TIME OUT
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
March 2007
Most of us do not have smooth career paths. There are negative slopes, dotted lines and blank spaces in our achievement versus time graphs, and periods when cynicism levels are high, when completing sudoku puzzles become a major objective, and when we are particularly susceptible to proposals from friends to walk across the Himalayas. Some of us have dropped out completely or moved off-track to do something different, and some have searched for stimulation through extra-marital misadventures or other self-destructive behaviour. Such are the effects of the ‘outs’.
Those of us plodding away within an organization are familiar with the ‘outs’, we see them often enough and experience them occasionally. Frozen out when stylistic idiosyncrasies clash with a superior’s personality or an organization’s culture. Burned out by the toxic triad of an overwhelming workload, the inability to see the positive impacts of one’s labours, and the failure to achieve one’s career ambitions. Psyched out by biological or psychological changes that trigger a midlife crisis. Flaming out from a fundamental incompatibility between one’s abilities and the requirements of the job.
There are some alpha plus types, one had always assumed, who do not have these problems – who have a smooth, short and inexorable rise to the top, whose career graphs turn sharply upwards from their late twenties and plateau out only in the stratosphere – the supercharged ones who exult in winning, in mastering new skills and in surpassing previous benchmarks of excellence. It was therefore interesting to read an article in a recent HBR[1] of a problem that is exclusive to these types that the authors have called the Summit Syndrome (SS – with due apologies to Adolf). Interesting because it says something about the career paths of the highly successful, and interesting because it explains the gaps we sometimes see between perceived potential and actual achievement.
The first point the authors make is that a successful career is not a straight line to the top; it is more like a series of northeast pointing S-curves with each S representing a job or task. Stage 1 at the bottom of the S represents the beginning of a new role, of assessing and assembling the requirements for the climb (building a new network, forming relationships with one’s team, developing a strategy, etc.). Stage 2 represents the ascent up the slope, a period of learning and adapting to the role, of developing the appropriate levels of skill and proficiency, of figuring out how to navigate the organizational territory and the external competitive environment. Stage 3 represents the approach to the summit, which is when the onset of SS occurs – mastering the work triggers discomfort and is the harbinger of a crisis. Stage 4 represents the plateau, when the challenge has been conquered and the requirement is to coast along until the next task – super-achievers have difficulty in negotiating flat terrain and this is a time of inner turmoil and mounting confusion about career direction. Stage 5 represents the descent and is characterized by an obvious drop in performance and career-limiting behaviour.
SUMMIT PHASE
INTERNAL SYMPTOMS
EXTERNAL SYMPTOMS
Approaching
· Low level discontent
· “What happened to the excitement?”
· Subtle loss of edge
· Emerging distractions
o Hobby obsessions
o Heightened appetite for stimulation
o Daydreaming
· Attraction to unsolicited offers
Plateauing
· Loss of enthusiasm
· Fearing loss of career momentum and legacy
· ‘What happened to my goals?”
· Working harder to do the basics
· More serious distractions
o Fancier adventures
o Curiosity about alternate lifestyles
o More vacations
· Unorthodox career choices attract disproportionate consideration
Descending
· Feeling lost
· Cynicism, anger, frustration are near the surface
· “What happened to my career?”
· Working harder to conceal disengagement
· Severe distractions
o Substance abuse
o Sexual indiscretions
o Unconscious career sabotage
· Bailing out
SS is quite unlike the other “outs”. This is not a once-in-a-lifetime event like a mid-life crisis. Those in the initial phases of SS have not been frozen out or marginalized – they reside in the inner circles. They rarely burn out – they see the impact of their work and welcome big demands. Their capabilities are not merely aligned with organizational purpose, they are admired and celebrated by superiors, peers and subordinates alike. In short, they are the superstars – they do not have the insecurity and inferiority complexes of the victims of the “outs”. And SS is more profound for the more proficient – it causes superstars to leave the fast track, drift from one job to another, and ultimately be among those highly promising men and women who never manage to achieve the positions and goals that friends and colleagues had assumed they would. For their organizations, this uncharacteristic behaviour from those least expected to disappoint comes as a shock. Getting them back in the saddle is expensive in terms of lost contribution, organization disruption and the price of counseling – but that’s the best-case scenario. The worst is surprise departures that rob organizations of their most promising talents.
The rest of the article is about recognizing and handling SS. I am going to move from the international corporate sector to the Indian development sector, as usual. We need to attract good people in and retain them to survive. Getting them in is comparatively easy – a nice pep talk about motivation, commitment, the need to give back to the country, etc., etc., tends to suffice. Retaining them is much more difficult, organizations in the sector have little knowledge of the frustrations such people face and are constantly and continuously surprised by the sudden departures of their prodigies. Making do with the ordinary is not enough – we need to engage with the brilliant to keep this sector vibrant and in tune with the challenges faced. Bleating on about their fickle nature, their capriciousness and their turbo-charged ambition is pointless. Maybe we can learn from those with experience in dealing with them, such as the international corporate sector.
I would like to conclude by returning to the subject of the ‘outs’. There is little understanding of this phenomenon within the development sector, especially the ‘outs’ faced by the brilliant. The first ‘outs’ occur before they actually land up at the NGO’s doorstep. Their parents freak out, and they contemplate a life out of pocket. Nothing new with the former, plenty with the latter! Salary differentials, even at entry levels, between the development sector and outside are now humungous. And today’s youth do not ask Mom and Dad for money, they prefer a bank loan for their post-graduation. And yet, despite poor salaries, despite EMIs, despite parental, peer and to-be-spouse pressure, and despite plenty of options, some brilliant people do come into the sector.
The mismatch between the organization’s requirements and the individual’s abilities invariably occurs from the beginning. A best-case scenario is when the recruit is given responsibilities that include the hurly-burly of dealing with communities (something that no post-graduate degree prepares one for), forcing her/him to sink or swim. If s/he sinks – good riddance! If not, you have somebody worth keeping. The worst is when the organization dumps all its English-writing requirements (proposals, reports, blah, blah, blah!) on this person – a quick flame out happens. Bosses, such people have not come to be glorified translators and candy floss for donor visits. The disservice you do to the sector far outweighs the immediate relief from meeting writing deadlines.
Empirical evidence points to the first burn out happening 2 to 3 years after the person joins. And while the results of our work are right in front of us, the other elements of the toxic triad are joined by a third – that city kids working in the boondocks miss the lights, sound and action and feel that life is passing them by. Cynicism and faultfinding set in, and they pick the wrong fights and create tension. What should the organization do? One, recognize it for what it is – a burnout and not some fundamental deficiency in either the individual or the organization. Two, provide space for introspective thinking (facilitate long term training, for example). Three, if it comes to losing the person, make sure that the process is pleasant and positive. Use your contacts within the sector to place the person suitably and ensure that your recommendations are not coloured by the recent past. And four, maintain the relationship – the brilliant will always rise in the world.
The most dangerous of the ‘outs’ happens to the brilliant in mid-life, because those that have stayed in the sector are now leaders and policy-makers. Many re-evaluate their objectives at this stage, weigh them up against financial and physical security concerns[2], and get psyched out. Organizations lose their way when this happens to the boss – the bricks and mortar, vehicles and salaries become more important than the communities served and problems addressed. The donors become kings, and others within the organization, especially the other brilliant, become threats. Everything works to enable this one person to stay in position. Vision, mission and values turn into more jargon.
Some survive the ‘outs’ and go on to do their best work later in their careers. But the unrealized potential and overall loss to the sector of those who don’t is huge. It would be useful for development organizations to work out ways of dealing with the ‘outs’.
[1] “Crisis at the Summit”, George Parsons and Richard Pascale, Harvard Business Review of March 2007
2. An old saying goes - men, when they turn 40, rethink the value of honesty, and women of virtue.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A Business Trip
A BUSINESS TRIP
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: An article in a management journal that does not leave you with a headache! Development writing in a management journal! Something on the development scene in the US of A being relevant to India! The paper “Should Non-Profits Seek Profits” by William Foster and Jeffrey Bradach in the Harvard Business Review of February 2005 was all these things, and would qualify as a must-read to those like me who have never seen an NGO run a successful income generating venture and wonder why this is so, and why so many continue to want to do so.
The Situation: Apparently, today it is routine for non-profit organizations (read NGOs) to run a business venture and most believe that earned income will play an important role in bolstering an organization’s future revenues. Revenue generating initiatives are being launched or considered in almost every non-profit domain, and a flood of publications, events and experts have sprung up, including how-to books with titles like “Selling Social Change (Without Selling Out)”. The Yale School of Management, in a paper entitled “Enterprising Non-Profits: Revenue Generation in the Non-Profit Sector” reports that half to two-thirds of the ventures they examined were profitable or breaking even – a claim that Foster and Bradach viciously trash by casting doubts on the sampling and enquiry methodology and the analysis – have inter-university rivalries replaced the cold war?
Why is this so? First, the obvious – given the way philanthropy (i.e. funding) is practiced today, mostly small short-lived grants restricted to specific uses that are hard and frustrating to attract, the allure of earned income is understandable because it comes with no strings attached. Second, the general enthusiasm for business in the booming 1990s percolated into the non-profit sector, with managers wanting to be active entrepreneurs rather than passive bureaucrats and with organizations keen to be viewed as disciplined, businesslike and innovative to stakeholders. And third, financial self-sufficiency is a goal to non-profits and earned income is a means to attaining ‘sustainability’.
Skepticism! Foster and Bradach claim that there are reasons for skepticism; that few ventures actually make money, that most ventures are badly evaluated, with potential financial returns exaggerated and challenges routinely discounted, and that commercial ventures can distract non-profit managers from their core social missions, and even subvert those missions. Earned income ventures, they say, have a role in the non-profit sector, but unrealistic expectations are distorting decisions, wasting precious resources and leaving important social needs unmet. They conducted a survey (and a fair bit of effort goes into explaining how their sampling methodology, etc., unlike Yale’s, is correct and the results therefore applicable) that indicated that 71 percent of ventures were unprofitable, 24 percent profitable and 5 percent breaking even. Of the profitable, half did not fully account for indirect costs. “Simply put,” they conclude, “there is every reason to believe that the lion’s share of earned income ventures do not succeed in generating revenues beyond their costs.”
The disadvantages of non-profits: Running a business is challenging under the best of circumstances, and only 39 percent of small businesses are profitable. The odds are stacked even higher against non-profits because –
· Conflicting priorities – non-profits focus on both financial and non-financial concerns, such as paying a ‘living wage’ (I think this means not squeezing your employees sufficiently), hiring from some disadvantaged pool of people, pricing products lower so that they are affordable to low-income groups, or offering products that are ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than market norms – all appropriate social objectives, but they put non-profits at a disadvantage in a highly competitive market.
· Lack of business perspective – non-profits tend to overlook the difference between revenues and profits, unremarkable when revenues are in the form of grants that have a negligible cost attached to raising them but critical in the viability of a business venture. They also invariably do not include the cost of holding inventory, or indirect costs, or overheads, or top management time, in their costing structure. Start-up costs, too, tend to be overlooked as these are invariably met from philanthropic funding and thus leave the organization without investors clamouring for returns.
· Philanthropic capital and escalation of commitment – when they realize that a venture is unprofitable, managers rarely pull the plug and instead opt to throw good money after bad in the hope of turning the venture around and thus avoiding the embarrassment of failure.
A question of mission: A cold look at any venture will conclude that it won’t yield any real revenues – does this mean that all should be abandoned? Foster and Bradach feel that a venture can be attractive without breaking even if it contributes to the core mission of the organization (the example they give is of a catering operation for an organization that works on training the unemployed, in which the primary objective is to provide valuable on-the-job training). Research reveals that many ventures fail the mission as well as the financial test (often the two compete with each other), and the lure of potential profits tend to distort an impartial evaluation of a venture’s mission contribution. A good assessment of a venture’s mission contribution would return the non-profit sector to its fundamental principles, as non-profits are non-profits because the marketplace does not take adequate care of the needs they address.
In conclusion: The situation in India is, no doubt, different. There are donor organizations with a long-term perspective and an interest in seeing a non-profit organization develop. Many Indian non-profits, too, are highly capable organizations with a clear sense of mission and an ability to understand what contributes to this and what does not. And yet, successful income generating ventures in the NGO sector are few (I have yet to see one) for the reasons outlined above and some more – an inability to distinguish between money to the community and money to the organization and an ability to attract only people like me who are genetically unable to do business (else they would!) come to mind. Happily, many do pass the mission test.
Acronyms / Jargon Watch
HBR Harvard Business Review
Mission Core objectives of an organization
Non-profits The equivalent of non-governmental organizations
References:
“Should Non-Profits Seek Profits”, William Foster and Jeffrey Bradach, Harvard Business Review of February 2005
“Enterprising Non-Profits: Revenue Generation in the Non-Profit Sector”, Cynthia Massarski and Samantha Beinhacker, The Yale School of Management - The Goldman Sachs Foundation partnership on Non-profit Ventures
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: An article in a management journal that does not leave you with a headache! Development writing in a management journal! Something on the development scene in the US of A being relevant to India! The paper “Should Non-Profits Seek Profits” by William Foster and Jeffrey Bradach in the Harvard Business Review of February 2005 was all these things, and would qualify as a must-read to those like me who have never seen an NGO run a successful income generating venture and wonder why this is so, and why so many continue to want to do so.
The Situation: Apparently, today it is routine for non-profit organizations (read NGOs) to run a business venture and most believe that earned income will play an important role in bolstering an organization’s future revenues. Revenue generating initiatives are being launched or considered in almost every non-profit domain, and a flood of publications, events and experts have sprung up, including how-to books with titles like “Selling Social Change (Without Selling Out)”. The Yale School of Management, in a paper entitled “Enterprising Non-Profits: Revenue Generation in the Non-Profit Sector” reports that half to two-thirds of the ventures they examined were profitable or breaking even – a claim that Foster and Bradach viciously trash by casting doubts on the sampling and enquiry methodology and the analysis – have inter-university rivalries replaced the cold war?
Why is this so? First, the obvious – given the way philanthropy (i.e. funding) is practiced today, mostly small short-lived grants restricted to specific uses that are hard and frustrating to attract, the allure of earned income is understandable because it comes with no strings attached. Second, the general enthusiasm for business in the booming 1990s percolated into the non-profit sector, with managers wanting to be active entrepreneurs rather than passive bureaucrats and with organizations keen to be viewed as disciplined, businesslike and innovative to stakeholders. And third, financial self-sufficiency is a goal to non-profits and earned income is a means to attaining ‘sustainability’.
Skepticism! Foster and Bradach claim that there are reasons for skepticism; that few ventures actually make money, that most ventures are badly evaluated, with potential financial returns exaggerated and challenges routinely discounted, and that commercial ventures can distract non-profit managers from their core social missions, and even subvert those missions. Earned income ventures, they say, have a role in the non-profit sector, but unrealistic expectations are distorting decisions, wasting precious resources and leaving important social needs unmet. They conducted a survey (and a fair bit of effort goes into explaining how their sampling methodology, etc., unlike Yale’s, is correct and the results therefore applicable) that indicated that 71 percent of ventures were unprofitable, 24 percent profitable and 5 percent breaking even. Of the profitable, half did not fully account for indirect costs. “Simply put,” they conclude, “there is every reason to believe that the lion’s share of earned income ventures do not succeed in generating revenues beyond their costs.”
The disadvantages of non-profits: Running a business is challenging under the best of circumstances, and only 39 percent of small businesses are profitable. The odds are stacked even higher against non-profits because –
· Conflicting priorities – non-profits focus on both financial and non-financial concerns, such as paying a ‘living wage’ (I think this means not squeezing your employees sufficiently), hiring from some disadvantaged pool of people, pricing products lower so that they are affordable to low-income groups, or offering products that are ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than market norms – all appropriate social objectives, but they put non-profits at a disadvantage in a highly competitive market.
· Lack of business perspective – non-profits tend to overlook the difference between revenues and profits, unremarkable when revenues are in the form of grants that have a negligible cost attached to raising them but critical in the viability of a business venture. They also invariably do not include the cost of holding inventory, or indirect costs, or overheads, or top management time, in their costing structure. Start-up costs, too, tend to be overlooked as these are invariably met from philanthropic funding and thus leave the organization without investors clamouring for returns.
· Philanthropic capital and escalation of commitment – when they realize that a venture is unprofitable, managers rarely pull the plug and instead opt to throw good money after bad in the hope of turning the venture around and thus avoiding the embarrassment of failure.
A question of mission: A cold look at any venture will conclude that it won’t yield any real revenues – does this mean that all should be abandoned? Foster and Bradach feel that a venture can be attractive without breaking even if it contributes to the core mission of the organization (the example they give is of a catering operation for an organization that works on training the unemployed, in which the primary objective is to provide valuable on-the-job training). Research reveals that many ventures fail the mission as well as the financial test (often the two compete with each other), and the lure of potential profits tend to distort an impartial evaluation of a venture’s mission contribution. A good assessment of a venture’s mission contribution would return the non-profit sector to its fundamental principles, as non-profits are non-profits because the marketplace does not take adequate care of the needs they address.
In conclusion: The situation in India is, no doubt, different. There are donor organizations with a long-term perspective and an interest in seeing a non-profit organization develop. Many Indian non-profits, too, are highly capable organizations with a clear sense of mission and an ability to understand what contributes to this and what does not. And yet, successful income generating ventures in the NGO sector are few (I have yet to see one) for the reasons outlined above and some more – an inability to distinguish between money to the community and money to the organization and an ability to attract only people like me who are genetically unable to do business (else they would!) come to mind. Happily, many do pass the mission test.
