A LIFE THROUGH THE AGE OF EXTREMES

‘Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.’

                                                               

                                               -Eric Hobsbawm

Having seen a century come alive with ideas and hopes of humanity, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer touched so many lives wandering in many worlds- as a lawyer, jurist, minister, writer and humanist. His was a time and age both enriching and challenging, it was an era of two worlds battling out for narrow supremacy of ideologies and he stood by those who were left out of as the vanguard of justice and the voice of the voiceless. His reading of the overarching architecture of justice was through the mind of a meticulous philosopher but also with eyes that acknowledged human struggles. Towering personalities of his generation have left us a legacy and a message that the purpose of life is a life of purpose. The miracle of life is not to fly but to walk on earth. To wipe a tear and to bring a smile has been his mission in life, a literal translation of Gandhi’s Talisman. To fill what is empty, we have to empty what is full; as the Bible says, ‘If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth.’ 

Nations exist not only as a testimony to territory or integration of a people but also to the aspiration of something more inclusive and just. This re-ordering of the social system is what is envisaged through a ‘transformative’ Constitution like that of India. Our Constitution is unique in having the just reordering of the social order as its ‘grundnorm’. Our lives are horizontally and vertically divided by the hierarchies of gender and caste, but the vision document and the well spring of law speaks of an egalitarian world and the well being of the poorest through not only Fundamental Rights but Directive Principles of the State Policy. That it is a directive to the state and speaks about the outcome of governance is often forgotten. Justice Krishna Iyer’s judgements on the bench reflected the highest ideals of this aspiration whether it be trade union rights or Muslim personal laws. His verdicts brimmed with the melody of justice along with the felicity of the English language itself.

No country is perfect let alone a country like ours of gigantic proportions. It is simply unacceptable that 400 million go to bed hungry every day and only about 3% children make it to post-graduate level education. The nouveau riche is in a stupor from which they do not want to wake up. The ones in the squalor are crying hoarse yet we build our edifice of development razing down the hovels of the poor to conquer the earth and beyond. A partition in our souls will be more dreadful than the partition of our soil and an India that belongs to only a few will easily become an India that belongs to none.

To build a just and fair world, the beginning lies not only in imagining the future but also in re-imagining the past. The past is the mirror that holds us in firm stead of actions- it is the ashes from which we are reborn as new. In an age when idealism is slowly fading away and armed violence and wilfully created epidemics are invading our vision of future, Justice Iyer’s presence will remain an assurance and inspiring example of never retiring from being human and humane.

Rethinking Poverty

Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the ways to end it, Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Random House India, 2011, pp.404

Development Economics has grown in content and importance in the last few decades. With the ushering of the Human Development Index, a distinct way of looking at development began that encompassed not only improvements in economic indices but also in human life indices. This picture sometimes complemented the GDP sketch but often contradicted it. Ideas regarding national economic policies, allocation of resources and the role of the state and market have undergone tremendous transformation. So have our assumptions regarding poverty and especially how the poor live, think through and make choices in their lives. This ‘othering’ of the poor and the generalizations that we make of them in economic and social theory and literature are at best plausible guess and at worst complete misunderstanding. ‘Poor Economics’ is an important book that brings the narrative of the poor from eighteen countries to the poverty story, as the dramatic personae of history, source of creative thinking and as human beings with agency and power who are as sophisticated and as capricious as everyone is. It is in capturing this complexity and richness without reducing those who are economically poor, that the book succeeds.

Lives and Choices of the Poor

The celebrated economists Abhijit Banerjee (MIT professor and Infosys Prize winner) and Esther Duflo (winner of the prestigious Clarke Medal and the Infosys Prize this year) have pioneered the use of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) that are basically experiments with people as they live their lives. RCTs are used in medicine to test new drugs and by imitating them in Economics, we can analyse policy prescriptions and judge their efficacy. By observation method, the authors argue that it is possible to make good judgements and accurate assessments of what life situations impact the poor and what does not, through the evidence of their own lives. For instance, in the chapter that explains why schools fail, it was found that the schools do not expect the students to do well in the first place. Changing expectations required a little commitment, expendable energy and effort of the teacher. Despite laws and policies in place, if this simple human factor is missing, the policy will be a huge failure on the ground. Often, it was small changes that made all the difference to a policy and not complete overhaul or rethinking.

Policy Implications

This study has policy implications as understanding the real causes of poverty will help channelize global resources through the appropriate projects of alleviating it. Placing distributive (government services) and redistributive (welfare schemes) of the government and donor aid and support in context, the book discusses different policy issues - poverty trap, public health issues like malaria eradication, education policy and the Constitutional framework, pensions for the elderly- with real time case studies and some accessible solutions.

The insights of the book have implications both to policy design and implementation. The authors agree that eradicating poverty through creative interventions is extremely important on two counts- the moral imperative that it is unacceptable for so many not to have a dignified life and the economic imperative expressed by Amartya Sen as ‘intolerable waste of human talent’. The reasoning of the book is by pondering over specific questions as opposed to broad strokes of universal preoccupations. Secondly, the work stresses on the evidence from the ground not only as empirical but also the only litmus to theoretical understanding.

The message of such an exhaustive and interpretative analysis is that ideology and ignorance should not blind policy makers to scientific rigor, openness to learn and understand with fresh perspective and prioritise those policies that are relevant to the lives of the poor. It is in bridging the gap between the expert and the public through nuanced understanding of human lives that this book sets a trailblazing trend.