District Chairman,
Human Resources Development,
RID 3054 (2019-20)
“On factors holding India back, my biggest
disappointment is the low level of human development”.
Bill Gates
Co-Chair, Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation
The post
explores role of the Rotary in the post PolioPlus era.
There is no secret
that India's growth is much skewed and its benefits go disproportionately to
few people as gets manifested by Oxfam’s Wealth Report (2018) which points out
that the nine richest Indians own as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of
the population. Further, the income inequality is rising much faster than expected. The top one percent richest individuals in
India appropriated six percent of total income in the early 1980s, and now,
this figure has gone up to twenty two percent, as per the French Economist Thomas Piketty.[2] This suggests that wealth is not trickling
down to the poor and India is turning
into a ‘republic of inequality’.
Inequality
is a roadblock to progress when it deprives people of opportunity, and subjects
many to conditions of extreme poverty. As a result, it is sharply diminishing
living conditions of millions of people in India, a country that is already
home to some of the world’s poorest and hungriest people. More than half of India’s population (around 700
million in 2019) is still living under ‘multi-dimensional poverty’ compared to 5.2 per cent in China.
The article
is an attempt to understand what should be done in the next 5 to 10 years to reduce
the level of inequality? Most
importantly, how can the Rotary contribute in this effort?
Why high level of inequality? The main reason behind the high level of inequality is the
low productivity of labor. India became the fifth largest economy in
the world in terms of GDP in 2018 but still it has a very-very low per capita
GDP, as per IMF. It is placed at 122nd position among 187 countries. Hence, there needs to
be a concurrent increase in productivity.
With
the World Bank ranking India at 115th out of 157 countries on the Human
Capital Index in 2018, India cannot avoid the issue of empowering
people. HCI seeks to measure the amount of human capital that a child
born today can expect to attain by the age of 18. According to its parameters,
a child born in India today will only be 44 percent as productive as she
could have been if she had enjoyed quality education and full health as well as
quality of living environment including water and sanitation. In other
words, there are grave deficiencies in India’s human development inputs that
are preventing children from reaching their full potential.
Let us
consider some facts. India has done well over the past decade or so to get most
of its children into school. It has done less well at getting them to learn substantially
or meaningfully. Analysts are, therefore, already worrying that India’s
demographic dividend — its vast pool of young people — will become (has already
become) a curse: Without jobs, all those young people could drag down the
country instead of pushing it towards upper-middle income status. The problem
is that they are desperately short of preparation for both the old economy and
the new. India has taken education in isolation. We cannot improve the quality
of education without harmonizing it with other items like WASH
(Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and primary health, not only in schools but
also in homes of students.
In addition,
the population growth is a worrying factor. The current population growth in India is
mainly caused by unwanted fertility. Around five in ten live births are
unintended/unplanned or simply unwanted by the women who experience them which trigger continued high population growth.
Around 26 million children were born in India in 2018, and out of
this, about 13 million births could be classified as
unwanted. Further, based on the National Family Health Surveys, it is
estimated that in 2018 around 445 million people out of 1,350 million in India were a result of unwanted
pregnancies. With a large number of people resulting from unwanted
pregnancies, how can one think about using them for nation building?
Rotary initiative to unlock human potential: There is growing consensus that economic growth is
not sufficient to reduce inequality unless it is backed by high level of labor
productivity. Everyone, therefore, recognizes that harnessing the human
potential is the key to reduce inequality. With this in mind, the top leadership of the Rotary International District 3054 [3]
assembled at the Rotary Club, Jaipur on October 28, 2017 and came out with a strategy
to empower people. [4]
The strategy is being christened as ‘HDPlus’ (Human
Development Plus). It is a dynamic agenda based on a ‘whole child’
concept, that is primary-school-going child and his/her family (that is ‘HDPlus
family’). The concept is being described by policies, practices, and
relationships that ensure that each child is healthy, educated, engaged,
supported and encouraged. For this, integrating the child and his or her family
more deeply into the day-to-day life of school and home activities represents
an untapped instrument for raising the overall achievements including learning
skills and health parameters, and hence improving overall productivity.
To start with, the HDPlus strategy focuses on
five interventions in a more closely integrated form in focusing on
the HDPlus families to unlock the human potential. These are:
1. Ensuring quality elementary
education
by improving assessment and accountability systems,
which largely translates into improving teacher recruitment and training as
well as community participation in the management of government schools; [5]
2. Improving physical living conditions by strengthening access to WASH (Water,
Sanitation and Hygiene) facilities, electricity and LPG among others;
3. Enhancing
healthy life by focusing on primary health and nutrition;
4.