Acronyms / Jargon Watch
HBR Harvard Business Review
Mission Core objectives of an organization
Non-profits The equivalent of non-governmental organizations
References:
“Should Non-Profits Seek Profits”, William Foster and Jeffrey Bradach, Harvard Business Review of February 2005
“Enterprising Non-Profits: Revenue Generation in the Non-Profit Sector”, Cynthia Massarski and Samantha Beinhacker, The Yale School of Management - The Goldman Sachs Foundation partnership on Non-profit Ventures
Decline & Fall of the NGO
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE INDIAN NGO[i]
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Back in the early 1990s, the Indian non-governmental development sector (referred to hereafter as the NGO sector) was a source of pride to me. In most underdeveloped countries, international donor agencies would have to set up their own implementing operations; this meant that plans were formulated in London, New York, Geneva, Stockholm, etc., that significant sums were spent on expatriate staff and administration, and that local communities were reduced to the status of recipients. Not in India! Here, there was a small, vibrant and independent NGO sector that linked donors and communities, carried the aspirations and requirements of one to the other, and was cost effective in its operations. Here, donors did not work directly.
They still, for the most part, don’t. And it is a strange time to be talking of the NGO sector in terms such as decline and fall – the sector receives Rs. 7,000 crore annually in grants from abroad, a number that has been shooting up rapidly in the recent past, and the number of organizations with governmental permission to receive foreign funds (what is called the FCRA) stands at about 35,000[ii]. The sector continues to be a prime customer of vehicle manufacturers and the international travel industry, as well as to occupy some great real estate and provide employment to a large number of otherwise unemployable people (such as me). So what’s the problem?
I’m not too sure, but I do see some disquieting trends.
The first is that I have not come across any great new ideas from the NGO sector for a long time. The business of creating buzz in development is back with the government, with exciting initiatives such as the NREGA and Panchayati Raj that a) have the ability to address root causes of problems and b) have no or at best peripheral roles for NGOs. The NGO sector is not driving the nation’s development agenda or the debate on poverty any more – it is in ‘business as usual’ mode.
The second is that brilliant young people are not coming into the NGO sector. The developmentally inclined among them see NGOs as part of the problem, not a solution, and are looking at other forms of organizations and activities to address matters including for-profits and financial services. The mediocre young, to whom development is a career option rather than a calling, are more inclined towards the various layers of touting organizations in the sector because they are based in cities and salaries are higher.
The third is that, like ideas, I have not come across too many great young NGOs[iii] for a long time as well – and I am in the business of looking. It seems that good new organizations dealing with development, like people, are taking new forms such as for-profits, Internet start-ups and non-banking financial companies. And those NGOs that are being set up tend to have the limited ambition of emulating their role models in the NGO sector – which are either the public service contractors, the fancy infrastructure, lifestyle and talk-wallahs seen making loud sucking sounds in the corridors of power, or the downright venal and corrupt. Nothing original here!
The fourth is that the skeletons in the NGO sector’s collective cupboard – the dirt, corruption and the egregious practices – are finally hitting the public space[iv]. At the same time, the inability of anyone within to see, hear, or speak of wrongdoing (what I refer to as the 3-Monkeys Syndrome) continues unabated. While there has been some cursory action from within the sector[v], it seems a case of too little too late. Nobody in the NGO sector, it appears, is willing to take a strong stand. The government has no such compunctions, however, and we are slowly seeing a tightening of regulations that address some of these issues but make it difficult for the honest (and silent) minority.
The fifth is that the role of mobilizing people and providing a forum for opposition and protest has moved from the NGO sector to the extreme right and left. A look at the movements against land acquisition for SEZs, or the one against mining in Vth Schedule areas, all of which seem obvious cases for NGO action, and they are conspicuous by their absence. Those that should have been in the forefront, who claim to speak for small farmers and tribals, appear to be on the side of the corporates involved. I wonder why!
These trends point to larger problems within the NGO sector, and while there is much ranting and raving about the obvious ones, government corruption, the lack of dedicated, motivated, etc., people coming in, the lure of the Mammon and so on, some critical internal issues are being papered over, including –
The individuals and organizations that blazed a trail in the 70s and 80s are ageing, and neither is being replaced. The old bosses continue to rule their empires, with cynicism and self-aggrandizement replacing fire and zeal. They also make it impossible for second lines to develop (unless it is their progeny) while simultaneously lamenting the lack of committed and capable people who can ‘stay on to take over’. Most of their organizations are sad and tired, and exist because they exist and not so as to address critical problems of the poor and marginalized. Yet, such individuals are effective at protecting their own short-term interests to the general detriment of their organizations and the NGO sector.
The role and importance of touts within the NGO sector, in the form of resource organizations, nodal NGOs, training institutions, research and documentation setups, development consulting businesses, etc., has increased considerably. There are now layers upon layers of these between the donor and the NGO that actually uses the money, sitting in Delhi and state capitals, knowing donorspeak, writing proposals to formulas, and providing a variety of services to donors on a 20 (or whatever) percent commission. They are the new patrons of the Indian NGO and now claim to speak for and on behalf of the NGO sector[vi]. I have yet to see evidence of a mandate for them for this role.
With a now widespread belief in the mainstream that NGOs are irrelevant combined with little evidence to show that NGOs have been more effective than the state (for all its inefficiency and corruption) in providing development, there is a growing move to scuttle the NGO sector through restrictions and controls and let it sink in its own quagmire. But, before you start saying ‘to hell with the whole bloody lot of them’ and before, if you are a young professional within, you start retraining and looking around for opportunities, take a minute to think of the consequences to the country of a dormant NGO sector.
First, NGOs form an important component of civil society and thereby a forum for debate and action that is out of government circles. Without NGOs, the state would become much more powerful. Non-state opposition would move to the fringes. We are already seeing this with the government and the private sector cozying up to the detriment of vulnerable sections of society. And the extreme left groups that are now active in more than 100 districts in the country have an agenda that is similar to that of NGOs (other than the violence and overthrow of the state). Not coincidentally, the parts of the country facing the problem of insurgency are also the parts with little genuine NGO activity.
And second, who will focus on the very poor, the marginalized, etc.? The government? The new genre of development organizations? In both cases, unlikely! The state can pass high-minded laws, but would always require grassroots support and pressure to implement them effectively. And the new guys would be lost in a world without Internet connectivity, where proposed beneficiaries have little education and no marketable skills.
To conclude – most people would agree that NGOs are in a state of decline despite some glitzy statistics on foreign contributions. It is my contention that it is not in the country’s interest that they die out. Can we, on the inside, do something? As a beginning, and at the very least, we need to give less respect to a bunch of has-beens and touts who have built empires on public money raised in the name of poor people. And we need to stop behaving like the 3 monkeys – there is little disconnect between others’ bad practice and our own futures. The impetus for reform has to come from within – let us not merely react to government and public scrutiny. Or else, better brush up those CVs.
Acronyms / Jargon watch
Vth Schedule Areas Areas that have a tribal majority
Donorspeak That peculiar language of donor organizations
FCRA Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act
NGO Non-governmental Organization
NREGA National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
SEZ Special Economic Zone
[i] With apologies to Edward Gibbon
[ii] “The Noose Tightens”, an article by Neeraj Mishra in India Today issue of 29th January 2007
[iii] I should protect myself here by mentioning that there are exceptions
[iv] There have been three articles I have read in the past month in the mainstream press with headlines combining the words corruption and NGOs.
[v] One such is the formation of the Credibility Alliance – purely voluntary with no checking system in place and no means of expelling members who are not complying with the standards.
[vi] A recent example is a meeting that a group of these touts had on behalf of the NGO sector with the Home Minister on the new FCRA bill. They had not done Mr. Shivraj Patil the courtesy of reading the new bill – so when he asked them specifically which passages were objectionable to NGOs there was a flummoxed silence followed by hemming and hawing. You can be sure that the NGO sector’s purpose was not served.
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Back in the early 1990s, the Indian non-governmental development sector (referred to hereafter as the NGO sector) was a source of pride to me. In most underdeveloped countries, international donor agencies would have to set up their own implementing operations; this meant that plans were formulated in London, New York, Geneva, Stockholm, etc., that significant sums were spent on expatriate staff and administration, and that local communities were reduced to the status of recipients. Not in India! Here, there was a small, vibrant and independent NGO sector that linked donors and communities, carried the aspirations and requirements of one to the other, and was cost effective in its operations. Here, donors did not work directly.
They still, for the most part, don’t. And it is a strange time to be talking of the NGO sector in terms such as decline and fall – the sector receives Rs. 7,000 crore annually in grants from abroad, a number that has been shooting up rapidly in the recent past, and the number of organizations with governmental permission to receive foreign funds (what is called the FCRA) stands at about 35,000[ii]. The sector continues to be a prime customer of vehicle manufacturers and the international travel industry, as well as to occupy some great real estate and provide employment to a large number of otherwise unemployable people (such as me). So what’s the problem?
I’m not too sure, but I do see some disquieting trends.
The first is that I have not come across any great new ideas from the NGO sector for a long time. The business of creating buzz in development is back with the government, with exciting initiatives such as the NREGA and Panchayati Raj that a) have the ability to address root causes of problems and b) have no or at best peripheral roles for NGOs. The NGO sector is not driving the nation’s development agenda or the debate on poverty any more – it is in ‘business as usual’ mode.
The second is that brilliant young people are not coming into the NGO sector. The developmentally inclined among them see NGOs as part of the problem, not a solution, and are looking at other forms of organizations and activities to address matters including for-profits and financial services. The mediocre young, to whom development is a career option rather than a calling, are more inclined towards the various layers of touting organizations in the sector because they are based in cities and salaries are higher.
The third is that, like ideas, I have not come across too many great young NGOs[iii] for a long time as well – and I am in the business of looking. It seems that good new organizations dealing with development, like people, are taking new forms such as for-profits, Internet start-ups and non-banking financial companies. And those NGOs that are being set up tend to have the limited ambition of emulating their role models in the NGO sector – which are either the public service contractors, the fancy infrastructure, lifestyle and talk-wallahs seen making loud sucking sounds in the corridors of power, or the downright venal and corrupt. Nothing original here!
The fourth is that the skeletons in the NGO sector’s collective cupboard – the dirt, corruption and the egregious practices – are finally hitting the public space[iv]. At the same time, the inability of anyone within to see, hear, or speak of wrongdoing (what I refer to as the 3-Monkeys Syndrome) continues unabated. While there has been some cursory action from within the sector[v], it seems a case of too little too late. Nobody in the NGO sector, it appears, is willing to take a strong stand. The government has no such compunctions, however, and we are slowly seeing a tightening of regulations that address some of these issues but make it difficult for the honest (and silent) minority.
The fifth is that the role of mobilizing people and providing a forum for opposition and protest has moved from the NGO sector to the extreme right and left. A look at the movements against land acquisition for SEZs, or the one against mining in Vth Schedule areas, all of which seem obvious cases for NGO action, and they are conspicuous by their absence. Those that should have been in the forefront, who claim to speak for small farmers and tribals, appear to be on the side of the corporates involved. I wonder why!
These trends point to larger problems within the NGO sector, and while there is much ranting and raving about the obvious ones, government corruption, the lack of dedicated, motivated, etc., people coming in, the lure of the Mammon and so on, some critical internal issues are being papered over, including –
The individuals and organizations that blazed a trail in the 70s and 80s are ageing, and neither is being replaced. The old bosses continue to rule their empires, with cynicism and self-aggrandizement replacing fire and zeal. They also make it impossible for second lines to develop (unless it is their progeny) while simultaneously lamenting the lack of committed and capable people who can ‘stay on to take over’. Most of their organizations are sad and tired, and exist because they exist and not so as to address critical problems of the poor and marginalized. Yet, such individuals are effective at protecting their own short-term interests to the general detriment of their organizations and the NGO sector.
The role and importance of touts within the NGO sector, in the form of resource organizations, nodal NGOs, training institutions, research and documentation setups, development consulting businesses, etc., has increased considerably. There are now layers upon layers of these between the donor and the NGO that actually uses the money, sitting in Delhi and state capitals, knowing donorspeak, writing proposals to formulas, and providing a variety of services to donors on a 20 (or whatever) percent commission. They are the new patrons of the Indian NGO and now claim to speak for and on behalf of the NGO sector[vi]. I have yet to see evidence of a mandate for them for this role.
With a now widespread belief in the mainstream that NGOs are irrelevant combined with little evidence to show that NGOs have been more effective than the state (for all its inefficiency and corruption) in providing development, there is a growing move to scuttle the NGO sector through restrictions and controls and let it sink in its own quagmire. But, before you start saying ‘to hell with the whole bloody lot of them’ and before, if you are a young professional within, you start retraining and looking around for opportunities, take a minute to think of the consequences to the country of a dormant NGO sector.
First, NGOs form an important component of civil society and thereby a forum for debate and action that is out of government circles. Without NGOs, the state would become much more powerful. Non-state opposition would move to the fringes. We are already seeing this with the government and the private sector cozying up to the detriment of vulnerable sections of society. And the extreme left groups that are now active in more than 100 districts in the country have an agenda that is similar to that of NGOs (other than the violence and overthrow of the state). Not coincidentally, the parts of the country facing the problem of insurgency are also the parts with little genuine NGO activity.
And second, who will focus on the very poor, the marginalized, etc.? The government? The new genre of development organizations? In both cases, unlikely! The state can pass high-minded laws, but would always require grassroots support and pressure to implement them effectively. And the new guys would be lost in a world without Internet connectivity, where proposed beneficiaries have little education and no marketable skills.
To conclude – most people would agree that NGOs are in a state of decline despite some glitzy statistics on foreign contributions. It is my contention that it is not in the country’s interest that they die out. Can we, on the inside, do something? As a beginning, and at the very least, we need to give less respect to a bunch of has-beens and touts who have built empires on public money raised in the name of poor people. And we need to stop behaving like the 3 monkeys – there is little disconnect between others’ bad practice and our own futures. The impetus for reform has to come from within – let us not merely react to government and public scrutiny. Or else, better brush up those CVs.
Acronyms / Jargon watch
Vth Schedule Areas Areas that have a tribal majority
Donorspeak That peculiar language of donor organizations
FCRA Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act
NGO Non-governmental Organization
NREGA National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
SEZ Special Economic Zone
[i] With apologies to Edward Gibbon
[ii] “The Noose Tightens”, an article by Neeraj Mishra in India Today issue of 29th January 2007
[iii] I should protect myself here by mentioning that there are exceptions
[iv] There have been three articles I have read in the past month in the mainstream press with headlines combining the words corruption and NGOs.
[v] One such is the formation of the Credibility Alliance – purely voluntary with no checking system in place and no means of expelling members who are not complying with the standards.
[vi] A recent example is a meeting that a group of these touts had on behalf of the NGO sector with the Home Minister on the new FCRA bill. They had not done Mr. Shivraj Patil the courtesy of reading the new bill – so when he asked them specifically which passages were objectionable to NGOs there was a flummoxed silence followed by hemming and hawing. You can be sure that the NGO sector’s purpose was not served.
Health for Sum
THE NEXT BIG IDEA by Ajit Chaudhuri
This two-pager is the result of a series of coincidences. Buried away in a pompous piece in India Today on ways to make our country a better place was a tiny, completely unsubstantiated but yet interesting statistic - that a health insurance scheme for the poor would cost Rs. 248 per poor family per year (way number 13, for the superstitious). A little before this, EPW had one article outlining community health insurance in general and another detailing the CHI scheme managed by an NGO in southern India. Somewhere in-between was the request made to me by India Today’s watchman, a daily wager called Hira Lal, for a loan to help meet the costs of his brother’s son’s operation in AIIMS – connecting the articles to a problem faced by a real person.
We all know a Hira Lal, and we all know the financial problems caused by serious illness within the family. We all know that identifying the poorest ten percent in any community is simply a matter of finding the women headed households and those which have or had a long term illness within the family. We all see that the public health system has collapsed, and is now accessible only to government servants, politicians (the lower ones on the pecking order, who can’t leverage the public exchequer to push off to the US) and their friends and relatives. We all see that most private hospitals would give leeches and bloodsuckers an inferiority complex. We all see that the poor avoid getting healthcare and, when they do, go broke in trying to pay for it – in fact, the families of 24 percent of all Indians hospitalized fall below the poverty line as a direct result of hospitalization, and expenditure on healthcare is the single biggest cause for a non-BPL household to go BPL. There is a need for radical new ideas in the field of healthcare for the poor.
What is CHI? The definition, for the definitionally inclined, is: any not-for-profit insurance scheme that is aimed primarily at the informal sector and is formed on the collective pooling of health risks in which members participate in its management. CHI schemes (should) aim to provide low cost healthcare, protect participants from high hospitalization costs and encourage participation by communities in their own healthcare. A CHI scheme has three basic stakeholders - the community, the insurer and the health maintenance organization or healthcare provider. The former EPW article studied 12 existing CHI schemes in India and identified three basic designs –
· HMO-led, where an NGO/hospital provides healthcare, purchases insurance from an insurance company and runs the insurance programme, i.e. generates awareness within the community, collects premium, submits claims, manages reimbursements and monitors for fraud.
· Insurer-led, where an NGO is the insurer, runs the insurance programme and purchases healthcare from independent providers.
· Intermediate, where the NGO runs the programme and plays the role of an agent, purchasing healthcare from providers and insurance from insurance companies.
Some of the characteristics of the CHI schemes studied were –
· The communities insured included tribal populations, dalits, farmers, women SHG members, self-employed women, etc. Some used existing CBOs to piggyback the scheme upon, such as SHGs, unions, cooperatives, etc. In some the unit of enrollment was individual and membership in the scheme voluntary and in others, enrollment was in groups or families and membership mandatory. Enrollment ranged from 1000 to 17 lakh members. Premiums per person per annum were always under Rs. 100.
· Many schemes had important exclusions such as pre-existing illnesses, self-inflicted injuries, chronic ailments, TB, HIV, pregnancies. Most reimbursed the direct cost of treatment, while some reimbursed the loss of wages as well. Some, especially the HMO-led ones, were cashless, while others had the patients paying bills and getting compensated later. Most schemes had a fixed upper limit ranging from Rs. 1250 to Rs. 1 lakh per person per annum.
· The problem of adverse selection (only the old/sick enrolling in the scheme) could be prevented by mandatory enrollment or having a larger enrollment unit. The problem of moral hazard (the health provider sticking you for as much as they can) could be prevented by capping fee structures and ensuring standard treatment guidelines.
· The subscription rates to CHI schemes varied from 10 to 50 percent of the target community when enrollment was voluntary. The reasons for this being low were – no immediate benefit perceived, premium too high, family size too high, confidence in own well-being and the source of healthcare too far.
