Author: chester.c

Reimagining Abundance in Post COVID-19 India

Posted on by chester.c

As people return to life and work post the lockdown, some predictions point to a mad rush to do even more than before. Travel more, buy more, meet more people, eat out more — do more of more. The government too is expected to do more to restore economic growth and livelihoods. Much more is anticipated from the State. Some see it as an opportunity to overtake China.

To achieve this, many states might roll back labour laws that took decades of human rights movements to build, and push aside hard-won environmental protection.

If we succumb, will we return to the old normal, or an even older 19th century normal? Will the “more” being planned heal the economy or plunge us faster into the next disaster? Is there another imagination to achieve the common goals of opportunity and prosperity for all?

This crisis has demonstrated that prosperous, healthy and well-governed communities can tackle public health emergencies well. But how do we define prosperity and move towards such a society?

For centuries, prosperity has been easy to define in material terms. At a personal level, by how much one earns; how much one has. At a societal level, through Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a computation of all assets and interactions within an economy. GDP cannot discount products and services that are bad for society, such as the output of polluting industries, or of sweatshops. Several attempts to retool GDP have made little headway.

However, during the pandemic, most people, including the elite, experienced different forms of frugality, simplicity, and dignity associated with personal labour. After decades, urbanites also encountered purity — of air and water, and diversity — of flora and fauna. Simple things acquired fresh value for many. The time may be ripe to retool GDP. We now hold a brighter vision of how things can be, and can converse creatively with our future from an altered present.

One pathway is to shift from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. For there is abundance everywhere, if only we look for it. If this profusion of resources goes from being just abundant to being effective, perhaps we could lean away from economic choices that appear inevitable, but that destroy natural capital and human well-being.

Let’s list some things that are abundant in India.

At a societal level, India has the world’s largest working population. At 13 million, it also has the most number of teachers. It has health care professionals, from super-speciality doctors to accredited social health activists (Asha).

At a physical level, India is blessed with a rich biodiversity of flora and fauna. We have a predictable monsoon, and a vast network of rivers and water bodies. We have one of the longest coastlines. We have enormous access to solar energy.

We also have among the world’s most sophisticated digital infrastructure, and an increasing penetration of Internet services and smartphones.

At a spiritual level, we have a plethora of practices and leadership across religions. And we enjoy the affluence of volunteer energy, as evidenced recently. This is not just an inventory of our assets, but the robust foundation for what we want to achieve.

During the pandemic, food bloggers came up with a simple and potent idea. They asked what was left in people’s refrigerators, and helped them cook up wonderful new recipes with existing ingredients. They re-purposed what existed, and allowed people to experience plenty from paucity.

This is a perfect analogy for what the nation could put into practice, and, is already experimenting with.

Using digital infrastructure, like Diksha, millions of teachers are creating and sharing better content and classroom practices, both physical and virtual. Parental creativity and peer groups, both plentiful resources, are also being engaged to help children learn better.

Using the Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) model, health care workers are receiving virtual, guided mentoring. This moves knowledge instead of people, to build faster, more sustainable capacity across the chain.

Overnight, you can overturn an apparent scarcity — the lack of good teachers or skilled health workers — into an abundance of distributed, empowered talent.

Opportunities are everywhere — in energy, in mobility, in agriculture, and in livelihood generation. If we can use this flipped thinking, it can create more headroom for those who genuinely need resources — more carbon for the energy-deficient; more land for the landless; more mobility for transport deficit areas, and more potential for sustainable and meaningful livelihoods everywhere.

For example, India’s ubiquitous building infrastructure can be re-purposed to harness solar energy, or for vertical and terrace farming. Work from home will relieve the pressure on urban infrastructure and land, which can be released for mass housing or public transport, and critical lung space.

Last but not least, let’s unlock our spiritual treasure trove. Most disciplines invite us to more mindfulness, and more contentment. Not by consuming more externally, but by harvesting more from within, and by sharing more without. Neurosciences and behavioural sciences increasingly corroborate this ancient wisdom — joy can come from giving, and unlimited happiness from bonhomie.

Flipping to an abundance mindset is a creative-yet-practical task for samaaj (society) first, but also for the bazaar (market) and sarkaar (State). We know now that we need to emerge from this crisis together. Let’s boldly use the stimulus to redefine prosperity and redirect resources to make abundance effective.

