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How Can We Meaningfully Engage With The Rural Poor

By Moin Qazi

08 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

It was only through long and close contact with the poor themselves and through our work with them that we were able to gain a deeper understanding and more balanced view of the local society. In this way, our experience was not that of typical non-governmental organizations (NGO), many of which work from within the confines of the project enclave or are based in urban centres from where excursions are made out into the villages by jeep. Sadly, many NGOs are far removed from the realities of poverty and often fail to reach those most in need. For me, the most surprising discovery was the simple human-to-human connection that let me overcome both linguistic and cultural barriers.

We have to get rid of the pernicious notion that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West. I found the villagers had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were keenly interested in profits, and entrepreneurship was in plentiful supply in rural India, having been part of the traditional culture for a millennium.

Underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Anti-poverty programmes that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. Many government programmes inadvertently fostered stratification by channelling resources through village officials who used the money to fatten the existing rich classes. The fact that policies often fail for no good reason is annoying, but is certainly less depressing than the view that they are a conspiracy against the poor.

Now more than ever, it is important to reaffirm that significant advances are attainable for the rural poor, who are a potential source of great wealth and creativity, but who must first and foremost seek their own survival under present institutional, cultural and policy conditions. Their poverty deprives not only themselves but also the rest of us of the greater value they could produce under more conducive circumstances. I feel that the people who have pioneered the various programmes that have now become models, recognised this potential and sought to evoke it.

We should not forget that poor villagers are not just statistics but people like you and me, and apart from the poverty that they share in common, there is as much variety of humankind among them as anywhere else in the world: the hardworking, the lazy, the shy, the outspoken, the honest, the devious, the intelligent and the dull, the improvident and the enterprising. The people with whom we worked were all of these, though, in my experience, the positive characteristics almost always stood out.

An important advice I would proffer to the younger crop of rural managers is that they must always have the desire and urge to produce a superior thing. How you think and the way you handle relationships are what decide how well you communicate with your customers and relate to your team. Someone said that much of today’s communications are like scrambled eggs—wholesome but messy. We must learn to be cogent and logical in our communications. I suffered from an irresistible urge to correct not only my own drafts and letters but also those of others, much to the distress of my long-suffering typists whom I must have driven up the wall many times and to whom I shall ever be grateful for their understanding and patience. With a low threshold of tolerance for inefficiency, I confess to being intolerant of slipshod work and irritatingly insisted on pursuing excellence in tasks which hardly demanded it.

While the world is indeed complex, we see that constraining ‘circles’, even if they are not always ‘vicious’, can be broken by initiatives that are well thought out but adaptable, conceived by leadership that persisted and shared credit widely, by melding so-called traditional and modern features into new attractive combinations. Midway through my rural career, I realized I had collated a ragbag of half-cooked impressions, prejudices and preferences about the villages. I had no idea what my rambling outpourings of half-fangled ideas would amount to. I wrote to get things off my chest—a kind of catharsis. I was surprised that leading business newspapers gave prominent space to my despatches, presumably because I was the only writer reporting directly from the field. In quick time, I became a roving faculty member, lecturing at academies, and a one-eyed denizen in a kingdom of the blind. I scribbled in my notebooks. With the onset of computers I kept tapping away on my laptop, composing copious notes and sometimes angry missives, the words spawned from the depths of my rage and desperation. As an ex-journalist, I had learned the subtleties of the craft and the sensitive nuances of the profession.

I found that the word ‘finance’ conjured up images of cold-hearted bankers working with people they did not understand, an unwelcome stranger to the village. The rural banker seemed a remote figure: infinitely rational and too perfect to relate to mere human concerns. At worst, he would seem like a social naïf, if not an outright sociopath, a man who had intelligence and reason but was devoid of emotions. Yet bankers are not the horned, greedy villains the public tries to demonize them to be. They are decent, caring human beings. Because their business offers few anchors for their morality, their primary compass becomes how much money they make.

To me, the real story of development finance is neither the numbers nor rapid growth. In fact, it is about the slow movement—a value-based, de-risked, diverse, widely-spread, bottom-up social transformation. The exact opposite of the dizzying development in financial markets around the world. That’s why it merits discourse. As a society, we have often looked for models that we hope will trickle down. Maybe it is just the right time for some lift. There are charlatans everywhere. There are also attempts to subvert the ethic, some by entrepreneurs pushing ultra-rapid growth and some by politicians who love to give away freebies at no cost to themselves. But there have been genuine attempts by innovative and committed managers that have brought new hope for the poor, particularly the women among them. It is now an accepted wisdom that villages present an ideal arena for improvisation of credit policies and procedures.I myself found innovative efforts at village level both easier and followed by rich dividends.

The poor are yet to find their voice, even as the media (for that matter, the entire establishment) have become the megaphone of the classes that are prospering. The preference for growth over social justice, indeed, the argument that economic growth is the road to social justice, is advocated over and above increased spending. But is it required for accelerated growth to translate into inclusive growth? The answer, I fervently believe, lies in inclusive governance. In the absence of inclusive governance, the people at the grassroots, that is, the intended beneficiaries of poverty alleviation programme are left abjectly dependent on a bureaucratic delivery mechanism over which they have no effective control. The alternative system would be participatory development, where the people themselves are enabled to build their own future through elected representatives responsible to the local community and, therefore, responsive to their needs.

Moin Qazi is a well known banker, author and Islamic researcher .He holds doctorates in Economics and English. He was Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. He has authored several books on religion, rural finance, culture and handicrafts. He is author of the bestselling book Village Diary of a Development Banker. He is also a recipient of UNESCO World Politics Essay Gold Medal and Rotary International’s Vocational Excellence Award. He is based in Nagpur and can be reached at [email protected]



 



 

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