· Utilisation rates ranged from 1.4/1000 to 240/1000. The low rates were usually because of non-financial barriers to accessing health care (hospital too far, loss of wages), while adverse selection caused the high rates.
· Some were run purely from premiums raised from the community, some relied completely upon external resources such as government or donors, and most supplemented local resources with external ones.
In the authors’ opinion, good CHI schemes protect the community by covering 100 percent of the direct cost of illness and some of the indirect one’s as well. They cover all illnesses and provide the financial benefit at the source of healthcare, thus ensuring that there are no waiting periods which patients have to cover. In addition, the premium needs to be affordable, the NGO and CBO credible and the administrative load of the scheme minimal. The insurer has to be involved hands-on. The main pitfall is the lack of good providers as the Indian private healthcare sector is unregulated and unaccountable.
The second article was of particular interest to me because it described the efforts of Ashwini, an NGO that I visit about once a year, in the field of CHI and it was to Dr. Nandakumar Menon of Ashwini, one of the authors of the paper, that I was able to address specific questions on the practicalities. He said that, in addition to all the above, CHI is viable only when all stakeholders to the scheme have an interest in reduced costs, and this is possible only in an HMO-led design in which preventive health care and a decentralized outreach programme are part of the package. Including all costs, i.e. in-patient, referral and community outreach, a CHI would come to Rs. 150 per person per annum or about 15 lakhs a year for a population of 10,000.
There is a gradual realization that access to healthcare is a serious problem, that access to medical insurance is available only to the middle class and above, that platitudes about the importance of public sector health care remain what they are, and that something needs to be done. Community health insurance schemes could be the next big idea.
References
Point 13, “57 Ways to Make a Better Place”, India Today issue of August 23 2004
Devadasan, Van Damme, Ransom and Criel, “Community Health Insurance in India: An Overview”, Economic and Political Weekly of 10-16 July 2004.
Devadasan, Manoharan, Menon, et al, “Accord Community Health Insurance: Increasing Access to Hospital Care”, Economic and Political Weekly of 10-16 July 2004.
Acronyms
BPL Below the Poverty Line
CBO Community Based Organisation
CHI Community Health Insurance
EPW Economic and Political Weekly
HMO Health Maintenance Organization
NGO Non-governmental Organization
WHO World Health Organization
This two-pager is the result of a series of coincidences. Buried away in a pompous piece in India Today on ways to make our country a better place was a tiny, completely unsubstantiated but yet interesting statistic - that a health insurance scheme for the poor would cost Rs. 248 per poor family per year (way number 13, for the superstitious). A little before this, EPW had one article outlining community health insurance in general and another detailing the CHI scheme managed by an NGO in southern India. Somewhere in-between was the request made to me by India Today’s watchman, a daily wager called Hira Lal, for a loan to help meet the costs of his brother’s son’s operation in AIIMS – connecting the articles to a problem faced by a real person.
We all know a Hira Lal, and we all know the financial problems caused by serious illness within the family. We all know that identifying the poorest ten percent in any community is simply a matter of finding the women headed households and those which have or had a long term illness within the family. We all see that the public health system has collapsed, and is now accessible only to government servants, politicians (the lower ones on the pecking order, who can’t leverage the public exchequer to push off to the US) and their friends and relatives. We all see that most private hospitals would give leeches and bloodsuckers an inferiority complex. We all see that the poor avoid getting healthcare and, when they do, go broke in trying to pay for it – in fact, the families of 24 percent of all Indians hospitalized fall below the poverty line as a direct result of hospitalization, and expenditure on healthcare is the single biggest cause for a non-BPL household to go BPL. There is a need for radical new ideas in the field of healthcare for the poor.
What is CHI? The definition, for the definitionally inclined, is: any not-for-profit insurance scheme that is aimed primarily at the informal sector and is formed on the collective pooling of health risks in which members participate in its management. CHI schemes (should) aim to provide low cost healthcare, protect participants from high hospitalization costs and encourage participation by communities in their own healthcare. A CHI scheme has three basic stakeholders - the community, the insurer and the health maintenance organization or healthcare provider. The former EPW article studied 12 existing CHI schemes in India and identified three basic designs –
· HMO-led, where an NGO/hospital provides healthcare, purchases insurance from an insurance company and runs the insurance programme, i.e. generates awareness within the community, collects premium, submits claims, manages reimbursements and monitors for fraud.
· Insurer-led, where an NGO is the insurer, runs the insurance programme and purchases healthcare from independent providers.
· Intermediate, where the NGO runs the programme and plays the role of an agent, purchasing healthcare from providers and insurance from insurance companies.
Some of the characteristics of the CHI schemes studied were –
· The communities insured included tribal populations, dalits, farmers, women SHG members, self-employed women, etc. Some used existing CBOs to piggyback the scheme upon, such as SHGs, unions, cooperatives, etc. In some the unit of enrollment was individual and membership in the scheme voluntary and in others, enrollment was in groups or families and membership mandatory. Enrollment ranged from 1000 to 17 lakh members. Premiums per person per annum were always under Rs. 100.
· Many schemes had important exclusions such as pre-existing illnesses, self-inflicted injuries, chronic ailments, TB, HIV, pregnancies. Most reimbursed the direct cost of treatment, while some reimbursed the loss of wages as well. Some, especially the HMO-led ones, were cashless, while others had the patients paying bills and getting compensated later. Most schemes had a fixed upper limit ranging from Rs. 1250 to Rs. 1 lakh per person per annum.
· The problem of adverse selection (only the old/sick enrolling in the scheme) could be prevented by mandatory enrollment or having a larger enrollment unit. The problem of moral hazard (the health provider sticking you for as much as they can) could be prevented by capping fee structures and ensuring standard treatment guidelines.
· The subscription rates to CHI schemes varied from 10 to 50 percent of the target community when enrollment was voluntary. The reasons for this being low were – no immediate benefit perceived, premium too high, family size too high, confidence in own well-being and the source of healthcare too far.
· Utilisation rates ranged from 1.4/1000 to 240/1000. The low rates were usually because of non-financial barriers to accessing health care (hospital too far, loss of wages), while adverse selection caused the high rates.
· Some were run purely from premiums raised from the community, some relied completely upon external resources such as government or donors, and most supplemented local resources with external ones.
In the authors’ opinion, good CHI schemes protect the community by covering 100 percent of the direct cost of illness and some of the indirect one’s as well. They cover all illnesses and provide the financial benefit at the source of healthcare, thus ensuring that there are no waiting periods which patients have to cover. In addition, the premium needs to be affordable, the NGO and CBO credible and the administrative load of the scheme minimal. The insurer has to be involved hands-on. The main pitfall is the lack of good providers as the Indian private healthcare sector is unregulated and unaccountable.
The second article was of particular interest to me because it described the efforts of Ashwini, an NGO that I visit about once a year, in the field of CHI and it was to Dr. Nandakumar Menon of Ashwini, one of the authors of the paper, that I was able to address specific questions on the practicalities. He said that, in addition to all the above, CHI is viable only when all stakeholders to the scheme have an interest in reduced costs, and this is possible only in an HMO-led design in which preventive health care and a decentralized outreach programme are part of the package. Including all costs, i.e. in-patient, referral and community outreach, a CHI would come to Rs. 150 per person per annum or about 15 lakhs a year for a population of 10,000.
There is a gradual realization that access to healthcare is a serious problem, that access to medical insurance is available only to the middle class and above, that platitudes about the importance of public sector health care remain what they are, and that something needs to be done. Community health insurance schemes could be the next big idea.
References
Point 13, “57 Ways to Make a Better Place”, India Today issue of August 23 2004
Devadasan, Van Damme, Ransom and Criel, “Community Health Insurance in India: An Overview”, Economic and Political Weekly of 10-16 July 2004.
Devadasan, Manoharan, Menon, et al, “Accord Community Health Insurance: Increasing Access to Hospital Care”, Economic and Political Weekly of 10-16 July 2004.
Acronyms
BPL Below the Poverty Line
CBO Community Based Organisation
CHI Community Health Insurance
EPW Economic and Political Weekly
HMO Health Maintenance Organization
NGO Non-governmental Organization
WHO World Health Organization
Here Come the BRICs
Here Come The BRICs
By Ajit Chaudhuri
Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street broking and investment firm, came out with a report in October 2003 entitled “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050” (Global Economics Paper No: 99 by Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman). This said that Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRICs) would be among the world’s largest economies by 2050 and the drivers behind world economic growth over the next 30 years. The report did not really catch my attention, apart from wondering how the acronym would look had it been Paraguay or Pakistan instead of Brazil, until it was heavily quoted during the testosterone-filled initial election campaign of the then ruling party in India earlier this year. Are these guys (Goldman Sachs) serious, I remember wondering at the time, or is it another of those 3 monkey reports (see no problems, hear of no problems, speak of no problems) that ultimately aim to sell something to suckers. What does the report say, and what does it not say? What follows is my take on this.
What does the report say? In a nutshell, that the BRICs would be a much larger force in the world economy over the next 50 years. Today, the BRICs are 15 percent of the G6 (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France and Italy) in dollar terms. By 2025, they are likely to be more than 50 percent of the G6, and will overtake the G6 by 2039. Of the G6, only the US and Japan will be among the 6 largest economies in the world in 2050. China will be the second largest economy in the world in 2016 and will overtake the US in 2041. India will be the third largest economy in 2050, and will be about four times larger than the fourth largest, Japan. The attached table lists the world’s large economies in 2050.
The rise in GDP in the BRICs will be most dramatic over the next thirty years before tapering off. The main drivers of the increase will be real growth (accounting for about 67 percent of the increase), capital accumulation and appreciation in currency as real exchange rates converge on the purchasing power parity rates. India will be the only significantly growing economy of the ten in 2050, with GDP growth projected at more than 3 percent at the time. It will also be the only country in which working age population will continue to increase. Per Capita Income (PCY) in the BRICs will still be significantly lower than the G6 countries (see the attached table) with the exception of Russia. India’s PCY will be by far the lowest, about half of China’s and 20 percent of the US’s (which will be by far the richest).
The BRICs will therefore emerge as an engine for economic growth, demand growth and spending power over the next thirty years, and will offset the impact of low growth and ageing populations in advanced countries. In 2050, the largest economies (by GDP) will not be the richest (by PCY), thus making strategic choices for firms more complex.
These predictions are made using demographic projections and a model of capital accumulation that are explained in the paper but are unintelligible to the likes of me, and I am unable to question the mathematics of it all. The key assumptions are that the BRICs will maintain policies that are supportive of growth, i.e. stable monetary and fiscal policies (low inflation, low deficits), fostering of institutions such as legal systems, markets, financial institutions, health and education systems, and openness to trade and FDI. Interestingly, the report attributes an additional 0.3 percent of annual GDP growth over a thirty-year period to every additional year of schooling for the average citizen.
What does the report not say? My feelings upon having read the report are that it is certainly a bold one whose predictions grab attention - the BRICs, with the possible exception of China, don’t look like global economic superpowers of the future today. The predictions come across in the report as more or less inevitable. Are these actually so? Professor Paul Kennedy, a historian from Yale University, was talking about the report at the India Today Conclave earlier this year and was asked what the main threats to the predicted scenario in 2050 would be. He listed three. The first, he said, was that of maintaining social cohesion in a high growth environment. The second was the temptations of superpowerhood that high growth would bring, especially that of increasing expenditure in unproductive areas such as defense. And the third was his doubt whether the Earth’s ecology and environment would be able to handle 3 billion Chinese and Indians having lifestyles and consumption patterns similar to that of Americans today, cars for every two people and all.
The other matter that the report throws little light upon is the nature of spread of GDP within the BRIC societies. The PCY is an average – for India, for example, it gives no indication as to whether we are going to be a nation of 50 or 100 million very rich and a very large number of very poor, or a more egalitarian society. What would the social, economic and geographical fault lines look like during this period of growth? And would the pursuit of policies that spread wealth negate policies that create it? Maybe there are a few things about the India of 2050 that are still open to today’s influence.
Country
GDP in 2050 (2003 US$ b)
PCY in 2050 (2003 US$)
China
45,000
31,000
US
35,000
84,000
India
28,000
17,000
Japan
7,000
67,000
Brazil
6,000
27,000
Russia
6,000
50,000
UK
4,000
59,000
Germany
4,000
49,000
France
3,000
53,000
Italy
2,000
41,000
Acronyms
BRICs Brazil, Russia, India and China
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
G6 US, UK, Japan, Italy, Germany and France
GDP Gross Domestic Product
PCY Per Capita Income
By Ajit Chaudhuri
Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street broking and investment firm, came out with a report in October 2003 entitled “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050” (Global Economics Paper No: 99 by Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman). This said that Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRICs) would be among the world’s largest economies by 2050 and the drivers behind world economic growth over the next 30 years. The report did not really catch my attention, apart from wondering how the acronym would look had it been Paraguay or Pakistan instead of Brazil, until it was heavily quoted during the testosterone-filled initial election campaign of the then ruling party in India earlier this year. Are these guys (Goldman Sachs) serious, I remember wondering at the time, or is it another of those 3 monkey reports (see no problems, hear of no problems, speak of no problems) that ultimately aim to sell something to suckers. What does the report say, and what does it not say? What follows is my take on this.
What does the report say? In a nutshell, that the BRICs would be a much larger force in the world economy over the next 50 years. Today, the BRICs are 15 percent of the G6 (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France and Italy) in dollar terms. By 2025, they are likely to be more than 50 percent of the G6, and will overtake the G6 by 2039. Of the G6, only the US and Japan will be among the 6 largest economies in the world in 2050. China will be the second largest economy in the world in 2016 and will overtake the US in 2041. India will be the third largest economy in 2050, and will be about four times larger than the fourth largest, Japan. The attached table lists the world’s large economies in 2050.
The rise in GDP in the BRICs will be most dramatic over the next thirty years before tapering off. The main drivers of the increase will be real growth (accounting for about 67 percent of the increase), capital accumulation and appreciation in currency as real exchange rates converge on the purchasing power parity rates. India will be the only significantly growing economy of the ten in 2050, with GDP growth projected at more than 3 percent at the time. It will also be the only country in which working age population will continue to increase. Per Capita Income (PCY) in the BRICs will still be significantly lower than the G6 countries (see the attached table) with the exception of Russia. India’s PCY will be by far the lowest, about half of China’s and 20 percent of the US’s (which will be by far the richest).
The BRICs will therefore emerge as an engine for economic growth, demand growth and spending power over the next thirty years, and will offset the impact of low growth and ageing populations in advanced countries. In 2050, the largest economies (by GDP) will not be the richest (by PCY), thus making strategic choices for firms more complex.
These predictions are made using demographic projections and a model of capital accumulation that are explained in the paper but are unintelligible to the likes of me, and I am unable to question the mathematics of it all. The key assumptions are that the BRICs will maintain policies that are supportive of growth, i.e. stable monetary and fiscal policies (low inflation, low deficits), fostering of institutions such as legal systems, markets, financial institutions, health and education systems, and openness to trade and FDI. Interestingly, the report attributes an additional 0.3 percent of annual GDP growth over a thirty-year period to every additional year of schooling for the average citizen.
What does the report not say? My feelings upon having read the report are that it is certainly a bold one whose predictions grab attention - the BRICs, with the possible exception of China, don’t look like global economic superpowers of the future today. The predictions come across in the report as more or less inevitable. Are these actually so? Professor Paul Kennedy, a historian from Yale University, was talking about the report at the India Today Conclave earlier this year and was asked what the main threats to the predicted scenario in 2050 would be. He listed three. The first, he said, was that of maintaining social cohesion in a high growth environment. The second was the temptations of superpowerhood that high growth would bring, especially that of increasing expenditure in unproductive areas such as defense. And the third was his doubt whether the Earth’s ecology and environment would be able to handle 3 billion Chinese and Indians having lifestyles and consumption patterns similar to that of Americans today, cars for every two people and all.
The other matter that the report throws little light upon is the nature of spread of GDP within the BRIC societies. The PCY is an average – for India, for example, it gives no indication as to whether we are going to be a nation of 50 or 100 million very rich and a very large number of very poor, or a more egalitarian society. What would the social, economic and geographical fault lines look like during this period of growth? And would the pursuit of policies that spread wealth negate policies that create it? Maybe there are a few things about the India of 2050 that are still open to today’s influence.
Country
GDP in 2050 (2003 US$ b)
PCY in 2050 (2003 US$)
China
45,000
31,000
US
35,000
84,000
India
28,000
17,000
Japan
7,000
67,000
Brazil
6,000
27,000
Russia
6,000
50,000
UK
4,000
59,000
Germany
4,000
49,000
France
3,000
53,000
Italy
2,000
41,000
Acronyms
BRICs Brazil, Russia, India and China
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
G6 US, UK, Japan, Italy, Germany and France
GDP Gross Domestic Product
PCY Per Capita Income
Islands in the Sun
ISLANDS IN THE SUN
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: One of the (admittedly minor) effects of the tsunami was that I visited a part of our country that I had never seen before – an increasingly rare occurrence in a career spent roaming around at other people’s expense. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a chain of 562 islands in the Bay of Bengal, in which the population of about 362,000 inhabit 38. Port Blair, its headquarters, is about 2 hours by flight east from Chennai or alternatively about 60 hours by ship. The Nicobar islands are quite distinct from those in the Andamans and are separated from them by the ten-degree channel, they have a population of about 40,000 consisting mainly of Nicobarese tribes, government servants and Tamil settlers. The Andamans consist mainly of settlers from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Bengal, descendants of prisoners who settled here and ‘primitive’ tribes such as the Jarawa, the Onge and the Sentinelese. What follows are my observations from the twenty or so days I spent in the state.
