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
|
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.
[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
