This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments on the “Digital Dependencies” panel at Digital Impact Mumbai Conference presented by the Stanford PACS on Feb 7, 2018. The panel discussion on “Digital Dependencies” was conducted by Lucy Bernholz, Director, Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. They discussed ways that digital data and infrastructure create new possibilities for working across sectors and the new demands of these relationships – including governance challenges, challenges to the social contract, and the need for new institutional capacities.
I’m so glad this conference is happening because it’s a very critical question that we are discussing about digital dependencies. India’s very young population is going to mature in this new digital age, and I think it opens up questions for society. And especially for civil society and how it is going to react and create a whole new era of functioning in a democracy. I think from what I’ve seen of India’s civil society organizations, some of them have quickly learnt and joined this digital universe very effectively, but the bulk of the organizations probably are just waking up to its immense potential. And there are some organizations that are almost technophobic, and I think we need to address the fears that some of them have about participating in a digital universe that is controlled by large corporations or perhaps they fear surveillance by the government. So how do we bring them to the discourse table?
One of the things I do believe is that the same technologies that allow for surveillance equally allow for participation and sousveillance, which means looking at power structures from below. We really need to see how we can employ that potential in civil society’s work. I think that in the continuum of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkar, i.e. society, the markets, and the state, it is going to be very important to understand that we can not hide too much from this digital world and therefore how can civil society organizations also act as a check and balance on this potential of technology to amplify everything, both bad and good? And how can we think of a new design for civil society itself?
Let me give you a small example from the work that we have been doing in Arghyam, which is the foundation I set up for water and sanitation back in 2005. When we developed the India Water Portal, which was envisaged as a knowledge platform on water, it was born in an area where some of these fascinating new technologies were not being deployed. So it is sort of an old fashion idea of a digital presence. And you can’t take something that was designed then and retrofit it. So we now have to rethink it completely.
On the other hand, EkStep, which is the learning platform that my husband Nandan, Shankar Maruwada, and I set up two and a half years ago, is already born in an age where so many digital technologies have converged and combined. So, the way this organization is born is very different. And we have had a sharp learning curve from our earlier work, my husband and I. So, I think this organization is developed as a new child of the digital age and incorporates a value structure which I believe is dear to my heart and very important to articulate — that this platform will be open, it will not hide behind proprietary walls, it will have many shareable structures. It has simple-to-use toolkits. It allows many actors to talk to each other. It is mobile-friendly.
We are talking about things like offline internet for those with poor access to the internet. We are also talking about creating three layers, a shared digital infrastructure, and toolkits co-created by many of the actors in that sector, and then an amplification layer. So, I think there’s so much tremendous potential for civil society organizations to scale their work, to find new partners across geographies, to de-risk from any local conditions, and to pull in the power of collaboration and co-creation. I hope we can enable India’s thriving civil society to participate more fully in this inevitable digital universe.
You cannot walk or drive more than a few metres in any Indian city without encountering mounds of rubbish. Even in our villages, you will find garbage billowing around fields, piling up along roads or even lining the forest floor. At many beaches, you are as likely to find your toes tickled by strands of plastic as by little fish.
It is no longer possible to look away.
India’s waste problem is gigantic, and with its economy growing steadily, it will be compounded manifold. Yet, our waste stream management has not even got off the ground.
We need to turn to the 200 million young men of India with as much urgency and focus as we spend on the millions of young women in the country. Every day, we hear of horrible atrocities that have taken place against girls and women in India. This is despite the fact that as a country, we can boast of having some of the most progressive policies and civic movements. It is despite the fact that we have the world’s largest pool of elected women representatives – adding up to more than one million across all tiers of government. It is despite the fact that tens of millions of women belong to self help groups that are working to empower them. And, it is despite the fact that as a society, we are becoming more and more aware of our inherent gender bias and gender based problems.
With the approaching winter the air quality in many Indian cities, especially in Delhi, becomes a public health hazard. Something so fundamental as breathing easy can no longer be taken for granted. It’s a wake-up call worthy of a civic revolution.