The Place: A region, in my opinion, should be judged on three indicators only – the visual appeal of the place, the beauty of its women, and the quality of its cuisine – all else is unimportant. A&N scores a 911! The islands are astoundingly beautiful from any angle, many of them just green forested circles with a continuous yellow ring of beach around them. The sea is also multicoloured, with light green and then aquamarine rings around the islands giving way to deep blue as one moves further out. About the women, suffice to say that your eyes won’t be under strain here! A young lady reporter (with looks like the hero’s sister in Hindi films, who has to say “Bhaiya” a few times and heat his food when he returns from his nocturnal adventures) from the Telegraph had come down from Kolkata and was given Aishwarya Rai like treatment. Not much scope for the likes of me, you would think, except that we happened to sleep together on a ship between Hut Bay and Port Blair (as my wife, mother and father also read these 2-pagers I will reluctantly mention that the Reuters correspondent and the Deputy Director of the Shipping Department were sleeping in between us) and shared a comfortable friendship and several evenings together thereafter, to the consternation of the blades of Port Blair.
The Distances: The distances in A&N hit you. All internal journeys have to be done on ship (except for the favoured few who have helicopters at their disposal) and travel times are massive. The journey from Kamorta Island in the middle Nicobars to Port Blair in the southern Andamans took me 48 hours – all of which was spent on the deck because no cabins were available (only for babus) and the bunks were full of puke. This wasn’t particularly unpleasant, nights under the stars and all, except for crossing the rough ten-degree channel that had the ship rocking and rolling (apparently Bernoulli’s Principle applies here) and the likes of me contemplating life at the wrong end of the food chain in these shark infested waters. The shorter journeys in smaller ships across open and rough sea were much worse, especially when one travelled against the waves, as were the journeys on boats to get from the ships on to land because the jetties were destroyed.
The 26th of December: What actually happened? First, the earthquake! I was on Kachal on the 24th of January when an earthquake of 6.2 centered in Sumatra hit the island (there have been more than 100 earthquakes over 5 in the past few weeks) and can only imagine what a 9 must have been like. People came out of their houses, and, a few minutes later, saw the sea recede. Those who ran for their lives away from the sea and on to the central higher ground are alive today – those who were curious, or stopped to pick up belongings, or to pray, or to help others, did not make it. The police inspector in Kapanga tried to do his duty by shepherding others to safety (dead), another settlement of 1050 people in West Bay held a community prayer after the earthquake (4 are alive today). In Little Andamans, much further to the north, there were a series of four waves with about ten minute gaps in between, of which the third and the fourth were particularly vicious, twenty meter walls of water arriving at you at the speed a plane takes off.
The Ban: The Nancowry division, consisting of the islands Chowra, Kachal, Kamorta, Nancowry, Teresa and Trinket, is off limits to outsiders unless the government issues you a tribal area permit. I got one by hanging around government officers in Port Blair, meeting the Lt. Governor and kissing a lot of backside, nobody else did. A ban on media and NGOs after the tsunami is being strictly enforced. The reasons are not being articulated and rumours are rife – that the government is mismanaging relief, that the bodies are much more than the official figures, that there is something to hide, etc. There has been controversy over the numbers here, mainly because a large number of Tamil labourers had been illegally brought in by contractors and settled in coastal hamlets, and there is no record of who these people are, how many, and how many have died. Certainly, the numbers don’t match! The relief, too, is being mismanaged in this region, with the relief camps getting enough food and water but little else, with the whole area still looking like the tsunami had hit yesterday, with bodies still coming in with the tide and with huge quantities of everything on earth lying around in Port Blair but very little making its way here. But this would be the result of a media ban and not the cause of it.
More likely is the fact that the Nicobars sit at the head of the Mallacca Straits, the busiest shipping lane in the world, and are thus of strategic importance in the great game being played between China, the US and India. About 90 percent of China’s external trade passes through here, and thus we have a hold that counters any aggression in the Himalayas. The mandarins simply don’t want people poking around in this region.
The Taipans: Life must have been nice here! The Nicobarese tribals on these tiny islands lived in little settlements along with their school, church and football field, with all financial requirements being met by coconut plantations that were plentiful. They are governed through a system of elected village captains who deal with the outside world and managed government schemes. My quest for institutions through which to implement relief and rehabilitation activities on the islands led me to the tribal federations and the cooperative marketing federations that buy and sell the copra – all these turned out to be fronts for trading empires a la some of James Clavell’s novels. There is a constant game of chess between the Gujarati Jadwets, the Kamorta-based Rasheeds and the Tamils, all trying to outmaneuver each other with their ships, their fronts, their alliances and their patronage systems. They are now competing for the rehabilitation cake.
Infrastructure and Accommodation: Interestingly, no buildings in the state were destroyed in the earthquake – it was the tsunami that caused all the destruction to infrastructure. A local wag said that this was because the state public works department did all construction and they made their money by over-invoicing and not by under-constructing. The destruction of infrastructure was complete in the Nicobars, where all the jetties and all buildings on the coast, schools, churches, hospitals, police stations, government quarters, don’t exist any more. The temple left standing on Kachal had settlers of a certain mentality feeling that ‘mine is bigger (oops, better!) than yours’.
A list of places to stay across Nancowry division would begin and end with the PWD Guest House in Kamorta, fabulously located on a hill that overlooks the harbour and having a running kitchen, well worth being on the right side of the local Assistant Commissioner who controls the right to stay here. Kachal was the pits, with severe food, water, electricity and accommodation shortages. The poor head of administration there, an IAS officer from Delhi who was sent there for relief duty and turned out to be a friend of my batchmate Amir, is staying along with five others in a two-room office where they also work, eat, and do everything else. An army Colonel and his men and a 19-member relief team from Sirsa in Haryana were putting up in the church in the high center of the island, to the consternation of my namesake Father Ajit Ekka and his staff. He tried to get them to leave by bringing in a batch of trainee nuns from Jharkhand, but I suspect it had the opposite effect.
Will the Place Recover? Difficult to say! Jetties take a long time to rebuild, and all supplies depend upon the jetties. Coconut trees take seven to ten years to grow back, what will the Nicobarese do until then? The banking system has been washed away, and no records exist either with the account holders or with the bank, what will people do for their immediate cash requirements? 79 children on Kachal are supposed to be sitting for their class X and XII, how that will happen with all schools on the coastlines, and all their teachers, washed away. Earthquakes are hitting the Nicobars every day, undermining the little remaining confidence. Most of the village captains are dead and there is a serious leadership vaccum. On the other hand, time is a great healer. And other disaster areas in India have, in the long run, become better places for those who survived with the huge investment in infrastructure. A&N may not be an exception.
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: One of the (admittedly minor) effects of the tsunami was that I visited a part of our country that I had never seen before – an increasingly rare occurrence in a career spent roaming around at other people’s expense. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a chain of 562 islands in the Bay of Bengal, in which the population of about 362,000 inhabit 38. Port Blair, its headquarters, is about 2 hours by flight east from Chennai or alternatively about 60 hours by ship. The Nicobar islands are quite distinct from those in the Andamans and are separated from them by the ten-degree channel, they have a population of about 40,000 consisting mainly of Nicobarese tribes, government servants and Tamil settlers. The Andamans consist mainly of settlers from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Bengal, descendants of prisoners who settled here and ‘primitive’ tribes such as the Jarawa, the Onge and the Sentinelese. What follows are my observations from the twenty or so days I spent in the state.
The Place: A region, in my opinion, should be judged on three indicators only – the visual appeal of the place, the beauty of its women, and the quality of its cuisine – all else is unimportant. A&N scores a 911! The islands are astoundingly beautiful from any angle, many of them just green forested circles with a continuous yellow ring of beach around them. The sea is also multicoloured, with light green and then aquamarine rings around the islands giving way to deep blue as one moves further out. About the women, suffice to say that your eyes won’t be under strain here! A young lady reporter (with looks like the hero’s sister in Hindi films, who has to say “Bhaiya” a few times and heat his food when he returns from his nocturnal adventures) from the Telegraph had come down from Kolkata and was given Aishwarya Rai like treatment. Not much scope for the likes of me, you would think, except that we happened to sleep together on a ship between Hut Bay and Port Blair (as my wife, mother and father also read these 2-pagers I will reluctantly mention that the Reuters correspondent and the Deputy Director of the Shipping Department were sleeping in between us) and shared a comfortable friendship and several evenings together thereafter, to the consternation of the blades of Port Blair.
The Distances: The distances in A&N hit you. All internal journeys have to be done on ship (except for the favoured few who have helicopters at their disposal) and travel times are massive. The journey from Kamorta Island in the middle Nicobars to Port Blair in the southern Andamans took me 48 hours – all of which was spent on the deck because no cabins were available (only for babus) and the bunks were full of puke. This wasn’t particularly unpleasant, nights under the stars and all, except for crossing the rough ten-degree channel that had the ship rocking and rolling (apparently Bernoulli’s Principle applies here) and the likes of me contemplating life at the wrong end of the food chain in these shark infested waters. The shorter journeys in smaller ships across open and rough sea were much worse, especially when one travelled against the waves, as were the journeys on boats to get from the ships on to land because the jetties were destroyed.
The 26th of December: What actually happened? First, the earthquake! I was on Kachal on the 24th of January when an earthquake of 6.2 centered in Sumatra hit the island (there have been more than 100 earthquakes over 5 in the past few weeks) and can only imagine what a 9 must have been like. People came out of their houses, and, a few minutes later, saw the sea recede. Those who ran for their lives away from the sea and on to the central higher ground are alive today – those who were curious, or stopped to pick up belongings, or to pray, or to help others, did not make it. The police inspector in Kapanga tried to do his duty by shepherding others to safety (dead), another settlement of 1050 people in West Bay held a community prayer after the earthquake (4 are alive today). In Little Andamans, much further to the north, there were a series of four waves with about ten minute gaps in between, of which the third and the fourth were particularly vicious, twenty meter walls of water arriving at you at the speed a plane takes off.
The Ban: The Nancowry division, consisting of the islands Chowra, Kachal, Kamorta, Nancowry, Teresa and Trinket, is off limits to outsiders unless the government issues you a tribal area permit. I got one by hanging around government officers in Port Blair, meeting the Lt. Governor and kissing a lot of backside, nobody else did. A ban on media and NGOs after the tsunami is being strictly enforced. The reasons are not being articulated and rumours are rife – that the government is mismanaging relief, that the bodies are much more than the official figures, that there is something to hide, etc. There has been controversy over the numbers here, mainly because a large number of Tamil labourers had been illegally brought in by contractors and settled in coastal hamlets, and there is no record of who these people are, how many, and how many have died. Certainly, the numbers don’t match! The relief, too, is being mismanaged in this region, with the relief camps getting enough food and water but little else, with the whole area still looking like the tsunami had hit yesterday, with bodies still coming in with the tide and with huge quantities of everything on earth lying around in Port Blair but very little making its way here. But this would be the result of a media ban and not the cause of it.
More likely is the fact that the Nicobars sit at the head of the Mallacca Straits, the busiest shipping lane in the world, and are thus of strategic importance in the great game being played between China, the US and India. About 90 percent of China’s external trade passes through here, and thus we have a hold that counters any aggression in the Himalayas. The mandarins simply don’t want people poking around in this region.
The Taipans: Life must have been nice here! The Nicobarese tribals on these tiny islands lived in little settlements along with their school, church and football field, with all financial requirements being met by coconut plantations that were plentiful. They are governed through a system of elected village captains who deal with the outside world and managed government schemes. My quest for institutions through which to implement relief and rehabilitation activities on the islands led me to the tribal federations and the cooperative marketing federations that buy and sell the copra – all these turned out to be fronts for trading empires a la some of James Clavell’s novels. There is a constant game of chess between the Gujarati Jadwets, the Kamorta-based Rasheeds and the Tamils, all trying to outmaneuver each other with their ships, their fronts, their alliances and their patronage systems. They are now competing for the rehabilitation cake.
Infrastructure and Accommodation: Interestingly, no buildings in the state were destroyed in the earthquake – it was the tsunami that caused all the destruction to infrastructure. A local wag said that this was because the state public works department did all construction and they made their money by over-invoicing and not by under-constructing. The destruction of infrastructure was complete in the Nicobars, where all the jetties and all buildings on the coast, schools, churches, hospitals, police stations, government quarters, don’t exist any more. The temple left standing on Kachal had settlers of a certain mentality feeling that ‘mine is bigger (oops, better!) than yours’.
A list of places to stay across Nancowry division would begin and end with the PWD Guest House in Kamorta, fabulously located on a hill that overlooks the harbour and having a running kitchen, well worth being on the right side of the local Assistant Commissioner who controls the right to stay here. Kachal was the pits, with severe food, water, electricity and accommodation shortages. The poor head of administration there, an IAS officer from Delhi who was sent there for relief duty and turned out to be a friend of my batchmate Amir, is staying along with five others in a two-room office where they also work, eat, and do everything else. An army Colonel and his men and a 19-member relief team from Sirsa in Haryana were putting up in the church in the high center of the island, to the consternation of my namesake Father Ajit Ekka and his staff. He tried to get them to leave by bringing in a batch of trainee nuns from Jharkhand, but I suspect it had the opposite effect.
Will the Place Recover? Difficult to say! Jetties take a long time to rebuild, and all supplies depend upon the jetties. Coconut trees take seven to ten years to grow back, what will the Nicobarese do until then? The banking system has been washed away, and no records exist either with the account holders or with the bank, what will people do for their immediate cash requirements? 79 children on Kachal are supposed to be sitting for their class X and XII, how that will happen with all schools on the coastlines, and all their teachers, washed away. Earthquakes are hitting the Nicobars every day, undermining the little remaining confidence. Most of the village captains are dead and there is a serious leadership vaccum. On the other hand, time is a great healer. And other disaster areas in India have, in the long run, become better places for those who survived with the huge investment in infrastructure. A&N may not be an exception.
North by North West - 1
NORTH BY NORTH WEST – 1
Are Scandinavians Sanctimonious??
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: Most of my readers would be familiar with the previous government’s decision to request bilateral aid agencies, except for a select few, to pack up. If you are not, it is only the reasons that are interesting and relevant to this paper (the policy itself is likely to be rescinded a la the Governor of Tamil Nadu), and it is these that I will try to enumerate. The official reasons for this were that the previous government saw India as a soon-to-be developed country and wanted to signal a change in status from aid recipient to aid giver, that overseas development assistance was not very much anyway in per capita terms and as a percentage of GDP, and that the amount of bilateral aid the government received was not worth the effort the government put into receiving it. The unofficial reason was that India was at the receiving end of opprobrium from some of the donor countries in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear blasts, and the government did not feel that providing tiny quantities of money gave a small country the right to question India on security issues. And, that dealing with these countries, especially the Scandinavians, was trying because they were sanctimonious.
This paper attempts to address this last point. Many of us in the development business have had to deal with Scandinavians – they have a plethora of aid agencies operating in India and a mafia-like hold over international recruitment in the UN system. Whether they are sanctimonious or not is a matter of perception. Do they have the right to be sanctimonious? This paper has a short introduction to Scandinavians in general and a longer treatise on their treatment of minorities that concludes that they are not very different from anybody else - just quieter and more systematic.
Scandinavia and Scandinavians: The popular perception of Scandinavia is one of a giant refrigerator populated by tall, blonde and socialistically inclined men and women who look alike, think alike, and, except for a brief period in history when they were busy looting and pillaging the rest of Europe and discovering America, want to make the world a better place in which everyone uses cellular phones. In fact, Scandinavia consists of the countries Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. They are all small, especially Faroe Islands, a protectorate of Denmark, and Iceland, population 295,000, which is often the subject of discussions on the viability of small countries who have to maintain a central bank, an airline, a national football team with aspirations of qualifying for the World Cup Finals, and other such trappings. Their histories are intertwined – Norway won freedom from Sweden only in 1905, Finland was a grand duchy within Sweden before being annexed by Russia and winning independence only in 1917, Sweden and Iceland were part of Denmark, etc., etc. Today, Norway and Iceland are not part of the EU but are part of the EEA, Sweden and Denmark are part of the EU and the EEA but not the Euro zone, while Finland is a member of all three entities. They all speak different dialects with Germanic roots except Finland whose language is Finno-Ugric in origin.
The Stereotypes: A Danish friend of mine once said that understanding Scandinavians is quite easy – the Danes are the bosses and keep Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands alive with their financial aid. Norway is a mountainous country and its people are constantly disappearing into their hunting lodges, drinking too much akvavit and then mistaking their fellow hunters for moose and shooting them. The Swedes are the businesslike ones, the only time they are not thinking about money is when they are passed out on the streets of Copenhagen which, because of its cheaper alcohol, is to Swedes what Daman and Diu are to Gujaratis. Finland is a predominantly rural country, and Finns are basically inward-looking villagers with a closed mentality that is more Russian than western. While this is not quite true (Iceland has long ceased to depend upon Danish aid), it is quite a helpful understanding of stereotypes in Scandinavia.
Minority Rights in Scandinavia - The Saami: The far north of Scandinavia was originally inhabited by an indigenous community called the Saami, who converted from a hunter-gatherer society into one dependent upon fishing (specifically those along the coastline) and, with the domestication of the reindeer, reindeer husbandry. Land was held on a communal basis. There were no international boundaries in this region at that time, and thus few restrictions to the movement of herds. The Saami practiced a way of life that emphasized a close linkage between their livelihood, their social and cultural systems, and the harsh natural environment of the far north. Today, there are about 75,000 Saami of whom most are in Norway.
They gradually came into the contact of explorers and adventurers from the south (about the 13th century), who were followed by missionaries and traders and finally by arms of the states of Norway, Sweden and Russia who made informal agreements on borderlines and taxation rights in the Saami area. It was also a period when southerners began to settle in the area and practice fishing and settled agriculture and thus compete for natural resources with the Saami. Churches and businesses regulating the Saami's access to the fur trade were gradually set up. The process of colonization thus began.
This was formalized with the signing of the Lapp Codicil in 1751 that divided out the Saami area by defining national boundaries in the far north. It rendered the Norwegian Saami as separate from the Swedish, Finn and Russian Saami and restricted the movement of reindeer herds across national boundaries. At the same time stress was given to rational agriculture, thus encouraging settlers from the south to fence and 'individualise' the land and block access to Saami reindeer herders for whom land was a communally held property. Norwegian, Swedish and Finn policy towards the Saami differed in some aspects, but all were aimed at colonizing the far north. I will concentrate upon events in Norway, which has the most significant Saami population.
