HDPlus Strategy: Rotary’s framework to alleviate poverty (HDPlus रणनीति: गरीबी को कम करने के लिए रोटरी की रूपरेखा)

Devendra Kothari, Ph.D [1]

District Chairman,

 Human Resources Development Committee,

 RID 3054 (2019-20). 

“The mission of The Rotary Foundation is to enable Rotarians to advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through the improvement of health, the support of education, and the alleviation of poverty.”

Rotary International

HDPlus strategy is a process of empowering people to alleviate poverty.

(HDPlus रणनीति गरीबी को कम करने के लिए लोगों को सशक्त बनाने की एक प्रक्रिया है।)

Mission of HDPlus strategy

The article explores role of the Rotary in the post-PolioPlus epoch.[2]

In a thought provoking article – Our Precarious Progress on Poverty - Bill and Melinda Gates make an astonishing point that the world is facing a tragic stalling in the fight against extreme poverty. [3]  Their diagnosis is sound: “violent conflict, severe climate change and broken health and education systems” are the new keys to poverty. Also, their prescription is effectual:  “investments in people, especially their health and education, and in innovation.”  It is because extreme poverty is a feature of life only where people’s opportunities to overcome it are brutally limited.

But how to apply the ‘prescription’ at the ground level is not clear. 

While there has been impressive progress made towards reducing poverty due to strong growth and resilience in the world, there are large domains of extreme poverty in the Sub-Sahara and South Asian countries.   And, India is still a home to very large number of the poor. Alleviating poverty in its all forms in these regions remains one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.

This article suggests a way out in form of the HDPlus Strategy, formulated by the RI District 3054, [4]  to alleviate poverty not only in India but elsewhere through a system of investment in people. Here the concept of Human Capital can be a big help. HC is a measure of the skills, education, capacity and attributes of people which influence their productive capacity and earning potential.[5] Also, the article examines whether can it be an agenda for Rotary in the post-polio epoch?

The conceptualization of HDPlus strategy is based on the Indian experiences; however, it can be applied elsewhere with area specific requirements to alleviate poverty.

Inequality directly affects the amount and severity of poverty within a nation/region. Countries that have greater inequality often have many citizens living in poverty. Income inequality has increased in nearly everywhere in recent decades, but at different speeds. 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 per cent of the population. Further, the income inequality is rising much faster than expected, as shown by Chancel and Piketty in their thought provoking article: “Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” . [6]  They found that the top one per cent richest individuals in India appropriated six per cent of total income in the early 1980s, and now, this figure has gone up to twenty two per cent. This suggests that wealth is not trickling down to the poor and India is turning into a ‘republic of inequality’.

These widening disparities require sound human development policies to empower lower income classes, and promote economic inclusion.  These policies must include components like education, analytical ability, skills, and health among other things. Let us consider one of the important components of human development – state of education – in India.

Is our education system geared enough to empower people?  Considering India’s poor education system from top to bottom, one cannot be too optimistic about it. With primary school enrollment reaching around 97 per cent since 2009, and girls making up 55 per cent of new students between 2007 and 2015, it is clear that many problems of access to schooling have been addressed. The problem is now of quality, not that of numbers. More than half of India’s students can be classified as functionally under-educated or simply half-educated. India has failed miserably in transforming schooling into genuine learning.[7]  

The Annual Status of Education Report 2017 reveals that nearly one-fourth of India’s government-school-going youngsters aged 14-18 cannot read their own language fluently. The report also reveals that 57 per cent of the children assessed struggled to solve a simple sum of division - exposing chinks in the quality of education imparted in the country. Further, 47 per cent of all 14 year-olds in the sample could not read English sentences. In addition, 64 per cent had never used the internet.  These findings have been collaborated by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries. PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years.  PISA does not test a student’s memory and curriculum-based knowledge rather PISA emphasizes functional skills that students have acquired as they near the end of compulsory schooling.  India first participated in PISA 2009 with 16,000 students from 400 schools across Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. However, the performance of Indian students was abysmally poor and India was ranked 72nd rank among 74 participating countries. Then government of India boycotted PISA, blaming “out of context” [8]

As a result, a majority of the Indian children living in low- and middle-income families   are experiencing “learning poverty”, as per the World Bank report, released in October 2019. [9]  And, there is no wonder that The World Bank ranked India at 115th out of 157 countries on the Human Capital Index in 2018.  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 per cent as productive as she could have been if she had enjoyed quality education and full health as well as better 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. “On factors holding India back, my biggest disappointment is the low level of human development,” as observed by Bill Gates. It is interesting to note that the productivity, measured as per capita GDP,   is very low. 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.

The current pool of India’s manpower has very low employability mainly due to poor quality of human capital, i.e. abilities and skills of human resources.  The country produces more than five million graduates every year. The National Employability Report    reveals that a significant proportion of these graduates, nearly 47 percent, are unemployable, given their poor linguistic and cognitive/analytical skills. 

India, therefore, accounts a large number of deprived/poor people. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), developed by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and UNDP, identifies how people are being left behind across three key dimensions: health, education and living standards, and 10 indicators – nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, sanitation, cooking fuel, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets.  It means around 700 million (70 crore) out of the total population of 1350 million in 2018 can be classified as deprived or vanchit Indians.

And without investing in this population of 140 million families, mainly comprising Dalits, tribals, OBCs and Muslims among others, India cannot think of becoming an inclusive and developed economy. Also, this could be a significant   political force in improving quality of life, enhancing governance, managing the climate change, etc.

