maintain social safeguards but will have to forsake a strong currency. Inflation would then do to the European lifestyles what common sense alone couldn't establish.

This is the meta context under which the European crisis resolution is being fought. Countries with savings - like Germany - do not wish to suffer from inflation but want instead that their southern neighbors simply destroy structural benefits instead. Southern countries would rather keep their benefit systems, but try to depreciate their currencies to a growth path.

Another issue and perhaps the core one is that the elite want one thing, and have decided to pursue that solution - written by bankers - without heeding the legitimate demands of those ostensibly being bailed out.

It gets worse. Not content with one unwieldy object, the G-20 also had to contend with a second one, namely Italy, wherein the government rejected calls for IMF aid while calling for "increased surveillance" and a formalization of the troika (European Union, IMF and European Central Bank) in case Italy needed funds later. Market observers who had to sit through months of uncertainty waiting for the Europeans to get their act together over a 100 billion euro (US$137 billion) bailout package for Greece will now have to do the same for a 1 trillion euro package for Italy.

Italian bonds crossed the magic level of 450 basis points (bps) in spread over Germany last week even as the EFSF failed in its attempted 13 billion euro funding deal. The level of 450 basis points is important because that sets rules with respect to collateral posting against global banks, and essentially puts a sovereign "in play" ie enhances volatility expectations in markets, with unspecified market demands for resolution driving sentiment.

It fell to the French president to tell off the Greeks in the end: plainly, he stated, that the Greeks could have any referendum they wanted, but would have to leave the euro if they went ahead with this particular one. Germany's most popular newspaper, the Bild, called last week for a referendum in Germany on whether Greece could stay in the single currency or not.

So it has come to this, that the French who started the era of modern European democracies with their storming of the Bastille and a cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity" essentially devalued their own history by telling the Greeks not to have inconvenient opinions. I can spy the ghost of Marie Antoinette demanding her head back.

The message from eurocrats couldn't have been more unequivocal if they had spelled it all out: democracy was an unnecessary complication in the grand European project.

Elsewhere, the new resident of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, conducted his first full meeting and started with an auspicious (I am being sarcastic) rate cut to get things going. The idea that the new ECB president would be populist and swing the monetary institution somewhat further on loose monetary policy than his predecessor ever managed was immediately (of course) played up in the popular media.

Think about it like this - the ECB has been criticized for inflicting greater pain on the highly indebted countries by raising rates and failing to do more towards monetary easing. The incoming head of the ECB likely has very similar inclinations to his predecessor (he announced, for example, that there was no mechanism for any country to leave the euro) but has decided to have a stronger public relations battle by starting off with a small rate cut that would do absolutely nothing to resolve the core issues because high interest rates are not the issue while wide credit spreads very much are.

It has been clear with every new European approach to the crisis that the primary objective of any grouping is to save the European financial system at all costs. This system includes within it a unwieldy common currency that has simply failed to meet its objectives for the 11 years of its existence. Rather than consigning the project to the dustbin of history, the elite of Europe choose to perpetuate the currency's existence at the expense of the people.

This is what fascism is all about at the end - an overwhelming subjugation of the individual at the altar of nationalism, the authoritarian rule of a financial system that disallows countries from following their own courses.

Between them, it is difficult to read too much into the events; even allowing for a fair bit of doubt to gather in one's mind the unshakable end result is a feeling of deja vu as it appears that the fascist past echoed by the likes of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler has come back to roost.

The DEVELOPMENT Deception

By Brendan P O'Reilly

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

"At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP."
- Paul Hawken

There is a dangerous lie that permeates the media, government and general discourse of nearly every single nation on Earth.

That lie is the Development Deception. This myth is based on three concepts. First is the distinction between the developed nations (North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan), and the Developing Nations (everywhere else).

The second idea is that "developing" countries can become "developed" through improved education, stable governance, and opening their markets to trade and investment. The third leg of this Deception is that such a transformation is not only possible, but also desirable.

The metric used to distinguish "developed" nations from "developing" nations is gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Poor nations aspire to reach a certain economic level to become so-called "developed nations". The Myth of Development has four fundamental inter-related flaws. The first one is the problem of the Gray Area.

The gap between "developed" and "developing" countries is presented as a simple black-and-white dichotomy. I often hear from my Chinese students say, "China is a developing country. America is a developed country. We want to become a developed country."

Fair enough. But which country has high-speed trains? Which country has a higher unemployment rate? How can the government of a "developed" country owe trillions of dollars to a "developing" country?

Obviously many nations in Asia and Africa, and Latin America have very serious structural problems, which could be alleviated through stable government and educational reform. Very poor countries should aspire to create social and economic institutions that allow their people to live with dignity. Nevertheless the rise of new economic powers such as Brazil, India, and (especially) China, coupled with the massive financial difficulties faced by Europe, Japan, and the United States, call into question the utility of the developed/developing dichotomy.

