Bangladesh 2015: Crossing miles...
Less well-known has been the resilience of the people and a continuous under-current of national efforts, conscious or otherwise, which sought to take the country out of the shadow of famine. Only in the aftermath of the devastating floods of 1998, when national and international observers predicted a new famine but were astonished at the rapidity and the comprehensiveness of the turnaround of the national economy, did the realization dawn how far ground realities had moved beyond the 70s imagery.
The outcome was not achieved in a day: the freeing of import restrictions on irrigation equipment in late 80s giving an immediate boost to agricultural production, the impetus to rural infrastructure building by LGED from late 80s, far-reaching reforms in the food distribution system in the early 90s, the impetus to non-crop agriculture in the early 90s and the robust growth of these sub-sectors in the late 90s, the consolidation of the micro-credit network over the 80s and 90s, consolidation of safety-net initiatives in late 90s, and above all, the robust engagement of ordinary citizenry on all available opportunities, local and international, have played a part in bringing Bangladesh out of the shadow of famine. The 2000 IFPRI publication of the same name merely put the professional seal on a quiet transformation which had been three decades in the making.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The paradox of poor imagery and impressive achievements has continued into more recent times. While new imageries of corruption, poor governance and confrontational politics bedevil the country, it is instructive to see what else has been achieved. Uniquely for a country facing an extremely vulnerable ecology, Bangladesh has established a credible record of sustained growth within a stable macroeconomic framework. Growth rates have inched upwards from a low of 1-2% in the 1970s to 3-4% in the 1980s to 4-5% in the 1990s to over 5% in the current decade. It is not only macro data which confirm a credible degree of growth dynamism. A recent study on local business in seven towns shows more than doubling of firm capital over the start-up amount. Annual remittance flows are in excess of 4 billion dollars.
Poverty too has declined by an average of a percentage point a year since early 1990s. The burden of seasonal poverty which covered many parts of the country even as late as 1990 had by 2005 become restricted to the ecologically vulnerable parts of northern districts. Achievements on social indicators have been equally noteworthy. At a comparatively low level of development, Bangladesh has earned the distinction of a major decline in population growth rate which currently stands at an annual rate of 1.7%. Progress on MDG-related health and education targets have been equally astounding: notwithstanding widespread poverty, the country has graduated to the medium human development group of countries by UNDP's ranking. Child mortality was halved during the 1990s, life expectancy has increased to 61 years, net primary enrolment went up significantly as did women's economic participation, gender parity has been achieved in primary and secondary education, and, major strides have been made on sanitation for all. Gender parity is not only at the level of students: the proportion of female primary teachers has risen from 2 percent at the time of independence to nearly 40 percent currently. On environment, depletion of tree cover has been reversed rising from seven to 15 percent through a focus on social forestry.
Infrastructurally, a focus on rural roads has succeeded in substantially banishing the curse of remoteness for the majority of villages. People have been on the move as never before and mobile telephony has revolutionized connectivity among ordinary citizens. Anti-poverty innovations such as micro-credit have gone on to win world renown. Vibrant non-government sectors as well as private sector bodies have worked side by side with the government to achieve the above. Against all odds, the democratic process has found roots though the road ahead is anything but assured.
It is true aggregate poverty rates remain dauntingly high. Pockets of extreme poverty persist. Inequality is a rising concern fuelled in particular by a quality divide in education. Women continue to face entrenched barriers and insecurities in their attempts to consolidate their gains on social and economic fronts. Governance weaknesses stand in the way of an acceleration in the growth process. But the discourse on poverty is no longer a discourse on the statistics of despair. Yesterday's dreams of sheer survival are increasingly giving way to new dreams of graduation, dreams which have already found roots in millions of hearts in the villages and in the towns, in the fields and in the factories, in offices and in homes across the length and breadth of the country.
Limits of economics
Bangladesh is already embarked on a journey of transformation. However, once the reality of economic dynamism is acknowledged, it is easy to see critical social and governance downsides which impinge on the quality and future of the change process. Three such downsides need to be highlighted.
Growth with insecurity: While the growth process is certainly a credible one, it appears to be imbued with various insecurities which ultimately detract from the equitable and unhindered enjoyment of the fruits of growth. The insecurities stem from poorly developing governance norms, a growing concentration of economic power, lack of effective planning oversight over a rapid urbanization process, and, institutional weaknesses of grievance redressal mechanisms.
Insecurity can lead to concrete economic loss but also often translate into higher risks for all categories of economic transactions. Even where opportunity frontiers are expanding, not all the available opportunities are accessed on account of the insecurities of public spaces. This is particularly true for women. Not surprisingly, quality of the criminal justice system and access to affordable justice have become as important determinants of how well the poor and marginalized groups are accommodated in the growth process as much as trade and investment policies.
Widening choice, limited influence: The poverty literature of the 70's was replete with references to analytical categories such as inter-locked markets and personal dependence. These described a situation where the poor households were enmeshed in inter-locking ties of dependence on land, labour and credit markets. Three decades on, this situation of personal dependence has significantly weakened. The spread of high-yield agriculture and all-weather road infrastructure has largely done away with seasonal dependence. Possibilities of quick migration have greatly expanded the choice horizon of the poor. The lives of women have also been touched: female mobility is a conspicuous phenomenon and women's reproductive burden too has gone down.