The first signs of a backlash to this process appeared in the 1840s with the beginning of a Saami revivalist movement under the leadership of Lars Levi Laestidius that culminated in the Kautokeino rebellion of 1852. The Laestidian sect attacked the local merchant-cum-sheriff, the local liquor dealer and the local vicar - the authorities subdued the rebellion and 2 leaders were subsequently beheaded. A process of rapid Norwegianisation followed. In the 1850s, the Saami lost the right to be educated in their own language with a decree enforcing the teaching of only Norwegian in schools. In 1902, the Land Act stipulated that land could be transferred only to Norwegian citizens who could speak, read and write Norwegian. Social Darwinist thinking provided ideological legitimacy to the process with the claim that the Saami would fall prey to evolution and natural selection. There was a simultaneous increase in interest of mainstream populations in Saami territories due to the discovery of ores and national security considerations. All these served to legitimize the assimilation policy of the state and provide little space to ethnic diversity and cultural differences.
In Norway, although the official assimilation policy ended in 1948, attitudes to the Saami did not change. Additionally, disadvantages suffered by the Saami in the process of assimilation did not disappear - language, tradition, culture and perceptions of history and identity are values that are difficult to regain. A large number of committees and organizations were set up to facilitate development in Saami regions between 1950 and 1975, Norway's political parties tried to include Saami aspirations within their manifestos, much effort was made to devolve power, but nothing reached the roots of Saami identity issues until the Alta Dam agitation.
The Alta Dam – The Narmada of the North: The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration issued comprehensive plans in the 1970s to develop the Alta-Kautokeino water system on the Finnmark plateau, including a dam that would inundate the Saami community at Masi. The plans also involved the construction of a road across reindeer grazing land and calving areas. The reindeer owners who were affected by this and the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature took the state to court to prevent the development in 1979. The case gained symbolic value, with Saami and environmentalist interests joining forces in demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. Demonstrations were staged at the construction site and Saami activists started a hunger strike in front of the Storting in Oslo. The dam was completed but this issue dominated the debate about Saami politics throughout the 1970s. The Saami's situation received public attention across Scandinavia and many claim that it cleared the air for a better climate for Saami politics in the 1980s. The Alta Dam provided a new life to the Saami movement for recognition of their rights and identity, in Norway and across the region.
Conclusion: It is difficult to escape the conclusion that if you want to screw a community completely and in a sustainable manner, this is the way to go about it. Move over, Idi Amin, Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Australians and Gujaratis, there is a clear champion.
References:
Chaudhuri, Ajit, “EU-Russia Relations and the Role of Small Regional Formations”, a dissertation at the London School of Economics in 2001
Minde, Henry, 'The Saami Movement, the Norwegian Labour Party and Saami Rights', on the internet
Rassmussen, Paul Nyrup, “The Danish Way”, a presentation by the then PM at the London School of Economics in November 2001
Saxena NC, “The New Government Policy on Bilateral Aid to India”, commissioned by the Embassy of Sweden, October 2003
“Small but Perfectly Formed”, The Economist issue of 1st January 1998
Acronyms / Jargon Watch:
Bilateral Aid Agencies: These are aid agencies of foreign governments, such as Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), Department for International Development (DfID of the British government) or Norwegian Aid (Norad). They spend their country’s tax revenue, are answerable to their respective parliaments and are usually part of their country’s foreign policy.
EC, EEA, EU: European Community, European Economic Area, European Union
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GoI: Government of India
Are Scandinavians Sanctimonious??
A 2-pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
Introduction: Most of my readers would be familiar with the previous government’s decision to request bilateral aid agencies, except for a select few, to pack up. If you are not, it is only the reasons that are interesting and relevant to this paper (the policy itself is likely to be rescinded a la the Governor of Tamil Nadu), and it is these that I will try to enumerate. The official reasons for this were that the previous government saw India as a soon-to-be developed country and wanted to signal a change in status from aid recipient to aid giver, that overseas development assistance was not very much anyway in per capita terms and as a percentage of GDP, and that the amount of bilateral aid the government received was not worth the effort the government put into receiving it. The unofficial reason was that India was at the receiving end of opprobrium from some of the donor countries in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear blasts, and the government did not feel that providing tiny quantities of money gave a small country the right to question India on security issues. And, that dealing with these countries, especially the Scandinavians, was trying because they were sanctimonious.
This paper attempts to address this last point. Many of us in the development business have had to deal with Scandinavians – they have a plethora of aid agencies operating in India and a mafia-like hold over international recruitment in the UN system. Whether they are sanctimonious or not is a matter of perception. Do they have the right to be sanctimonious? This paper has a short introduction to Scandinavians in general and a longer treatise on their treatment of minorities that concludes that they are not very different from anybody else - just quieter and more systematic.
Scandinavia and Scandinavians: The popular perception of Scandinavia is one of a giant refrigerator populated by tall, blonde and socialistically inclined men and women who look alike, think alike, and, except for a brief period in history when they were busy looting and pillaging the rest of Europe and discovering America, want to make the world a better place in which everyone uses cellular phones. In fact, Scandinavia consists of the countries Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. They are all small, especially Faroe Islands, a protectorate of Denmark, and Iceland, population 295,000, which is often the subject of discussions on the viability of small countries who have to maintain a central bank, an airline, a national football team with aspirations of qualifying for the World Cup Finals, and other such trappings. Their histories are intertwined – Norway won freedom from Sweden only in 1905, Finland was a grand duchy within Sweden before being annexed by Russia and winning independence only in 1917, Sweden and Iceland were part of Denmark, etc., etc. Today, Norway and Iceland are not part of the EU but are part of the EEA, Sweden and Denmark are part of the EU and the EEA but not the Euro zone, while Finland is a member of all three entities. They all speak different dialects with Germanic roots except Finland whose language is Finno-Ugric in origin.
The Stereotypes: A Danish friend of mine once said that understanding Scandinavians is quite easy – the Danes are the bosses and keep Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands alive with their financial aid. Norway is a mountainous country and its people are constantly disappearing into their hunting lodges, drinking too much akvavit and then mistaking their fellow hunters for moose and shooting them. The Swedes are the businesslike ones, the only time they are not thinking about money is when they are passed out on the streets of Copenhagen which, because of its cheaper alcohol, is to Swedes what Daman and Diu are to Gujaratis. Finland is a predominantly rural country, and Finns are basically inward-looking villagers with a closed mentality that is more Russian than western. While this is not quite true (Iceland has long ceased to depend upon Danish aid), it is quite a helpful understanding of stereotypes in Scandinavia.
Minority Rights in Scandinavia - The Saami: The far north of Scandinavia was originally inhabited by an indigenous community called the Saami, who converted from a hunter-gatherer society into one dependent upon fishing (specifically those along the coastline) and, with the domestication of the reindeer, reindeer husbandry. Land was held on a communal basis. There were no international boundaries in this region at that time, and thus few restrictions to the movement of herds. The Saami practiced a way of life that emphasized a close linkage between their livelihood, their social and cultural systems, and the harsh natural environment of the far north. Today, there are about 75,000 Saami of whom most are in Norway.
They gradually came into the contact of explorers and adventurers from the south (about the 13th century), who were followed by missionaries and traders and finally by arms of the states of Norway, Sweden and Russia who made informal agreements on borderlines and taxation rights in the Saami area. It was also a period when southerners began to settle in the area and practice fishing and settled agriculture and thus compete for natural resources with the Saami. Churches and businesses regulating the Saami's access to the fur trade were gradually set up. The process of colonization thus began.
This was formalized with the signing of the Lapp Codicil in 1751 that divided out the Saami area by defining national boundaries in the far north. It rendered the Norwegian Saami as separate from the Swedish, Finn and Russian Saami and restricted the movement of reindeer herds across national boundaries. At the same time stress was given to rational agriculture, thus encouraging settlers from the south to fence and 'individualise' the land and block access to Saami reindeer herders for whom land was a communally held property. Norwegian, Swedish and Finn policy towards the Saami differed in some aspects, but all were aimed at colonizing the far north. I will concentrate upon events in Norway, which has the most significant Saami population.
The first signs of a backlash to this process appeared in the 1840s with the beginning of a Saami revivalist movement under the leadership of Lars Levi Laestidius that culminated in the Kautokeino rebellion of 1852. The Laestidian sect attacked the local merchant-cum-sheriff, the local liquor dealer and the local vicar - the authorities subdued the rebellion and 2 leaders were subsequently beheaded. A process of rapid Norwegianisation followed. In the 1850s, the Saami lost the right to be educated in their own language with a decree enforcing the teaching of only Norwegian in schools. In 1902, the Land Act stipulated that land could be transferred only to Norwegian citizens who could speak, read and write Norwegian. Social Darwinist thinking provided ideological legitimacy to the process with the claim that the Saami would fall prey to evolution and natural selection. There was a simultaneous increase in interest of mainstream populations in Saami territories due to the discovery of ores and national security considerations. All these served to legitimize the assimilation policy of the state and provide little space to ethnic diversity and cultural differences.
In Norway, although the official assimilation policy ended in 1948, attitudes to the Saami did not change. Additionally, disadvantages suffered by the Saami in the process of assimilation did not disappear - language, tradition, culture and perceptions of history and identity are values that are difficult to regain. A large number of committees and organizations were set up to facilitate development in Saami regions between 1950 and 1975, Norway's political parties tried to include Saami aspirations within their manifestos, much effort was made to devolve power, but nothing reached the roots of Saami identity issues until the Alta Dam agitation.
The Alta Dam – The Narmada of the North: The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration issued comprehensive plans in the 1970s to develop the Alta-Kautokeino water system on the Finnmark plateau, including a dam that would inundate the Saami community at Masi. The plans also involved the construction of a road across reindeer grazing land and calving areas. The reindeer owners who were affected by this and the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature took the state to court to prevent the development in 1979. The case gained symbolic value, with Saami and environmentalist interests joining forces in demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. Demonstrations were staged at the construction site and Saami activists started a hunger strike in front of the Storting in Oslo. The dam was completed but this issue dominated the debate about Saami politics throughout the 1970s. The Saami's situation received public attention across Scandinavia and many claim that it cleared the air for a better climate for Saami politics in the 1980s. The Alta Dam provided a new life to the Saami movement for recognition of their rights and identity, in Norway and across the region.
Conclusion: It is difficult to escape the conclusion that if you want to screw a community completely and in a sustainable manner, this is the way to go about it. Move over, Idi Amin, Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Australians and Gujaratis, there is a clear champion.
References:
Chaudhuri, Ajit, “EU-Russia Relations and the Role of Small Regional Formations”, a dissertation at the London School of Economics in 2001
Minde, Henry, 'The Saami Movement, the Norwegian Labour Party and Saami Rights', on the internet
Rassmussen, Paul Nyrup, “The Danish Way”, a presentation by the then PM at the London School of Economics in November 2001
Saxena NC, “The New Government Policy on Bilateral Aid to India”, commissioned by the Embassy of Sweden, October 2003
“Small but Perfectly Formed”, The Economist issue of 1st January 1998
Acronyms / Jargon Watch:
Bilateral Aid Agencies: These are aid agencies of foreign governments, such as Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), Department for International Development (DfID of the British government) or Norwegian Aid (Norad). They spend their country’s tax revenue, are answerable to their respective parliaments and are usually part of their country’s foreign policy.
EC, EEA, EU: European Community, European Economic Area, European Union
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GoI: Government of India
Oh No More on Kashmir - 1
OH NO! YAWN! MORE ON KASHMIR??
By Ajit Chaudhuri
Actually, no, this is a paper on South Tyrol (patience, those of you going ‘where?’ under your breaths) and may not add to our collective ‘Kashmir fatigue’! But let me first get the Kashmir bit out of the way. Most Indians tend to be vague on Kashmir – we know that there is a problem, but not quite what it is and don’t really care as long as the ‘troubles’ don’t extend beyond the valley and into our lives. Those who do know a bit more tend to find the situation depressing; they feel that the problem has historic roots that can not be undone, that Kashmir will always be a source of contention between India and Pakistan, that Muslim Kashmiris will always face an identity problem in our country, that there is no solution, and that we are forever stuck with the Indian Army pointing guns at Kashmiris to make them Indian. The point I am going to make in this paper is that it does not have to be this way, that solutions are possible, and that there are places that have moved from similar situations towards lasting peace. I give you the case of South Tyrol!
The Summer of 2004: I spent my summer vacation this year in South Tyrol in the Italian Alps. For those interested in the vacation possibilities – if you like walking about 20 km a day on soft ground in hilly terrain with a little weight on your back and eating cheese and ham and drinking red wine in copious quantities, South Tyrol would be heaven for you. If not, it would resemble a Siberian prison camp – very very naturally beautiful and blah, blah, blah but cold from when you wake up to when you go to sleep, even in May. There are no opportunities to socialize and the youngest and prettiest woman I met (by far) was my own Mother. South Tyrol consists of a low and narrow valley into which are squeezed a river (the Eisach), an autostrada, a normal road and a railway line, with the mountains going up another 2000 meters on either side. Its main town is Bozen/Bolzano, and it is separated from Austria by the famous Brenner Pass across which Hannibal had brought elephants to raid Rome eons ago. Much like our own hill areas, the men drink a lot and the women do all the hard work, everyone is very religious, the economic mainstay is tourism, maintaining goats and sheep and small farming, and the young people all get the hell out of there as soon as they can. I stayed in a farmhouse in the vicinity of the village of Klobenstein/Collalbo in the region Ritten/Rennon, about 50 km from B/B. Why these double names, I remember thinking, and how come the locals are blonde haired and blue eyed and, while willing to converse in Italian, speak German in their homes. An enquiry into these questions brought me to the South Tyrol issue, which is seen as a model for the protection of regional and cultural minorities.
A historical perspective: The Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled Tyrol, which consists of today’s Austrian province of North Tyrol and the Italian provinces of South Tyrol and Trentino, from Vienna until the end of WW1. The first two were predominantly German speaking, the last predominantly Italian, and Tyrol itself (89 percent German, 4 percent Italian and 7 percent others in 1900) was seen as a borderland between German and Italian cultures, joined rather than divided by the Brenner. The whole of South Tyrol was ceded to Italy (Peace Treaty of St. Germain, 1919) as per assurances made by the British and the French to the Italians in 1915 in return for Italy’s participation on the allied side in WW1, and in complete contradiction to the principle of self-determination advocated at the time by US President Woodrow Wilson. It is indeed interesting to note how many of today’s territorial disputes have their roots in British and French shenanigans in the first half of the 20th century.
The fascists came to power in Italy in 1922 and embarked on a programme of sustained Italianisation in South Tyrol. The German presence and influence in cultural, political and economic life was repressed, Italian became the official language and those officials not fluent in it were dismissed, schooling, public inscriptions and place names were made solely in Italian, and names of people were Italianised. The government also set up industries and encouraged the movement of people from southern Italy into the region. In 1939, Italians were 24 percent of South Tyrol’s population but in other aspects the policy achieved the opposite of its intentions – by creating a Tyrolean identity that disassociated rather than integrated with Italy. Mussolini finally accepted that he couldn’t convert 220,000 German speakers into Italians and, along with Hitler (who was looking for Italian support for his ambitions at the time), came to the conclusion that a radical solution was required – that South Tyroleans had to choose between Germany, or emigration, and Italy, or assimilation. 86 percent opted to move to Germany, and did not due to the advent of WW2 that gave both Germany and Italy other matters to think about.
In 1943, German troops occupied South Tyrol and, glad to be ‘liberated’ from the Italians, the locals collaborated with the Nazis. This subsequently became an obstacle to South Tyrol rejoining Austria after WW2, with the Allied powers rejecting both their claims in favour of Italy who had ended the war on the side of the Allies. However, Italy and Austria were obliged to come to a political settlement over South Tyrol, and both countries’ foreign ministers assured equal rights for Tyroleans and Italians in a vaguely worded First Autonomy Statute that raised more issues than it resolved. Tyrolean politicians from both sides of the Brenner repeatedly claimed that autonomy was temporary and self-determination was the ultimate objective. The Italian government reacted by passing restrictive laws that it applied restrictively, and lumping South Tyrol with the Italian province of Trentino to form one Italian-majority region. A South Tyrol People’s Party (SVP) was formed to represent German speaker interests and obtained a sufficient majority among them to obtain de-facto rights to negotiate with Italy. Austria’s sovereignty was fully restored in 1955 and it began to seek a role in the South Tyrol issue, which Italy treated as an internal matter and refused to have any official negotiations. The issue became hotter and hotter.
An insurgency begins: The bomb blasts began in 1956 on symbols of Italian rule; government offices, police stations and power plants. Italy sent 15,000 soldiers in, and Italian right wing radicals responded by carrying out bombings of their own, including in Austria. The issue escalated and internationalized – Austria brought the South Tyrol question into the UN in 1960, which confirmed that Austria had a say. Italy continued to refuse to talk meaningfully with Austria, who took it to the UN again in 1961, who in turn re-affirmed the 1960 resolution. Italy relented and began talking to Austrians and to South Tyroleans, the latter for the first time. A settlement package was approved by the SVP in 1969 and subsequently by the Italian and Austrian governments, coming into force as the New Autonomy Statute in 1972.
A few years of relative peace resulted, before two factors intervened. The first was ‘Italian slowness’, or the tortoise-like pace at which the Italian government worked, which created a concern among the German-speakers that Rome was trying to slime out of implementing the autonomy measures fully. This gave cause to German hardliners of the ‘Ein Tyrol’ ideology. The second was that the Italian speakers, up to now a mollycoddled bunch, did not react well to losing their special privileges and began voting for far-right Italian political parties. The atmosphere deteriorated again, with sporadic bombings and whatnot, and this continued until the late 1980s.
Working towards a solution: It was only in 1988 that some of the more contentious points on the Autonomy Statute, such as equal status for the German language in the police force and in court, were passed and implemented by the Italian legislature and this led to de-escalation in tension. After this, there was considerable urgency by the Italian government to get this whole thing over with, and the final points on the statute were implemented in 1992. The SVP approved the packet with an overwhelming majority and a Conflict Settlement Declaration was handed over to the UN Chief by the Italian and Austrian governments.
