Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

On Gandhian Self-sufficiency

I am somewhat familiar with the concepts of Satyagraha and non-violence that Gandhi preached and sometimes practiced. They are interesting tools and can be employed effectively in some circumstances. But, like all tools, they too can’t be employed in every case; they are not easy for mere mortals to employ even under favorable circumstances. In fact, they have severe limitations in that they are not general purpose tools but are rather special purpose tools. The interesting thing is irrespective of whether they work or not, the user gets to occupy the moral high ground.

Occupying moral high ground is well and good if that is one’s objective. But one could be very dead at the end of the day — on high ground but still dead.

Those tools elevate the user in the user’s estimation at least. But the sad fact of this world is that it does not work in those cases where you most desperately want it to work. One needs an effective tool against mass murderers more urgently than against robbers. The former could not care less whether you have an elevated opinion of your own moral standing. Hitler, for instance, would have slaughtered without compunction those who responded to his aggression with non-violence; it would have eased the realization of his megalomanical dreams of world domination. Continue reading “On Gandhian Self-sufficiency”

Seduced by ICT

Yesterday I started writing about the ICT for development meeting I was at held at ICRISAT at Hyderabad earlier this week. The usual suspects were in attendance. I had met many of them at the MS Swaminathan Policy Makers’ Conference at Chennai a few months ago. One face new to me was Prof Ken Keniston of MIT who gave an opening address.

He made five cautionary points which are worth noting. They are:

  • Do not get seduced by ICT
  • Localize, localize, localize
  • Do realistic cost projections
  • Given the complexity of systems, choose operators with extreme care
  • Be patient

The use of ICT tools for development is a no-brainer. But it is a mistake to think that a Pentium4 in every village will solve India’s developmental problems. The point one has to pay special attention to is to examine the entire set of ICT tools and then choose ones that are appropriate to the task. Information and communications technology tools are not limited to PCs and internet connections. There are many other tools such as radio (both FM and shortwave), ham radio, and TV which may be more cost effective and relevant in a given context.

Recently I came across a news item which said that they are looking at solving Mumbai’s traffic problems by making Mumbai roads “electronic intelligent roads.” I don’t have the slightest doubt that it would involve huge outlays to the tune of millions of dollars and lots of people will make lots of money up and down the line providing expertise and hardware and software for this hi-tech venture. I am also convinced that it will not make the slightest effect on the congested Mumbai roads because it is not the roads that need the intelligence but the people designing the roads that need to be intelligent.

Close to where I live in Kandivali, a suburb in North Mumbai, there is an intersection that is almost always caught in a grid-lock. The intersection is like an “H” with bi-direction flow of traffic along all the sections and it has one traffic signal at one of the points where the horizontal section meets the vertical sections. Traffic gets log-jammed around 300 meters of this intersection and it takes about a half hour to cross this bit every evening. Hundreds of autorickshaws, buses, cars, trucks, two-wheelers, and whatnots spew exhaust fumes and honk continually and people suffer. It is astonishing that the traffic people have not figured out that the simplest thing to do would be to paint some part of this intersection with the “KEEP CLEAR — DO NOT BLOCK” sections and put a couple of traffic cops to teach the people to keep off these sections. It would be a simple effective system which would cost very little compared to the enormous price that everyone pays throughout the day due to the congestion.

Instead, the Mumbai municipal corporation is investigating ways of using electronics. Why not better road markings and so on? Because there is not much money involved in a simpler but more effective system. Simpler may be better but there is not much profit in it. A blackboard, a teacher, and a dozen slates and some chalk may be simpler and better for adult education, but there is not as much profit as in putting PCs with literacy programs to teach adults how to read in rural areas.

PCs have powerful lobbies to promote their use. Chalkboards, radios, TVs, etc, don’t have that. Put it this way: the manufacturers of expensive shiny new hammers need people to be convinced that every problem is a nail and that everyone should have a shiny new expensive hammer. Never mind that sometimes a rusty screwdriver is better at a particular task than a shiny new expensive hammer.

HP, Microsoft, Intel and others of its tribe have to keep pushing their products. For impoverished people who can barely afford food, finding the most cost-effective solution is more important. But doing that involves much hard thinking and for those who make the decisions, there is not as much money in it. So the poor get saddled with expensive but ineffective solutions.

I should hasten to add that I am not a Luddite. I don’t need to be convinced of the extreme utility of computers and connectivity. Not only am I a user of these technologies, I have studied computer science and have worked for computer corporations. Some of my best friends are computer geeks (there but for the grace of god go I.) My concern is that PCs and the internet are crowding out the other more effective technologies that could help India develop.

The Amazing Ogallala Aquifer

I have been neglecting this blog because I have been traveling to places exotic. Well, maybe not all that exotic since it was just Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. I had gone there to speak at a conference on ICT and development.

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Continue reading “The Amazing Ogallala Aquifer”

Hunger in India

According to UN estimates, India has the largest number of hungry people. Over 200 million, or about one-fifth of India’s population, is chronically hungry. This is an apparent paradox in a country which is food-surplus on the aggregate. The Wall Street Journal of June 25th 2004 reports that according to Indian government sources, by 2001 India had a national stockpile of around 60 million tons of rice and wheat. It goes on to say:

But with inefficiency and local mismanagement plaguing distribution, it couldn’t move the grain fast enough through the system. Some even spoiled in warehouses. A 2002 government survey concluded that 48% of children under five years old are malnourished. That’s an improvement from three decades ago and even today, given rapid population growth, the proportion of chronically hungry Indians continues to fall. But in a sign that there are limits to the Green Revolution, the absolute number of hungry people in India began to rise again in the late 1990s, according to the U.N.

