Kuldip Maity

People value what they pay for. On the other hand, in most cases, access to services or commodities that come free are generally not viewed as having the same quality as similar services or commodities that are paid for.

Take for example the case of services like healthcare that are provided free are generally availed of with a pinch of suspicion. If we can afford it we would rather pay a hefty fee and accept probably less than adequate medical services from a private facility notwithstanding studies that run counter to this belief.

This, however, is not to say that government healthcare services are always excellent or private healthcare services are always poor compared to free public medical facilities. The point here is that we have a choice when it comes to things that we pay for. But things that come free provides an option in binary. Take it or leave it.

Same is the case with schools. We tend to reject the quality of public instruction system outright as having a lower quality despite there being government schools with excellent faculty. According to the Hindustan Times, between 2010-11 and 2015-16, student enrolment in government schools across 20 Indian states fell by 13 million, while private schools acquired 17.5 million new students. This again is the result of a mind-set that the teachers in government schools will not be up to the mark and the schools are most likely to lack proper infrastructure. Although studies have shown that public institutions also have some of the best teachers as members of faculty.

The point that needs to be noted here is that nothing comes free. Public health care services are subsidised. The government pays for it from the taxes that we pay. Public instruction systems that are subsidised are again paid for from our taxes. What happens in the cases of free services and commodities is that the cost burden gets shifted from the shoulders of the beneficiary to somebody else. The issue here is that of managing the quality and restoring the faith of the people in the system.

Thus said we must bear in mind that even the common perception that air and water are free is also a misconception. For ages we thought it to be so. Now gradually due to misutilisation for generations, we are now paying the price for it. Gradually, potable water is getting scarce and we are being forced to pay a price for it. So the cost of misutilisation, because it was deemed to be available in abundance has been shifted across generations on us and we are paying for it.

Even in economic terms services like defence and law and order enforcing agencies don’t come free. The price of their maintenance is paid for out of the taxes that we pay.

The same principle operates in the commercial products and services. Certain market strategies dictate that to grab a slice of the market or to raise sales volume freebies need to be offered. But here again the extent of acceptance is a function of the acceptance of the value of the brand. However, we must bear in mind that the cost of the freebies that is informed by a marketing strategy is subsumed in the price one way or the other.

Net net, in our world, the adage that there is no free lunch holds across the board irrespective of our rejection or acceptance of a product or service. Somebody always has to pay for it.

There are many things that go unsung about women. Take for example, their habits of setting aside resources to tide over bad times. Across nations and cultures women traditionally maintain a store. That store has always been used to set aside a little of grains or money and use that as savings.

Such habits have traditionally been referred to as emulation worthy. Mothers have, for ages, insisted that the children learn the value of savings. For ages while men have been referred to as the bread earners, it actually has been the responsibility of the women to use the earning rationally. They have been the ones who fed the family and enforced discipline.

Savings are the first step and the most important step in financial discipline. If you spend all that you earn now nothing would be left for the future. That again is the first principle in creating the prosperity of a family. The buck, however, doesn’t stop here. An aggregation of good habit of saving also leads to the prosperity of a nation.

Women’s role in setting aside for the rainy day has been studied by development economists in depth. They have done so to find out ways to put it into development dynamics. And the findings have led to evolution of strategies to fight poverty.

The entire micro finance movement is based on empowering women precisely because of this. The basic tenet of the movement rests on the principle that women are the ones who are the main actors within a family to hold it together and keep it running. So if they could be empowered that would lead to breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and put the poor on the cycle of prosperity.

This would also create an overall ambience of financial discipline by creating an urge among all to save and invest. But for the savings in a piggy bank, that’s what traditionally was the practice, to get into investment channel for generating returns requires awareness. So putting the women first is not enough. The strategy needed a structure that would allow the women to borrow and along with their savings that borrowing would lead to productive investment for creation of surplus.

The focus on women therefore was to leverage their financial discipline into productive channel and make development a sustainable process. The concept of microfinance, therefore, puts women first in terms of providing them with capital and handholding them to create awareness about the productive use of money.

Add ‘em’ before power and you have a goal that would change the face of the earth. The question “how”, however, is the challenge. There was a time when it was thought that by taking from the rich and giving to the poor would help alleviate poverty. In the name of subsidy it was actually a dole the structure of which struggled with the concept of empowerment.

It would be wrong to say that policy makers were not aware of the need to make the poor literate and create a path of self-sustaining development. But the form or the strategies that were thought of kept defying effective achievement of the goal of poverty alleviation. Again it would be wrong to say that it was totally fruitless. But the speed of achievement was too slow to create the thrust to bust the vicious cycle of poverty and turn it into virtuous cycle of prosperity.

However, Muhammad Yunus, for the first time, applied the generally accepted tenet that the poor are inherently enterprising into real time actionable strategy. Subsequently, he also showed the world that the model that he proposed was not only actionable, but also scalable and sustainable.

He thought of a very simple experiment. It involved handing out a little sum of money to a group of women near the Chittagong University where he was a professor of Economics. The women used to make stuff from bamboo and were hugely exploited by the market. With this money as capital they started their own business without depending on exploitative structure of raising funds to run a business that kept them perennially indebted and in bondage. Riding the prosperity curve was just a dream. But with access to unfettered capital they could generate surplus for productive consumption.