This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on Understanding and Resolving Water Conflicts, organised jointly by the Forum for Water Conflicts in India, TERI, and ATREE on October 5, 2016
One of the most important questions in the country and possibly around the world, is the management of conflicts around this key resource – water. My first disclaimer is that I am not an expert. 12 years ago, I set up a foundation called Arghyam through which I have been engaged with the water sector. I knew nothing about it before, I know something about it now, but every day I learn more. I have also been involved in a lot of civil society activities over the last 20 years and supported the work of amazing NGOs that do incredible work all around the country. My husband, Nandan Nilekani, has been in the corporate sector for the last 35 years, and that has given me a ringside seat to see how different fora in the world interact on issues like resource management and how the business community is responding to challenges.
So, today I bring you from a perspective from outside, trying to see upstream, non-water sector linkages to how they also impact the conflicts that you are going to be diving deep into, and perhaps to see if we can come at it from many different lenses.
Conflicts Are Opportunities I think all of us can agree that conflicts are opportunities. Sustainable shifts of paradigm can happen, can emerge from deep conflicts. For example, World War II with its tens of millions of casualties and a deep realignment of world politics, did allow for one thing to happen, which is the engagement of women in the workforce. In the last eight decades, women have taken back more and more space in the world to improve their own economic opportunities. So, I always think of this as one positive example, though it came out of one of the worst conflicts in human history. Of course, this does not mean that we should create conflicts deliberately just to yield beneficial side effects. But we need to acknowledge that conflicts can yield a lot of information about resources, competition, mismanagement, power structures, and latent demand.
So, looking at these conflicts dispassionately with a partly academic, and very humane perspective can really be the first step towards reducing or preventing conflict. Analyzing them and devising taxonomy and typology becomes extremely useful in terms of creating a whole basket of approaches for resolving current conflicts and trying to prevent future ones. It’s useful in this sector to have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal or BHAG, like one day there will be no more conflict around water. If we keep that as a faraway vision and then work systematically towards it, who knows what will happen one day. We have a long way to go though.
Over the past 12 years I’ve seen that sometimes those of us who engage in the water sector often come from a water mindset, and that could limit opportunities to look for solutions. I urge people working on these issues to sometimes step outside the sector and look upstream at linkages elsewhere that could help you with your own work. Broadly speaking, the two main reasons why there are conflicts are due to quality and quantity issues. We can immediately see how many externalities exist in the question of both quantity and quality. Agriculture, industry, culture, personal choices, and climate change are some of the many determinants of water conflicts. So, to prevent conflicts or reduce their negative impact in India, we need to start officially moving towards a low water economy.
In India, we have some history and tradition of being a low water society. Coming from a perspective of ecological and intergenerational justice, people have always thought of water as a valued resource that should not be wasted. So in a sense, we have a lot of rich tradition of being a low water society. Can we then also become a low water economy? As our governments draw us into the narrative of a high growth economy to lift people out of poverty, can we simultaneously look at being a low growth water economy? Can we design systems and improve processes so that they use less water? How can we look across the supply chains of agriculture, industry, and urbanization? When we design the next 7,000 towns that need to be updated with public infrastructure, how can we rethink water infrastructure so that the towns reduce their water footprint? What would this require?This will require immense data collection, analysis, and dissemination, but in a very transparent manner, so that all stakeholders can monitor the progress.
Farmers, corporations, and city managers need to have an idea of what their water footprint is, and then be able to set ambitious goals for reducing it. We must keep an eye out for all the amazing new technologies that make it possible to bring this data together from diverse sources, which may include crowd-sourcing, sourcing through research, sourcing through government data, primary data, or secondary data. There are many new technologies that have made it easier to do all of these things, and other technologies that enable us to create better visualizations of this data so that people can understand it easily.
Leveraging Technology Recently I met Alejandro Iñárritu, an Oscar-winning director. He’s very concerned about the issue of migrants, refugees, and immigration around the world. So his next movie is going to be a partial documentary using virtual reality. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, “When you can allow people to immerse themselves in the situation of a refugee on a boat coming from Syria, for example, then you help people to improve their empathy.” So, unless we begin to exercise our empathy muscle I can’t imagine reducing any kinds of conflict, including the water conflict.
Technologies like virtual reality or augmented reality might be a way to create water consciousness in people by directly letting them experience things like the plight of people in the Bihar floods or the Cauvery basin situation. Imagine immersing yourself in Vidarbha or Marathwada or in Orissa where the Mahanadi issues are coming up. What will that mean in terms of moving dialogues and discourses forward? The water practitioner community has a role to play in feeding the creative imagination of people who are going to create such multimedia efforts. I don’t think we should knock this because it’s the way the world is moving, and we have to learn to move with them.
