Landslide victory for Nitish Kumar in Bihar, India

Nitish Kumar of Janata Dal-United (JDU) who ruled the state of Bihar in coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and contested the elections together are set for a landslide victory. The result is an outcome of some people centric measures.

 

Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar 3-10 March 2000 and 24 Nov 2005 till date.  ©  Government of Bihar

 

Elections to the 243 seats of the state assembly of Bihar, India was held in six phases that lasted for more than a month and the results have been announced today. The ruling JDU-BJP alliance with Nithish Kumar as its Chief Minister has won 206 seats, 115 for JDU and 91 for BJP.
 

The surprise part for people in other parts of the country is that the right-wing pro-Hindu BJP has been doing well despite the state having one-seventh of its population as non-Hindus (mostly Muslims). A few months ago, Nitish Kumar, had refused to share a dias with BJP's Narendra Modi, Chief Minister from Gujarat, a state that witnessed one of the worst anti-Muslim riots in 2002.

All this has been possible in Bihar because of some positive measures taken by the government. In 2005 when Nitish Kumar took over the reigns of the state, the word Bihar conjured up a negative image identified with poor law and order, poor infrastructure, high incidences of poverty that led to out migration from the state for basic livelihood and corruption. This was unfortunate because etymological roots of 'Bihar' lies with the monasteries of Gautama Buddha.

The last five years saw a change and Bihar is on its path to a new glory. In the last five years, visits to Patna the state capital and other regions throws up some positive developments. Law and order has improved tremendously. Murder, kidnapping and other crimes have reduced.
 

When it comes to infrastructure, new roads are being laid everywhere. Distances of 60 kilometers from Patna required five hours of travel, whcih could now be covered within two hours and this is the story all over the state. Number of vehicles have increased and travel time has reduced considerably.

To do away with poverty, good cases from other states were studied and JEEViKA: The Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project modeled with the Andhra Pradesh experience was taken up. This organized poorest women and vulnerable sections. One such story is among milkmen (Yadava's who belong to the same community as that of Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav), an earlier Chief Minister and leader of the opposition party). A group of 13-15 milkmen were indebted and had to sell their milk to the lender-trader at a lower price. Jeevika formed a group of these people and gave them a loan of about 75,000 rupees ($1,600) to repay the earlier loan and also helped them in establishing a marketing channel as a result of which the group was able to repay this fresh loan in three months time. There are many such success stories in building people's institutions. Of course, this is just the beginning and a lot needs to be done.

The one thing where perhaps the Nitish government failed is perhaps corruption. It is said that earlier people used to be afraid of the bullet (indicating the law and order problem) but today they are afraid of the pen (referring to the bureaucrats) who seem to be asking for a cut in all the pro-people scheme that have been initiated. The new government has to address this and also chart the new direction with people. The difficulty is that they will not have a credible opposition. One would have been happy if JDU could have formed a government on their own and BJP provided a strong opposition. But, that is not to be, as JDU falls short of a simple majority. One hopes that it is the people of Bihar who provide this critical input to check the coming of vested interests that may scuttle their surge forward. Bihar khush raho!

(This write-up was first put up in Digital Journal, 24 November 2010, http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/300626.)

Day 35 of farmers march coincides with Obama's visit to India

Farmers marching across India to save agriculture are now in Andhra Pradesh. This peoples movement of liberating agriculture and ushering in hope does not reverberate with Obama's call for liberalizing and opening up agriculture.

Logo of Kisan Swaraj Yatra. © Kisan Swarj Yatra

Kisan Swaraj Yatra (KSY) taking inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi started the freedom tour on his 141st birthday has today on its 35th day reached Andhra Pradesh, Mr Obama also started his India tour by visiting his hero Gandhiji's museum 'Mani Bhavan', Mumbai. KSY's journey is a peoples movement that calls for hope to do away with the ills plaguing Indian agriculture, Mr Obama's ascendancy to office two years ago in the United States was also reverberating with hope for people across the globe. The similarities, one hopes, should not stop there; but, unfortunately, it does.

Flag off of Kisan Swaraj Yatra from Sabarmati Gujarat 2 October 2010. © Kisan Swaraj Yatra

The visit has a lot on platter for business ties. An opening up of the economy so that they buy goods and services from America so that there are more jobs back home. There are significant interests in liberalizing agriculture so that Indian farmer relies heavily on the market for inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. These benefit business interests in America and also India. These will also have adverse affect on Indian livelihoods as tidbits of news from the Yatra indicates.

In a meeting at Jangaon in Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh on 3 November 2010 the slogans that rented the air are “Farmers’ welfare is nation’s welfare”, “Companies that loot farmers, gotta go; Ministers who are company agents, gotta go”, “Farmer who feeds us, don't commit suicide”. A host of groups came together and the mood may be summed up by the remark of a police official present “I have never seen all these organizations coming onto the same platform. How did you all manage this?” This was possible because of an engagement with people, what the Human Development Report has been stressing.

