Date:25/01/2009
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2009/01/25/stories/2009012550090300.htm Back Magazine
The war against begging
BY HARSH MANDER
Being destitute in our country has been made a crime. And the punishment is often inhumane…
The criminalising of begging is a relatively recent colonial construction. Traditional societies have been much more tolerant of people who live by begging…
From time to time, governments declare war on beggars. These despised and dispensable individuals, who live customarily by alms, can never hope to win a battle against such a powerful adversary as the State. Instead, they deploy their own time-tested weapons: a stubborn, if fatalist, resolve to survive, as they have against so many other odds, and a capacity to absorb every humiliation. They just lie low, bide out their time and return eventually to their shamed vocation. No other paths are open to them.
The war on beggars is engined by enormous middle class hostility to the begrimed men, women and children in rags, often with matted hair, disabilities and sores, who stretch out their palms peremptorily demanding our charity. The middle class resent the way these illegitimate denizens crowd decent public spaces like cinemas, traffic light intersections, shopping arcades and places of worship, wheedling them annoyingly for alms. They are embarrassed by their “in-the-face” poverty, and convinced that they are lazy, unwilling to earn an honest day’s work, and members of dangerous gangs which kidnap and maim children. They are the “undeserving poor”, who must be driven away or locked up for the larger benefit of decent, law-abiding citizens. In these beliefs, they are supported by the law, police, courts, welfare departments and the media.
Mere impediments?
The most recent skirmish in this sporadic warfare is a recent notification by the Delhi Traffic Police under the Motor Vehicles Act, which slaps fines of Rs. 1,000 on those who give alms to people begging at traffic lights. Beggars are therefore seen not as a spectacular human tragedy but an impediment to traffic. This view is endorsed by courts. In response to what was claimed to be a “public interest” litigation filed by a group of advocates — which characterised beggars as “the ugly face of the nation’s capital” which cause, among other sinister things, “road rage” — the learned judges of the Delhi High Court agreed that beggars should be removed from Delhi as they “obstruct the smooth flow of traffic”. The Delhi Social Welfare Department holds those who give money to beggars guilty of even more than delaying traffic. In an advertisement blitz last year in many national newspapers, it claimed dramatically that those who give beggars “alms may cause traffic jams, accidents, illiteracy, inconvenience, unemployment, biri, cigarette, alcohol, bhang, ganja, charas, heroin… mandrax, robbery, rape, sex, theft, murder, prostitution, handicapped, assault, hooliganism” and then even more darkly “slums, poverty, debt, ignorance, aggression, encroachment, molestation, mugging…”
Prejudiced perceptions
Hostility against beggars derives from the conviction that there are dangerous beggar mafias and gangs, which abduct children, cut off their limbs and blind them, and then use them for begging. These beliefs are deemed to be self-evident truths, requiring no evidence or verification. The Delhi Police was asked by the High Court to investigate allegations of such mafias, and it finally reported on oath to the court that the Delhi Crime Branch has found no evidence of such mafias. In my own extensive engagement with homeless populations for many years, including those who are in begging, I too have not encountered such mafias. This does not mean there is no coercion on children to beg. Children often beg because their parents and guardians send them out to beg, or simply because they do not feed them. They may do this because they are destitute, such as single homeless mothers, or when parents are addicted to substances, very ill and disabled, or when children have no responsible adult protection.
Coercion by adult guardians to beg must be dealt with in the same way as other forms of child labour are best combated, not by criminalising the parents or children, but by enforcing the fundamental right to education, which for homeless street children requires a network of hundreds of open residential schools in all cities. And if begging mafias do indeed exist in any city, it does not require any special law. Section 363A of the Indian Penal Code, for instance, specifically deals with the kidnapping and maiming of children for begging.
The notion that begging is a crime derives not just from fears of begging mafias, but also from the conviction that begging is the first resort of the lazy poor. It assumes that most homeless people beg as a matter of choice. But as a recent study by PUCL-CSDS in Delhi found, only nine per cent homeless adults beg. Remarkably, we have found this ratio to apply even to street children, who prefer work — picking rags, serving tea in eateries or even vocations on the dark side of the law — to begging, except the very small, rarely more than 10 per cent of the total. The PUCL-CSDS study, however, found that nearly 23 per cent homeless people are able to find work only in Delhi for barely 15 days a month, while another 33 per cent get work for anything between 16 to 25 days. These are the rare able-bodied people who beg, although the large majority of adult beggars are disabled, infirm, or with stigmatised ailments like leprosy and mental illness which debar them from work. My own experience has consistently been that when people who beg are offered dignified alternative work, the overwhelming majority welcome this.
The criminalising of begging is a relatively recent colonial construction. Traditional societies have been much more tolerant of people who live by begging, and some traditions like Buddhism in fact valorise begging by holy men because it is believed to teach them humility, and enables them to break away from all forms of material bondage. It was in the 1920s that begging was first declared a crime in British India, and the law was updated as the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act in 1959, and extended to 18 States including Delhi. This law provides for the jailing up to three years in special “beggars’ courts” of all people caught begging, which can be extended to 10 years in case of second and repeated “offences”. The definition under this law of beggars includes not just seeking of alms, but also traditional artists, as “singing, dancing, fortune-telling, performing or offering any article for sale”, all of which are deemed as offences under this Act. The definition of begging even includes simply “having no visible means of subsistence”. In other words, it makes destitution a crime, punishable by incarceration. Since many beggars suffer from leprosy and mental illness, it implicitly criminalises these ailments as well.
The operation of this patently anti-poor law is even more merciless and problematic. Teams of policemen and women with lay aides and armed with sticks, conduct periodic drives against homeless populations, rounding up men, women and children, not those who are actually found begging, but mostly those whose only crime is that they are manifestly penniless and unwashed. They are beaten into waiting vehicles, and it is usually only the most nimble street urchins who manage to escape. They are then presented before specially designated magistrates of beggars’ courts, who summarily enquire whether those rounded up, are people who live by begging. We have observed the functioning of these courts for several years, and found that it is very rare for elementary procedures of law to be applied in these courts. A person should be deemed innocent unless proved otherwise, and the duty lies with the State to produce evidence of guilt. However, for those charged with the “crime” of begging, usually little or no evidence is produced or even sought, and large numbers are sentenced by judges on whimsical considerations such as of their obviously extremely impoverished appearance.
The litigation in the Delhi High Court seeks not reform but more extensive application of this law. The court has therefore directed the establishment of mobile beggars’ courts to facilitate larger application of this law. The Director of Social Welfare complained to the court that beggars’ court magistrates were too lenient in applying the law against offenders. Humane voices of dissent are rare, such as of Justice Sarin, who maintained that detaining beggars was “nothing short of dehumanising them and they should be let of after an admonition.”
Sub-human conditions
People who are so deemed to be guilty of begging are then sentenced to incarceration in certified beggars’ homes. I have visited these in many cities, and found them typically to be in far worse conditions of disrepair and sanitation than ordinary jails which house others charged with more mainstream crimes. Jails in India have been documented to be sub-human habitations, therefore the state of beggars’ homes which house the most powerless, destitute and stigmatised people can well be imagined. Residents of beggars’ homes are rarely allowed even to move out of almost bare dimly lit dormitories, which reek of excreta, stale air and unwashed bodies. Some die during incarceration, of cholera and malnourishment. In theory, the incarcerated “beggars” are to be prepared for alternative vocations, but I have rarely found these in practice in any beggars’ homes I have visited.
The poor in our cities are more than mere impediments to traffic and embarrassments. The Delhi government is worried about the adverse image of India which overseas visitors will take away in the 2010 Commonwealth Games if they find beggars on the streets of a city which aspires to be what it describes as “world class”. Is this aspirational city one which criminalises its most destitute citizens, drives them away or locks them up? Or is it a city which truly cares?
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Struggling to learn
Date:18/02/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/02/18/stories/2009021855921000.htm Back
Struggling to learn
A. De, J. Drèze, M. Samson, and A.K. Shiva Kumar
There have been changes for the better in the schooling system over the last decade. But the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children and we must stop tolerating this.
How would you feel if half of the buses and trains that are supposed to be running on a particular day were cancelled at random — every day of the year? Quite upset, surely (unless you can afford to fly). Yet a similar disruption in the daily lives of children has been quietly happening for years on end, without any fuss: in rural north India, on an average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the primary schools.
Positive changes
In 1996-1997, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) team surveyed primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In 2006, we revisited the same areas to find out whether and how the schooling situation had changed over ten years. There were many signs of positive change.
First, school enrolment rates have risen sharply, for example, from 80 to 95 per cent in the age group of 6-12 years. For the first time, the goal of universal school participation is within reach.