There is a game my son pointed me to called ‘Fate of the World’. It is meant for ordinary citizens to begin to address the extraordinarily complex problems we are facing today. For example, how on earth are we going to address climate change? Fate of the World allows you to actually immerse yourself in a global game, where you get to be a policy maker and figure out how to resolve things. What would you do about climate change? What policies would you think of? These are simple things that may trigger people to think more critically about their own choices. We have a sophisticated basket of technologies, at the back-end of these very serious gaming techniques. We have machine learning, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and as these emerge, all of us in the water sector have to keep an eye out to see how we can use these technologies to achieve our common societal goals.
Ways to Minimize Water Conflicts People have started talking about the world already being at peak water. Unlike peak oil, peak water seems to be quite a contestable idea because water is on an annual renewable cycle. However, it’s important for us to think of it this way, because what it essentially means is that we are using up our fossil water. We are taking all our renewable water for human use and starving the ecological needs of the planet. When we talk about peak water, we’re really talking about reaching the physical, environmental, and economic limits on meeting human demands for water and the subsequent decline of availability. But as I mentioned earlier, conflicts are always opportunities.
What happens when you hit peak water? Look at what’s happening in oil or other commodity prices around the world as we reach peak levels of commodity use, availability, or economic viability. In some parts of the world, we seem to have already reached peak water demand. To quote Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, the latest data (released in 2014) shows the continuation and acceleration of a stunning trend. US water withdrawals for all purposes are declining, not growing. The world’s largest economies, China and the US, are coming to grips with their water situation and rapidly innovating their way out of excess water use.
In five years, mark my words, you will see similar data coming out of China. They are working very aggressively to reduce their water footprint. India is at that cusp. Per capita consumption in some parts of the world is also going down, with more efficiencies built into taps, pumps, pipes, and shower heads. European cities are moving their norms of liter per capita per day (LPCD) downwards, from 135 to 100 LPCD. They did this because they have found that we don’t need more than 100 liters per person per day in an urban environment, due to all the efficiencies they’ve generated through reuse and making the cycles of water use smaller. So that’s interesting to us in India as we look at how we should develop our next 8,000 towns and cities. Can we take the 135 LPCD norm that we have today down to 100? Multiply that by the number of people, and you get significant water savings.
People’s eating choices are also making a difference. A recent study attempts to deepen the understanding of the impact of diets on resource use by analyzing the effects of changes in diet on consumptive water use at a country level and at a global level. It first analyzed the impact of modifying diets to fulfill the Dietary Guidelines by the WHO, and then the effect of shifting from animal-based food products like meat to more plant-based diets. In both analyses, the diet composition was kept as close as possible to the traditional and culturally acceptable food composition. The study found that by reducing animal product consumption, global green water use would be reduced by 21%. The effect on blue water use in food production would be about 14%. Now to think about this, the less meat people eat, and the more they care about local, organic, artisanal produce, what impact could it have on water futures? India’s people and their changing food habits will impact global green water use quite significantly. And one way to minimize future water conflicts in India would definitely be to include a national information campaign. We need a national information campaign on both nutrition and embedded water, and its impact and reflection on how we produce food in this country. In agriculture around the world, people are trying to produce more crops per drop, and to respond to climate change-driven changes in rainfall, both in terms of location and quantity. Farmers in the US are relooking at dry land farming. They’ve had so much drought in the last few years that they are rethinking how to have rainfed agriculture, but with much more innovation through technology. If we start thinking like that, the whole scenario of water availability begins to change. They have understood that it is less about maximizing this year’s crop, and more about protecting the crops of future years because they can see the patterns now.
Sometimes I feel that we have not yet caught up in the technological race in India. That may be to our advantage because now, we can perhaps retain some of our water wisdom, while bringing in new technology so that we don’t go the wasteful way of the West. We have the capability to look at diverse perspectives and data sources to build out models for future water use in India. The key is for us to keep pushing for data to be democratically collected, kept on open platforms, and shared transparently. When you put relevant data, democratically gathered, in the hands of people and communities, they are much more likely to devise their own creative social protocols, restrained practices, right price signaling, and other incentives that are required to manage water more equitably and perhaps a little more sustainably. The work that Arghyam and its partners have done in Participatory Groundwater Management over the last six years has proven this to us.
