My blog post on social audits as change agents has attracted more engagement than I would have expected. Some of it has been through conversation but a substantive part has also been in writing. Keshav Desiraju, a senior IAS officer writes:
You have raised several issues.
1. Everything depends on how social audit is institutionalized. If the intention behind social audit is to bypass the political system, it is not going to work. No political system will allow a “people’s initiative” that has been pushed as a more credible, more honest, alternative to itself. A public audit will need to be based either in the established political system (MLAs, Assembly, Assembly Questions, Calling Attention Motions, etc.) or in the PRIs, both of which have legal sanction.
2. In any case, we cannot presume that NGOs are better motivated or better trained or are better poised to be the voice from the grassroots than the peoples’ representatives or the PRIs. The record of NGOs (Orissa, Andhra, Manipur) is patchy.
3. Of course, there is the very salutary example in Rajasthan where, as you note, it is something of a movement. This is crucial. It is not simply committees, or NGOs or whatever, but a movement, driven by highly charismatic leaders.
|
While international development practitioners debate and discuss the best tool for people’s monitoring, the Indian government takes a page out of the book of the Right to Livelihood and Right to Food movements and of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and institutionalizes social audits by mandating them in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The onus is now on the state to ensure that its own performance is monitored and evaluated by the people. The implementation of these bi-annual audits has been patchy; states differ in their strategy of “rolling them out”. While Andhra Pradesh has established a large state machinery that facilitates social audits, Orissa has decided to appoint the National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD) as the coordinator. In Rajasthan, the seminal work of MKSS has made people’s monitoring and social audits into something of a movement. Other states have left it to NGOs. Still other states have taken minimalist steps. At some level, the relationship between social audits and the state reflects the relationship between grassroots NGOs and the government. State governments have thus variously circumvented NGOs, replaced them, co-opted them or ignored them in the conduct of social audits. Entitled “Making economics relevant again,” a recent article in the New York Times described the path-breaking work of Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and their colleagues at MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab, who use evaluations based on randomized trials to determine what works and what doesn’t in various social programs. Much of their work has been on South Asia, as has some of the World Bank’s impact evaluations in education and health. In his blog post on the New York Times article, Dani Rodrik asks how these impact evaluations can be generalized. This is precisely what the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) initiative seeks to do by undertaking several evaluations of similar interventions, such as conditional cash transfers, and then aggregating them into a “meta evaluation” that provides guidance on the circumstances under which the intervention will and will not work. In discussing how to end poverty in South Asia, we often get so caught up in the statistics and policy discussions that we forget that we are talking about the lives of real people. But a magnificent photography exhibit by my colleague Michael Foley displayed in the hall outside my office, serves as a constant reminder of whom we are working for.
The reality is that South Asia is a heterogeneous region. The per capita income of the richest part is ten times that of the poorest part (see Table). Sustained economic growth and increasing globalization is propelling several Indian states, Bhutan, Maldives, and parts of Sri Lanka into middle-income environments. South Asian countries have been experiencing macroeconomic problems during the past year: inflation in Sri Lanka is over 17 percent, in Bangladesh 11 percent; Pakistan’s current account deficit is at 5 percent of GDP; the Maldives’ fiscal deficit is likely to be about 12 percent of GDP; and the Indian economy showed signs of overheating in mid-2007, with inflation rising above 6 percent. Although the rate has come down since then, capital flows remain buoyant, posing challenges for macroeconomic management. India’s trade deficit is forecast to be 8 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. is threatening to lead to a global credit crunch and a recession in the country. Will these global developments exacerbate South Asia’s macroeconomic problems and reduce its chances of ending poverty in a generation? The short answer is “No.”
My colleague Apurva Sanghi organized a fascinating discussion on the implications of climate change for the world's poor. The keynote speaker, Rob Mendelsohn of Yale University highlighted the fact that the biggest effects of climate change will be felt in the "low latitude" regions where most of the world's poor live (see picture). Inasmuch as these people are already very vulnerable to shocks, the case for adaptation policies is that much stronger. But the other side of this finding, that the effect on rich countries will be milder, raises the question of whether these countries will engage in mitigation policies. One of the discussants, Homi Kharas (an old friend and former colleague), pointed out that a successful mitigation program will require rich countries to keep their side of the bargain, especially if they want the fast-growing poor countries (such as China and India) to curtail their carbon emissions. But these same rich countries appear not to be keeping their promise made in 2002 to double foreign aid by 2010 (last year the total amount of official development assistance fell in nominal terms). If you add the fact that agriculture in northern countries may actually benefit from low levels of climate change, the political impetus for mitigation may be quite limited. While we received several, mostly supportive, comments on the post on "The World Bank and poverty reduction in South Asia", one of them hoisted me on my own petard: Why do you guys give loans when you know the policies [pursued] by these governments are - by your own assertions -...simply wrong? why do you go about subsidising wrong policies, by...financing over-staffed, over-spending, governments? especially budget support?