Secondly, social disparities in school enrolment have considerably narrowed. For instance, the gap between boys and girls has virtually disappeared at the primary level. Enrolment rates among Scheduled Caste and Muslim children are very close to the sample average – about 95 per cent in each case. Enrolment among Scheduled Tribe children, however, is lower at 89 per cent.
Thirdly, the schooling infrastructure has improved. For instance, the proportion of schools with at least two pucca rooms went up from 26 to 84 per cent between 1996 and 2006. Nearly three-fourths of all primary schools now have drinking water facilities. Toilets have been constructed in over 60 per cent of all schools.
Fourthly, school incentives are reaching many more. To illustrate, free uniforms were provided in barely 10 per cent of primary schools in 1996, but this went up to more than half in 2006. Similarly, the proportion of schools where free textbooks are distributed was less than half in 1996, but close to 100 per cent in 2006.
Fifthly, cooked mid-day meals have been introduced in primary schools – they were in place in 84 per cent of the sample schools. The bulk of the gap was in Bihar, where mid-day meals were still in the process of being initiated at the time of the survey.
Economic growth, rising parental literacy, and the rapid expansion of rural infrastructure and connectivity have certainly facilitated these achievements. But public initiatives such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Supreme Court orders on mid-day meals, and active campaigns for the right to education have also made a major contribution to this new momentum for the universalisation of elementary education.
Idle classrooms
Having said this, we must highlight the fact that the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children. To start with, school enrolment does not mean regular attendance. Almost everywhere, children’s attendance as noted in the school register was far below enrolment. Actual attendance, as observed by field investigators, was even lower.
Further, classroom activity levels are very low. One reason for this is the shortage of teachers. Despite a major increase in the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. The proportion of schools with only one teacher appointed has remained much the same – about 12 per cent. In 2006, an additional 21 per cent of schools were functioning as single teacher schools on the day of the survey, due to teacher absenteeism. Aggravating the situation is the fact that teachers often come late and leave early. Even when they are present, they are not necessarily teaching. In half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all when the investigators arrived – in 1996 as well as in 2006.
Even in the active classrooms, pupil achievements were very poor. Teaching methods are dominated by mindless rote learning, for example, chanting endless mathematical tables or reciting without comprehension. It is therefore not surprising that children learn little in most schools. For instance, we found that barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5.
No quick fix
Some quick fixes have been tried, but with limited results. One of them is the appointment of "contract teachers," often seen by State governments as a means of expanding teacher cadres at relatively low cost. In the government primary schools surveyed, contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers. Owing to the contractual nature of their appointment, and the fact that they are local residents selected by the Gram Panchayat, these contract teachers were expected to be more accountable than permanent teachers. This has not happened. The inadequate training and low salaries of contract teachers affect the quality of their work. In some schools, they were certainly more active than the permanent staff; but not in others where they were protected by their connections with influential people in the village.
Another way of improving school performance, related to the first, is to promote community involvement and decentralised school management. Most of the schools in our sample had a Village Education Committee or some other committee of this sort. In most cases, these committees have helped to improve the school infrastructure, select contract teachers, and supervise midday meals. However, they have been much less effective in improving the levels of teaching activity. Power in most committees rests with the President (generally the sarpanch) and the Secretary (generally the head teacher), who need to be held accountable in the first place. With the exception of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), representation of parents in these committees tends to be nominal, and their active involvement is rare. The survey found numerous instances where committee members did not even know that their name had been included in the committee.
This does not detract from the importance of community participation in reviving classroom activity. But active and informed community participation requires much more than token committees, especially in India’s divided and unequal social context.
A third quick fix is greater reliance on private schools. The proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often creates an impression that this is the solution. A closer look at the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’ ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very different from government schools. Their success in attracting children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards; some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for example, with misleading claims of being "English medium." Further, a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools). Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of ’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of class, caste, and gender in Indian society.
Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80 per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do something about classroom activity levels in government schools, instead of giving up on them.
The future
The title of the last chapter of the PROBE Report, published in 1999, was "Change is Possible." In many ways, this assertion has come true. Much has indeed changed – for the better – in the schooling system during the last ten years or so. The need of the hour is to consolidate the momentum of positive change and extend it to new areas – particularly those of classroom activity and quality education. The forthcoming Right to Education Act may help. But the first step is to stop tolerating the gross injustice that is being done to Indian children today. Wasting their time day after day in idle classrooms is nothing short of a crime.
(The authors are members of the PROBE team.)
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Struggling to learn
A. De, J. Drèze, M. Samson, and A.K. Shiva Kumar
There have been changes for the better in the schooling system over the last decade. But the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children and we must stop tolerating this.
How would you feel if half of the buses and trains that are supposed to be running on a particular day were cancelled at random — every day of the year? Quite upset, surely (unless you can afford to fly). Yet a similar disruption in the daily lives of children has been quietly happening for years on end, without any fuss: in rural north India, on an average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the primary schools.
Positive changes
In 1996-1997, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) team surveyed primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In 2006, we revisited the same areas to find out whether and how the schooling situation had changed over ten years. There were many signs of positive change.
First, school enrolment rates have risen sharply, for example, from 80 to 95 per cent in the age group of 6-12 years. For the first time, the goal of universal school participation is within reach.
Secondly, social disparities in school enrolment have considerably narrowed. For instance, the gap between boys and girls has virtually disappeared at the primary level. Enrolment rates among Scheduled Caste and Muslim children are very close to the sample average – about 95 per cent in each case. Enrolment among Scheduled Tribe children, however, is lower at 89 per cent.
Thirdly, the schooling infrastructure has improved. For instance, the proportion of schools with at least two pucca rooms went up from 26 to 84 per cent between 1996 and 2006. Nearly three-fourths of all primary schools now have drinking water facilities. Toilets have been constructed in over 60 per cent of all schools.
Fourthly, school incentives are reaching many more. To illustrate, free uniforms were provided in barely 10 per cent of primary schools in 1996, but this went up to more than half in 2006. Similarly, the proportion of schools where free textbooks are distributed was less than half in 1996, but close to 100 per cent in 2006.
Fifthly, cooked mid-day meals have been introduced in primary schools – they were in place in 84 per cent of the sample schools. The bulk of the gap was in Bihar, where mid-day meals were still in the process of being initiated at the time of the survey.
Economic growth, rising parental literacy, and the rapid expansion of rural infrastructure and connectivity have certainly facilitated these achievements. But public initiatives such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Supreme Court orders on mid-day meals, and active campaigns for the right to education have also made a major contribution to this new momentum for the universalisation of elementary education.
Idle classrooms
Having said this, we must highlight the fact that the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children. To start with, school enrolment does not mean regular attendance. Almost everywhere, children’s attendance as noted in the school register was far below enrolment. Actual attendance, as observed by field investigators, was even lower.
Further, classroom activity levels are very low. One reason for this is the shortage of teachers. Despite a major increase in the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. The proportion of schools with only one teacher appointed has remained much the same – about 12 per cent. In 2006, an additional 21 per cent of schools were functioning as single teacher schools on the day of the survey, due to teacher absenteeism. Aggravating the situation is the fact that teachers often come late and leave early. Even when they are present, they are not necessarily teaching. In half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all when the investigators arrived – in 1996 as well as in 2006.
Even in the active classrooms, pupil achievements were very poor. Teaching methods are dominated by mindless rote learning, for example, chanting endless mathematical tables or reciting without comprehension. It is therefore not surprising that children learn little in most schools. For instance, we found that barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5.
No quick fix
Some quick fixes have been tried, but with limited results. One of them is the appointment of "contract teachers," often seen by State governments as a means of expanding teacher cadres at relatively low cost. In the government primary schools surveyed, contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers. Owing to the contractual nature of their appointment, and the fact that they are local residents selected by the Gram Panchayat, these contract teachers were expected to be more accountable than permanent teachers. This has not happened. The inadequate training and low salaries of contract teachers affect the quality of their work. In some schools, they were certainly more active than the permanent staff; but not in others where they were protected by their connections with influential people in the village.
Another way of improving school performance, related to the first, is to promote community involvement and decentralised school management. Most of the schools in our sample had a Village Education Committee or some other committee of this sort. In most cases, these committees have helped to improve the school infrastructure, select contract teachers, and supervise midday meals. However, they have been much less effective in improving the levels of teaching activity. Power in most committees rests with the President (generally the sarpanch) and the Secretary (generally the head teacher), who need to be held accountable in the first place. With the exception of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), representation of parents in these committees tends to be nominal, and their active involvement is rare. The survey found numerous instances where committee members did not even know that their name had been included in the committee.
