HDR 2013 - Rise of the Global South

The Human Development Report 2013 - Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World is out. In HDI rankings, Norway ranks first, but Australia (#2) and New Zealand (#6) do better than Norway when it comes to non-income HDI.
 
US (#3) fares poorly in terms of life expectancy as it is below 30 countries. This means that at a higher level of attainment, shortfalls in one dimension are compensated by attainments in other dimensions. Future calculations of HDI could use An Alternative Approach to Measure HDI or choose from A Class of Human Development Index Measures. These address the inequity across dimensions. In other words, as the average attainment increases, the same deviation from a balanced approach is considered worse off. It turns out that the HDI computed with geometric mean does not satisfy this.

Conflict-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo and drought-affected Niger jointly take the last position at #186, but despite the odds they are the ones that have made impressive improvements. In fact, the story from HDR 2013 is the rise of the Global South. It is pertinent that when the North slowed down because of the financial crisis during 2007/2008, it is the entrepreneurship of masses and social innovations in diverse settings with proactive state that have helped in this progress. Fourteen countries, mostly low-HDI ones from Africa (including DR Congo and Niger), made HDI gains of at least 2 per cent per annum since 2000.

In 150 years, the year 2010 marks a turnaround as Brazil (#85), China (#101) and India (#136) together have a combined income as that of the six industrial countries of Canada (#11), France (#20), Germany(#5), Italy(#25), UK (#26) and US. The middle class is growing in the South and they are demanding better services, but one should not forget that income inequalities are widening.

I take the liberty to get out of the report and provide some pointers for India. Some recent successes in India are the state-facilitated livelihood missions (see BRLPS, SERP and also NRLM) among others. Civil society participation also have made significant contributions leading to recent legislations on Right to Education and Right to Information. There also have been public movements such as India Against Corruption, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, and Right to Food. Another recent initiative is the RRA Network, which advocates for a differentiated policy and support system for revitalizing rainfed agriculture.

To sustain the momentum, the report calls for enhancing equity, enabling voice and participation, confronting environmental challenges and managing demographic change.The report reiterates the need to change the structures of global institutions to involve and articulate the concerns of the South, to bring in plural concerns and to unravel that the notions of 'publicness' and 'privateness' in our understanding of public goods are social constructs. Bringing about effective interventions needs good leadership who can keep vested interests out of decision making.

Brazilian lessons for India

In the evening of 18th March 2009 Professor Marcelo Medeiros, Senior Policy Specialist, International Poverty Center, Brazil, had a discussion with some of our colleagues at IGIDR. He has been around for about ten days and participated in Holi celebrations (taking those beautiful photographs) and interacting with many of us.

One of his first observations on India was that we are making the same mistakes that Brazil did during their initial years of liberalization based on Fund-Bank conditionality. There is growth, but it is concentrated and there is a strong case for distribution.

On the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) being operational he was of the view that it should be extended to urban areas, include all adult members of the household and extended to 200 days in a year. In fact, these seem to match with the demand to all political parties being put forth by the Right to Food Campaign.

He also opined that these wage-employment programmes should not be like digging and filling up holes. They should add value. The discussion also veered to how Right to Information (RTI) along with NREGA has helped in empowering the rural poor. Along with this wage-employment programme, I would like to add that there is the need for a comprehensive self-employment programme (as has been suggested by the Report of the Committee on Credit Related Issues under SGSY, Chairman R Radhakrishna, submitted to the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India) and a strong case for addressing the larger agrarian crisis.

He did mention that a large proportion of individuals/households in Brazil have an account in bank/post office with an id card. This helps in the direct transfer of welfare funds in a timely manner. This is similar to the Smart card experiment under NREGA. But, then we should have a common card for all purposes. Some political parties have put this in their agendas for the forthcoming elections in 2009.

On corruption and crimes he thought that India was much better. He referred to incidents of any entire Any Time Money (ATM) machine being taken away or waylaying of Trucks that carry goods (particularly medicines, as it is very costly). As a response to this the service providers have fitted these with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) so that they could be traced through satellites. In many cities of India, GPS are now being used by providers of some taxi services like MERU and MEGA CABS among others. Whether this has dented the incomes of the usual taxi drivers is to be seen.

Chalo Brazil!