Empowerment and not population excuse needed.
Let us paint India's canvas with colours of equal opportunity
“There is already so much of insightful material on every topic I can think of and most of it by the people who are a hundred times smarter and more intelligent than me. Does my blog, which would be a small drop in this vast ocean, be of any help to anyone?”
For quite a while, I have been struggling with this thought and therefore couldn’t publish anything, because everything I wrote seemed too insignificant to be even published. I was waiting for a miracle to happen that will push me to write a piece, which will be worth sparing time on for my readers.
It is rightly said that miracles don’t always come in the form we expect, they can sometimes just be a nice explanation of the topic you are finding hard to opine on.
Exactly this happened to me today when I read this amazing piece “Nrega, Nyay and PM-Kisan: Why do politicians rush to give direct benefits (cash) to the poor” by Udit Misra, and an insightful book “Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South” which Mr Misra quotes.
A student of Economics is taught to think from the first principles, and Economics at its core says that any government intervention is bad. Thus, it shouldn’t happen. But when the economists tried solving the problems of real economy outside models, they realized that Economics has assumptions just to understand the problem and the world simplistically, and to find a solution, we need to go deep into the assumptions and find a reliable policy solution.
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”—
This quote has been iterated so many times that it now turned into a global folk quote. But have we ever thought that the man we are referring to here can be in a million different circumstances in a billion parallel universes, that generalizing him can be a moral crime?
This is all very fine until one examines and questions the assumptions. What if the man is too hungry on the first day to learn anything? What if he is so weak and feeble that he needs to be fed for a few days before he can summon up enough strength to learn? What if the choice is not between feeding him a fish and teaching him to fish? What if the choice is between feeding him a fish today (and ensuring he lives for another day to learn fishing) and risking his life (and ability to learn fishing tomorrow)?
What would you do then?
Perhaps the answer would change in favour of giving the man a fish before insisting that he learns how to fish. This switch is likely to be based on two key realisations.
One, that a feeble man can’t really learn much on an empty stomach.
Two, that the concerned man doesn’t have to be lectured on the usefulness of learning how to fish, and is motivated enough to learn provided he is in a situation to learn.
We elites, including me, who is writing this, and you who are reading this, are so privileged that we think that the people who are not privileged do not know how to think for themselves, how to choose between eating healthy or dying of starvation. We think that they don’t know education and health are important for them, but we forget to think that they might need to choose between today’s wage (which will bring dinner to their home) and college fees (which don’t guarantee them a job after 3 years of foregone wages plus the paid fees).
“Instead of maintaining a huge aid industry to find ways to ‘help the poor,’ it is better to give money to poor people directly so that they can find effective ways to escape from poverty…(these examples) point to a little-understood reality of the developing world: The biggest problem for those below the poverty line is a basic lack of cash. Many people have so little money that they cannot afford small expenditures on better food, sending children to school, or searching for work. It is not a lack of motivation: people with little money spend their days actively trying to find a way out of poverty. It is not a lack of knowledge; they know what they need and manage their money extremely well,” write the authors.
Moreover, it can trigger an important phenomenon that Mahatma Gandhi called swaraj or village circular economy.
Transfers can create a virtuous development cycle in a country. “Families with an assured, though small, income begin to take small risks by investing in their future: buying better seeds to try to increase farm production, purchasing goods that can be resold locally, or even spending more time looking for better jobs. In impoverished communities, it is hardly worth starting a business because no one has money to buy. When they have a bit of extra income, most families spend the money locally, buying food, clothing, and inputs. This stimulates the local economy, because local people sell more, earn more, and buy more from their neighbors, creating the rising spiral,” argue the authors.
The authors provide five guiding principles:
Such programs should be fair;
Assured;
Practical (Are the civil service and banking infrastructures sufficient to administer the program?);
Not pennies (Are the cash payments large enough to make a difference?);
And popular (Are the programs politically acceptable?).”
I don’t know how as an economy we will balance the money we need to give to our poor by generating equivalent productive economic activity to bear its costs, nor do I have any idea how long it can take until we reach the moment when our ‘MAN’ in the fishing quote will not be in any parallel universe but in a capacity to learn how to fish and earn from the next day.
But I am hopeful that we, as a nation who started its journey of empowerment in 1947 as broken poor dust ridden pieces of a beautiful canvas will one day be able to give all our citizens an equal footing to start on their own journeys of empowerment which would not start with the need to feed their families but to do much beyond that for them, their families and the society around them.
In this new year 2024, I pray that as a global society and a nation, we will walk the extra mile to learn and understand a problem in a deeper sense and hence not commit the mistake of thinking that ‘Man’ always has a choice between feeling lazy and not go for fishing and having the capacity to live for the next day to learn and earn.
“A quiet revolution is taking place based on the realization that you cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. And giving ‘boots’ to people with little money does not make them lazy or reluctant to work; rather, just the opposite happens. A small guaranteed income provides a foundation that enables people to transform their own lives. In development jargon, this is the ‘poverty trap’ model-many people are trapped in poverty because they have so little money that they cannot buy things they know they need, such as medicines or schoolbooks or food or fertilizer. They are in a hole with no way to climb out; cash transfers provide a ladder.”
Cheers to the New Year 2024!!