Hindustan Times

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The World After Covid-19: Unless We Are Alert, The Pandemic Could Become The Last Nail In Individualism’s Coffin

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For centuries, individualism or the notion that every human individual has intrinsic value has underlined ideas about societal organisation, the economy and justice. Recently, however, the primacy of the individual’s inalienable rights and freedoms has come under immense pressure.

Individualism in the West originated from the Enlightenment. It believes in the moral worth of the individual and that his/ her interests should take precedence over the state or the social group. This birthed laissez faire capitalism, in which the individual is a free market agent.

Western style individualism has had its greatest run since World War 2. Even with large parts of Europe behind the Iron Curtain, and even with China in pre-market mode, the sheer hegemony of the US ensured a bull run for the frontiersman idea of individualism – with the rugged, proud individual at its centre, spinning progress from the unbroken thread of his free will.

Another form of individualism was also at play in those same years, based on the belief system of Mahatma Gandhi and his mentors. Their individualism had spiritual roots. Gandhi recognised that Western style individualism could end up as mere materialism. He saw the individual as an autonomous moral agent, not just someone with the means to fulfil personal desires. The individual’s inviolable human rights are placed at the heart of societal progress. The focus is on the personhood of the last, most vulnerable human being, in whose name state and society would practice their dharma.

The first idea of individualism propelled furious innovation for three centuries. The entrepreneur, the creative artist, the public intellectual generated a global marketplace for ideas, products and services. Arguably, this generated more material prosperity for more people than ever before.

The second idea has driven the largest state and societal intervention of welfare and patronage to various vulnerable groups of individuals. It has been a grand experiment, though not fully realised, to leave each individual with social safety nets, while preserving his dignity and risk taking capacity.

However, over the past decade or more, individualism and the primacy of the individual have been seriously threatened.

There are three key reasons for this. The first is terrorism combined with economic collapse. When 9/11 happened, it changed things overnight, giving the biggest shock treatment to individual agency. People in the US, the absolute stronghold of individualism and libertarianism, had to give up many cherished freedoms and privacies in exchange for the promise of public safety. Then came the financial meltdown of 2008. In its wake, we entered a post-globalisation world, which coincided with the rise of authoritarian regimes that consolidated state power.

In many countries romantic patriotism, where an individual’s love for the country could be expressed as honest criticism, shifted to a harder nationalism of ‘my country, right or wrong’. Dissent was discouraged, and this nudged the independent individual further off the political stage.

The second reason is the rise of the internet giants with their massive social platforms. At first, these appeared to bulwark the primacy of the free individual. The anytime, anywhere, anything consumer was king. The labourer employee was now a self-employed entrepreneur; and the citizen was now a netizen, expressing his opinion around the world.

Unfortunately, individual choice turned out to be an illusion; a shimmering mirage. This was the beginning of what is now feared as surveillance capitalism, where the gig worker remains underpaid and overworked; the consumer is but a packet of data, and his free will can be bent by artificial intelligence. These same technologies also further enabled the surveillance state, shrinking the individual’s rights and privacies at an alarming pace. Even an individual’s vote, his most precious gift in an electoral democracy, has become an object of manipulation.

Third, the world has become even more interdependent. Climate change and air pollution know no borders, and antibiotics resistance respects no boundaries. Bacteria from Africa can make people in America sick. The burning of Indonesian forests can keep Asia gasping for breath.

Now, the Covid-19 pandemic might well be the last nail in the coffin of individualism, unless we are alert. It has quickly led us to surrender personal privileges and submit to the diktat of the state or the decisions of the proximate group – the apartment complex, the village and the city. We have rightly been willing to give up our individual freedoms, because we sense the danger from exercising this freedom willfully.

Frontiersman ideas of individualism stand exposed as we realise just how much our actions impact others.

But we must beware against losing the positive aspects of individualism. We must ensure that the individual identity is not subsumed by a coercive group unaccountable to larger structures or to the rule of law. It is one thing to obey a government order. It is quite another to succumb to resurrected irrational fears, especially of ‘the other’. We are already witnessing the rise of vigilantism, and even mob rule. Fearful villagers ban all outsiders; doctors are prevented from returning to their urban homes; the policeman wields a lathi with impunity.

Such reactions to this pandemic could bring about the end of positive individualism for the foreseeable future. Samaaj must act quickly and creatively to recover the balance between individual agency and the collective good. No man is an island, but let’s not undermine the intrinsic value of every individual human being. It is the foundation for all good societies.

Times of India

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Covid-19: Securing the Present and the Future

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This is the most serious crisis since World War II. Politicians must step up; voters must allow them to.