The paradox is easy to resolve if one understands one basic principle: that economic policies matter. The Indian economy has been chronically mismanaged by the Congress ever since India’s independence. And now the new Congress government could continue on the same failed path of socialism that led us to this sorry state. Vote-bank politics and the command and control license-permit-quota raj is responsible. Paul Samuelson could have been speaking about India when he wrote in April 2002 (HOW TO PROSPER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY):

The good life does not come from dramatic speeches or boisterous parades. Where economics is concerned, so far, there is nothing in sight more promising than the limited welfare democracy where public laws harness and monitor the energies and efficiencies of the somewhat free marketplace.

It is a good time to review Amartya Sen’s book of 1982, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Here is an excerpt from Ken Arrow’s review of the book:

In a free-enterprise economy every good or service has a price, and each economic agent starts out by owning some goods or services. The rice farmer owns some land, used for producing rice, which can then be sold on the market at the going price or reserved for use by the farmer and his family. The receipts from sales can be spent on other goods—different foods, spices, clothing, and so forth. The agricultural laborer has only his or her labor to sell; the proceeds can be spent on rice or other goods. Similarly the cities contain workers who sell labor for money to buy food, shelter, and clothing, and entrepreneurs who buy goods and labor, produce other goods, sell them, and have the proceeds for personal consumption and investment in business expansion.

People will starve, then, when their entitlement is not sufficient to buy the food necessary to keep them alive. The food available to them, in short, is a question of income distribution and, more fundamentally, of their ability to provide services that others in the economy are willing to pay for.

This, of course, does not mean that the supply of food is irrelevant. A decrease in the supply of food will usually increase its price, as people compete for the scarcer quantity. This will in turn decrease their ability to buy food by using their entitlement and, if they start close enough to the margin of hunger, may drive them to the point of starvation. Further, the entitlement approach, simple as it is, enables the analyst to say something about the distribution of the burden of starvation. Farm owners and, to a lesser extent, sharecroppers, should be less affected than others because the reduction in the amount they sell is at least partly offset by the higher prices. If the reduction in supply is caused by some factor, like flood, that reduces the amount to be harvested, farm laborers are thereby more likely to be seriously affected.

I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith’s words from his poem The Deserted Village:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay

There is something rotten about India that so many people are so unconcerned about the true state of affairs. The communists are solely concerned with protecting a handful of jobs, the larger interests of the nation be damned. The government is concerned with blocking the liberalization of the economy and dragging it back to its insular autarkic pre-reform paralysis. The idiotic hype about India Shining and IT superpower crap has addled the brains of the already marginally stupid. One wonders where this is all going to lead to.

It is all karma, neh?

Peddling Pornography

Caught a glimpse of the front page of The Times of India while commuting to work this morning. I noticed that they are now peddling pornography to increase their circulation. No wonder they are referred to by some as The Slimes of India. The top left hand corner of the front page declares in bold print:

Internet Hawker Puts Brittney Sex Video Up For Sale

A few weeks ago it was confirmed that the newspaper has paid editorial-page content that masquerades as honest reporting. I wonder how much they get paid for peddling pornography on the front page.

{See also India’s Primary Concern.}

Tolerance and Economic Prosperity

When I feel angry about India’s lost opportunities and feel especially despondent about the Indian economy, I sometimes compare India with its neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, just to get a sense of balance and say to myself “but for the grace of our un-countably many gods, goes India.” India is not ruled by intolerant monotheistic morons (an expression I picked up from the Department of Redundancy Department) — at least not yet.
Continue reading “Tolerance and Economic Prosperity”

Irreversible Decisions

A friend of mine with whom I had dinner last night at a restaurant in Colaba has an interesting job. As he puts it, he gets women pregnant and is paid handsomely for doing it. He is a doctor and runs an in vitro fertilization clinic. There are more than one way of making babies (18 ways, according to his website Malpani Infertility Clinic) and he knows them all.
Continue reading “Irreversible Decisions”

Sex selection in a Second-Best World

Niket in a comment raised the issue of the skewed sex ratio in the context of population control. To my mind, the differential preference for boys over girls is a consequence of overpopulation as well. If the population problem were to be addressed, the skewed sex ratio problem will also be addressed. For my views on the causes and consequences of the skewed sex ratio, check two earlier blog entries. The first, The Skewed Sex Ratio where I wrote: Continue reading “Sex selection in a Second-Best World”

The Population-Poverty Trap

The causal connection between population and poverty is widely researched and understood by many economists and demographers quite well. There is a causal link between poverty and population which is mediated by a third component which is broadly labeled the local resource base. Poverty cannot be understood without reference to the resource base that the population has access to. The three components of population, resources, and poverty are interrelated and influence each other in complex ways that vary across time and space. How these factors influence each other without any of them being the prior cause of the others is as interesting a study as it is depressing to note that the complex interrelations make problems arising within an economy nearly intractable to simple solutions.
Continue reading “The Population-Poverty Trap”