The Third Age of Water Industry is completely incentivised right now. It’s under extreme duress and needs to use less water throughout its production processes. Small factories in India probably suffer the most. Recently, a garment factory in Bellary had to quarter its production because there was simply no water. Similarly large companies like Mahindra and Mahindra had to shut down a plant in Maharashtra because they could not get water. Industry is very sensitive to the question of water, and most large corporations can’t get away with bad practices. They are responding and the government is also responding. In April, the Environment Minister, Javadekar, said that “India will aim to reduce industrial water usage by half in the next five years by using the latest technologies to reuse, recover, and recycle water.” These are things worth holding government to. We talk of surveyance and worry about surveyance, but there is such a thing as sousveillance, which means looking up from below. And that can create a very powerful push on the supply side to change behavior and be more publicly accountable. Never forget the power of sousveillance.
Meanwhile, bigger corporations around the world are signing on to a global campaign for water disclosure. This would mean disclosing how much water they are using, both in the factories, inside their fence, and throughout their supply chain. From beverage companies and info-tech to hospitality, automotive, and agro-companies, they are really trying to get more efficiency from their water. Often for economic reasons and because of public pressure, it’s getting harder for them to get the water they need, whether from the utilities, the ground, or the rain. Companies that achieve zero discharge, reduce their pollution, or improve their water efficiency are getting recognised around the world. This is one of the drivers for industry. There are many rogue sectors like energy and mining that are not caught up with this at all, but that gives us an opportunity to pressure them, when other sectors are leading the way.
Additionally, there’s an increasing sensitivity about wastewater reuse. The good news is that in India, we are so bad at it that the only way is up. After 20 years or so, we may actually have contained the global, and hopefully the Indian, demand for more fresh water. To me, that is a really positive way of looking at reducing or preventing conflict. Peter Gleick has said that, “the first stage of water was when human civilization had barely begun. Water was just something we took from the natural environment where we needed it. But as populations grew, as civilization expanded, and as cities developed, we outgrew our local water resources, and started to develop the second age of water. This was when science and technology began to play a role in helping us understand what we were doing to our water resources and how to access the water we needed in a much more concentrated, intense way. So we started to build dams, irrigation systems, water treatment plants, and massive distribution systems that characterize water use today. But the second age of water is also ending. We are moving into a time when the manipulations of the second age also are not enough. They have massive contamination, overdraft, and unsustainable use of water. We have contamination of water resources and water related diseases, and we need a new way of thinking about water.This is where the third age comes in. The third age is ultimately going to have to be a sustainable water management system. We will have to learn to live within our means. We will have to realize that ecosystems are a critical component of our water cycle — that it’s not just humans alone. That it’s humans and the natural environment together. The third age ultimately is going to have to be a sustainable age.”
It is absolutely critical to keep learning in order to solve the current conflicts that India is experiencing today. You will need to learn more about people, the environment, about sharing, power structures, cultures, and about the painstaking nitty-gritty of getting people to sit across in dialogue and hammer out solutions. We also need to keep our minds open to new ideas and to believe in the human capacity to innovate. If we take desalination as an example, most people’s hair stands on end because we’ve been trained to think of it as a horrible thing. It seems ecologically and financially unsound. But what if I stepped into the mind of a techno-optimist? What if we figured out a much cheaper, less energy embedded way to desalinate? What if we figured out what to do with the effluents and how to not impact the pH balance of the coastal areas? We have to keep our minds and hearts open, as we look into the future, as we look into the deeper and more politically complicated issues of issues like the Kaveri and Mahanadi basins, or even the conflicts around the local aquifer or local tap.
As we look at how to address water conflicts, we must be self aware, have a self-critique, and be open to different scenarios from different perspectives. Is it better to work with the politicians or is it better to work with the farmers? Is it better to go to industry or is it better to help people change their eating behavior? How will we, based on our priorities and our passion, focus our work so that we really get the best returns and we can reduce the human and the ecological damage from unnecessary water conflicts?
Those of you who are working in this sector are going to be the most important people in this country, along with our many leaders – because water management, reducing conflict, thinking of future generations, thinking of our fragile ecosystem is going to be the most important work. You cannot have economic growth without doing that. You can not bring prosperity without doing that. You cannot have peace without doing that.
When a government limits the freedom of NGOs to criticize, as seems to be happening now, it prevents them from doing what it needs them to do. The world over, it is understood that civil society organizations (CSOs) provide checks and balances to counter the unbridled power of the state and any abuse of that power.