This does not detract from the importance of community participation in reviving classroom activity. But active and informed community participation requires much more than token committees, especially in India’s divided and unequal social context.
A third quick fix is greater reliance on private schools. The proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often creates an impression that this is the solution. A closer look at the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’ ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very different from government schools. Their success in attracting children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards; some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for example, with misleading claims of being "English medium." Further, a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools). Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of ’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of class, caste, and gender in Indian society.
Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80 per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do something about classroom activity levels in government schools, instead of giving up on them.
The future
The title of the last chapter of the PROBE Report, published in 1999, was "Change is Possible." In many ways, this assertion has come true. Much has indeed changed – for the better – in the schooling system during the last ten years or so. The need of the hour is to consolidate the momentum of positive change and extend it to new areas – particularly those of classroom activity and quality education. The forthcoming Right to Education Act may help. But the first step is to stop tolerating the gross injustice that is being done to Indian children today. Wasting their time day after day in idle classrooms is nothing short of a crime.
(The authors are members of the PROBE team.)
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Sunday, February 8, 2009
"I live smelling death, but it is fine."
'My life cleaning Delhi's sewers'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7872770.stm
India may be spending billions on its high tech space programme but its spending on sewers is decidedly low tech and deadly, reports the BBC's Rupa Jha.
I will never forget the sight of that thin short man, wearing nothing but cotton underpants, strapped into a harness arrangement, disappearing down into a dark manhole beneath the streets of my home city.
The diameter of the hole was so small that he bruised himself while slipping down.
Inside was a dark well, full of sewage, with giant cockroaches sticking to the wall.
Before he climbed in I asked him his name. I was really surprised when he answered flamboyantly, "Rewa Ram - Son of Khanjan."
I thought: "He must be educated, seems to speak some English." But when I asked him, he said: "No. I'm a complete illiterate."
When I looked down that hole into the drains of Delhi, the smell was overwhelming. Down below, he was coughing, trying hard to keep breathing.
He was struggling to clear a blockage with his bare hands.
Dizzying smell
All of a sudden, a pipe protruding into the drain above his head started spewing out water and human faeces that poured over his body.
I began to feel dizzy just looking down into this mess.
My nostrils were filled with that obnoxious smell, a bit like of rotten eggs. I wanted to vomit. I felt weak and wanted to run away from the smell.
I was born and brought up in India and for the past 15 years I have lived in Delhi, the capital city of one of the world's most rapidly growing economies. I am a member of the growing, upwardly mobile middle class.
I suppose I represent the "roaring Tiger" India, but I am regularly shocked and surprised when I see the struggle for dignity that so many face here.
Literally beneath the glitter of the big city lies a vast network of these dark drains, where so many Rewa Rams are struggling with toxic gases and human waste. They suffer disease and discrimination in return for cleaning the city's sewage system.
Deadly job
Rewa Ram is just one of thousands of sanitation workers in India who work hard to keep the cities, towns and villages clean.
Most of them come from the community of lower caste Dalits as they are known, or untouchables.
Health experts working in the field told me most of these workers would die before their retirement because of the poor health and safety conditions they work in. Their life expectancy is thought to be around 10 years less than the national average.
Dr Ashish Mittal, an occupational health consultant, did a survey of the working conditions of sewage workers.
He told me most of the workers suffer from chronic diseases, respiratory problems, skin disorders and allergies. He said they are constantly troubled by headaches and eye infections. I am not surprised.
Rewa Ram was pulled out when he started feeling dizzy from the toxic fumes in the manhole.
They were thick with a mixture of methane and hydrogen sulphide, both considered potentially fatal by the health experts.
He needed water to clean himself, just a splash on his face could have made him feel better.
His colleagues started banging on doors of the rich neighbourhood where he was working. Nobody opened their gate.
Ancient sewers
Human rights activists and trade unionists I have talked to ask a simple question. If the government of India can spend billions on its space programme, if Delhi can reach all its targets for the beautification of the city in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, including an underground train system, then why can't the sewage system be modernised?
Why does it still rely on sending practically naked men down below the streets to clear the drains with their bare hands, being exposed to noxious gases which could take them to a premature grave?
I put these questions to the authorities.
The reply? "We are trying our best."
It did not really feel good enough after what I had seen.
The law courts have passed several orders banning human beings from going into the sewage system unless it is an emergency.
In Delhi it looks as if every day is an emergency in the sewers.
Smell of death
I asked Rewa Ram, still breathless and covered with the sewage from the drain: "How do you feel about having to do this work?"
With folded arms, he replied: "I am not educated, I come from a very poor family of untouchables. What else can I expect?
"At least I have a government job and I am able to feed my children. I get into this hell everyday but then this is my job.
"I live smelling death, but it is fine."
But is it fine? Why should he expect so little just because he comes from a lower caste and is not educated?
How can our so-called civil society be so indifferent to the millions like him? I, for one, am left feeling guilty.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Do you have the right kind of badge for WEF in Davos?
Rules and pecking orders at Davos
| By Stephanie Flanders BBC Economics editor, in Davos |
The World Economic Forum in Davos is supposed to be a gathering of the elite. A time when the world's movers and shakers go to the Swiss mountains to talk about being on top of the world.
It is a club. And with any club, the rule is that you want it to be as small as possible while still including you.
The knack of the organisers for exploiting this weakness of human nature fits with everything you have ever heard about the Swiss.
I am told that the private companies that bankroll the event find it ruinously expensive to bring anyone other than the boss. He or she gets in fairly cheap because it helps Davos to be full of number ones.
You pay a lot more to bring your number twos and threes. They are worth less to the gathering, but the organisers know they are the ones who will really, really want to come.
The result? A lot of money for the World Economic Forum, but also a lot of people in the club.
This year the "select few" going to Davos ran to more than 2,500.
Yet Davos has an answer to that too.
It is all in the colour of your badge. That tells you where you are in the pecking order, in the Forum's favoured phrase, your level of "guestdom".
And trust me, the powers that be have a very shrewd idea of who is up and who is down.
White badges mean you are a full participant.
If you are a journalist that means the holy grail of being able to wander the conference centre, collecting bigwigs - and their mobile phone numbers - from the hallways, like so many hanging fruit.
Reporters with orange badges can only lurk in the background, like the second-class citizens they are.
A purple badge with a red stripe means you are "with" someone - someone like Tony Blair or George Soros.
Plain purple or green spells even higher levels of the elite elite. But I think you have to be a former president to even know what they mean.
The upshot is that thousands of self-important people can spend four days living cheek by jowl in a tiny ski resort and still come away with their egos intact - assuming no-one asked the president of Mexico to talk on a panel with fewer than two other heads of state.
Anthropologists would have a field day, if they had a chance of getting in.
Changing priorities
But at this year's gathering of the tribe, even cursory observation would have revealed a change of mood.
For all the careful gradations of colour and access, there was no escaping the feeling that all these titans of global capitalism were in the same boat, and that boat was going down.
Five minutes from the conference centre there was even a concrete basement where the likes of Richard Branson and the CEO of Nike turned off their mobile phones, wrapped their heads in a bandage, and spent an hour "living the life of a refugee". The gift bags said it all.
A few years ago they were giving away state-of-the-art electronic organisers. This year there was a bargain basement pedometer and a request that you walk around the village instead of taking the limo.
There were sideshows to distract the condemned.
A neuro-biologist turned Buddhist monk told the participants that it was time "to take a more altruistic world view".
The Forum's own group of Young Global Leaders held an event declaring it was time to "De-Worm the World".
The UN sponsors of the "refugee run", as it was called, said it was based on the idea that you only understand a man if you walk a mile in his shoes.
It was probably less than a mile, but for many at Davos this year I suspect that pretending to wear a refugee's shoes was a pleasant break from actually wearing their own.
Reversal of fortunes
Back inside the conference hall, there was no badge to escape the gloom about the global economy.
And in the end, perhaps for the first time in its 40-year history, the starry list of participants told you less about the state of the world than the list of those who stayed at home.
Most of the world's leading bankers did not show. Those that did come only came out at night.
The financiers were top dogs here even two years ago. Now even Davos man considers them the lowest of the low.
Governments and their old-fashioned rescue packages are back on top. The American government most of all.
None of the key players in the new Obama administration made the trip. They were too busy saving the world.
The grandees at Davos want them to succeed. But they know that in the world economy that comes out of this, they may no longer have the plum spot.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7871994.stm
Another Bizarre thing - Proud to be Indian? I doubt it..