The concept of micro credit, as it’s known now, essentially focuses on a few principles. It recognises the role of women in the dynamics of development. Women set a lot of store by bringing up their children and creating opportunities for them – the core tenet in sustainability. Women understand the merit of health and, being traditionally exploited, set a greater store by empowerment than the menfolk. Yunus, therefore, chose the women as his focus of work with microcredit with remarkable success.

Subsequently, the microfinance model that we see today with endorsed claims of success is the output of what Yunus had started in Bangladesh. Here microfinance companies are the agents for creating micro enterprises across the length and breadth of the country. This act is not a charity, neither the beneficiaries are recipients of dole.

Microfinance companies create access and awareness about funds. It’s not a process of charity. So there is a responsibility to stay productive in the entire chain of operations. The lender has the responsibility to empower through handholding so that the loan given out doesn’t turn into an NPA. The customer has the onus of being productive else she will not be able to generate the surplus required to pay back the loan and retain enough to run the family. Given this dynamics, the microfinance route is changing the country’s greatest weakness into its greatest power by busting the vicious cycle of poverty and replacing it with a virtuous cycle of prosperity.

If climate were to be a line, weather would be a dot in it. To most of us, climate change is all about global warming and its impact. The understanding is not wrong but is not comprehensive. Because, in real terms, when we refer to climate we refer to the long-term trend of weather. And weather is not about just cutting down of tree and carbon emission. It is all about temperature, rains, draught, sunshine or the lack of it, cloud cover and all that. Carbon emission is just part of the havoc being wrought on our own habitat, that is Earth.

When we refer to disaster in the context of climate change we, therefore, need to refer to a very wide gamut of risks like thoughtless creation of dams or ground water lifting for agriculture along with the one resulting from carbon emission.

The dams were thought of as a way of protecting agriculture from the vagaries of rains and ensuring an increased productivity of land. Add to that pesticides and chemical fertilisers and you have today’s one cause of breaching bio-diversity and increased salinity downstream of dams. Not only that, it has had its impact on the ground water recharge as well.

Chemical fertilisers and pesticides created havoc with every living organism. It killed beneficial insects, birds and impacted gene structure of living organisms in the ecological chain. Dams took away the strength of current in the river water leading to choking of streams through siltation. When the water surged, river beds couldn’t accommodate the increased volume of water, leading to floods that were not ordained by Nature.

We lifted water from the underground that are all connected through layers of porous earth. They couldn’t find their natural replenishment from water reservoirs on the surface at the same rate we were lifting water for agriculture. It affected the forest. In addition to our hunger for trees to create new habitats or furniture, we also contributed to depletion of natural resources that directly or indirectly are the conditions of our life.

This is the way we raised water salinity threatening our life support reservoir of sweet water. We contributed to raising the carbon footprint by increased use of everything that is a carbon contributor creating risks of disaster like global warming, rising of sea level, unpredictable rain cycles, tsunamis at a regular frequency wiping off habitations, earthquakes and of course polar melting. All of these are wrecking havocs and raising the risks of greater disaster. That’s why when we talk about climate risk, we are also talking about disaster risk. We are doing so because the Earth can live without us, but we cannot live without the Nature that gave us our birth. And that is the risk we are talking about when we are talking about climate.

This is a question that has bugged discussions on economic movements for ages and there is no clear answer to it. Because competitions does kill jobs and it does create jobs. Sounds contradictory? It does but it’s true nonetheless.

Think about the artisans of the pre industrial revolution era. They were the dominant manufacturing force in the world. An artisan could be identified from his product as each product embodied skill of the artisan concerned. People would travel far and wide in search of an excellent product and search out the artisan whose skill was considered the best in the market in that specific product.

Things changed drastically after the industrial revolution. Individual skills were no longer in demand and artifacts became products for niche markets. Skill became ability to crank machines for specific hours within a factory and products became distinguishable only by their labels. Artisans became factory workers and they were labelled differently. New jobs were created. Engineers were needed to maintain machines or make machines. Managers were needed to run the factory and later the business.

The whole structure of the required skill sets changed. The old skills fell by the way side. Those who couldn’t upskill themselves became unemployed. Jobs were lost and jobs were created.

But competition like never before became intense. Enterprise took up a new flavour. Those who owned factories or businesses wanted to raise their profitability by producing more by employing less. This created search for those people who were capable of improving the existing technology or creating an entirely new set of technology to produce the same product more efficiently. Automation became the buzzword. This again created the need for new skill sets making the old ones obsolete. Jobs were killed and new job opportunities were created.

With computerisation there came another wave of change and now we have machine learning and artificial intelligence. This again is creating an absolutely new paradigm making existing job profiles obsolete.

What, however, needs to be noted here is that with each paradigm shift there has been a change in the levels of prosperity. For example, a few decades ago air-conditioners were for the rich to enjoy. It’s now part of middle class life. Cars were not easy to buy or affordable even a few years back; now, it’s a matter of concern for traffic managers.

With such changes in life and globalisation, impact of change and obsolescence of old skill has started to claim more victims than we had known previously. To this extent, therefore, the task of managing the change so that it doesn’t lead to a social and political disruption has become a major challenge. And policy makers are increasingly being called upon to devise ways and means to manage the transition so that the human impact could be minimised.