Good governance, no matter how you define it, is about more than govt and its institutions. Its about citizens investing and engaging in transformation process.
This letter was written for Pratham Books Annual Report 2013-2014.
We had more passion than experience. We had more commitment than competence. Like most start-ups, Pratham Books began with little more than a dream.
Sure, it was a grand vision. We wanted to enable ‘A Book in Every Child’s Hand’. Born out of the Pratham network, we set ourselves up as an independent, non profit publisher of children’s books on January 1, 2004. We would enable appropriate, indigenous content of high quality and an attractive price, and in multiple languages, to democratize the joy of reading for India’s children.
As Founder-Chairperson and chief funder for exactly ten years from that date, I can truly share that we have moved closer to that vision than co- founders Ashok Karnath, Rekha Menon and I thought possible on that cold January morning. Ten years later, we have nearly two thousand books, millions of readers, and a truly inspired volunteer community apart from a dedicated in-house team. And we have tried disruptive innovations every step of the way.
It has not been easy. We had to convert our lack of baggage into an advantage. While Ashok, our Managing Trustee had to quickly learn the difference between offset and digital printing, he also had to retain his fresh eyes. While some of us, including, myself, had to become children’s authors overnight, we also had to build out a plan to draw in real professionals.
We learnt rapidly along the way. We wanted to scale access, and we had to think differently. We chose to build a hybrid organization- with significant philanthropic capital, with a market-ready approach and with strategic alliances across the big players – the government, other publishers and non-profits. We had to innovate across the distribution cycle, and go where no publisher could go before. We tried everything we could. Our books went along with the door-to-door sales, women of Unilever, they went with the Indian Railways; they landed up in kirana stores and rode in the backpacks of solar energy salesmen.
Not everything worked. But we learnt from our failures and continued to innovate. We successfully drew in an ever enlarging circle of writers, illustrators and even co-publishers. We leveraged both technology and common sense to keep our costs low and our productivity high. We enabled more simultaneous translations per title than most other publishers. We did not get paralyzed by the desire for perfection; we knew our books and our outreach could be better and we focused on doing the absolute best we could do, with the resources that we had.
It helped that ours was a societal mission. This was not about us. Pratham Books clearly wanted to be a catalyst, a platform, and a bold innovator. There was just one real goal – to democratize the joy of reading. Many people naturally veered towards this mission. Not just writers and illustrators but many others who gave generously of their time and talent. Volunteers came forward by the dozens to help more children access more books.
I believe the real transformation came when we realized that the only way to truly break out of a low equilibrium was to leverage new technologies and new ideas. We decided to put up a lot of our content on the Creative Commons, allowing people to use our content freely, making stories available to children everywhere in a digital format, and on multiple devices so as to increase access. If we could not do it alone, we would enable others to do it with us.
They did it and how. Today, Pratham Books has one of the largest repositories of free children’s content. Enthusiasts across multiple countries have downloaded our books, rewritten them, translated them into many languages, printed them, distributed them, and even sold them. That’s been fine with us; we are happy with a small attribution about the source.
With that big idea, we have broken free of many constraints. Potential new distribution channels have opened up. A printer in, say Guwahati can now simply print and sell our Assamese books, if she wishes to.
Many more contributors have understood that this platform may not give them much money but will give them unprecedented reach, with all its implications. Non-profits have been happy to have good content, free, to give to the children they work with. I believe this has been a game changer for us.
I cannot resist a personal testimony. The Annual Haircut Day, which I myself penned under the pseudonym Noni, about a character called Sringeri Srinivas, has become astonishingly popular. Sringeri’s stories have been read not just in many Indian languages but also in languages around the world. Such as French, Chinese and Lojban, which is an Internet language! This could never have been possible if we had not freed up our content for others to use. I may never know exactly how much ‘print revenue’ we might have given up on Sringeri Srinivas, but I do know that our policy has made it possible for millions more children to have the same access to stories that I had, albeit in a more modern form.
This is why I can say with conviction that Pratham Books, in a short span of ten years, has moved energetically closer to its vision. Best of all, under Suzanne Singh’s leadership as the new Chairperson, with her vast experience as the earlier Managing Trustee, Pratham Books is set to take things to an entirely new level, as you shall soon see. I wish Pratham Books all the best for its second decade.
Everyone can help. I hope you will join Pratham Books in its mission. “A book in every child’s hand- or on her mobile phone!”