However, while choice horizons have expanded, the political leverage of the poor over power structures and decision-making processes shows little evidence of any significant change. The electoral process is increasingly biased towards big money. Local governments, where the political scope of the poor is somewhat greater, remain weak bodies. Press is independent but media ownership is narrowly controlled by business and political elites. Poor do retain a political potential in the spontaneous mobilisational politics around specific local demands or grievances. But such mobilisational efforts rarely translate into long-term transformation of the institutional processes of policy-making.
Education and the new inequalities: Historically, education has been the great ladder for social mobility for the rural and poorer classes in Bangladesh. However, while major strides have been made towards universal primary schooling in recent times, an emerging quality divide is rapidly eroding the social mobility potential of education. The quality divide manifests itself firstly, in the increasingly large differences in achievement indicators between urban and rural schools, secondly, in the consolidation of a private sector elite education stream which is largely unconnected to the national system, and thirdly, in the proliferation of a sub-stream of religious schools which offers opportunities for poor children but include no national curriculum on basic education. The quality divides are not only fuelling new economic inequalities but also creating fertile grounds for social conflicts and asocial behaviour. An associated concern is the narrowing of interpretive focus across the three streams of madrassah (religious) education which stands at odds with the generally more tolerant social practice of religion.
While it is unlikely that there will be any slowing down of the private sector elite education stream, the quality divides within the public education system particularly between metropolitan centres and village and rural town schools is clearly an area for effective policy engagement. A paradoxical barrier to such engagement is the MDG-influenced discourse emphasis on summary indicators such as enrolment rates. A shortcut mentality has come to prevail amongst politicians and administrators, and indeed even within the electorate, which unwittingly militates against a more holistic engagement on such critical issues as teaching quality, service ethics, class-room environment, performance monitoring and system development.
Key lessons
There are a number of lessons from the Bangladesh experience which are of relevance to the wider struggle against poverty.
A plurality of drivers: A key feature of the Bangladesh experience has been the plurality of drivers in the process of social change and the relative utilisation of the comparative strengths of each type of driver. Less a conscious strategy and more a contextual outcome, this multi-driver reality has provided the strengths for achievements so far but also pose new challenges in the task of scaling up efforts for accelerated poverty reduction. It is instructive to see how and when such a reality comes into play.
In a fundamental way, the state in Bangladesh has been jurisdictionally aggressive but functionally pragmatic. Jealous on issues of power, the state has nevertheless demonstrated a
propensity to co-exist with or even accommodate a progressive series of functional actors, most notably NGOs, private sector, local governments and the media. The sociology of this process has been little examined but some important lessons can be highlighted.
Take the NGO case. A rarely understood aspect of why NGOs came to be able to operate on such a social scale was the political intelligence of Grameen in defining its micro-credit clientele as informal groups. The emphasis on the category 'informal' served to create and nurture as it were a jurisdictionally-protected functional space in an institutional environment where the law on co-operatives had proved systematically inimical to viable growth of co-operatives. By terming them informal and thus rendering them outside the purview of co-operative law, micro-credit groups were able to develop their own rules of operation and eventually become
a mainstay of NGO growth, and indeed, of similar initiatives by state agencies themselves. The consolidation of the micro-credit sector subsequently has been marked by one of the more successful examples of government-NGO partnership in the form of PKSF, the apex micro-finance funding organization.
A different set of insights emerge from the case of the private sector. Current discourse, particularly in elite and donor circles, tends to equate private sector with capital-based big business having organized voices in policy and political arenas. While the emergence of such an actor has indeed been a major development of the last fifteen years particularly in response to economic liberalization from the early 1990s, equally important has been the larger and longer transition, both through incremental reforms and physical connectivity, to a market economy from the late 1970s and the deepening of entrepreneurship across micro, meso and macro levels of society.
The local government case too is instructive. The macro establishment, both the bureaucratic and the political components, is inherently opposed to upfront devolution ideas. This is well-reflected in the reluctance to empower local governments financially or jurisdictionally. However, on the functional imperative of attaining MDG targets, one can see a pragmatic policy of administrative incorporation of local government bodies in many of these tasks, the most recent being the campaign on sanitation for all.
Contextualizing MDG attainment:
The Bangladesh experience highlights the utility and significance of effective contextualization of MDG implementation. Two particular success areas have been in the adoption of social mobilization approaches and getting intermediate milestones right in the attainment of the goals of sanitation, child mortality, primary enrolment, gender parity, and tree cover. Social mobilizational approaches which creates effective partnerships of government, NGOs and local governments and which use campaign methods as well as specific incentives have brought major success in immunization, shunning of open space defecation, registering children in school including girl children, and spread of road-side forestry.