Managed but not resolved: Since 1992, South Tyrol has been enriched by new legal and administrative competencies and now has far-reaching territorial autonomy within the Italian state. It has also become an economically prosperous region, with low unemployment and high per capita income. However, there is a sort of voluntary apartheid in the region, with the Germans not distinguishing between Italians from South Tyrol (who have been there for several generations) and other Italians. Most institutions of civil society are mono-ethnic; schools, political parties, trade unions, clubs, churches and even kindergartens. About the only exception is the Green Party. The Italians are concentrated in the bigger towns, the Germans in homesteads in the mountains. The Germans generally eschew public employment (the tourism business is more lucrative) and most officials are Italian. This is all a bit weird, and it is clear to the casual observer (which I was for 10 days) that there is a fair amount of mistrust between the two communities who do however make a genuine effort to put the past behind them. The expected negative outcomes for the Germans of remaining within Italy, such as being swamped by southern Italians in search of economic opportunities, did not materialize – in fact the proportion of Italian speakers dropped a bit after 1992. There is also confidence that the future of South Tyrol’s autonomy is not subject to the whims and fancies of the Italian state as it is internationally guaranteed and the Austrian government is a keen observer.
Conclusion: Well, such is the case of South Tyrol! There are some parts that must be pretty familiar for those of us who read local newspapers, and also parts that are not. These do not require enumeration. To go back to the beginning of this paper, conflict can be managed (if not resolved) and it is possible to have lasting peace in areas that have deep-rooted problems of ethnicity, identity, sub-nationalism and nationalism, even when two or more nations are involved. Things don’t have to go the way of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Kosovo, or Chechnya. There are positive models as well, and I sincerely hope that South Tyrol gives some cause for optimism in this depressing business.
References:
· Kager, Thomas, “South Tyrol: Mitigated but not Resolved” in the Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Acronyms/Jargon watch
Autostrada Italian for autobahn
Ein Tyrol One Tyrol
SVP SudTyrolischer Volkspartei
WW1 World War 1
WW2 World War 2
By Ajit Chaudhuri
Actually, no, this is a paper on South Tyrol (patience, those of you going ‘where?’ under your breaths) and may not add to our collective ‘Kashmir fatigue’! But let me first get the Kashmir bit out of the way. Most Indians tend to be vague on Kashmir – we know that there is a problem, but not quite what it is and don’t really care as long as the ‘troubles’ don’t extend beyond the valley and into our lives. Those who do know a bit more tend to find the situation depressing; they feel that the problem has historic roots that can not be undone, that Kashmir will always be a source of contention between India and Pakistan, that Muslim Kashmiris will always face an identity problem in our country, that there is no solution, and that we are forever stuck with the Indian Army pointing guns at Kashmiris to make them Indian. The point I am going to make in this paper is that it does not have to be this way, that solutions are possible, and that there are places that have moved from similar situations towards lasting peace. I give you the case of South Tyrol!
The Summer of 2004: I spent my summer vacation this year in South Tyrol in the Italian Alps. For those interested in the vacation possibilities – if you like walking about 20 km a day on soft ground in hilly terrain with a little weight on your back and eating cheese and ham and drinking red wine in copious quantities, South Tyrol would be heaven for you. If not, it would resemble a Siberian prison camp – very very naturally beautiful and blah, blah, blah but cold from when you wake up to when you go to sleep, even in May. There are no opportunities to socialize and the youngest and prettiest woman I met (by far) was my own Mother. South Tyrol consists of a low and narrow valley into which are squeezed a river (the Eisach), an autostrada, a normal road and a railway line, with the mountains going up another 2000 meters on either side. Its main town is Bozen/Bolzano, and it is separated from Austria by the famous Brenner Pass across which Hannibal had brought elephants to raid Rome eons ago. Much like our own hill areas, the men drink a lot and the women do all the hard work, everyone is very religious, the economic mainstay is tourism, maintaining goats and sheep and small farming, and the young people all get the hell out of there as soon as they can. I stayed in a farmhouse in the vicinity of the village of Klobenstein/Collalbo in the region Ritten/Rennon, about 50 km from B/B. Why these double names, I remember thinking, and how come the locals are blonde haired and blue eyed and, while willing to converse in Italian, speak German in their homes. An enquiry into these questions brought me to the South Tyrol issue, which is seen as a model for the protection of regional and cultural minorities.
A historical perspective: The Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled Tyrol, which consists of today’s Austrian province of North Tyrol and the Italian provinces of South Tyrol and Trentino, from Vienna until the end of WW1. The first two were predominantly German speaking, the last predominantly Italian, and Tyrol itself (89 percent German, 4 percent Italian and 7 percent others in 1900) was seen as a borderland between German and Italian cultures, joined rather than divided by the Brenner. The whole of South Tyrol was ceded to Italy (Peace Treaty of St. Germain, 1919) as per assurances made by the British and the French to the Italians in 1915 in return for Italy’s participation on the allied side in WW1, and in complete contradiction to the principle of self-determination advocated at the time by US President Woodrow Wilson. It is indeed interesting to note how many of today’s territorial disputes have their roots in British and French shenanigans in the first half of the 20th century.
The fascists came to power in Italy in 1922 and embarked on a programme of sustained Italianisation in South Tyrol. The German presence and influence in cultural, political and economic life was repressed, Italian became the official language and those officials not fluent in it were dismissed, schooling, public inscriptions and place names were made solely in Italian, and names of people were Italianised. The government also set up industries and encouraged the movement of people from southern Italy into the region. In 1939, Italians were 24 percent of South Tyrol’s population but in other aspects the policy achieved the opposite of its intentions – by creating a Tyrolean identity that disassociated rather than integrated with Italy. Mussolini finally accepted that he couldn’t convert 220,000 German speakers into Italians and, along with Hitler (who was looking for Italian support for his ambitions at the time), came to the conclusion that a radical solution was required – that South Tyroleans had to choose between Germany, or emigration, and Italy, or assimilation. 86 percent opted to move to Germany, and did not due to the advent of WW2 that gave both Germany and Italy other matters to think about.
In 1943, German troops occupied South Tyrol and, glad to be ‘liberated’ from the Italians, the locals collaborated with the Nazis. This subsequently became an obstacle to South Tyrol rejoining Austria after WW2, with the Allied powers rejecting both their claims in favour of Italy who had ended the war on the side of the Allies. However, Italy and Austria were obliged to come to a political settlement over South Tyrol, and both countries’ foreign ministers assured equal rights for Tyroleans and Italians in a vaguely worded First Autonomy Statute that raised more issues than it resolved. Tyrolean politicians from both sides of the Brenner repeatedly claimed that autonomy was temporary and self-determination was the ultimate objective. The Italian government reacted by passing restrictive laws that it applied restrictively, and lumping South Tyrol with the Italian province of Trentino to form one Italian-majority region. A South Tyrol People’s Party (SVP) was formed to represent German speaker interests and obtained a sufficient majority among them to obtain de-facto rights to negotiate with Italy. Austria’s sovereignty was fully restored in 1955 and it began to seek a role in the South Tyrol issue, which Italy treated as an internal matter and refused to have any official negotiations. The issue became hotter and hotter.
An insurgency begins: The bomb blasts began in 1956 on symbols of Italian rule; government offices, police stations and power plants. Italy sent 15,000 soldiers in, and Italian right wing radicals responded by carrying out bombings of their own, including in Austria. The issue escalated and internationalized – Austria brought the South Tyrol question into the UN in 1960, which confirmed that Austria had a say. Italy continued to refuse to talk meaningfully with Austria, who took it to the UN again in 1961, who in turn re-affirmed the 1960 resolution. Italy relented and began talking to Austrians and to South Tyroleans, the latter for the first time. A settlement package was approved by the SVP in 1969 and subsequently by the Italian and Austrian governments, coming into force as the New Autonomy Statute in 1972.
A few years of relative peace resulted, before two factors intervened. The first was ‘Italian slowness’, or the tortoise-like pace at which the Italian government worked, which created a concern among the German-speakers that Rome was trying to slime out of implementing the autonomy measures fully. This gave cause to German hardliners of the ‘Ein Tyrol’ ideology. The second was that the Italian speakers, up to now a mollycoddled bunch, did not react well to losing their special privileges and began voting for far-right Italian political parties. The atmosphere deteriorated again, with sporadic bombings and whatnot, and this continued until the late 1980s.
Working towards a solution: It was only in 1988 that some of the more contentious points on the Autonomy Statute, such as equal status for the German language in the police force and in court, were passed and implemented by the Italian legislature and this led to de-escalation in tension. After this, there was considerable urgency by the Italian government to get this whole thing over with, and the final points on the statute were implemented in 1992. The SVP approved the packet with an overwhelming majority and a Conflict Settlement Declaration was handed over to the UN Chief by the Italian and Austrian governments.
Managed but not resolved: Since 1992, South Tyrol has been enriched by new legal and administrative competencies and now has far-reaching territorial autonomy within the Italian state. It has also become an economically prosperous region, with low unemployment and high per capita income. However, there is a sort of voluntary apartheid in the region, with the Germans not distinguishing between Italians from South Tyrol (who have been there for several generations) and other Italians. Most institutions of civil society are mono-ethnic; schools, political parties, trade unions, clubs, churches and even kindergartens. About the only exception is the Green Party. The Italians are concentrated in the bigger towns, the Germans in homesteads in the mountains. The Germans generally eschew public employment (the tourism business is more lucrative) and most officials are Italian. This is all a bit weird, and it is clear to the casual observer (which I was for 10 days) that there is a fair amount of mistrust between the two communities who do however make a genuine effort to put the past behind them. The expected negative outcomes for the Germans of remaining within Italy, such as being swamped by southern Italians in search of economic opportunities, did not materialize – in fact the proportion of Italian speakers dropped a bit after 1992. There is also confidence that the future of South Tyrol’s autonomy is not subject to the whims and fancies of the Italian state as it is internationally guaranteed and the Austrian government is a keen observer.
Conclusion: Well, such is the case of South Tyrol! There are some parts that must be pretty familiar for those of us who read local newspapers, and also parts that are not. These do not require enumeration. To go back to the beginning of this paper, conflict can be managed (if not resolved) and it is possible to have lasting peace in areas that have deep-rooted problems of ethnicity, identity, sub-nationalism and nationalism, even when two or more nations are involved. Things don’t have to go the way of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Kosovo, or Chechnya. There are positive models as well, and I sincerely hope that South Tyrol gives some cause for optimism in this depressing business.
References:
· Kager, Thomas, “South Tyrol: Mitigated but not Resolved” in the Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Acronyms/Jargon watch
Autostrada Italian for autobahn
Ein Tyrol One Tyrol
SVP SudTyrolischer Volkspartei
WW1 World War 1
WW2 World War 2
Oh No More On Kashmir - 2
OH NO! NOT ANOTHER ON KASHMIR!! Part 2
A short note by Ajit Chaudhuri
Since the earthquake of October 2005, I have traveled to Kashmir several times – specifically to Srinagar town and Baramullah and Kupwara districts. When I mention this to people, I get a strange look along with the question ‘how is it?’ or ‘what’s it like?’ I am never too sure what to say – are they asking about the scenery, the food, the women, or the militancy? What follows is a general introduction to Kashmir for those with an interest in going beyond the stuff in the news and films, and those considering a visit.
The first thing that strikes one about J&K state is its size and diversity – it is a huge area consisting of plains, mountains, valleys, passes, deserts and plateaus, and of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist communities. Both size and diversity were much more so before 1947 when it stretched from Tibet in the east to the Northwest Frontier in the west, and from the plains in the south to the Wakhan corridor, a narrow stretch of Afghanistan created to separate the British and Russian empires, in the north. It then consisted of the Jammu region, the Kashmir valley (including the Pakistani-administered bits of it), Ladakh, what the Pakis call their Northern Areas – Baltistan (which was originally part of Ladakh) and Dardistan – and Aksai Chin, the area India conceded in 1962 to China. I will restrict this paper to the Indian part of the Kashmir valley.
The Kashmir valley is a fairly small part of this vast region, but it is the part that is heavily populated. Most of the residents are ethnic Kashmiris – they are Kashmiri speaking, rich, educated and traditionally dominant, with what was an 80:20 mix of Sunni Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) changing to about 99:1 because of the militancy and the subsequent out-migration of Hindus. Minorities include the Pahadis, who are tall and broad and claim to be Rajputs brought as mercenaries by the Dogra kings, and the nomadic Gujjars and Bakharwals. The minorities are less educated, speak a dialect of Punjabi, and stay in the mountains surrounding the valley – they tend not to speak Kashmiri, and are looked down upon by Kashmiris (and don’t like it – both the terms ‘Pahadi’ and ‘Kashmiri’ have a slightly derogatory connotation when used by the other). The earthquake-affected areas of Uri and Tangdhar are Pahadi and Gujjar dominated, and the Sikh officer accompanying me from Border Roads Organization (BRO) on one of my journeys was much more comfortable with the community than his Kashmiri superintendent. Most of the Muslims are converts from Hinduism and, in the villages, retain their caste identities and hierarchies – Bhats, for example, are Brahmin converts and consider themselves superior to others. The Rajput and Jat converts tend to disagree.
What is the militancy about? One of my friends, a conflict expert[1], said that unfriendly neighbours can fan insurgent movements but root causes always lie within. The Kashmiri people were actively pro-India in its conflicts with Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971, which gives lie to the view that the cause of the problem is in the way the region acceded to India. In my view, poor governance and high corruption levels enabled a very small group to gain at everyone else’s cost, and the resultant backlash has taken the form of a movement against the state. The movement has a broad spectrum, with some strands that are Islamic in nature, some that are pro-independence, some that are pro-Pakistan, and some that are mere extortion rackets. Most people, with the exception of the KPs, are pro-independence and most are also quite happy to see the back of the KPs who dominated government employment and were seen to gain disproportionately from corruption.
Who are the militants? The BRO guys gave me an interesting take on this. A brief word first on the BRO – it builds and maintains roads in the border areas of the country, and is responsible for most roads in Kashmir. It is scattered in remote outposts across militant dominated areas without protection, and yet rarely gets attacked. Its formula is fairly simple. First, neither its camps nor its vehicles ever carry weapons, and this is known to one and all. Groups therefore never attack it so as to re-stock their weapons inventory. Second, the roads it builds are critical links for remote villages, and it is often the most important employer in the communities where it works. There is therefore considerable pressure from people on the militancy to enable BRO to work unimpeded. And third, and not least, it does not hesitate to make strategic use of its liquor rations. The BRO boss in Uri said that when he gets a call from the Hizb area commander asking for five men to be employed for five days, he could be sure that five men will land up and will actually work for five days. When LeT or JeM area commanders ring up asking for the same, it is usually just money they are looking for. He attributes this to the fact that the Hizb is a Kashmiri group, has a vision for what it wants Kashmir to be and sees BRO’s work as an important part of that, and the others are Pakistanis with only one thought on their mind. Kashmiris themselves are fairly wary of the Paki groups and of Pakistan itself – many have visited Pakistani Kashmir and seen for themselves the effects of Punjabi imperial attitudes and military rule. This was re-enforced in October 2005 by the positive role the Indian Army played in earthquake relief, which was in sharp contrast to their Pakistani counterparts who walked through the affected region without looking left or right to secure their borders – a fact all Kashmiris are aware of.
So what is the fight between India and Pakistan over Kashmir actually about? Is it that the land is worth the conflict? Or that Pakistan is desperate to repay India over Bangladesh 1971? Or even that the Pakistanis feel for their Kashmiri brethren, as is often touted to be the case? There is a more cynical and basic explanation in some quarters[2] – that it is neither about land, nor egos, and not even religion – it is about water. More than 90 percent of Pakistan’s fresh water comes from India through, from the north southwards, the Indus, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej rivers. According to the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, India has the right to treat the southern three rivers catchments and has to let the northern three, all of which are through J&K, flow unimpeded into Pakistan. However, fresh water requirements in both countries have grown astronomically and are projected to grow even more astronomically in the future. India has begun treating the northern three rivers as well, thus effecting Pakistan’s real strategic interests. The Chinese have not helped the situation by considering the same on the three large Indian river systems that originate in their territory, the Indus, Sutlej and Brahmaputra, to divert water to their parched northern provinces. As someone said – the wars of the future will be fought over water, not oil.
So much for all this background! What’s Kashmir actually like? Well, for one, it’s as beautiful as advertised – the chinars along the Jhelum, the houseboats on Dal lake, Nishat Bagh, Sonmarg, etc. The roads are excellent. The food is tasty – with rice a staple and various kinds of meat such as Rishta, Gojtaba and Tabak Maaz to go with it in a distinct style of cooking called Waazwaan. And the women are stunning! Preventing heavenhood are the Kashmiris themselves, who though highly educated and well spoken are not straightforward (your tourist tout in Connaught Place is a fairly typical example), the ubiquitous guns of the security forces and last but most, the reason for these guns.
A word about the Army – this is one lot of people you really feel sorry for. They are cooped up inside barricaded areas all the time, going outside only under heavy security (despite which they are constantly being shot at), and with no scope for normal interaction with anybody. I had to stay 3 days in the BRO mess in Srinagar, which is not under particularly high security compared with the Army camps, and yet could not go out anywhere and had to maintain hierarchy and formality 24 hours a day. Imagine doing it for three years? No wonder they have to deal with so many psycho cases these days.
Traveling within Kashmir is stressful! Civilian vehicles are stopped and checked every twenty or so kilometers. I once had the experience of traveling at night from Kupwara to Srinagar, where the vehicle was stopped and powerful lights shined upon it, blinding one completely. With the lights was a medium machine gun, which was pointed at the vehicle. Three soldiers came out, of whom two would stay a little back with their fingers on their AK-47 triggers, again all pointed at the vehicle, and one would come up to the car and ask for papers. The moment they are sure that you are no threat (being from the plains and having an India Today identity card help that along), there is a visible easing of tension and their demeanor is almost welcoming while letting you through. But until that point, even a small twitch can lead to a massacre. And this was repeated every twenty kilometers. After that, I made sure that all movement was done in daylight.