India is experiencing a massive transformation. Economically, socially and politically, it is a time of rapid change. The second decade of this new century is critical. It gives us a window of opportunity to complete the unfinished agenda of inclusive growth; of universalizing access to opportunities. Old debates about the role of the state and the role of the markets towards this end are being sharpened anew. It is a time of experimentation and renewal. Citizens are challenging and nudging the state to deliver better public services and improved governance. Consumers are driving markets to more innovation in products and services at lower prices across a broader geography. No doubt the lines are not drawn evenly and power is not distributed equally. Yet it is impossible to ignore the roar of a billion hopes and fears blowing in the winds of our democracy. Two decades of market reforms have created quick and unprecedented wealth for those who were poised to take advantage of the open economy. Now the rich have to show why this wealth creation is good not just for a few but for the whole country. Recently, philanthropy has come under the glare of the media. As more Indians learn to give away more of their wealth, there will hopefully be a diversity of models for giving. Indians will tailor their philanthropy to local conditions and may not follow existing models. That is the rich promise ahead. Some of this philanthropy will go towards building institutions- for education and health, for arts and culture, for the protection of the environment. Some philanthropy will support movements for socio-political change. Increasingly however, it looks as though some of this philanthropy will underwrite social entrepreneurs and a market-based approach to problems of poverty.
Making markets work better for society is absolutely critical if economic freedom is to thrive. Post the economic crisis, there has been a strong backlash against the role of global financiers and the opaque financial markets they straddle. But unless there is a counter movement to demonstrate how capital can work differently, nothing much will change on Wall Street. Philanthropy has a small but important role to play in this direction. Patient capital is needed for businesses that serve the poor and the underserved. Nothing can or should replace the role of the state in ensuring basic goods and services to all, right up to the last citizen. But markets (bazaar) have always been an important third leg after society (samaj) and the state (sarkar). Without adequate public infrastructure, and without access to formal credit it is a gargantuan task for entrepreneurs serving the poor to succeed. Often, their models are built by carefully listening to what their potential clients actually want, whether it is in low-cost energy devices, housing, education supplements or livelihood- enhancing services. They do have the potential to create successful double bottom-line enterprises. What they lack is financial support that will not hold them to a model of maximum profit extraction at any cost. They need money and mentoring that allows them to experiment and to sometimes fail. These entrepreneurs need financial banking that allows them, when they do succeed, not to destroy the very foundation on which they built their dream; not to trample over the poor as they themselves rise. For now, only philanthropic capital might be available for this purpose. But within that, perhaps, lies the seed to reclaim the role of the bazaar as an enabler and not a master of the samaj.
Acumen Fund, perhaps more than any other such entity in the world, has succeeded in drawing such philanthropic capital and other resources from an ever widening base. In a short period of time, it has established a strong though small presence in three continents. Its vision to combine business and philanthropy to break the cycle of poverty, its focus on dignity not dependence have attracted many talented people to its fold. My husband Nandan and I made a small commitment to Acumen Fund when it started operation in India and have admired how its efforts have spread from safe water to alternative energy and sustainable agriculture. The powerhouse behind Acumen Fund is Jacqueline Novagratz, a woman I greatly admire for her courage and humour, her open mind and her universalist humanism. Jacqueline’s highly infectious enthusiasm for life and her conviction that people can make anything of their own lives with the right help make her one of the most extraordinary people I know.
The Blue Sweater is a remarkable story of her journey across continents and across a political canvas of despair, hope and sheer grit. Written from Rwanda and Kenya, India and Pakistan Jacqueline’s book reminds us of how shared our destiny really is in interconnected world. She sought out men and women of extraordinary courage in her desire to ‘change the way the world tackles poverty’. She has had the courage herself to learn from them and evolve her own ideas and reverse her assumptions about the role of pure charity or even that of markets. “I’ve learned that generosity is far easier than justice,” she writes, and her work towards a more just world then yields to her, as in Tennyson’s Ulysses, that “ I am part of all that I have met”. She then adds “And they- every one of them, good and bad – are part of me.”
This understanding, embodied in a phrase familiar to Indians – vasudhaiva kutumbam- really defines Jacqueline’s quest. I hope many, especially young people in India, will read and be inspired by The Blue Seater. There is so much work ahead to ensure that all our people can live in dignity and prosperity. This book offers many insights and raises the possibility that patient capital can take on a part of that task. India’s new wealth combined with its growing band of social entrepreneurs can surely move us closer to make the bazaar more accountable to the needs of the samaj.