Sri Ram Sena's bizarre V-Day threat
Vicky Nanjappa | February 05, 2009 | 16:54 IST
story from Rediff.com
Vicky Nanjappa | February 05, 2009 | 16:54 IST
story from Rediff.com
Unfazed by the outrage over its attack on a Mangalore pub, the self-styled moral brigade of the Sri Ram Sena on Thursday threatened to forcibly "marry off" couples dating in public on Valentine's Day.
Addressing a press conference at Bengaluru on Thursday, the Sena founder Pramod Muthalik said that if girls and guys could date in the open then he sees no harm in them being married off.
Muthalik said that his activists would hold protests at hotels, hostels and colleges where Valentine's Day celebrations are held.
Muthalik announced that he had formed five teams to go around the city on Valentine's Day. "Our team members would have a video camera and also a tumeric stub. If our team member finds anyone dating, we will force them to get married . We will take the couple to the sub-registrar's office and the marriage will be solemnised," he said.
He termed Valentine's Day as anti-Indian culture and urged educational institutions and the police to help discourage this. "There is a need to safeguard our culture and we will do everything in the book to ensure that this happens," he added.
The Shri Ram Sena has also submitted a memorandum to the Bengaluru city police commissioner in which they have sought help to ban Valentines Day. In the memorandum, the Sena has also assured of a peaceful protest on Valentine's Day, if it is celebrated in Bengaluru.
Muthalik, however, said that the entire operation would be a peaceful and that they will take the help of the police. When questioned what he would do if the government refused to support his initiative, he said that they would think about it if the government let them down.
"I have directed all members not to intimidate the students and make them understand about our culture," he said.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is non-committal on whether it would support the Sena but added that they were against the celebration of Valentine's Day as it was not part of Indian culture.
The police however say that they are geared up for February 14 and added that all measures will be undertaken to ensure that the city is peaceful.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2009/feb/05sri-ram-senas-bizarre-vday-threat.htm
No kissing please, we are Indians : Bizzare...
No kissing please, we are Indians
A court in India recently dismissed criminal proceedings against a couple who were arrested for kissing. The BBC's Soutik Biswas examines India's tangled relationship with the kiss.
Look before you kiss in India. A smooch can get you in serious trouble in the world's largest democracy.
Earlier this week, a court in Delhi - ah, of all places, in the "happening" capital! - threw out the case against a young, married couple who were picked up by police allegedly for kissing near a railway station.
The kiss has been under threat in India for as long as I can remember.
Two years ago, an over-enthusiastic Richard Gere had the riot act read to him when he swooped down and clasped actress Shilpa Shetty and planted several kisses on her. The two, by the way, were at an event to tell lorry drivers about safe sex.
News television hyperventilated, serving up titillation and tattle in equal measure on the serial-kissing Hollywood actor. Some protesters burnt effigies of Gere; others shouted slogans demanding the death of the hapless Shetty. It took the Supreme Court to suspend an arrest warrant against Gere, and obscenity charges against Shetty.
Much earlier, in the early 1990s, I remember the public outrage after Nelson Mandela kissed actress Shabana Azmi when he came visiting.
Clueless
And when India's usually benign tabloids splashed grainy mobile phone pictures of a Bollywood couple - they were dating at that time - allegedly kissing some years ago, the star diva fretted and fumed and began legal proceedings against the paper.
Even marriage sometimes doesn't give you the licence to smooch - an Israeli couple was fined $22 by a court for kissing after getting married in a Hindu ceremony in Rajasthan. The priests had taken umbrage.
For clues to why Indians appear to be clueless about kissing, listen to a model-actress Udita Goswami.
"I have pledged that in any of my forthcoming films I will not give a lip kiss," she told a newspaper.
"I am not comfortable doing that. I belong to a traditional family and my values do not allow me to indulge in such acts."
But a kissing famine has led to a curious demand for it in the dark confines of the movie theatre - and become a passport to fame for some.
A Bollywood starlet's film some years ago was hyped as one in which she had kissed her dazed looking co-star 17 times. (It so happened that the kisses were the only memorable thing about the film.)
Since then kiss-starved audiences have been counting the starlet's kisses in all her films - one later film of hers was advertised as one with "99 slaps - 1 kiss" so that fans were not entirely disappointed.
A Bollywood dance girl kicked up a storm when she was smooched in front of the cameras by a little-known singer at his birthday party. She hummed and hawed about the "inappropriateness" of the kiss and the media and the kiss-hungry republic lapped it up.
India's ancient past is littered with kisses, if literary work is any evidence.
'Westoxication'
Vedic Sanskrit texts, dating back to 1500 BC, apparently contain the first mention of a kiss in writing. (A caveat from a researcher: "This does not mean that nobody kissed before then, and it doesn't mean that Indians were first to kiss.")
India's famous epic poem and one of the world's oldest literary works, The Mahabharata, composed sometime between 3000 BC and 1500 BC, mentions kissing.
The Radhika Santwanam, an collection of erotic poetry from a courtesan in a court in southern India, from the mid-18th century, describes a kiss in fairly graphic detail: Move on her lips/The tip of your tongue/Do not scare her/By biting hard.
And in Kama Sutra, the definitive epic of amour, the scholar Vatsayana, devotes a chapter on the art of kissing. He painstakingly details some 30 types of kisses - straight, bent, turned, press, nominal and throbbing are some among them.
And Richard Gere, please take note, Indian cinema's first kiss dates back to 1933 in a film called Karma where the actress is lip-locked with actor and real life husband Himanshu Rai for some four minutes. Four minutes!
So why does India have this tortured and twisted relationship with the kiss?
Some people play it down, saying those who protest belong to a "loony fringe" of moral fundamentalists. Others say it is a hangover from tradition in an ancient civilisation. Still others say many Indians long for traditional mores as Western consumerist values swamp the country.
Or is it a response to what the Iranian intellectual Jalal-e-Ahmad called "Westoxication" - superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West?
Do some Indians - cutting across class - actually rail against such "Westoxication" when they are revulsed by couples kissing? "Looked at closely," says leading Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta, "revulsion against Westoxication is principally an aesthetic sneer and not a full blooded call for a return to tradition".
Or is the rage against the kiss born out of a hypocritical morality that equates sex with sin and desire with guilt? As sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan tells me, "India is the only country which has a body police and not a thought police".
There must be some truth in all these theories.
So, torn between tradition and seductive imported values, Indians will continue to grapple with the Big Question - to kiss or not to kiss? And, as a friend quips, "When we do kiss, we don't tell".
Sunday, February 1, 2009
What Is Education For?
What Is Education For?
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel's words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."
The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival - the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe's Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes' epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we're losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:
"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities.... In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.
A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four proposals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisciplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel's words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."
The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival - the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe's Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes' epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we're losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:
"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities.... In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.
A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four proposals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisciplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"
Friday, January 30, 2009
Why they love Narendra Modi
Why they love Narendra Modi
http://in.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/31why-they-love-modi.htm
Latha Jishnu | BS | January 31, 2009 | 11:20 IST
http://in.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/31why-they-love-modi.htm
Latha Jishnu | BS | January 31, 2009 | 11:20 IST
This is a country of nit-pickers. Here was Vibrant Gujarat announcing another huge haul from its latest investment spectacle when critics went into overdrive. The figures were exaggerated and most of the money had not really come in, they carped.
Reporters, celebrity columnists and political rivals quoted official statistics from varied sources and Right to Information disclosures to show up the claims of the Narendra Modi government.
Some became extremely shrill. Remember, said a Congress spokesman, how well industrialists adored Hitler. There were also references to the 2002 pogrom which took the lives of around 2,000 Muslims. But industry couldn't have cared less. This year's extravaganza, with even more of the cream of Indian business in adulatory attendance, netted promises of investments amounting to Rs 12,00,000 crore (Rs 12,000 billion) -- a colossal tribute to Modi's reputation for ruthless efficiency.
His is not the discreet charm of the accommodating politician but the irresistible attraction of a strongman who delivers. The big draw appears to be the way Modi functions: red tape has been practically banished and government departments take their cue from the chief executive.
Thus, clearances come at breathtaking speed, much to the delight of businessmen who value speed above all else. An awestruck Ratan Tata reminded the January 2009 investors' summit that the Nano project was cleared in just three days!
"I have to listen to my own saying (of 2007) that if you are not in Gujarat you are stupid. Today, I am saying that I am not stupid," the country's most iconic businessman was quoted as saying. But then Ratan Tata has special reasons for saying that.
The extremely cosy relationship that industry and the Gujarat CM enjoy raises some troubling questions.