On 2 November 2010 in a meeting at HD Kote, Karnataka a discussion revealed that not non Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) seeds and organic seeds are not available in the market and Pandit Krishi Vivek Cariappa added that parental lines of hybrid seeds have been contaminated. Another speaker emphasized that "to save the country, we should save our villages; for saving our villages, we should save our farming; for saving farming, we should save our seed, our land and our ecological farming methods." The absence of regulation for private input providers, the yield stagnation, the increasing health risks were also discussed. The Yatris joined the paddy diversity festival at Rangayana, Mysore.

Meeting and paddy diversity festival Rangayana, Mysore, where Yatris had delicious lunch made out of many traditional rice-based recipes, 2 November 2010. © Kisan Swaraj Yatra

The tour had reached the state of Kerala on 30 October 2010. In a public meeting at Palakkad, Mr Mullakkara Ratnakaran, Minister for Agriculture, conveyed through phone that "all the issues being raised by the Yatra are issues of concern for the state government too." Mr Diwakaran, the local member of the legislative assembly, mentioned about "the disappearance of honeybees and the huge environmental imbalances that we are creating."

The state of Kerala, which has been in the centre of many environmental movements such as the save silent valley, has now also declared itself to be free of genetically modified crops. The state has a policy towards organic farming and plans to implement the same in a few years time said Sridhar Radhakrishnan of Thanal.

Sridhar says that KSY in Kerala is a celebration as the state has declared itself a GM-free organic state, Palakkad, Kerala, 30 October 2010. © Kisan Swaraj Yatra

Kavita Kurangathi of Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) who said that the Yatra "aims to provide a message of hope to farmers in the country that there is indeed a way out of the crisis in farming today – that of adopting self-reliant, ecological farming." It comes in the backdrop of the government not addressing "the issue in fundamental ways, including assessing the role of unsustainable technologies in creating and exacerbating the crisis."

On their second day in Kerala the Yatris visited a school where the meeting was organized by the Mallapuram Organic Farmers’ Movement. Dr VS Vijayan (Former Chair, Kerala State Bio-Diversity Board) explained the local practices and gave the example of a farm family that "has been living off the organic farm by integrating innovative cattle and organic farming techniques." The historic relevance of the place Eddappal, Ponnani where there was an uprising in the struggle for independence was indicated by Dr Jacob Vadakkanchery.

Dr. Vijayan addresses the crowd at Eddappal, Mallapuram, Kerala, 31 October 2010. © Kisan Swaraj Yatra

Farmers from different parts of the country shared their story of the over-hyped green revolution in Punjab, the yield of nine tonnes of paddy per hectare during pre-independence days at Chengalpat, Tamil Nadu or how farmers in Budelkhand kept their seed stock for the next generation even during extended period of drought. A second meeting was organized at Nilambur by Haritha Senam, a farmers collective which has been working on the issue of debt and farmers suicides.

The third day in Kerala began at the memorial for Pazhassi Raja, the Adivasi King who fought the British for independence. The town reverberated with slogans in Hindi and Malyalam. The Yatris visited the farm of Mr Raman who has been growing 23 different traditional varieties of paddy. Mr Kalpetta Narayanan, a writer and poet, questioned the industrialization of agriculture. He gave examples from Gandhiji to explain the real meaning of 'swaraj' (freedom).

Yatris pay homage to Pazhassi Raja, the king who fought the British for Adivasi rights, Wayanad, 1 November 2010. © Kisan Swaraj Yatra

Mr Obama are you listening. Farmers' across the country do not agree that opening of agriculture will not affect their livelihoods.

(This write-up was first put up in Digital Journal, 6 November 2010, http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/299596.)

Other articles in this series are day 28 of the Yatra and their travels in eastern regions and northern regions of India.

'People first' stressed on 20th Anniversary edition of HDR

People are the real wealth reiterates the 20th anniversary edition of Human Development Report (HDR) 2010. It also comes up with three new measures for discussing poverty and inequality.

Cover Page, HDR 2010, © HDR 2010, UNDP.

 

The first HDR in 1990 by United Nations (UN) started a new era in development thinking. It put people at the centre and includes the processes of enhancing their choices as well as improvement in their well-being. Human beings are the ends. It is for this that human development is considered to be different from the following approaches.

* Economic growth is a means and not an end of development. Moreover, high GDP growth does not necessarily translate to progress in human development. Global experience has shown that income and human development are not always perfect companions, where some countries display relatively high levels of human development for their income and vice versa.

* Theories of human capital formation and human resource development view human beings as means to increased income and wealth rather than as ends. These theories are concerned with human beings as inputs to increasing production;

* The human welfare approach looks at human beings as beneficiaries rather than participants in the development process;

* The basic needs approach concentrates on the bundle of goods and services that deprived population groups need - food, shelter, clothing, health care and water. It focuses on the provision of these goods and services rather than their implications on human choices.