The second problem with the Myth of Development is philosophical. The very term "development" implies a steady linear progression from poverty and ignorance to wealth, literacy, and general happiness. This viewpoint is Western in origin, and alien to many of the world’s cultures.

The idea of the inexorable march of progress has roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview of time (God creates the world, the world exists, the world ends), and has been largely co-opted by modern science. We are told to believe that progress is inevitable, that the quality of life for each new generation will be better than the life of their parents. Never mind the fact that humanity has created weapons that empower a handful of political leaders to destroy civilization itself.

Never mind obesity is now challenging starvation as a cause of premature death. Of course, the advances made in the last century in curing diseases, increasing literacy rates, and fighting hunger must be lauded. However, to blindly value "progress" above all else threatens our very survival as a species.

The third problem with the Development Deception stems from definitions. As mentioned previously, GDP per capita is the standard the yardstick for measuring development. This assessment ignores serious social difficulties faced by the so-called developed nations.

For example, a third of the adult population of the United States of America, the archetype "developed" nation, suffer from obesity, with another third classified as overweight. The United States of America also has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any nation on Earth.

Meanwhile Japan, the paragon of "development" in Asia, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, leading to a rapidly aging population. This trend, unless dramatically reversed, will exacerbate Japan’s social, economic, and political crisis, as more retirees put enormous strain on the working population. Japan’s population is set to shrink by roughly thirty million over the next four decades (Citation here). Are these worthy goals for the so-called "developing" nations to aspire to?

The fourth and final problem with the Myth of Development is a terminal defect. Citizens in countries such as China and India are encouraged to join the middle class and live "Western" lifestyles. As benign as it sounds, this goal is completely impossible. Simply put, there are not enough natural resources on this planet to sustain such an increase in consumption.

According to World Bank figures, in 2008 Americans, on average, used 87,216 kilowatt hours of electricity. The average Chinese used 18,608 kilowatt hours, and the average Indian 6,280. All three countries depend primarily on coal for electricity. To bridge the gap between these levels of resource utilization of would entail environmental catastrophe and global shortages on an unimaginable scale. Coal is just one example - one could also look at oil, lumber, or meat consumption. Indeed, many of the fundamental challenges facing the world economic system - such as rising food and fuel costs - are directly related to economic development.

The Development Deception is perpetuated by international corporations and national governments. Resource mining, production, and overconsumption are the basis for the current globalized economic system. Human beings are classified as "consumers", because overconsumption entails short-term profit.

Rich nations leverage their "developed" status to influence poorer nations, while the governments of these poor nations use the promise of development to maintain political power. None of this propaganda changes the fact that it is grossly misleading for the nations who over-consume the Earth’s finite resources to be considered developed.

Advocates of The Development Myth may point to science as a savior. We are constantly told that new inventions will allow for more efficient use of resources, or allow for sustainable consumption patterns. This argument provides only false hope. We cannot speculate our way out of environmental pollution and a collapsing natural resource base. Unless and until new "green" technology actually exists and is utilized, science is actually exacerbating ecological disaster.

Recently, the Human Development Index (HDI) has been promoted as a more "human-centered" alternative to GDP as a metric for measuring development. HDI uses data on life expectancy, literacy, number of years in school, and GDP to determine the development status of a country. Although this presents a useful alterative, the continued use of GDP as a basis for measuring development is HDI’s fundamental flaw. Unsustainable consumption of finite resources cannot reasonably be classified as "development".

What is the viable alternative to the Development Myth? Bhutan has advocated Gross National Happiness as an alternative goal to increasing GDP per capita. Citizens are asked about their Subjective Well Being in order to establish Gross National Happiness. Obviously this measurement is difficult to define and numerate, and ignores problems such as illiteracy and extreme poverty. However, it does point in the right direction.

Development needs to be redefined in order to account for human physical and emotional well-being as well as environmental sustainability. Otherwise it is only a lie, and a dangerous one at that. To seek economic advance at the expense of human interests and future generations is a recipe for global disaster.

When extreme wealth is challenging extreme poverty as the bane of human existence, a revolution of values is needed. We as a species must advance values of conservation, and teach people to live within the means of the productive capacity of our planet. No longer can the scramble for nonrenewable resources be viewed as a zero-sum game. Human beings need to develop solidarity on a global scale. Citizens of wealthy nations must learn to live with less.

The most important development is that of the individual. Social and spiritual harmony is the antidote to the Development Deception, for all traditions encourage compassion and warn of the destructive power of greed. To quote LaoZi (as translated by D C Lau):

There is no crime greater than having too many desires;
There is no disaster greater than not being content;
There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.
Hence in being content, one will always have enough.

Brendan P O'Reilly is a China-based writer and educator from Seattle. He is author of The Transcendent Harmony.