What do the Ratan Tatas, Sunil Mittals, K V Kamaths and Ambanis see as the role of politicians? Can generous sops to industry and the speed and simplification of regulations alone be compelling reasons for the adulation of a politician with a spotty record on pursuing development goals and protecting the rights of the vulnerable sections of society? It would appear that India's business community for the most part is unable to see beyond its nose.
If not, what explains the complete indifference of these men to some shocking revelations about Modi's Gujarat that were made at the same time the Vibrant Gujarat histrionics were being played out? Top among these is that the state's record on getting its children into school and keeping them there is dismal.
The Annual Status of Education Report Rural 2008, the most telling document on education trends, shows 21 per cent of the boys and 30 per cent of girls in the 15-16 age group in rural Gujarat dropping out of school.
Worse, the younger children are simply not getting a proper education. Only 59.6 per cent rural children in the Standard 3 to 5 group could read the Standard 1 text against the all-India average of 66.6 per cent. In maths, they fared worse: only 43.1 per cent could do subtraction against the national average of 54.9 per cent, way behind the figures for Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
Surely, something is rotten in the state of Gujarat? Perhaps, his business fan following is not aware that Gujarat under Modi has fared worse than most states on almost every index of human development, the worst blot being the dwindling sex ratio. The number of girls per 1,000 boys in Gujarat is just 878, one of the lowest in the country, despite the growing prosperity of the state -- or perhaps because of it.
The poor indices of overall human development -- Gujarat has slipped from first spot to sixth place among Indian states -- are a deeply worrying issue for social scientists who have also been sounding the alarm bells on the fragmentation and ghettoisation of Gujarat's society.
But these are not issues that find resonance in the business community. Instead, there is a belief that all is well with Modi's state. Nothing but rank ignorance could explain this very recent statement by a leading banker, who is also the head of an industry organisation, praising what he called "Gujarat's all-round development".
He says: "When I talk about Gujarat as a role model, it is not only to do with GDP growth but also other parameters like human development index, schooling, education, infrastructure and basic services. That is a model which is setting a right benchmark."
A big part of the answer as to why industry takes such a benign view of the 'Gujarat model' could be that Modi makes no bones about favouring this segment over all others. It is a model where public money is used to turn a private venture into a profitable enterprise at the cost of the environment. This is not to say that other parts of India are not similarly engaged but it is a fundamental principle with Modi.
A clear indication of this is available in a Government Resolution on the concessions made to Tata's Nano project. The GR passed on January 1, 2009, but made public just 10 days ago, is an eye-opener although there have been several speculative reports that revealed the blandishments offered by Modi to bring the Nano to Gujarat.
These make the incentives offered by the West Bengal government to the Tatas in Singur look tight-fisted. According to one estimate, tax-payers in Gujarat will be footing as much as Rs 60,000 per vehicle to make the Nano the car of the masses with a price tag of Rs 1 lakh.
It's a dream package that Modi is giving the Tatas: apart from the 1,100 acres of land and infrastructure sops, there is a soft loan of Rs 9,570 crore (Rs 95.7 billion) that is repayable over 20 years at an unbelievable 0.1 per cent rate of interest.
Facilities for solid-waste disposal and effluent treatment plants are to be developed by the state government which will also provide a dedicated power connection of 200 KW to the factory along with 14,000 cubic metres water daily. There are other dispensations, too.
The Nano project does not have to recruit 85 per cent of the workforce locally as the state industrial policy mandates.
How can one not love Modi if public money is to fund private industry to this extent? In the old days, industry was brought in to spur infrastructure and employment. That doesn't seem to be an overriding concern these days, and certainly not for Gujarat.
Attracting big-ticket industrial projects is essentially image-building that comes in handy at the time of elections. If you can get a Tata to set up the Nano factory outside Ahmedabad, does it really matter if children in the hinterland cannot read, write or count?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
'I'm 15 and have seen all the ugly faces of poverty'
This one of the series of articles that Rediff.com is publishing after the success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/20-im-15-and-have-seen-all-the-ugly-faces-of-poverty.htm
'I'm 15 and have seen all the ugly faces of poverty'
January 20, 2009 | 14:04 IST
Slumdog Millionaire has received tremendous international recognition and highlighted Mumbai's underbelly. While some hail it as a grand endorsement for the city, others think of it as a sorry stereotype.rediff.com correspondents met children in the slums to find out what life really means for them.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/20-im-15-and-have-seen-all-the-ugly-faces-of-poverty.htm
'I'm 15 and have seen all the ugly faces of poverty'
January 20, 2009 | 14:04 IST
Slumdog Millionaire has received tremendous international recognition and highlighted Mumbai's underbelly. While some hail it as a grand endorsement for the city, others think of it as a sorry stereotype.rediff.com correspondents met children in the slums to find out what life really means for them.
Monica Halder, Dhakuria, Kolkata
"I could not sleep for nights after I saw a man being thrown out of a running local train. It was way back in 2004."
Monica, then 10, was chatting with neighbours at their slum near the Dhakuria railway station when she witnessed along with many others, a severely injured man being hurled out of a train compartment.
"A living being got transformed into a mangled mass of flesh and bones -- the sight was unbearable. The incident had me dumbfounded, my feet, it seemed, had grown roots," she says.
Violence and morbidity of this kind are an inseparable part of 200-odd families that reside in the slums along the railway tracks connecting Kolkata with its suburbs of a wide area of south Kolkata.
"One morning many years back, three of us, my elder sister Meenakshi and our parents left our ancestral home at a village in Diamond Harbour (located at the southern tip of West Bengal) in search of a better life."
"On reaching Kolkata, we started sharing a 100-square foot room in the Dhakuria slum that my widowed grandmother had taken on rent."
"It was agreed that my parents would share the monthly rent of Rs 500 as soon as they got jobs in lieu of our boarding and lodging."
"Soon after, Baba got himself a masonry job while Ma got employed as a part-time maid servant. Somewhat relieved, they got Didi and me admitted to a government school. Both of us had studied till Class III in the village school."
Was life taking a better turn?
"We hoped and prayed so." But destiny had something else in store.
"Soon Ma met with an accident on her way to work. She injured her right hand so badly that she had to quit her job."
"The family's income halved overnight and it became impossible to afford both our school fees with a meager monthly income of Rs 600."
"Didi, without even a second thought, gave up her studies and took up a maidservant's job to help me continue with my studies."
"I can never forget her sacrifice. During my spare time, I do odd jobs like cleaning a pond, helping my father in his masonry job. Whatever I earn from that I save. I plan to hand over my entire savings to Didi some day. We hope to marry her off to the best of the grooms."
"Though I am only 15 I have seen all the ugly faces of poverty. As I cover my nose while using the common toilet of our slum every morning, I also dare to dream of tasting success some day. I want to be a doctor. Does it sound ludicrous?"
"I want to be of some help to people of this slum who have to slog like dogs to earn two square meals a day. I hate to stay in this dingy place, I hate to see Ma cry -- pain in her injured arm keeps her up through nights."
"I hope to see a better world some day when poverty won't darken my brightest dreams."
Readers who wish to help Monica's family can write to: Monica Halder
C/o Geeta Halder
Rail Colony Basti
Dhakuria
Kolkata 700031
Or
Monica Halder, Account Number: 11653, Dhakuria Cooperative Bank Limited, Kolkata-31
Text: Indrani Roy Mitra; Photograph: Dipak Chakraborty
Born on the road, she aims for Miss India
This one of the series of articles that Rediff.com is publishing after the success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/21-born-on-the-road-she-aims-for-miss-india.htm
Born on the road, she aims for Miss India
Insiyah Vahanvaty | January 21, 2009 | 16:28 IST
Slumdog Millionaire has received tremendous international recognition and highlighted Mumbai's underbelly. While some hail it as a grand endorsement for the city, others think of it as a sorry stereotype.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/21-born-on-the-road-she-aims-for-miss-india.htm
Born on the road, she aims for Miss India
Insiyah Vahanvaty | January 21, 2009 | 16:28 IST
Slumdog Millionaire has received tremendous international recognition and highlighted Mumbai's underbelly. While some hail it as a grand endorsement for the city, others think of it as a sorry stereotype. rediff.com correspondents met children in the slums to find out what life really means for them.
Kokila Vaghela, pavement dweller, Mumbai
Dragging along a toy car on a red ribbon, while the other hand tugs at the sleeve of her younger sister, twelve-year-old Kokila is humming a tune and sauntering along the slums of Khar Danda, north-west Mumbai.
She looks enquiringly and spits out the piece of grass she is chewing on, so that she can speak. Dressed in a cobalt blue salwaar kameez, the pretty child looks around her with big, sparkling, curious eyes. Eyes that look at the squalor around her, but doesn't feel a part of it. That holds hope, faith and belief in herself and the world.