Kashmiris tend to be two-faced, thinking one thing and telling you another. And yet, hospitality norms have not been eroded by the many years of militancy, and once you have come to a deal with a vehicle or hotel you will usually be pleasantly surprised at the quality of service. Everyone speaks very well and is politically aware, and good discussions are sometimes possible. But scratch below the surface and there will be several areas of argument, such as the misdeeds of the Army and India the imperial monster. The effect of many of these is that I turn into an unashamed nationalist as soon as I enter Kashmir (the sort who would make me blanche anywhere else), taking examples of misdeeds of the militancy and asking why it is that the Army’s misdeeds can be questioned, but these cannot. And questioning Kashmir’s ability to survive without the Indian taxpayer subsidizing it – to which the response usually is that that problem is for them and not the Indian taxpayer to worry about. All in a very civilized vein, of course.
Would you be safe if you visited? Yes! The militancy is fairly well organized and you are a target only if you are a target – a few random incidents notwithstanding. My advice is not to be dumb and organize security unless you actually are a target (in which case, don’t visit) because the mere presence of security attracts militant operations. And if you leave by air, budget 45 minutes for the journey from the airport gate to the check-in area.
This paper may not read like a J&K Tourism brochure, but I would like to conclude along similar lines. Most people who travel to Kashmir come back with the view that it was, net net, a great experience. And while you may not return quoting Mohamed Iqbal (who, upon seeing Kashmir, said ‘if there is heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this’), it will still be worth the time, money and effort. If you are considering a visit, do go ahead.
Acronyms:
BRO Border Roads Organization
Hizb Hizbul Mujahedin
J&K Jammu and Kashmir
JeM Jaish-e-Mohamed
KP Kashmiri Pandits
LeT Lashkar-e-Toiba
Additional Reading Material for the very enthusiastic:
‘Jummoo and Kashmir Territories’ by Frederic Drew, the then Governor of Kashmir, published in 1893.
‘Shalimar the Clown’ by Salman Rushdie
[1] Dr. Sunil Kaul, currently with The Ant, an NGO in Assam.
[2] Gleaned from discussions with Col. Talwar in Srinagar over long and cold winter evenings.
A short note by Ajit Chaudhuri
Since the earthquake of October 2005, I have traveled to Kashmir several times – specifically to Srinagar town and Baramullah and Kupwara districts. When I mention this to people, I get a strange look along with the question ‘how is it?’ or ‘what’s it like?’ I am never too sure what to say – are they asking about the scenery, the food, the women, or the militancy? What follows is a general introduction to Kashmir for those with an interest in going beyond the stuff in the news and films, and those considering a visit.
The first thing that strikes one about J&K state is its size and diversity – it is a huge area consisting of plains, mountains, valleys, passes, deserts and plateaus, and of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist communities. Both size and diversity were much more so before 1947 when it stretched from Tibet in the east to the Northwest Frontier in the west, and from the plains in the south to the Wakhan corridor, a narrow stretch of Afghanistan created to separate the British and Russian empires, in the north. It then consisted of the Jammu region, the Kashmir valley (including the Pakistani-administered bits of it), Ladakh, what the Pakis call their Northern Areas – Baltistan (which was originally part of Ladakh) and Dardistan – and Aksai Chin, the area India conceded in 1962 to China. I will restrict this paper to the Indian part of the Kashmir valley.
The Kashmir valley is a fairly small part of this vast region, but it is the part that is heavily populated. Most of the residents are ethnic Kashmiris – they are Kashmiri speaking, rich, educated and traditionally dominant, with what was an 80:20 mix of Sunni Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) changing to about 99:1 because of the militancy and the subsequent out-migration of Hindus. Minorities include the Pahadis, who are tall and broad and claim to be Rajputs brought as mercenaries by the Dogra kings, and the nomadic Gujjars and Bakharwals. The minorities are less educated, speak a dialect of Punjabi, and stay in the mountains surrounding the valley – they tend not to speak Kashmiri, and are looked down upon by Kashmiris (and don’t like it – both the terms ‘Pahadi’ and ‘Kashmiri’ have a slightly derogatory connotation when used by the other). The earthquake-affected areas of Uri and Tangdhar are Pahadi and Gujjar dominated, and the Sikh officer accompanying me from Border Roads Organization (BRO) on one of my journeys was much more comfortable with the community than his Kashmiri superintendent. Most of the Muslims are converts from Hinduism and, in the villages, retain their caste identities and hierarchies – Bhats, for example, are Brahmin converts and consider themselves superior to others. The Rajput and Jat converts tend to disagree.
What is the militancy about? One of my friends, a conflict expert[1], said that unfriendly neighbours can fan insurgent movements but root causes always lie within. The Kashmiri people were actively pro-India in its conflicts with Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971, which gives lie to the view that the cause of the problem is in the way the region acceded to India. In my view, poor governance and high corruption levels enabled a very small group to gain at everyone else’s cost, and the resultant backlash has taken the form of a movement against the state. The movement has a broad spectrum, with some strands that are Islamic in nature, some that are pro-independence, some that are pro-Pakistan, and some that are mere extortion rackets. Most people, with the exception of the KPs, are pro-independence and most are also quite happy to see the back of the KPs who dominated government employment and were seen to gain disproportionately from corruption.
Who are the militants? The BRO guys gave me an interesting take on this. A brief word first on the BRO – it builds and maintains roads in the border areas of the country, and is responsible for most roads in Kashmir. It is scattered in remote outposts across militant dominated areas without protection, and yet rarely gets attacked. Its formula is fairly simple. First, neither its camps nor its vehicles ever carry weapons, and this is known to one and all. Groups therefore never attack it so as to re-stock their weapons inventory. Second, the roads it builds are critical links for remote villages, and it is often the most important employer in the communities where it works. There is therefore considerable pressure from people on the militancy to enable BRO to work unimpeded. And third, and not least, it does not hesitate to make strategic use of its liquor rations. The BRO boss in Uri said that when he gets a call from the Hizb area commander asking for five men to be employed for five days, he could be sure that five men will land up and will actually work for five days. When LeT or JeM area commanders ring up asking for the same, it is usually just money they are looking for. He attributes this to the fact that the Hizb is a Kashmiri group, has a vision for what it wants Kashmir to be and sees BRO’s work as an important part of that, and the others are Pakistanis with only one thought on their mind. Kashmiris themselves are fairly wary of the Paki groups and of Pakistan itself – many have visited Pakistani Kashmir and seen for themselves the effects of Punjabi imperial attitudes and military rule. This was re-enforced in October 2005 by the positive role the Indian Army played in earthquake relief, which was in sharp contrast to their Pakistani counterparts who walked through the affected region without looking left or right to secure their borders – a fact all Kashmiris are aware of.
So what is the fight between India and Pakistan over Kashmir actually about? Is it that the land is worth the conflict? Or that Pakistan is desperate to repay India over Bangladesh 1971? Or even that the Pakistanis feel for their Kashmiri brethren, as is often touted to be the case? There is a more cynical and basic explanation in some quarters[2] – that it is neither about land, nor egos, and not even religion – it is about water. More than 90 percent of Pakistan’s fresh water comes from India through, from the north southwards, the Indus, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas and the Sutlej rivers. According to the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, India has the right to treat the southern three rivers catchments and has to let the northern three, all of which are through J&K, flow unimpeded into Pakistan. However, fresh water requirements in both countries have grown astronomically and are projected to grow even more astronomically in the future. India has begun treating the northern three rivers as well, thus effecting Pakistan’s real strategic interests. The Chinese have not helped the situation by considering the same on the three large Indian river systems that originate in their territory, the Indus, Sutlej and Brahmaputra, to divert water to their parched northern provinces. As someone said – the wars of the future will be fought over water, not oil.
So much for all this background! What’s Kashmir actually like? Well, for one, it’s as beautiful as advertised – the chinars along the Jhelum, the houseboats on Dal lake, Nishat Bagh, Sonmarg, etc. The roads are excellent. The food is tasty – with rice a staple and various kinds of meat such as Rishta, Gojtaba and Tabak Maaz to go with it in a distinct style of cooking called Waazwaan. And the women are stunning! Preventing heavenhood are the Kashmiris themselves, who though highly educated and well spoken are not straightforward (your tourist tout in Connaught Place is a fairly typical example), the ubiquitous guns of the security forces and last but most, the reason for these guns.
A word about the Army – this is one lot of people you really feel sorry for. They are cooped up inside barricaded areas all the time, going outside only under heavy security (despite which they are constantly being shot at), and with no scope for normal interaction with anybody. I had to stay 3 days in the BRO mess in Srinagar, which is not under particularly high security compared with the Army camps, and yet could not go out anywhere and had to maintain hierarchy and formality 24 hours a day. Imagine doing it for three years? No wonder they have to deal with so many psycho cases these days.
Traveling within Kashmir is stressful! Civilian vehicles are stopped and checked every twenty or so kilometers. I once had the experience of traveling at night from Kupwara to Srinagar, where the vehicle was stopped and powerful lights shined upon it, blinding one completely. With the lights was a medium machine gun, which was pointed at the vehicle. Three soldiers came out, of whom two would stay a little back with their fingers on their AK-47 triggers, again all pointed at the vehicle, and one would come up to the car and ask for papers. The moment they are sure that you are no threat (being from the plains and having an India Today identity card help that along), there is a visible easing of tension and their demeanor is almost welcoming while letting you through. But until that point, even a small twitch can lead to a massacre. And this was repeated every twenty kilometers. After that, I made sure that all movement was done in daylight.
Kashmiris tend to be two-faced, thinking one thing and telling you another. And yet, hospitality norms have not been eroded by the many years of militancy, and once you have come to a deal with a vehicle or hotel you will usually be pleasantly surprised at the quality of service. Everyone speaks very well and is politically aware, and good discussions are sometimes possible. But scratch below the surface and there will be several areas of argument, such as the misdeeds of the Army and India the imperial monster. The effect of many of these is that I turn into an unashamed nationalist as soon as I enter Kashmir (the sort who would make me blanche anywhere else), taking examples of misdeeds of the militancy and asking why it is that the Army’s misdeeds can be questioned, but these cannot. And questioning Kashmir’s ability to survive without the Indian taxpayer subsidizing it – to which the response usually is that that problem is for them and not the Indian taxpayer to worry about. All in a very civilized vein, of course.
Would you be safe if you visited? Yes! The militancy is fairly well organized and you are a target only if you are a target – a few random incidents notwithstanding. My advice is not to be dumb and organize security unless you actually are a target (in which case, don’t visit) because the mere presence of security attracts militant operations. And if you leave by air, budget 45 minutes for the journey from the airport gate to the check-in area.
This paper may not read like a J&K Tourism brochure, but I would like to conclude along similar lines. Most people who travel to Kashmir come back with the view that it was, net net, a great experience. And while you may not return quoting Mohamed Iqbal (who, upon seeing Kashmir, said ‘if there is heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this’), it will still be worth the time, money and effort. If you are considering a visit, do go ahead.
Acronyms:
BRO Border Roads Organization
Hizb Hizbul Mujahedin
J&K Jammu and Kashmir
JeM Jaish-e-Mohamed
KP Kashmiri Pandits
LeT Lashkar-e-Toiba
Additional Reading Material for the very enthusiastic:
‘Jummoo and Kashmir Territories’ by Frederic Drew, the then Governor of Kashmir, published in 1893.
‘Shalimar the Clown’ by Salman Rushdie
[1] Dr. Sunil Kaul, currently with The Ant, an NGO in Assam.
[2] Gleaned from discussions with Col. Talwar in Srinagar over long and cold winter evenings.
The Empire Strikes Back
THE EMPIRE STIKES BACK – I
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
The development sector, when I drifted in to it, was still a space occupied by people looking to work in the farthest possible place and do something ‘different’. The decision to work in ‘an NGO’ guaranteed long-term penury, pity tinged with scorn from one’s peers from post-graduation, a low priority in the Darwinian marriage markets, and a life of conflict with the authorities. Somewhere along the way, while I was still avoiding the dreaded ‘what do you do?’ question at social occasions, development became mainstream. The government acknowledged that it was not doing, and was not capable of doing, enough to address the problems of poverty and hunger and began looking to NGOs to provide answers on the ground. Money began to flow in, people in immaculate khadis began stalking the corridors of power, development became a respectable career option, and all sorts of NGOs sprang up; quangos, gongos, dongos, development contractors, resource NGOs, etc., etc. The new lords of poverty had arrived, and NGOs are now a major employer and development a multi-million dollar industry.
There have been recent indications that things are going to change, and this two-pager looks at one of these indications, the FCMC, in some detail. No, this is not a short form of bi-lingual abuse – it stands for Foreign Contribution (Management and Control) Bill 2005. Foreign funding for NGOs is currently governed under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act of 1976, or the FCRA, and the government proposes to replace this with the FCMC over the next one or two years. Accountaid, an organization that provides accounting support and advice to NGOs, has studied the FCMC, its differences from FCRA, and its implications, and published this in the newsletter Accountable (volumes 106-109), from which I have prepared this synopsis.
FCRA
FCMC
History: The FCRA seeks to ensure that foreign funding does not affect Indian elections. It was originally targeted at political parties, and NGOs were included as a safety measure. NGOs were asked to register under the FCRA so as to receive foreign funds in 1984, and about 30,000 have registered so far. The FCRA department now spends all its time registering and monitoring NGOs.
Since FCRA was not designed for NGOs, its implementation has created some problems. For example, an organization can receive all foreign contributions only in one designated bank account, and it has to be spent from this bank account. NGOs with activities in multiple locations have to either carry cash around or break the law. The FCRA is also vague on interest on foreign contributions, and on income from foreign contributions.
On registration: NGOs have to apply for registration under FCRA. There is no provision for renewal.
If an NGO is refused registration, reasons are not given.
The FCRA is centralized in Delhi. This causes major problems for NGOs located in remote areas.
No fees.
There is no provision for cancellation of registration.
There is a provision for prior permission to receive foreign funds in case an NGO has a willing foreign contributor but no FCRA registration, in which the department is to respond in a maximum of 120 days.
As of 1996, FCRA registration can be frozen if fifty percent or more of the governing body members change. This leads to NGOs avoiding elections.
If fellowships/scholarships/stipends to individuals are being provided from foreign funds, payments above Rs. 36,000 per annum have to be reported.
The government’s only prohibitory power is that it can direct that a specific person or NGO requires prior permission to receive future foreign contributions.
Organizations of a political nature can receive foreign funds after getting prior permission on a case-by-case basis.
The FCMC shifts focus from politics to anti-national activities, and is targeted primarily at NGOs. While anti-national activities are not legally defined, ten activities are listed (terrorism is not one).
Foreign contribution can be accepted into only one designated bank account, but can be shifted to other bank accounts (as long as these are used exclusively for foreign funds) according to operational needs. These bank accounts can only be in scheduled banks.
Interest on foreign contribution is foreign contribution. Income from foreign contribution is still vague.
NGOs will have to apply for registration under FCMC, and renew the registration every five years.
The grounds for refusal of registration have been officially listed, and the grounds for rejection will be conveyed in writing.
It appears that the FCMC registration and administration will be decentralized.
NGOs will pay fees for registration, renewal of certificates, appeals, etc.
The government can prescribe the percentage of foreign contribution an NGO can spend on administration.
The FCMC lays down a provision for cancellation of registration. All foreign funds with the NGO at the time of cancellation become the government’s.
The provision for prior permission continues, without mention of time limits.
There is no mention of this.
There is no such requirement.
The role of banks has increased. Banks are prohibited from allowing credit to or withdrawal from foreign contribution accounts unless the concerned NGO has FCMC registration or prior permission.
The government has considerable prohibitory power. It can put onto a prior permission list an entire class of people or NGOs, a geographical area, any specific purpose, or any specific source.
Organizations of a political nature cannot receive foreign funds at all.
Other points to note are –
· The FCRA will be withdrawn once the FCMC Bill is passed in parliament.
· NGOs registered under FCRA will not get automatic registration under FCMC. They will have to register under FCMC within two years of the Bill becoming law.
· In that window period, FC returns have to be filed in new formats and the new provisions will govern transactions.
· Registering 30,000 existing FCRA holders in this two-year period is likely to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
The FCMC’s potential for bureaucratic harassment should be generating concern in the NGO sector – yet there is not a peep from a sector that has an opinion on most things. Perhaps this is because it is the fourth attempt to straighten out the FCRA since 1988; the other three did not see the light of day because of changes in the government before the bill could become law.
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
The development sector, when I drifted in to it, was still a space occupied by people looking to work in the farthest possible place and do something ‘different’. The decision to work in ‘an NGO’ guaranteed long-term penury, pity tinged with scorn from one’s peers from post-graduation, a low priority in the Darwinian marriage markets, and a life of conflict with the authorities. Somewhere along the way, while I was still avoiding the dreaded ‘what do you do?’ question at social occasions, development became mainstream. The government acknowledged that it was not doing, and was not capable of doing, enough to address the problems of poverty and hunger and began looking to NGOs to provide answers on the ground. Money began to flow in, people in immaculate khadis began stalking the corridors of power, development became a respectable career option, and all sorts of NGOs sprang up; quangos, gongos, dongos, development contractors, resource NGOs, etc., etc. The new lords of poverty had arrived, and NGOs are now a major employer and development a multi-million dollar industry.
There have been recent indications that things are going to change, and this two-pager looks at one of these indications, the FCMC, in some detail. No, this is not a short form of bi-lingual abuse – it stands for Foreign Contribution (Management and Control) Bill 2005. Foreign funding for NGOs is currently governed under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act of 1976, or the FCRA, and the government proposes to replace this with the FCMC over the next one or two years. Accountaid, an organization that provides accounting support and advice to NGOs, has studied the FCMC, its differences from FCRA, and its implications, and published this in the newsletter Accountable (volumes 106-109), from which I have prepared this synopsis.
FCRA
FCMC
History: The FCRA seeks to ensure that foreign funding does not affect Indian elections. It was originally targeted at political parties, and NGOs were included as a safety measure. NGOs were asked to register under the FCRA so as to receive foreign funds in 1984, and about 30,000 have registered so far. The FCRA department now spends all its time registering and monitoring NGOs.