The macro crisis in the microfinance sector may not get resolved anytime soon. But it is a symptom of a much larger trend moving through the country.
The Indian microfinance model developed differently from that in its original home in Bangladesh. It took root with self-help groups (SHGs) set up in Karnataka by Myrada, with NABARD’s support, back in the early 1980s. These affinity groups created a social glue among poor women which allowed them not only to offer their mutual guarantee as collateral against their borrowings, but enabled them to work collectively for other causes in their communities. There are hundreds of documented stories of how the SHG movement has generated social change and political empowerment, in addition to accessing more finance for the poor than ever before in independent India.
As the fledgling sector began to attract notice from banks and markets for its excellent repayment rates, well into the high 1990s, a lot of things began to change. From a vision of creating slow and steady small fortunes ‘for’ the bottom of the pyramid, some microfinance players moved to selling a glittering story of quick and large fortunes ‘from’ the bottom of the pyramid.
Within a short span of five years, the microfinance sector in India, built around carefully nurtured affinities and an appropriate pace of scaling up based on capacities, has turned into a chaotic marketplace with little regulation. It now has diverse offerings from multiple players and scant regard for proper group formation. An estimated Rs 30,000 crore is chasing the poor and being collected from them, whether they are ready for it or not.
A movement that was based on the hope that women working closely together could create for all of them some economic and social value has been overrun by the idea that loose coalitions of joint liability groups can enable individuals to escape poverty. This subtle shift rides on high theory. When we the elite do not need to form groups and prove our book- keeping skills to access bank services, how long should we expect that of the poor? Hence the sector has moved to many financial products designed for individuals. Fair enough, so long as there is informed consent of the risks of indebtedness.
But the strategy shift also surfs a wave in the current polity. We are witnessing the march of socio-economic rights in India. We have had the right to information, to education and to work. We will soon have the right to food and maybe to water. Each day, someone thinks of a new entitlement to frame as law. This rush to secure individual rights seems to suit everyone.
For rights-based activists, every success brings a heady sense of power and progress. Compared to the hard and long struggles undertaken by NGOs for sustained collective action to preserve the commons, for example, the rights movement has seen relatively quicker policy wins. And it seems they plan to continue on that path.
For market players, who deal with citizens mainly as consumers, the emerging sense of entitlement is useful to consolidate messaging around high individual aspirations. As India becomes the newest focal point for all the world’s leading brands, Indian consumers will be able to satisfy any whim, if they can afford it, or can access ‘buy now, pay later’ services.
And for a government committed to a market economy and struggling hard to deliver to a growing population all the public infrastructure that the urban elite takes so much for granted, the individualisation of demand creates an easy way to channel resources into individual citizen pipelines. Clearly, this is simpler than creating the public school education, health care services, roads and energy and communication services that the urban middle class has enjoyed and built its future on. All those services were created by the state in its more socialist avatar. Today, many governments across the country talk of public-private partnerships as the only viable model for infrastructure development. These are powerful though subtle shifts in the economy that arguably could put India on a path to more human dignity and prosperity.
But is there something we are missing, something we are losing out on, in this splitting up of the collective for the benefit of the individual? To those organisations struggling to pull people together beyond their individual or caste and creed based identities, the answer is obvious. The focus on the individual takes away the focus from work that requires collective action. Individuals cannot preserve water bodies. Individuals cannot protect forests. Individuals cannot prevent coercive states or uncaring corporations from taking away lands and livelihoods. All of these require continued and creative united efforts.
Perhaps the old institutional forms may never return; they have lost their moral power. Some cooperatives that collapsed on greed, some Gandhian groups that compromised on truth, some communists who took to extreme violence, all have made 21st century Indians wary of old paradigms and formations. And there is no denying the arrival of legitimate individual ambition in a young and economically stronger India.
Yet, if we want to belong to a nation where poverty is history and nature’s power to nurture and sustain is restored, we have to find viable new models of cooperation. Otherwise, the securing of individual ambition may remain a mirage.
Some homegrown ideas and forums are emerging. There is also hope in the innovative way in which technology commons are being used to build virtual bridges across physical divides. But, as the serious distress in the microfinance sector warns us, we must not undermine the models we already have.