Born on the pavement of Carter Road, a plush enclave that borders a fisherman's colony, Kokila's father sells garlic for a living. Her mother works at a municipality school.
Despite their poverty, Kokila's mother makes sure that all six of her children go to school in the hope that their lives will someday be better. The family lives on the pavement of Carter Road. While they have the most coveted of prime locations, and a panoramic sea view, they don't have a roof... or walls.
Dropping her gaze to her feet shyly, Kokila says, "Main Miss India banna chahti hoon. Miss India picture mein aati hain, na, is liye. (I want to become Miss India because she acts in the movies.)"
When she wins the crown, she wants to star opposite her favourite actor, Hrithik Roshan.
And where one finds such ambitions, the dreams of riches and luxuries are never far behind. When she grows up and makes a lot of money, (which she has no doubt she will), Kokila wants to buy clothes and jewellery, but more importantly, she wants a building, some utensils and a car.
She justifies these choices by saying: "Building, kyonki hum log ka ghar nahin hain, is liye. Aur bartan nahin hain zyaada, is liye. Aur car chahiye, blue waali. (I want a building because we don't have a house. I want utensils because we don't have many. And I want a car, a blue one.)"
Her six-year-old sister and four-year-old brother cling to her legs and giggle when Kokila tells us how rich she will be someday. Older children mill around, and Kokila's mother says her daughter stays back after school hours to wash dishes, and earns Rs 300 every month. Only 12, Kokila is an earning member of this household.
She doesn't want to stop studying for a long time yet, saying, "Main bahut padna chahti hoon, achha lagta hai. Aage badhkar kuchh banna chahti hoon. (I want to study a lot; I like it. I want to progress and become successful.)"
While this girl is still a child at heart, she is not satisfied with the idea of good food, clean clothes, a roof over a head... Hidden away behind the stench and squalor of desperate poverty, she dreams of claiming her place in the world, of reaching for the stars, and of bringing them home for all to see!
Kokila Vaghela
C/o Kanchan Vaghela
Danda Shopping Centre
General Chemist and Druggist
3, Dev-Ashish Building
C D Marg
Danda, Khar West, Mumbai 400052
Text: Insiyah Vahanvaty. Photograph: Sanjay Sawant
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A Payoff Out of Poverty?
A Payoff Out of Poverty?
FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis published a book called “Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty,” detailing a single day in these families’ lives. One family, headed by Jesús Sánchez, a food buyer for a restaurant, continued to tell its story in a second Lewis book, the widely read “Children of Sánchez.” Lewis singled out elements of a culture that, he argued, keep those socialized in it mired in poverty: machismo, authoritarianism, marginalization from organized civic life, high rates of abandonment of illegitimate children, alcoholism, disdain for education, fatalism, passivity, inability to defer gratification and a time orientation fixed firmly on the present.
We still call this the culture of poverty today. But the idea has taken on a life far beyond the world of Mexican peasants. And although the concept originated with Lewis, it has come to mean almost the opposite of what Lewis intended.
Lewis was a man of the left. He saw the culture of poverty as a defense mechanism adapted by the poor in response to capitalist inequality. For a while, the culture of poverty remained a leftist idea: Michael Harrington used it throughout his hugely influential 1962 book, “The Other America,” which laid the foundation for President Johnson’s War on Poverty. But Lewis soon lost control of the concept. With the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family,” the “culture of poverty” became a shorthand for black ghetto culture, a defect of the poor. Then Edward Banfield, a conservative political scientist, introduced the notion that the culture of poverty was immutable; his 1970 book, “The Unheavenly City,” attacked the key assumption of the War on Poverty — the idea that government can help. Banfield argued that poverty was a product of the poor’s lack of future-orientation, and that nothing government could feasibly do would change that orientation or stop parents from transmitting it to their children.
Banfield’s book is widely seen as retrograde today, but he still seems to own the culture of poverty. Lewis had used the phrase to describe habits acquired in response to structural factors — the standard left-wing argument that people are poor because of low wages, discrimination and bad schools. But the phrase has essentially become shorthand for the right-wing argument that poverty stems from the limitations of the poor and is largely impervious to outside intervention.
Persistent poverty has retreated from the political debate in the United States. But outside the headlines there has been a gentle evolution in thinking about the causes and cures for poverty, one that moves away from blaming capitalism and blaming the poor alike. Today, the most interesting development in that evolution — one with implications for fighting poverty around the world, including in the United States — is coming once again from Mexico, this time from the grandchildren of the children of Sánchez.
WE DO NOT KNOW exactly where Jesús Sánchez was born, but it was a village in Veracruz and it easily could have been Paso de Coyutla, a village of 134 families in the mountains along the San Marcos River. Until just a decade ago, Paso de Coyutla was one of the most marginalized places in Mexico, a place where men scratched out a living farming ever-more-subdivided, ever-smaller patches of corn, joined by their children who left school too early, robbed of a future by the need to work. There, on a recent trip, I met Irma Solís, 37, and Pedro Hernández, 43, a couple that has four children.
Solís’s and Hernández’s grandparents were poor, their parents are poor and they are poor. Hernández, a stocky man with thick, graying hair and a mustache, raises corn; Solís gathers the husks to sell for wrapping tamales. They live in a pink cement house on a hill in Paso de Coyutla. Early this year, Hernández had to borrow $1,000 at a crippling 20 percent monthly interest to buy seeds and fertilizer. When I arrived in July, he had just harvested and sold the crop — but earlier than he would have liked, because he could no longer afford the interest. He made just enough on his corn crop to repay the debt.
In Paso de Coyutla, it seemed that the culture of poverty was indeed immutable. Generations after Jesús Sánchez, the lack of interest in education, failure to think about the future, machismo and authoritarianism persisted. There was every reason to think that life would be exactly the same for Solís and Hernández’s four children.
But it may not be. Today their oldest daughter, Maleny, who is 17, is finishing high school and wants to be a teacher. Her 13-year-old sister, María Fernanda, wants to be a nurse. Two younger brothers also plan to stay in school. Maleny’s bus takes up to 20 kids from Paso de Coyutla to her high school every day. “Around here, kids helped their parents in the fields,” Solís said. She is solidly built, with a lively intelligence and a ready laugh. “But now they want to do other things,” she added, flashing a smile revealing the silver that rims her two front upper teeth.
The change did not come gradually. Lewis’s description of the culture of poverty probably still fit Paso de Coyutla 10 years ago. It doesn’t anymore. The town has transformed itself in the past decade, a result of a deceptively simple government program that is now rewriting poverty-fighting strategies throughout Latin America and around the world. The program is called Oportunidades, and in 1997, Paso de Coyutla became one of the first places in Mexico to enroll. The program gives the poor cash, but unlike traditional welfare programs, it conditions the receipt of that cash on activities designed to break the culture of poverty and keep the poor from transmitting that culture to their children.
Until recently, for example, children like Maleny did not go to high school. Though Maleny’s school is public, families often prefer not to pay the fees they’re assessed or to pay for school supplies, food and transportation. More important, if she were not in school, she, too, could be working in the fields. Such work is especially common among girls, as their education has been widely derided as a waste of money in rural Mexico — why educate someone who is just going to get married?
Now Maleny goes to school because her mother is enrolled in Oportunidades. Solís gets $61 a month from the Mexican government on the condition that Maleny goes and maintains good attendance. (If she worked in the fields and earned a typical salary, she would be paid $7.40 for an eight-hour day.) Such grants start for students in third grade, increase for each year of school and are higher for girls, which gives families added incentive to send them.
Solís also receives money for the family’s food — again, subject to certain requirements. She gets a $27-a-month basic food grant if she takes her family to regular preventive health checkups at Paso de Coyutla’s clinic, which provides vaccinations, pap smears and the like. She must also attend a monthly workshop on a health topic, like purifying drinking water. In total, the grants the family receives for food and the oldest three children’s educations come to almost as much as Hernández earns farming.
I first visited Paso de Coyutla on Oportunidades’ payday, which falls every two months. Hundreds of people, mostly women wearing their credentials around their necks, small children clutching their legs, were gathered in the town’s open-air hall. The atmosphere was festive. The women stood in long lines to receive their envelopes of cash. Others were working behind banquet tables at the back, showing off embroidery and crafts made by Oportunidades beneficiaries.