It can however encompass the above and it is with this broad thinking that the HDR beyond an income-based measure to the human development index (HDI) that had health, education and standard of living as its components. Over time, the index for each component as well as the measure has evolved. Nevertheless, one important criticism of the HDI has been the linear aggregation of three components. The current report takes care of this by proposing a geometric mean. Another alternative, which has not been used in the report, is to calculate the shortfall from the ideal and take its inverse.

There are also some further departures in the way HDI has been calculated. The components of education are mean years of schooling for adults of 25 years and above and expected years of schooling for children of school going age (earlier they were literacy rate for adults and gross enrollment ratio for school children). For decent standard of living the 2010 report uses per capita gross national income in purchasing power parity dollars (earlier it was gross domestic product). Further, the global/expected maximum and minimum are taken from observations or estimations from the last forty years (1970-2010). With regard to education component where minimum can be zero, one is added to all observations to avoid problems in the calculation of a geometric mean.

In addition, there are three more measures in the report

* The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) adjusts the Human Development Index (HDI) for inequality in distribution of each dimension across the population. The IHDI accounts for inequalities in HDI dimensions by “discounting” each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality. The IHDI equals the HDI when there is no inequality across people but is less than the HDI as inequality rises. In this sense, the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for this inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of “potential” human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there was no inequality. The “loss” in potential human development due to inequality is given by the difference between the HDI and the IHDI and can be expressed as a percentage.

* The Gender Inequality Index (GII) reflects women’s disadvantage in three dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment and the labour market—for as many countries as data of reasonable quality allow. The index shows the loss in human development due to inequality between female and male achievements in these dimensions. It ranges from 0, which indicates that women and men fare equally, to 1, which indicates that women fare as poorly as possible in all measured dimensions.

* The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) identifies multiple deprivations at the individual level in health, education and standard of living. It uses micro data from household surveys, and—unlike the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index—all the indicators needed to construct the measure must come from the same survey. Each person in a given household is classified as poor or nonpoor depending on the number of deprivations his or her household experiences. These data are then aggregated into the national measure of poverty.

Using the previous method of calculating HDI there has been substantial progress in the last 40 years for 135 countries for which comparable data are available, and what is more, this has been possible through diverse path ways. The top mover is Oman that invested heavily in education and public health. The next nine movers are China, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, South Korea, Algeria and Morocco. Incidentally, China is the only one that made the gains because of income as they had earlier made investments in education and public health. Some of the important low-income but substantial gainers are Ethiopia, Cambodia and Benin.

Across regions, the gainers were East Asia, primarily because of China and Indonesia and the Arab countries. The laggards were former Soviet Union and Sub-Saharan Africa and from these three in the former (Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation) and six in the latter (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe) showing reductions in life expectancy.

Despite the above-mentioned setbacks in life expectancy,

"The dominant trend in life expectancy globally is convergence, with average life spans in most poor countries getting increasingly close to those in developed countries. In income, though, the pattern remains one of divergence, with most rich countries getting steadily richer, while sustained growth eludes many poor countries."

"Some countries have suffered serious setbacks, particularly in health, sometimes erasing in a few years the gains accumulated over several decades. Economic growth has been extremely unequal, both in countries experiencing fast growth and in groups benefiting from national progress. And the gaps in human development across the world, while narrowing, remain huge."

In South Asia, Iran fares the best (#70); Sri Lanka (#91), Maldives (#107), India (#119) and Pakistan (125) are in the middle HDI countries, whereas Bangladesh (#129), Nepal (#138) and Afghanistan (#155) are among low HDI countries. Data are not available for Bhutan.

As per the current measure of HDI done for 169 countries, the top ten are Norway, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Ireland, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden and Germany and the bottom ten are Mali, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Burundi, Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe.

IHDI has been applied to 139 countries and the average loss in HDI is 22 per cent. There are variations across regions and dimensions as indicated in the figure/chart given below.

Chart depicting inequality adjusted human development index across regions. © HDR 2010, UNDP

GII, calculated for 138 countries, also varies across regions and dimensions, but the largest contributor to loss is reproductive health. The loss on account of lower empowerment to females is also relatively higher for South Asia and Arab states, as indicated in the figure/chart given below.

Chart depicting loss on account of gender inequality across region and by dimensions (labour market, empowerment and reproductive health). © HDR 2010, UNDP

MPI has been calculated for 104 developing countries using data from household surveys. This as also some other measures used in HDR 2010 has already been discussed in some Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) papers. There is also a very lively debate under Let's talk HD. There are variations that one could observe between income-based measures and MPI, as indicated in the figure/chart given below.

Comparing multidimensional and income poverty for selected countries. © HDR 2010, UNDP

(This write-up was first put up in Digital Journal, 5 November 2010, http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/299827.)