Promoting gender equality
by changing the mindset of young as well as old through sensitization at the family level;[6]
and
5.
Stabilizing population by
reducing incidence of unwanted fertility and infant mortality by providing
services looking to the needs of people as well as advocating that every child should be a wanted one.[7]
How to implement the strategy? To
reduce inequality, policies should be universal in principle, paying attention
to the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. The framework focuses
on children from the government elementary schools (primary and upper primary)
and their families. Now question
arises why government schools are being selected to start with? The government lays emphasis on elementary education
involving children aged 6 to 14 years old. 80 percent schools at the elementary
level are government-run or supported, making it the largest provider of
education in the country. Further, even if some people have lost hope in
government schools, the fact remains that they are catering mainly students
coming from the poor families and they are present each and every corner of the
country; and as such, they are very important link in our efforts to focus on
the deprived population.
In short,
the HDPlus strategy is aimed to lay foundation for the human competency
that is quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually.
The strategy ensures that 14 year olds (8th graders)
are well prepared to read, write and be efficient in mathematics as well as in
the basic digital technology before moving to further education, thus
initiating the process of human capital formation.
What
can Rotary do? The Rotary is a group of local leaders making
progress on a particular issue. The world has already witnessed how the Rotarians used their intelligence
and financial resources and their energy to fight polio. Now the Rotarians must
help the deprived and marginalized people by unlocking their potential, thus eradicating
poverty. It will also help to achieve the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of United Nations which is one of the
focus areas of the Rotary Foundation.
Here,
the PolioPlus could be our guiding strategy in unlocking
the human potential.[8]
First of all, media should be used
extensively to propagate the HDPlus strategy. A number of press conferences
could be arranged before contacting the state and central governments as well
as corporate sectors for their involvement and funding. To
start with, the framework could be implemented in few RI districts on pilot
basis before covering up the entire country like the PolioPlus. Further, the Rotary
clubs should be encouraged to take field projects, based on the HDPlus strategy
by joining hands with corporate sector/NGO/government.
In sum, the mission of Rotary
is to provide “service” to poor and needy ones, and here the HDPlus
strategy provides an opportunity to the Rotarians to help deprived people by
unlocking their potential. I will like
to conclude in the words of Rabindranath
Tagore:
“I
slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I
acted and behold, service was joy.”
[1] After obtaining formal
degrees from Harvard and Australian National universities, Dr. Kothari has been
working on issues pertaining population and development. He has been nominated as the District Chairman, Human
Resources Development Committee of RID 3054 (2019-20). He can be contacted at:
dkothari42@gmail.c9om
or 09829119868. Last year, his comments on “Population and Climate Change”
appeared in the New York Times
(Sept. 11, 2018).
[2] Chancel, Lucas and
Thomas Piketty. 2017. “Indian income
inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” WID, World Working Paper Series No. 2017/11,
World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics.
[3] The discussion was
chaired by then DG Maulin Patel of RID 3054 (2017-18). In addition, then DGE Neeraj Sogani and DGN Bina Desai as well PDG Ratnesh
Kashyap, PDG Ashish Desai among others attended the discussion. Rtn. Devendra Kothari, District Chairman, Human Resources Development
Committee, RID 3054 (2017-18) initiated the discussion.
[4] For details,
see: Kothari, Devendra.
2019. Nurturing
Human Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragoan International
Publishers.
[5] Kothari, Devendra. 2017. “Managing school education in India”, in Administrative Change, Vol. XLIV
(2): 78-89.
[6] Kothari, Devendra. 2014. “Empowering women in India: Need for a Feminist
Agenda”, Journal of Health Management, 16 (2): 233-43.
[7] Kothari, Devendra. 2014. “Managing Unwanted Fertility in India: Way
Forward”, -- in Suresh Sharma and
William Joe. (eds.): National
Rural Health Mission: An Unfinished Agenda, Bookwell, New Delhi.
[8] Rotary's involvement in polio eradication began in 1979 with a five-year
commitment to provide and help deliver polio vaccine to six million children of
Philippines. Following similar commitments in other countries, in the early
80's Rotary started planning for the most ambitious program in its history
— to immunize all of world's children, less than five years of age, against
polio, and in 1985 PolioPlus program was born. Since then, Rotary’s
dedication to the global eradication of polio has remained constant. 2018
marked the 33rd anniversary of and challenges the program has faced. But through the efforts of Rotary, 99 percent
of the world’s population lives in regions certified polio-free. The goal of
eradication is closer than ever. Same can be done to alleviate poverty by
promoting HDPlus strategy.
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