When the program began, under the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo, it was called Progresa. Zedillo’s successor, Vicente Fox, changed the name. Five million families are enrolled nationwide — a quarter of the country’s households, including virtually every Mexican family at risk for hunger. Seventy-three of the 134 families in Paso de Coyutla are enrolled today. Oportunidades is now the de facto welfare system in Mexico, and it marks the first time modern Mexico has had an effective anti-poverty program.
The elegant idea behind the program — give the poor money that will allow them to be less poor today, but condition it on behaviors that will give their children a better start in life — is called conditional cash transfers, and the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank promote it heavily. At least 30 countries have now adopted Oportunidades, most of them in Latin America, but not all: countries now using or experimenting with some form of conditional payments include Turkey, Cambodia and Bangladesh. Last year, officials from Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia and China contacted or visited Mexico to investigate. Perhaps the most startling iteration is in New York City. Opportunity NYC, a pilot program begun last year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Mexico, will test whether the Oportunidades model can help the New York neighborhoods where poverty is passed down from parent to child. Britain has been successfully using a form of conditional cash transfers to keep teenagers in school and is now running pilots to broaden the program to other areas. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is starting a pilot program in several American states to test whether low-income students will stay in college if they get cash payments to do so.
Conditional cash transfers are a convergence point in two different evolutions in understanding and combating poverty. One is taking place in poor countries, which have long tended to concentrate their social services on building universities and hospitals for the urban middle class — a group with substantial political clout — as opposed to primary schools and clinics for the voiceless rural poor. In such countries that are governed by centrists, politicians are starting to help the rural poor because they now know how — and because the poor, who have not benefited from globalization, have flashed new political muscle by electing leftists elsewhere.
The situation is different in rich countries. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has been able to experiment with Opportunity NYC because of a philosophical shift in how Americans think about poverty. Liberals have largely abandoned entitlements — the so-called nanny state — that took care of people with welfare and other payments while demanding little or nothing on their part. And most conservatives now acknowledge that government must play a role in fighting poverty. But that role is taking a new form. Lawrence M. Mead, a political-science professor at New York University and a former Republican Congressional staff member, calls it “the new paternalism.” The nanny state offered unconditional love; the new paternalism is tough love, directly aimed at smashing the culture of poverty. Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for The National Journal, has coined the term “daddy state” — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities. Welfare reform, which imposes work requirements on welfare recipients, is the best-known example.
Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, as Lewis contended, or behavioral ones, as Banfield argued? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn’t matter.
In the mid-1990s, Mexico’s antipoverty programs were a failure. A third of the population lived in extreme poverty, which meant their income did not even pay for food. Poverty was both more widespread and deeper in rural areas than in cities. Mexico’s help for the poor was dispensed mainly in the form of subsidies on milk, tortillas and bread — a program that was inefficient, badly targeted and corrupt.
In 1994, the Mexican peso crashed, and the next year the economy contracted by more than 6 percent. It hit poor people especially hard. President Ernesto Zedillo — an economics Ph.D. who had run the food-subsidy program (and other social services) as a Treasury official and knew intimately what a mess it was — asked Santiago Levy, an undersecretary in the Finance Ministry, for new ideas on how to protect the poor.
Levy, who had been a professor of economics at Boston University, had long advocated scrapping food subsidies. But the first paper he wrote for President Zedillo, he told me in an interview, also included a new idea that occurred to him — conditional cash transfers. He had concluded that food subsidies were simply an inefficient way to give money to the poor. So why not just directly give them cash?
He presented his arguments to the cabinet. “They said, ‘This is nuts,’ ” he said. Some cabinet members warned that there were good reasons that other countries didn’t give the poor cash, and worried that it would be misspent, frittered away on alcohol. Others worried about the logistics of reaching remote villages. There were also more politically motivated objections — some cabinet members realized that their own fiefs were threatened. “That’s when I decided to run a pilot program without telling anybody,” Levy said.
He set up an experiment in two small cities in far-off Campeche State. He found that people preferred getting cash to buying subsidized food and were willing to meet conditions; he also found that it was feasible to distribute cash and that men didn’t beat up their wives, take the money and go to the cantina. Armed with his data, he won approval to start the program gradually, beginning in the most marginalized villages, like Paso de Coyutla.
In part because the program began stealthily, without the usual political bargaining and fanfare, Levy was able to design Oportunidades to resist special-interest pleading and concentrate on the poor. It tries to be comprehensive, tackling health, education and nutrition. It aims at the poorest Mexicans — and research shows that it is successful. The program used census data to find the poorest rural areas and urban blocks, and within those areas, gave out questionnaires about people’s income and possessions: Do you have a dirt or cement floor? Own a hot-water heater? The homes of those who qualified were visited to verify their answers. The criteria apply nationally — the program allows for no local discretion. Families must be recertified every six years, and according to Salvador Escobedo, Oportunidades’ director today, about 10 percent leave each year, either because they have failed to complete their responsibilities or because they are no longer extremely poor.
Levy also aimed the program at the group that will spend money on the family: women. Surveys show that 70 percent of Oportunidades’ payment is spent on food — mostly fruit, vegetables and meat. Much of the rest goes to kids’ shoes and clothing and home improvements. The program is also designed to combat the typical afflictions of Latin American social programs. Local political leaders have no influence and so cannot use the payments to extort political support. Oportunidades staff members do not handle money — local banks hand out the envelopes of cash, and recipients are encouraged to open bank accounts to receive direct transfers.
Oportunidades is now one of the most-studied social programs on the planet. The program has its own research unit and publishes all the data it generates. In addition, a wide variety of the program’s features have been examined in hundreds of surveys and papers by independent academics. The results are put to work. When research showed, for example, that many children receiving a nutritional supplement still had anemia, the supplement was changed to one with a more absorbable form of iron.
Levy paid for the program in a time of economic crisis by phasing out the general food subsidies. But since Oportunidades has virtually no infrastructure, it is still relatively cheap, costing Mexico about $3.8 billion annually. Escobedo boasts that 97 percent of the budget goes directly to beneficiaries.
The program does have its problems. For one thing, Oportunidades lacks the impact in urban areas that it has in the countryside. This may be because it is newer in cities, and the supply of schools and clinics lags behind the increased demand. Even in the countryside, I met with some students who had classes with as many as 42 children, and I saw some clinics with half-day waits for appointments.
The most widespread criticism of the program’s design I heard, from academics who study the program and from Oportunidades staff, is that it should attach more conditions to the handing out of money. These observers say that student achievement, not just attendance, should be rewarded. Oportunidades is now running a pilot program for this, but figuring it out is complicated by the fact that school quality in Mexico varies widely, and in rural zones it is largely awful. An initial study focusing on school achievement found that Oportunidades didn’t have much impact on test scores. But the study had some flaws, and the topic needs further research.
Yet in general, Oportunidades is, in many respects, an astonishing success. Though it is still too early to know its impact on the adult life of the children who have grown up in the program, the poverty indicators speak to the effects of Oportunidades today. In 1994, before the peso crisis, 21.2 percent of Mexicans lived in extreme poverty. In 1996, just after the crash, 37.4 percent did. But that figure had dropped to 13.8 percent by 2006. Mexico’s economic growth during the decade averaged an unspectacular 3 percent, which would not by itself have produced such gains for the poor. And these statistics underestimate the program’s true influence, as its greatest effects were concentrated on the very poorest.
In Mexico today, rates of malnutrition, anemia and stunting have dropped, as have incidences of childhood and adult illnesses. But the most pronounced effects are in education. Children in the program drop out less frequently, repeat fewer grades and stay in school longer. In some rural areas, the percentage of children entering middle school has risen by 42 percent. High-school enrollment in some rural areas has risen by 85 percent. The greatest gains were found in families where the mothers had the lowest levels of schooling.
During my visit to Mexico, I met family after family with distinct before-and-after stories. In the village of Tajin, Veracruz, I met a young mother named Minerva Santes Hernández. We talked on her spotless patio (several of the health workshops have dealt with household sanitation) while her three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, climbed on and off her lap. She entered the program when her two oldest were toddlers. “When we came into the program we found that they were undernourished,” she told me. “I took them for weighings every month. The clinic gave me cereal and vitamins and told me to make them fruits and vegetables.” The two older kids are fine now — the girl is quite tall. The 2-year-old was born into Oportunidades and has never had a problem, Santes said.
Before Oportunidades started, a major objection was that it could increase domestic violence. Poor, rural Mexicans are machista — and it’s easy to imagine that they’d be provoked by Oportunidades, which requires women to leave the house to attend workshops, get their money and go to the clinic. Some of the workshops are about women’s rights or about self-esteem. Women also get their own money and control how it is spent.
