Development Diaries

Recently finished an MSc in Development Economics at SOAS. Travelling to India and Tanzania. Writing about what I do, the things I see and the people I meet.

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Moving

This blog has moved. Please go to andynormdevelopment.wordpress.com

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How was India?

While I was back in the UK I was asked many times, “so, how was India?” yet despite having lived there for 3 months it is a question that I haven’t quite been able to answer.

How can I sum up my experience? A word I find myself continually returning to is ‘different’ – I have discovered that describing my Indian adventure without it to be practically impossible. India is different. But it is not a difference that is easily communicated from a comfortable living room in Buckinghamshire, nor, for that matter, in a blog post. It is a difference that needs to be felt, seen, heard, smelt, tasted for yourself in person, not read about on a computer screen or the pages of a book. You need to cling on to the back of a rickety moped speeding through the creative chaos of Indian traffic, play gastronomical Russian Roulette by eating 12 pence dosas from roadside carts, smell the mix of veg biryani and open toilets as you share your bag-cum-pillow with an old man on the floor of a packed night train compartment, drink sweet tea in the one room corrugated iron shack of an impoverished factory worker one day and the lavish living room of a wealthy textiles business owner the next. India, like my previous sentence, was exhausting. But in a good way.

I have found that India is a paradox that permeates every portion of the country. Firstly, I was struck by the sense of intense activity that was so apparent in Trichy, yet I was often frustrated by how difficult it seemed to get things done. Secondly, the great divide between rich and poor, which has been a common theme of previous posts, never failed to shock me. Thirdly, I found South India to be a land defined by both the presence and absence of freedom – simultaneously there seemed to be no rules and many. This serves as a reminded that social norms are far more powerful that written laws. I see South India as a society that manages to be flexible yet rigid.

These experiences I had, and many more, combined in a swirling concoction of intoxicating, invigorating and ultimately enchanting ‘Indianness’, which, like my stomach, has only just begun to settle down.

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India’s Climate Change Conundrum

This week leaders from all over the globe have come together in Paris for climate change talks. India’s position in such matters has traditionally been driven by a moralistic sense of justice, built on the culpability of advanced nations in the origination of global warming. It is contended that today’s developed countries became rich through the extraction and use of fossil fuels and that, as such, it amounts to little more than Western hypocrisy not to let the developing world do the same. India has become the leading voice in calls from the developing world for developed countries to shoulder the vast majority of the burden, with phrases such as ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘climate justice’ becoming common in Indian rhetoric. Developed countries, unsurprisingly, argue that each country must contribute.

There are echoes of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus in advanced countries’ stance that developing countries should not be allowed to use fossil fuels unabated to grow their economy. Western international economic policy has for many years forced developing countries to dismantle protection for domestic industries and instead pursue policies of free trade and open markets. The hypocrisy of this position is abundantly clear, as many Western economies built their prosperity behind huge domestic trade barriers. This is what Ha-Joon Chang has referred to as Western countries kicking away the ladder. This time the ladder is made of coal and oil rather than trade quotas and tariffs, but it is being kicked away all the same. I can understand, then, India’s position on climate change – why should they not be allowed to walk the same path to prosperity that Western countries trod so successfully?

However, while the benefits for a developing country opening up to free trade are, to say the least, highly questionable, the imperative for action on climate change is beyond doubt. Therefore, while this moralistic position is understandable, it is potentially catastrophic. It is built on principles rather than pragmatism. And the world needs India to be pragmatic, for it is currently the third largest carbon polluter and is set to triple its coal consumption in the coming years, and unlike China, India is yet to set a date for its coal consumption to peak.

Moreover, India for its own sake needs to be pragmatic, for it is exceptionally vulnerable to the effects of climate change. It must take leadership in the fight to keep global temperatures from rising or face dire domestic consequences. For example, as Climate Action Network South Asia point outs, it is estimated that in India 700 million people’s survival is dependent on climate-sensitive agriculture. As such, India has a significant interest in seeing that these climate talks are successful, which affords cautious optimism that it is willing to make serious commitments. This optimism is bolstered by India’s recent commitment to investing in renewable energies.

Yet the situation in India is, as always, complex and environmental policy will always be viewed here through the narrow lens of economic growth. India claims that coal is crucial to its economy – an economy that, it is said, needs to grow at a minimum of 8% if sufficient jobs are to be created to keep its rapidly increasing population in work and out of poverty. As such, economic growth is the priority for Modi, not climate change.

Thus India’s climate change conundrum emerges. Does it commit to strict measures to quickly bring down its greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to secure sustainable, although probably much reduced, growth? Or does it continue to scale up its use of coal in pursuit of the fast economic growth it believes it is entitled to and will create the jobs its population demands?  