Politicians are elected because they campaign in poetry, but voters don’t always account for the fact that elected representatives must govern in prose. That chasm between the promise and the delivery becomes more dangerous at times like these. Just like wartime generals have to be different from peacetime generals, crisis-time politicians have to step up from being normal-time politicians.

In times of the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19), we need our leaders to assume new responsibilities. They must first educate themselves about the crisis by listening to, and learning from, experts. Then, they must communicate what they know to us, without creating undue alarm. They must be honest enough to admit their fallibility. They need to be inspirational enough to command our cooperation. They need to lobby for their own constituencies to get a share of central and shared resources. They need to transparently prioritise these resources for those who may need them most. They have to be frontline responders.

Simultaneously, they also have to safeguard the future. History has shown us that in crises, a centralised, and unaccountable leadership can emerge. Unless carefully managed, this can lead to a breakdown of trust between the government and the public. Other politicians must then evolve into system leaders. They must safeguard democracy itself; to protect against a creeping authoritarianism that is hard to push back when normalcy returns. To do so, they must demonstrate the relevance of empowered local government.

Is it even possible for our politicians to step up to the plate? Will we allow them to, even if they wanted to try? Can voters respect the difficult situation their representatives find themselves in? Can we give them space to think ahead, even as they try to contain the immediate calamity?

Benjamin Disraeli once said, “The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians”.

One reason for such a deterioration is that voters expect too much from representatives. Strangely, we barely hold them accountable for their primary duty as lawmakers. We don’t always appreciate that good laws make for good societies, and that our representatives have the constitutional duty to help craft those good laws. Instead, most people expect their elected representatives to be at their beck and call, to provide patronage and brokerage, to help their communities through small but urgent hardships. It is a 24/7, largely thankless job for most politicians.

I saw this personally in my husband, Nandan Nilekani’s, unsuccessful Lok Sabha campaign. He would imagine big possibilities for the country, which would also make people’s lives much better. Most voters, though, asked about things that affected them in the here and now — whether a community hall could be built, or the speed bumps could be removed outside their gates or if the stray dogs would be taken care of.

Inevitably, voters feel frustrated when all these requests cannot be met. Sometimes, politicians give up on this impossible quest and ride roughshod over their constituencies. It is not too surprising that we have politicians across all parties with criminal records, who keep getting re-elected, even from prison. Many have their troops of men to fulfil some of the basic wishes of the voters, keep things in check, and appear to be locally effective.

Of course, we still have several wonderful politicians. They work as hard as they possibly can to serve their people, help pass good laws, represent the interests of their constituents at every opportunity and also reach out and communicate with their voters.

We must help their tribe increase, especially now. American theologian and author James Freeman Clarke observed: “The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.”

There are wonderful instances from India’s democratic history where India’s statesmen have done just that. Former Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru’s government built the nation’s core infrastructure. PV Narasimha Rao’s government opened up the economy for next-generation entrepreneurs. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government filled critical gaps in the education system, and developed the nation’s roads and telecommunication networks for today’s digital or migrant citizen. Their eyes were pinned to the horizon.

The pandemic and the economic downturn that accompanies it offer a creative opportunity for politicians to become statesmen. As poet Muhammad Iqbal wrote, “Nations are born in the hearts of poets – they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.” If our politicians focus on the word “prosper”, and if voters allow politicians to do what statesmen must, perhaps this unprecedented crisis would serve to strengthen our democracy for future generations, and not to undermine it.

All over the world, people are looking to their leaders to guide them through the double whammy they are facing: The Covid-19 pandemic and the unfolding economic crisis. This has been probably the most challenging time for politicians since the World War II. They need our empathy and our forbearance.

Hindustan Times

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Corporates Should Support the Rule of Law

Posted on by chester.c

The time has come to align self-interest and public interest in support of the rule of law and constitutional values.

I have often talked about the continuum of sarkaar, samaaj, and bazaar, and why, for a successful society, these three sectors must work together in a fine balance.

Ideally, sarkaar, or the state, should not grab too much power, bazaar, or the market, should not flout the rule of law or appropriate public resources, and vigilantes from the samaaj, or civil society, should not take the law into their own hands.
This requires awareness and active participation from all citizens. After all, we are citizens first; our primary identity is not as a subject of the state or as a consumer for the market. As citizens, how do we then help build a good society?

The bazaar’s interest in the rule of law

There are many interests between samaaj and sarkaar; bazaar and sarkaar; as well as between samaaj and bazaar. For the purpose of this article, we will examine the congruence of interest between samaaj (society) and bazaar (markets). And it starts with the rule of law.