The comment highlights an important aspect of foreign aid in the current era. Traditionally, foreign aid was aimed at correcting market failures--building public goods, such as bridges (like the Jamuna Bridge in Bangladesh pictured on the left) and dams, or subsidizing goods with positive externalities, such as primary education or immunization. There was an alignment between the wishes of government and those of the aid donors: both wanted to correct market failures. As the year comes to a close, and everybody has their "top ten" lists, I thought I'd share my ten most important events affecting poverty reduction in South Asia. Readers are invited to provide their own lists, or suggest changes to my list. Benazir Bhutto's death is an undeniable tragedy and a cruel reminder of the volatility of Pakistan's politics. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that even relatively peaceful and well-functioning democracies, such as India, continue to fail poor people, especially in the delivery of basic services such as health, education and water. And other South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal, with significantly more difficulties in their democratic processes--confrontational politics in one, conflict in the other--are reducing child mortality rates faster than India. The discussion in this blog after the declaration of emergency in Pakistan on November 3rd concluded that sustainable poverty reduction can only be achieved when the voice of the people, especially that of poor people, is heard. The problem is that holding elections, on time and in a relatively fair and peaceful manner, is only a necessary step in this direction. With economic growth at 6 percent a year and HIV-prevalence rates below one percent, it is tempting to conclude that HIV/AIDS is not a significant threat to South Asia’s development. This would be wrong. The particular nature of HIV/AIDS in South Asia, as well as some characteristics of South Asian societies, means that there is still a chance that AIDS could undermine South Asia’s development. Specifically, HIV/AIDS in South Asia is concentrated in specific high-risk groups, such as sex workers, intravenous drug users, men-having-sex-with-men, and so on. If the disease escalates within these groups, it can spread to the general population. Worse, these high-risk groups are also ones who are often discriminated against by society. The stigma of being a sex worker or IV-drug user is bad enough. Compound that with the stigma of being HIV-positive and you have the potential for the very people who need treatment, care and prevention to be those excluded from them. And a low-level epidemic could explode. Several of the comments around my seminar “Can South Asia End Poverty in a Generation?” were critical of the World Bank’s role in the subcontinent’s development. One commentator asked: “As the first step towards eradicating poverty in South Asia, how about closing the World Bank?” This theme was echoed by the Independent People’s Tribunal on the World Bank (this site was down at the time of posting) as summarized in a recent article in SAMAR. Broadly, these critics are making two points. One is that the World Bank has “pressured” South Asian countries into adopting policies that it thought would foster economic development. The second is that these policies were misguided, that they didn’t lead to poverty reduction. These points are worth separating because we can discuss each of them individually. I just attended a lucid lecture by my colleague Eduardo Ley that made me question whether the position of developing countries such as China and India on mitigating climate change is clearly in their best interest. The lecture was about the private provision of public goods. Using a simple, diagrammatic framework known as the Kolm triangle (below), Eduardo models the situation when two countries decide on how much to spend on “private goods,” such as their own economic growth, and a public good, such as a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this framework, it is easy to show that when the two countries play a non-cooperative game (each taking the other’s decision as given), the resulting equilibrium can be improved upon. That is, without cooperation, we will have less GHG emission reduction than both countries would like. This is fairly standard. Rising out of poverty can be frustratingly slow, as Praful’s post on Bhavnaben describes. But one thing is clear: poor people care deeply about their children’s education (Additional resources here about education in South Asia). Parents in Punjab, Pakistan get together and form private schools, charging $3.00 a month (10 cents a day). A recent story about members of the laundry caste (dhobis) in Mumbai—people who have been washing clothes for generations—described a dhobi couple whose sons are studying computers. All this came home to me during a recent visit to Kathmandu, Nepal. A Nepalese friend took me to Durbar Square at 6:30 in the morning (“Before the tourists get there,” he said). We sipped tea while watching the local people going about their morning errands—buying vegetables, greeting friends, using the communal water source for their ablutions. The woman who made us tea said that she used the money she earned as a tea seller to send her two children to a private boarding school. As evidence, she introduced us to her daughter, who spoke to us in perfect English. Joke #3 (attributed to a former colleague, Phil Musgrove): “No one ever dropped down stupid and had to be rushed to a university.”
|
|
How is the quest to end poverty in South Asia going? Parts of the subcontinent, such as the Maldives, the Western Province of Sri Lanka or some Indian states have already “eliminated” abject poverty (in the sense of having poverty rates below 10 percent). Other parts of South Asia such as Afghanistan or northern Sri Lanka are so mired in violent and escalating conflict that ending poverty seems a remote dream; providing basic security seems much more important.
The fundamental difference between tertiary education and tertiary health care is that you don’t know when you might need the latter—you don’t know when you will have a heart attack or need an emergency appendectomy. Moreover, the costs of tertiary health care are prohibitively high—even for rich people. In developed countries, this problem is managed by some form of health insurance. In the absence of insurance schemes in South Asia, most countries have free public hospitals to serve people with catastrophic illness. These public hospitals are valuable to the rich as well as the poor. Given the political clout of the rich, the lion’s share of the public health budget goes towards these hospitals. The result is a skewed allocation of the health budget in favor of the rich and under-spending on genuine public goods such as immunizations (see graph). These goods are less valuable to the rich (they will immunize their children anyway) but extremely important for the poor. In short, the absence of insurance schemes creates, through the political process, a public health system that favors the rich. The sooner we recognize the wisdom of Phil’s aphorism, the quicker we can do something about making the public health system work for poor people.
Ignacio Mas
Recent comments