Among the most macho was Solís’s own husband. “He was very angry in the beginning of the program,” Solís said. “He’d come pull me out of a meeting, yelling: ‘Your child fell down and hurt himself! See what happens when you abandon your house!’ ”
Pedro Hernández cheerfully pleaded guilty. “I didn’t accept it at first,” he said. “If the clothes were hanging on the line and it started to rain, I wouldn’t take them down — I’d go pull her out of a workshop. Or I’d complain my food was cold. I didn’t want to heat it up myself.”
I asked if he knew how. He smiled. “Now I even know how to cook,” he said.
What changed him was a burst appendix two years ago. Because of Oportunidades, the family received priority at a public hospital, where the operation cost $100, not the $3,000 the private hospital wanted. “I realized that it helps,” he said. “We have food, shoes, school supplies, the kids have education. We have fewer problems.”
Researchers on Oportunidades have not turned up much evidence that it has increased domestic violence, but they acknowledge that problem is often hidden. In the days before Oportunidades, “rights were only for men,” said Reyna Luisa Olmedo Vásquez, the nurse at Paso de Coyutla’s clinic. “So when that began to change, we began to see more mistreatment of women.” One woman, she recalled, was beaten by her husband for letting a male doctor do a breast examination. But in Paso de Coyutla, it seemed, the men eventually accepted that the world had changed. After about five years, violence began to diminish, Olmedo Vásquez said, and now there is less than before the program started — an assessment echoed by doctors I met in other villages.
OPORTUNIDADE’S SUCCESS has begun to echo in some unlikely places. In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg convened a 32-member group called the Commission on Economic Opportunity, charged with finding new ways to help poor New Yorkers. Oportunidades was discussed. “But there was enormous skepticism,” says Veronica White, the executive director of the Center for Economic Opportunity, which was established to carry out the group’s recommendations. Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, says that the members preferred to stick with the idea of caseworkers helping poor families. The group’s report did not recommend an Oportunidades spinoff for New York City. But in his response to the report, the mayor did. A pilot program began in September 2007, financed by private donors, including Bloomberg himself.
The study enrolled nearly 5,000 families in six consistently poor community districts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, 80 percent of which are single-parent families, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Half are in a control group and the other half get payments — for example, $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference or discussing test results with teachers. They get $25 per month if an elementary- or middle-school child maintains 95 percent attendance; for high-school students, the rate is $50 a month. (In the case of high-school students, rewards for attendance, accumulating credits and graduating go in part to the student.) Beneficiaries receive $150 monthly for holding down a full-time job — more for taking courses while employed. Participants receive their money after returning coupons signed by their doctors and sometimes their teachers. A family that completes all the requirements can make more than $4,000 per year.
It is too early to know if poor New Yorkers respond to payments as readily as poor Mexicans do; the first evaluation, carried out by the social-science research group MDRC, won’t be out for a few months. Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC (which also designed the pilot), says that precedents exist. He cites programs in Wisconsin, Minnesota and two provinces of Canada that gave the poor extra money for working. All brought increases in work and earnings as well as benefits to the schooling of the participants’ young children.
If Chandra Hannah is any indication, many New Yorkers will respond. Hannah is a 41-year-old black woman with six children, ranging from infant twins to a 22-year-old son, living in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. When I met her in August, she had just finished her bachelor’s degree and was preparing to start a master’s, hoping to open her own early-childhood special-education center in the neighborhood. But she said Opportunity had led her to become far more involved with her own children’s health and education. “I talk to their teachers more,” she said. “Now I go to conferences all the time. I didn’t know about the tests they took before. I mean, I knew about them, but I never really looked.” She went to a workshop at school for parents on how to help and motivate their children. “Now I spend an hour with my 11-year-old when he comes home from school on his homework,” she said. “With the twins, we’ll read to them — I’ll read one paragraph and then he’ll read a paragraph.”
Jose Gonzalez, an enrollment and outreach worker at Urban Health Plan, which administers the pilot program in the Bronx, told me: “Once they find out they’re getting paid, their children’s attendance in school gets a lot better. Getting them to stay current on health insurance is probably the hardest task. The yearly medical checkup is done most often. That’s $200 right there.”
But there were a few people enrolled in the pilot program in East New York who hadn’t yet even picked up their coupon books, said Candice Perkins, who coordinates East New York’s pilot program from the storefront office of Groundwork, a social-service agency. Hannah and Perkins sat in Groundwork’s small conference room and dissected the neighborhood’s low test scores and high drop-out rates. Perkins said that as part of her duties for Groundwork, she gives talks on the importance of sending kids to school and of being involved with their teachers and counselors. “But sometimes people say, ‘I’m too tired to send them to school.’ Or the child has asthma — and misses 13 or 14 days.” Perkins was a young and earnest black woman, dressed to kill with glitter makeup at 10 a.m. She was frustrated with people’s lack of interest in the job banks and training programs offered to help them. “We get less than 5 percent attendance at workshops,” she said. “Some people, their mind-set is dependence, and to go that extra mile to get resources is hard.”
For conservative critics of Opportunity, this disconnect is crucial. Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has written articles on the program that echo Perkins’s complaint: “Talk to any inner-city teacher,” Mac Donald wrote in The Weekly Standard, “and you will hear how difficult it is to get parents involved in their child’s education, or students to bother with homework. Countless schemes for tutoring and job training sit on the shelves unused because the ‘clients’ never show up.”
“If Opportunity NYC goes large scale,” Mac Donald told me in an interview, “it will further break down the moral obligation to care for one’s child and adopt the repertoire of parenting behaviors the middle class takes for granted. It will replace that with the expectation that I’m only going to do it if you pay me.” She cites Banfield that living in the present is the central cause of poverty and echoes his skepticism that government can help. “What government cannot do is create personal responsibility and drive in individuals,” Mac Donald has written.
But government can change toxic cultures. If the women of Paso de Coyutla are not yet wearing the pants, as Pedro Hernández nervously jokes they are, they certainly describe themselves as different people than they were 10 years ago. In large part, they’ve come to believe in their own capacity to take care of their families; they believe they are part of a group; they organize to improve the village; they invest all they can in their children’s futures. Change is usually generational, produced by education. But it came astoundingly quickly in many parts of Mexico.
Opportunity NYC will not be able to help those parents too apathetic to pick up their coupon books. But those parents are just a small handful. As for the rest, one of the most tantalizing lessons of the program is that the answer to why Mom skips the parent-teacher conferences may not matter.
This is the symbolic controversy of the poverty debate. Are these absentee moms just too busy working two jobs, overwhelmed with the problems of being poor? Opportunity NYC will probably help them. Or have they just not bothered? It may help them too. “There is no inherent contradiction in saying this problem is caused by something other than lack of money and saying that money is the incentive to fix it,” Levy says. “That’s Economics 101. But you have to evaluate it.”
Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, agreed. “We know that education and health as children are key to getting out of poverty as adults,” she said. “You can have an endless, circular debate about why people don’t do things. This program is less focused on the why and more focused on whether a different approach can have an impact in a way traditional approaches have not.”
Education and health, however, will take you only so far. Suppose Opportunity NYC succeeds. The likelihood is that these families will still be poor. One in three jobs in America pays less than $11.11 an hour, with no benefits. Full time, that’s less than $23,000 a year.
Mexico has it even worse. Anyone reading Oportunidades’ reviews might reasonably ask: so why is there still so much misery? One reason is that the payments, helpful as they are, are still heartbreakingly small. Emma Pasarán in the town of Venustiano Carranza in Puebla, told me that one of the benefits of the program is that “I am never without money. If my daughter says, ‘Mom, I need a pencil,’ I can say to her, ‘Here’s the money.’ ” She mimes taking a coin out of her purse, a proud smile on her face.
In the same town, I talked to Elia Valderrama Vargas, a mother of three, in her dirt-floor house, about the jobs that will be open to her soon-to-be-educated children. “My husband cuts weeds with a machete,” she told me. “My children will be able to work in a tortilla factory because they’ll know how to cobrar” — how to add purchases and give change. For Pasarán, buying a pencil on a whim was the fulfillment of a dream; for Valderrama, it was seeing her children in indoor work.
It is not enough — Oportunidades is only an antipoverty program, just one part of a solution, when what is needed is a whole strategy. Few good jobs await even educated young Mexicans. This is Levy’s latest crusade — to get Mexico to channel poor people into productive jobs in Mexico’s legal labor market. “Creating formal-sector jobs is Mexico’s central challenge,” Levy said. Without that, he added, “it is as if Oportunidades were financing an improved labor force for the United States.” But if Mexico can find a way to create better jobs, it will have access to a work force that, because of Oportunidades, has acquired more of the good health and education necessary to take advantage of them.
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