The example of sanitation merits a closer look. Key to success here has been the effective formulation of intermediate milestones. For much of the 1990s, the major transformation was a move from open space defecation to a fixed point defecation. Since then, the challenge has been to transform the fixed point hanging latrines into semi-sanitary ring-slab latrines. The coming challenge will be to transform the ring-slab latrines into water-sealed fully sanitary latrines. Interestingly, the ring-slab latrine has also proved to be a low-threshold technology. While the relevant state agency, i.e. Department of Public Health and Engineering supported by UNICEF, dispenses an ideal type costing around 30 dollars, local entrepreneurs have mushroomed who offer somewhat lower quality but usable products for as low as 7-8 dollars. The social mobilization approach too has innovated. The initial pre-occupation with technology gave way to an attack on cultural inhibitions and fostering appropriate behavioral norms such as washing of hands after use of latrines and ensuring that children too used the latrines. The mobilization of local government bodies has been particularly effective in addressing the issues of behavioral norms.
Example of the negative consequence of a failure to contextualize can also be cited. One of the areas where success has lagged is on the maternal mortality indicator. While there are deep-seated attitudinal problems here, one clear policy failure has been to promote skilled birth attendants (SBA) bypassing traditional birth attendants (TBA) located within the communities. The UNESCO emphasis on SBA rather than TBA bypassed the task of technically upgrading the culturally experienced TBAs and instead brought in inexperienced younger women who found less demand for their services. There are not only technical skill issues but also problems associated with superstitions and lack of knowledge. The contextualization challenge is also innovating on local monitoring systems utilizing existing institutional capacities eg. local health centres, local government bodies, NGOs, for effective pre-natal care. Another failure at contextualization is to project the anesthetic program as a case of specialists whereas an effective short-term training could enable locally-based health workers to assist on he matter.
Women's agency: 1st round victories, 2nd round challenges: Women in Bangladesh have won important first round victories of visibility and mobility. Female gains in primary and secondary education, access to birth control measures and micro-credit compare favourably with the situation in other developing countries. Social attitudes looking positively on women's economic participation too have become near universal. However, beyond these first-round victories of visibility and mobility lie new constraints and new areas of strategic challenge. Entrenched patriarchal attitudes and insecurities of public spaces serve to inhibit fuller engagement by women with the unfolding opportunities. At issue too are social attitudes which put low priority on maternal health. While women's economic participation has expanded, female labour productivity remains very poor.
A personality revolution: Perhaps the over-riding story of Bangladesh is one not found in the statistics at all. The poor of Bangladesh have undergone something of a personality revolution and become more assertive, pro-active towards opportunities, clearer on life-goals. This has not happened in a day. The egalitarian and democratic aspirations which underpinned the attainment of independence, a resilient outlook born of a continuous struggle with the vagaries of nature, the demonstration effect of mobility and livelihood opportunities, the return of competitive politics, all have played their role. The social reality may not have lost its oppressive features but the poor men and women of rural and urban Bangladesh are new protagonists on the scene and societal outcomes are very much open.
The Bangladesh experience also holds a number of cautionary lessons.
Politics and the perils of weak system development: The onset of parliamentary democracy in 1991 in Bangladesh has introduced new challenges of system development with implications both for the consolidation of a democratic polity and state capacity to address developmental goals. In many ways, the novelty of these challenges is not sufficiently appreciated by many who end up prescribing feel-good governance solutions. The administrative class has far deeper roots in the exercise of state-power than the political class a majority of whom assume offices with little or no training in statecraft or policy-making. A healthy transition on the politician-administrator interface has been anything but assured. Politicians often over-reach to overcome a sense of insecurity while administrators resist system change which could lead to a more productive distribution of administrative power. Such tensions have been compounded by authoritarian tendencies which have deep roots in the exercise of state-power and which are too readily adopted by democratic power-holders.
Two clear perils have manifested themselves: jurisdictional over-reach by parliamentarians, and, a 'spoils without standards' approach to administrative and other appointments. Unaided by any system development on their 'job description', MPs want to dominate all public institutions within their constituency, be it local government bodies, educational institutions or central government agencies. At the other end, appointments have narrowly come to be viewed as spoils of victory but an increasingly partisan political environment has neglected any system development which could inject a sense of standards within the process. Both of these systemic perils are compounded by a political culture of confrontation which shows little signs of abating.
Reversibility of achievements: A different category of peril is the reversibility of achievements. One of the notable success area has been in birth control. However, since the late 1990s, there has been an emerging concern on the plateauing of the total fertility rate (TFR) particularly among the poorer strata. Increased importance of temporary methods over permanent methods in family planning, health sector reform in the late 1990s which promoted a one-stop service centre in place of domiciliary (door-to-door) services may have contributed to the observed TFR plateauing. The policy lesson here is the importance of appropriate time sequencing of the intervention: clearly, an end to the social mobilisational approach was premature.
Reversibility has also occurred in the area of access to safe water. The near-universal access achieved via the spread of tube-wells has now come under question due to arsenic contamination of ground-water. The strategy is now having to be wholly re-oriented towards arsenic decontamination and a switch to use of surface water.
The case of rural electrification provides another example of the danger of reversibility. Rural Electrification Board (REB), once touted as a role model, has fallen victim to a combination of inconsistent donor support, political interference, and policy failure on power generation. (First part ends)