“No business can thrive without social stability outside its gates.”

We all want and need the rule of law to be upheld. In fact the bazaar—or at least the modern corporation as we know it—would not exist if the rule of law had not created the limited liability company 300 years ago. This allowed innovation to flourish over the centuries, and also provided for the absorption of failure, because wherever there is innovation, there is failure. It is because of the rule of law that companies can fail without going under themselves; and therefore, for their own sake, corporations have a great stake in upholding it. They need the enforceability of contracts, protection of property, availability of fair competition, and so on, otherwise they simply cannot function. But even beyond this, they need the law to be upheld by society at large, because no business can thrive without social stability outside its gates.

Civil society and business therefore have more in common than either believe. Sure, in some cases, civil society has to position itself against business interests, when those interests are being deployed unfairly on the ground. For instance, in the case of public goods like water and land commons, or with environmental issues like pollution and contamination, civil society and business knock up against each other. But they also have a common concern—to keep the sarkaar in check.

Keeping the sarkaar in check

State power worldwide tends to accumulate, and it is to the advantage of both business and civil society, to make sure that the state does not abuse its own power.

Many corporations have been subject to the vagaries of state power while running their businesses; excessive discretionary power also adversely affects the climate in which businesses operate. If the alignment of samaaj and bazaar is understood and worked on, it helps restrain the state.

For example, civil society institutions and business corporations might together, or separately, appeal to the state on poorly framed laws. In the recent proposal to criminalise non-compliance of CSR, both samaaj and bazaar would have been adversely affected.

Both successfully voiced strong reservations against it, and it was rolled back.

“We all need good laws, and an independent, impartial, and efficient judiciary to verify the constitutionality of those laws.”

We all need good laws, and an independent, impartial, and efficient judiciary to verify the constitutionality of those laws. We all require equal access to the justice system. We also need effective public institutions that help uphold the rule of law. It is the only way to both empower the bazaar and uphold the rights of the country’s citizens.

The samaaj has an interest in the rule of law as well, as it is critical for addressing access issues, especially for the poor. Civil society organisations (CSOs) representing samaaj are often driven by passion and a commitment to rights and freedoms.

Sometimes, at great personal risk, they go up against the power of the state and corporations, to create campaigns, build institutions, and push for more agency for people who are left out. Civil society must however learn to communicate better the long term benefits of such work to business.

Because, the bazaar itself cannot do this work. Though they benefit indirectly, corporations cannot support or implement politically sensitive programs, and risk the fallout of such action. It would make them vulnerable to all sorts of state action.

But they can certainly do more than what they’re doing at the moment.

With the civil society institutions that they trust and already have a relationship with, they can, and should, give core institutional support to continue work beyond project-based funding. Even if they do just this, it strengthens civil society capacity to take on issues of rights and exclusions that are adjacent to their work on service delivery.

It’s time to take big bets

Swami Vivekananda said, “Take risks in your life. If you win, you can lead, if you lose, you can guide.”

Indian philanthropy doesn’t take enough risk. However, it cannot achieve its potential without risk-taking. It’s good to keep honouring service delivery improvements, but it’s time to look at our society as a whole, and for the philanthropic sector to step up and get into more important areas such as access to justice. And the congruent interest of samaaj and bazaar is exactly why.

From a recent Boston Consulting Group report—‘Total Societal Impact- A New Lens for Strategy’, it’s clear that corporations which align with samaaj’s ideals will be better off in the long run. There is now exhaustive research that shows that the non-financial side of business is linked to its financial side, and that companies that do well when it comes to ESG—environmental, social, and governance issues—also consistently show better results on their bottom line.

Can we—as corporations and philanthropists—pledge that we will no longer do only incremental work, but will try something transformational? The time has come to align self-interest and the public interest in support of the rule of law and constitutional values.

The common within uncommon ground

It doesn’t have to be the state versus civil society, or business versus civil society, or the state versus business. They are not neccessarily antithetical to each other.

Society is successful when it reduces the friction for the three to co-create solutions. And it’s important for all the three sectors to recognise that—to discover the common within the uncommon ground.

It is an especially opportune time for business and civil society to act more creatively from their own, unrecognised common ground. Poised at a new decade, we can together ensure that this country’s solemn promise to itself—to secure liberty and justice, social, economic, and political—for all its citizens, will be met, and met in abundance.

India Development Review

Times of India

IDR PDF

Hindustan Times

Hindustan Times PDF