Rotary initiative to unlock human potential: There is growing consensus that economic growth is not sufficient to reduce poverty unless it is backed by high level of labor productivity.  With this in mind, the top leadership of the Rotary International District 3054, as noted earlier, assembled at the Rotary Club, Jaipur on October 28, 2017 and came out with a strategy to empower people.  The strategy is being christened as ‘HDPlus’ (Human Development Plus). [10]  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. In other words, creating an enabling environment at family and school levels is a way to promote human capital.  It is because we need a holistic approach in imparting education, since the quality of education cannot be seen in isolation. We have to recognize the importance of primary health, water and sanitation as well as gender equality issues in promoting human development. The main action areas of HDPlus strategy are:

·         Focus of action will be on government-school-going children (an overwhelming majority of children from the poor families go to government schools), aged 6 to 14 (that is I-VIII standards), and their families to be known as HDPlus families;

·         Focal point of various governments’ pro-poor schemes along with HD interventions will be HDPlus families to create enabling environment; and

·         It will be implemented by government agencies with the help of grassroots workers in collaboration with civil societies like PlusPolio campaign.  

In sum, the HDPlus strategy is aimed to lay foundation for the human competency that is quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually, as summarized in Box A.  In addition, the HDPlus strategy could be seen as an act of promoting "T-E-A-C-H" project of Rotary.[11] 

   Box A:  Steps involved in the implementation of HDPlus strategy

I. Govt. Elementary School ·         Ensure total involvement of community/panchayat in the management of school. ·         Select    all students (As per the Annual Economic Survey 2018, around 80% of students in the govt. elementary schools are from the weaker sections of the society.)

II. HDPlus Family ·         After selecting students, go to their families (HDPlus families) and provide all basic requirements for better living: water, toilet, electricity, cooking gas, primary health among others, if they are not having.

III. Human Competency ·         All these will ensure that the 8th graders are well prepared to read, write and be efficient in mathematics & basic digital technology before moving to further education, thus initiating the process of building human capital.

                                            →                                     →

               

Rotary International (RI) and HDPlus Strategy: Buoyed by the success of "End Polio", a programme of RI, the efforts of which resulted in dropping of the number of polio cases by 99.9 percent, and 16 million people are walking today who would otherwise have been paralyzed, the Rotary must concentrate on alleviation of poverty, which is the central goal of not only of the UN   Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [12] but also of Rotary. While speaking at the 2019 RI Convention in Hamburg, Cyril Noirtin, Rotary International Representative to UNESCO & OECD, said “I believe that the more closely we align our work with the work of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the better we will be able to leverage that work, and the more we will be able to achieve.”  And that may be the reason why Mark Maloney, RI President, told Rotarians at the 2019 RI Convention: “There are so many parallels between the work we already do through our areas of focus and the work of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”  [13]

The Rotary International,  therefore,  must take a lead to  create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels to support accelerated investment in people in order   to alleviate poverty “in all its forms” (SDGs 1: No Poverty) by 2030.

Here, HDPlus strategy could be a decisive adjunct. The HDPlus strategy directly contributes to SDGs 3, (good health and well-being), SDGs 4 (quality education), SDGs 5 (gender equality), and SDGs 6 (clean water and sanitation), and all these contribute in enhancing productivity.  And, higher productivity   helps in reducing inequality (SDGs 10)   in order to achieve the supreme goal of SDGs “No Poverty" (SDGs1).  

In conclusion, Rotary members believe that we have a shared responsibility to take action on our world’s most persistent issues. Here, the HDPlus strategy provides an opportunity to alleviate poverty by investing in people.

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[1] After obtaining formal degrees from Harvard and Australian National universities, Rtn (Dr.) Kothari has been working on issues pertaining population and development.  He can be contacted at:  dkothari42@gmail.c9om or 09829119868.  His recent article: “India's women need better health services to stop delivering unwanted children” was published in the National Herald on Sept. 1, 2019 (https://uc.xyz/1RsMf?pub=link ). On August 18, 2019, another article: “Do Indians want more Children?” appeared in Times of India at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/population-and-development-in-india/do-indians-want-more-children-5190/  Last year, his comments on “Population and Climate Change” appeared in The New York Times. 

[2] 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 by local Rotary. 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.

[3] Refer:  “Our Precarious Progress on Poverty” by Bill and Melinda Gates, The New York Times,   Sunday Review, Sept. 23, 2018.

[4] The HDPlus strategy is an outcome of a discussion. It 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.  They discussed and finalized  the draft plan prepared by  Rtn. Devendra Kothari, District Chairman, Human Resources Development Committee, RID 3054 (2017-18).

[5] According to the OECD, human capital is defined as the economic value of a worker's experience and skills or productivity. This includes assets like education, training, analytical ability, skills, and health among other things.

[6] 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. 

[7] Kothari, Devendra. 2017. “Managing school education in India”, in Administrative Change, Vol. XLIV (2): 78-89.

[8] Refer at: https://currentaffairs.gktoday.in/india-participate-international-student-assessment-pisa-2021-01201965073.html

[9]  Refer: “World Bank. 2019. Ending Learning Poverty: What Will It Take? World Bank,  Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32553 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”

[10] For details, see:  Kothari, Devendra. 2019. Nurturing Human Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragoan International Publishers.

  

[11] Rotary in India through “Rotary India Literacy Mission” has embarked upon one of the most comprehensive programmes on Total Literacy and Quality Education to empower people. This mission wishes to achieve the literacy goals through its comprehensive program called T-E-A-C-H: T – Teacher Support, E – E-learning, A – Adult Literacy, C- Child Development and H- Happy School. Each of these programmes has a specific focus and it is interlinked with each other in achieving the common goal of bringing total literacy and improving the learning outcomes of primary education, in various parts of the country.

[12] The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030.

[13] Refer article:  Rotary’s contribution to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals at: http://riunescoday.org/2020/rotarys-contribution-to-the-united-nations-sustainable-development-goals