Since FCRA was not designed for NGOs, its implementation has created some problems. For example, an organization can receive all foreign contributions only in one designated bank account, and it has to be spent from this bank account. NGOs with activities in multiple locations have to either carry cash around or break the law. The FCRA is also vague on interest on foreign contributions, and on income from foreign contributions.
On registration: NGOs have to apply for registration under FCRA. There is no provision for renewal.
If an NGO is refused registration, reasons are not given.
The FCRA is centralized in Delhi. This causes major problems for NGOs located in remote areas.
No fees.
There is no provision for cancellation of registration.
There is a provision for prior permission to receive foreign funds in case an NGO has a willing foreign contributor but no FCRA registration, in which the department is to respond in a maximum of 120 days.
As of 1996, FCRA registration can be frozen if fifty percent or more of the governing body members change. This leads to NGOs avoiding elections.
If fellowships/scholarships/stipends to individuals are being provided from foreign funds, payments above Rs. 36,000 per annum have to be reported.
The government’s only prohibitory power is that it can direct that a specific person or NGO requires prior permission to receive future foreign contributions.
Organizations of a political nature can receive foreign funds after getting prior permission on a case-by-case basis.
The FCMC shifts focus from politics to anti-national activities, and is targeted primarily at NGOs. While anti-national activities are not legally defined, ten activities are listed (terrorism is not one).
Foreign contribution can be accepted into only one designated bank account, but can be shifted to other bank accounts (as long as these are used exclusively for foreign funds) according to operational needs. These bank accounts can only be in scheduled banks.
Interest on foreign contribution is foreign contribution. Income from foreign contribution is still vague.
NGOs will have to apply for registration under FCMC, and renew the registration every five years.
The grounds for refusal of registration have been officially listed, and the grounds for rejection will be conveyed in writing.
It appears that the FCMC registration and administration will be decentralized.
NGOs will pay fees for registration, renewal of certificates, appeals, etc.
The government can prescribe the percentage of foreign contribution an NGO can spend on administration.
The FCMC lays down a provision for cancellation of registration. All foreign funds with the NGO at the time of cancellation become the government’s.
The provision for prior permission continues, without mention of time limits.
There is no mention of this.
There is no such requirement.
The role of banks has increased. Banks are prohibited from allowing credit to or withdrawal from foreign contribution accounts unless the concerned NGO has FCMC registration or prior permission.
The government has considerable prohibitory power. It can put onto a prior permission list an entire class of people or NGOs, a geographical area, any specific purpose, or any specific source.
Organizations of a political nature cannot receive foreign funds at all.
Other points to note are –
· The FCRA will be withdrawn once the FCMC Bill is passed in parliament.
· NGOs registered under FCRA will not get automatic registration under FCMC. They will have to register under FCMC within two years of the Bill becoming law.
· In that window period, FC returns have to be filed in new formats and the new provisions will govern transactions.
· Registering 30,000 existing FCRA holders in this two-year period is likely to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
The FCMC’s potential for bureaucratic harassment should be generating concern in the NGO sector – yet there is not a peep from a sector that has an opinion on most things. Perhaps this is because it is the fourth attempt to straighten out the FCRA since 1988; the other three did not see the light of day because of changes in the government before the bill could become law.
Genghis Khan and Management
THE GENGHIS KHAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
“History is written by the winners”??
Readers with an interest in nomadic cultures and communities would hark back to the times, in the 12th and 13th centuries, when there was a genuine clash of civilizations rather than the sexed up stuff peddled by Huntingdon that is so much in the news these days. Those were times when a small group of nomadic people called the Mongols united under Genghis Khan, moved out in all directions from their base in Karakorum (somewhere in Mongolia) and set about attacking the civilized city states and settled agriculturist communities that were dominant at the time. At its height, the Mongol empire was the largest the world has ever seen – stretching from the Black Sea deep in Europe to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from Moscow and Siberia in the north to the Himalayas and the Persian Gulf in the south. The three or four centuries that they were in power is mostly described as a dark time in history, when mankind was under attack from the scourge of an evil and cruel people, when the relentless pressure of barbaric nomads laid civilization low, when agricultural land was subsumed and converted into free ranges. And yet, it was a time of unprecedented exchange between east and west, a time when it was possible to travel overland from Italy to Beijing (can one do it today?), a time when established interests across the known world were broken and it was possible for ordinary people to make their mark. The old adage of history being written by winners could be changed to ‘history is written by those who can write’.
What was it about this small group of unlettered nomads that enabled them to rule the world? What enabled them to fight and win battles as far away as Leignitz (in 1241, a particularly interesting one because it was the Mongols western-most battle and the only one fought against the Teutonic Knights – more about this later) in today’s Poland, and in Myanmar, and around Baghdad, and in the outskirts of Vienna, exercises in logistics that must have been mind-boggling? How did they achieve such military domination, especially as this was achieved without larger numbers, superior weapons or a better economic base? How did such few people (at their height, there were about 700,000 Mongols) administrate such a vast empire? How did the empire last so long after the military dominance was lost? These questions are difficult to address because the Mongols themselves left no records, and one is thus dependent for information upon the educated elite among the civilized communities who were at the receiving end during this period. What I discovered during my inquiry into the Mongols of 1167 to 1552, especially the earlier part of this period, is relevant to any leader and manager today, and this is as follows.
Have core values, and enforce them: The Mongols, in keeping with their nomadic culture, placed a high value on simple things such as loyalty, honesty, generosity and an acceptance of the beliefs and way of life of others. They hated theft, and traitors were put to death horribly, even if they were betraying their rulers to the advantage of the Mongols. Apart from some core values, the Mongols did not impose upon those they ruled over – so much so that it was difficult for their enemies to rally around religion, both Muslim and Christian, race or ethnicity against them. The intense loyalty that they inspired enabled them to rule for far longer than their military dominance lasted – for example, the Russian princelings around Nyiznhi Novgorod and Moscow fought amongst themselves but all were scrupulously loyal to the Khan in Kazan and it was only in the 1550s that Ivan the Terrible smashed the Mongols by taking Kazan and Astrakhan. A common civil code called the Yasa was made applicable by Genghis Khan to the Mongols that was remarkably gender sensitive for the time – it outlawed adultery and the kidnapping of women (common practise in that day and age), required a woman’s consent for marriage, and made all children legitimate irrespective of the nature of relationship between the Mother and Father.
Get the best people into leadership positions, and ensure that good people rise: The Mongol empire was the first (and last??) genuine meritocracy in the history of mankind – unlike the armies of the day in which noble birth and connections enabled a person to get ahead, there was only one way by which to get command in a Mongol army – proven competence. They were indifferent to your birth, they were indifferent to whether you were a Mongol or not, and they were even indifferent to whether your abilities had been demonstrated against them – in fact, many of their commanders were from armies that had fought against the Mongols, and one of Genghis Khan’s most trusted generals had earlier shot Genghis’s horse from under him as an enemy foot soldier. Mongol armies were therefore much better led than their opponents, enabling their smaller forces to take on much larger armies and win. The meritocracy transferred on to civil life as well – administrators in the empire were also chosen and promoted on the basis of ability.
Be realistic, encourage subordinates to be frank and to speak their minds: Genghis Khan was one of those rare leaders who did not encourage flattery and was not afraid to listen to stuff that he did not like to hear. As a result, his generals gave him realistic assessments and, in turn, were given realistic assessments by their subordinates. This percolated across the empire and, again, was in sharp contrast to other armies of the day.
Understand your advantages and use them: The typical Mongol soldier was an expert horseman and could shoot an arrow accurately over a long distance, even while riding in the other direction. Each soldier would ride with three or four horses, and could change horses while riding at speed. This enabled a Mongol army to travel far larger distances much faster than other armies of the day. It also enabled them to maneuver nimbly in battle, change battle plans effectively and retreat quickly.
Know your adversary: The western armies of the day, and especially elite cavalry forces such as the Teutonic Knights, were huge men with heavy armour mounted on large horses and were formidable opponents who were able to smash their way through opposing forces. The Mongols simply shot their horses – the same Knight on the ground was a sitting duck. Similarly, western armies had a culture in which the commander had to be and be seen to be in the thick of the fighting setting an example to his troops, and was thus easily identifiable in battle. The Mongols would identify and kill the commander and thus render their opponents confused and not very sure who was giving the orders. Mongol commanders, on the other hand, were not easy to identify in battle. Western armies also saw retreat as a loss, and when their opponents retreated they would charge in with their cavalry to mow them down. The Mongols thus used the retreat to draw their opponents into traps by pretending disarray, turning around and fleeing, and thus inviting the enemy into a cavalry charge that invariably led to a massacre at a place of the Mongols’ choosing. This was later called the ‘steppes retreat’, a battle tactic that the Russians would use very effectively against Napolean in 1812.
What you are matters, not what you look like: A Mongol army going into battle looked like a horde descending, they did not appear to have any order or formation and there were no sounds of drums and trumpets. In actual fact, the Mongols were highly disciplined and tightly organized troops and used the decimal formation of platoons of ten, units of hundred, divisions of thousand and armies of ten thousand, who used visual tools to coordinate and communicate with each other in battle.
Use information technology effectively: Like other great IT innovations, the courier system (the Mongols, incidentally, were its inventors) was initially developed for military purposes. Mongol armies would have daily courier services running between them – it enabled them to know exactly where each other were, and if they planned to converge at a certain time and place they were usually able to do it to the day. The courier system also invariably enabled them to know exactly where their opponents were, and thus to choose the place and time of battle. The Journal of Military History, in its description of the battle of Leignitz, is instructive on this matter – it says that Henry the Pious of Silesia was expecting to join forces with the King of Bohemia to take on the Mongols but did not know where these forces were and when they would be able to join up. The Mongol generals Batu Khan and Subatai Khan, on the other hand, knew exactly where the Bohemian forces were (about four days away) and were keen to enforce the battle before their opponents joined forces. They did so and won the battle with a far smaller force.
Use PR as a weapon: Massacres, loot, rape and pillage were not Mongol inventions, though they used them as a means of subduing opposing populations and avoiding battles. When the Mongols did go into battle against a city-state and win, they would systematically destroy, rape and kill. They would then send survivors out to tell other city-states about what had happened – those that were opting to fight rather than pay the Mongols a tribute would invariably rethink their options. It is interesting to note those who were not killed in the city-states the Mongols conquered – the interpreters, the doctors and the engineers – the army used them for their further campaigns.
To conclude: It is certainly not possible for most of us to display the leadership qualities of Genghis Khan, even though many of us have his blood (according to Oxford University, about one out of every six people on earth today are descended from him and he has been nominated the ‘most successful alpha male’ ever). However, the Mongols are of some contemporary interest because it is only now, 777 years after Genghis’s death, that a similar world military domination by one power is being seen.
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
“History is written by the winners”??
Readers with an interest in nomadic cultures and communities would hark back to the times, in the 12th and 13th centuries, when there was a genuine clash of civilizations rather than the sexed up stuff peddled by Huntingdon that is so much in the news these days. Those were times when a small group of nomadic people called the Mongols united under Genghis Khan, moved out in all directions from their base in Karakorum (somewhere in Mongolia) and set about attacking the civilized city states and settled agriculturist communities that were dominant at the time. At its height, the Mongol empire was the largest the world has ever seen – stretching from the Black Sea deep in Europe to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from Moscow and Siberia in the north to the Himalayas and the Persian Gulf in the south. The three or four centuries that they were in power is mostly described as a dark time in history, when mankind was under attack from the scourge of an evil and cruel people, when the relentless pressure of barbaric nomads laid civilization low, when agricultural land was subsumed and converted into free ranges. And yet, it was a time of unprecedented exchange between east and west, a time when it was possible to travel overland from Italy to Beijing (can one do it today?), a time when established interests across the known world were broken and it was possible for ordinary people to make their mark. The old adage of history being written by winners could be changed to ‘history is written by those who can write’.
What was it about this small group of unlettered nomads that enabled them to rule the world? What enabled them to fight and win battles as far away as Leignitz (in 1241, a particularly interesting one because it was the Mongols western-most battle and the only one fought against the Teutonic Knights – more about this later) in today’s Poland, and in Myanmar, and around Baghdad, and in the outskirts of Vienna, exercises in logistics that must have been mind-boggling? How did they achieve such military domination, especially as this was achieved without larger numbers, superior weapons or a better economic base? How did such few people (at their height, there were about 700,000 Mongols) administrate such a vast empire? How did the empire last so long after the military dominance was lost? These questions are difficult to address because the Mongols themselves left no records, and one is thus dependent for information upon the educated elite among the civilized communities who were at the receiving end during this period. What I discovered during my inquiry into the Mongols of 1167 to 1552, especially the earlier part of this period, is relevant to any leader and manager today, and this is as follows.
Have core values, and enforce them: The Mongols, in keeping with their nomadic culture, placed a high value on simple things such as loyalty, honesty, generosity and an acceptance of the beliefs and way of life of others. They hated theft, and traitors were put to death horribly, even if they were betraying their rulers to the advantage of the Mongols. Apart from some core values, the Mongols did not impose upon those they ruled over – so much so that it was difficult for their enemies to rally around religion, both Muslim and Christian, race or ethnicity against them. The intense loyalty that they inspired enabled them to rule for far longer than their military dominance lasted – for example, the Russian princelings around Nyiznhi Novgorod and Moscow fought amongst themselves but all were scrupulously loyal to the Khan in Kazan and it was only in the 1550s that Ivan the Terrible smashed the Mongols by taking Kazan and Astrakhan. A common civil code called the Yasa was made applicable by Genghis Khan to the Mongols that was remarkably gender sensitive for the time – it outlawed adultery and the kidnapping of women (common practise in that day and age), required a woman’s consent for marriage, and made all children legitimate irrespective of the nature of relationship between the Mother and Father.
Get the best people into leadership positions, and ensure that good people rise: The Mongol empire was the first (and last??) genuine meritocracy in the history of mankind – unlike the armies of the day in which noble birth and connections enabled a person to get ahead, there was only one way by which to get command in a Mongol army – proven competence. They were indifferent to your birth, they were indifferent to whether you were a Mongol or not, and they were even indifferent to whether your abilities had been demonstrated against them – in fact, many of their commanders were from armies that had fought against the Mongols, and one of Genghis Khan’s most trusted generals had earlier shot Genghis’s horse from under him as an enemy foot soldier. Mongol armies were therefore much better led than their opponents, enabling their smaller forces to take on much larger armies and win. The meritocracy transferred on to civil life as well – administrators in the empire were also chosen and promoted on the basis of ability.
Be realistic, encourage subordinates to be frank and to speak their minds: Genghis Khan was one of those rare leaders who did not encourage flattery and was not afraid to listen to stuff that he did not like to hear. As a result, his generals gave him realistic assessments and, in turn, were given realistic assessments by their subordinates. This percolated across the empire and, again, was in sharp contrast to other armies of the day.
Understand your advantages and use them: The typical Mongol soldier was an expert horseman and could shoot an arrow accurately over a long distance, even while riding in the other direction. Each soldier would ride with three or four horses, and could change horses while riding at speed. This enabled a Mongol army to travel far larger distances much faster than other armies of the day. It also enabled them to maneuver nimbly in battle, change battle plans effectively and retreat quickly.
Know your adversary: The western armies of the day, and especially elite cavalry forces such as the Teutonic Knights, were huge men with heavy armour mounted on large horses and were formidable opponents who were able to smash their way through opposing forces. The Mongols simply shot their horses – the same Knight on the ground was a sitting duck. Similarly, western armies had a culture in which the commander had to be and be seen to be in the thick of the fighting setting an example to his troops, and was thus easily identifiable in battle. The Mongols would identify and kill the commander and thus render their opponents confused and not very sure who was giving the orders. Mongol commanders, on the other hand, were not easy to identify in battle. Western armies also saw retreat as a loss, and when their opponents retreated they would charge in with their cavalry to mow them down. The Mongols thus used the retreat to draw their opponents into traps by pretending disarray, turning around and fleeing, and thus inviting the enemy into a cavalry charge that invariably led to a massacre at a place of the Mongols’ choosing. This was later called the ‘steppes retreat’, a battle tactic that the Russians would use very effectively against Napolean in 1812.
What you are matters, not what you look like: A Mongol army going into battle looked like a horde descending, they did not appear to have any order or formation and there were no sounds of drums and trumpets. In actual fact, the Mongols were highly disciplined and tightly organized troops and used the decimal formation of platoons of ten, units of hundred, divisions of thousand and armies of ten thousand, who used visual tools to coordinate and communicate with each other in battle.
Use information technology effectively: Like other great IT innovations, the courier system (the Mongols, incidentally, were its inventors) was initially developed for military purposes. Mongol armies would have daily courier services running between them – it enabled them to know exactly where each other were, and if they planned to converge at a certain time and place they were usually able to do it to the day. The courier system also invariably enabled them to know exactly where their opponents were, and thus to choose the place and time of battle. The Journal of Military History, in its description of the battle of Leignitz, is instructive on this matter – it says that Henry the Pious of Silesia was expecting to join forces with the King of Bohemia to take on the Mongols but did not know where these forces were and when they would be able to join up. The Mongol generals Batu Khan and Subatai Khan, on the other hand, knew exactly where the Bohemian forces were (about four days away) and were keen to enforce the battle before their opponents joined forces. They did so and won the battle with a far smaller force.
Use PR as a weapon: Massacres, loot, rape and pillage were not Mongol inventions, though they used them as a means of subduing opposing populations and avoiding battles. When the Mongols did go into battle against a city-state and win, they would systematically destroy, rape and kill. They would then send survivors out to tell other city-states about what had happened – those that were opting to fight rather than pay the Mongols a tribute would invariably rethink their options. It is interesting to note those who were not killed in the city-states the Mongols conquered – the interpreters, the doctors and the engineers – the army used them for their further campaigns.
To conclude: It is certainly not possible for most of us to display the leadership qualities of Genghis Khan, even though many of us have his blood (according to Oxford University, about one out of every six people on earth today are descended from him and he has been nominated the ‘most successful alpha male’ ever). However, the Mongols are of some contemporary interest because it is only now, 777 years after Genghis’s death, that a similar world military domination by one power is being seen.
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