The answer is clear, yet it requires a long-term focus not easily found in the short-termist politics prevalent in modern democracies. Surely global warming concerns transcend those of national economic growth, for growth will fall as sea levels and temperatures rise if climate change is allowed to continue on its destructive path unchallenged. Therefore, despite the fact that both India’s historical culpability and current per capita rate of pollution is far lower than that of countries like the United States, Modi must acknowledge, for the sake of India and the world as a whole, that the efficacy of any climate change plan depends crucially on strong action by the world’s most populous country, whether this is fair or not.

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Poverty Tourism

Slum tourism is big business in India. Many operators charge large amounts of money to take rich Westerners on tours through the lives of slum-dwellers. Such tours strike me as invasive, patronising and exploitative, with impoverished people providing entertainment for rich tourists, turning vibrant slums into human zoos. Often, they seem nothing more than impudent safaris, with plenty of opportunities for a facebook selfie next to a real life poor person - #slums, #poverty.

 However, during my time so far in Tamil Nadu I have visited villages, slums and orphanages where some of India’s poorest people live. Am I engaging in a kind of poverty tourism?

This issue is connected to a wider worry of mine: does the West have the right to criticise life in developing countries? Because there is implicit criticism in the sheer existence of Western international development programmes, for even attaching the label of ‘developing’ as opposed to ‘developed’ implies inferiority. The people I have met here do not display any sign that they are ashamed of their circumstances. Two examples of this immediately spring to mind. A little boy at an orphanage a few weeks ago proudly led me to the patch of floor where he slept and showed me the small suitcase that contained all his worldly possessions. About a week into my stay, a woman in a slum on the outskirts of Trichy eagerly invited me into her hut to sit and chat with her. And why should they feel embarrassed? Am I superior because I was born into a country and a family where I live in a large, clean, comfortable house? Does that mean I should pity those with smaller, less secure housing? Is this how we measure humanity and happiness? Of course not.

 However, poverty, morbidity and the abuse of human rights that prevails in developing countries cannot and must not be explained away as national characteristics or cultural issues that the West has no right to meddle with. In this sense, I can certainly see the potential benefits of slum tourism, if done right. Its primary merit is that it educates participants on the poverty in which so many people in our world live – a kind of poverty that is simply impossible to comprehend from the comfort of the Western world. As always, education is key. It also shines an international spotlight on the dark patches of national poverty, which encourages local governments to take action.

This is why there is a place for Western international development programmes and slum tourism, but only when they are sensitive to the nature of the developing country in question and done on their terms. In terms of slum tourism, this means engagement and discussion with consenting local citizens on both the merits and challenges facing their community. The same should be true of international development, which means no one-size-fits-all concepts of what development looks like.  

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What Does Development Mean?

In my five years of higher education in economics I’ve been lucky enough to study the discipline from distinctly different viewpoints. My four-year undergraduate degree (3 years in Loughborough and 1 year at UC3M in Madrid) was spent being educated in mainstream economics. I was told to assume that we live in a world populated by rational economic agents, by representative individuals, by homo economicus, all driven solely by the pursuit of self-interest, all worshiping the omnipotent power of the almighty market. This is a land where meddling governments contribute nothing but inefficiency and corruption, where economic growth is the only desirable goal, where development is the natural consequence of the opening up of markets. A country is developing if its economy is growing, if people have more money, if consumers are consuming more. Free markets good, governments bad. 

Studying at SOAS introduced me fully to the ideas of heterodox economics, where mainstream theories are questioned, scrutinised and, more often than not, rejected. Here, nothing is assumed. People are irrational and most certainly not homogenous. There are no representative individuals. There is room made for governments, for measures that curtail the power of the market, for altruistic (irrational, in the eyes of the mainstream) behaviour. Development is a holistic concept, free of growth-only constrictions. The sentiment here is aptly articulated by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen: “The success of development programmes cannot be judged merely in terms of their effects on incomes and outputs, and must, at a basic level, focus on the lives that people lead.”

The Nobel Prize in Economics was recently won by Angus Deaton - that is, the prominent development economist, not the disgraced former host of ‘Have I Got News for You’. Deaton has always championed the use of detailed household surveys for assessing development, reflecting his belief that the world is an inherently complicated place, inhabited by fundamentally unpredictable people. The idea is that simple theories and aggregate statistics, such as GDP growth or real earnings growth, are unable to describe development in any meaningful way.  

Each branch implies very different concepts of development, so I’m curious about what kind of economics I’ll find here. Which kind of development is happening here?

A few weeks ago I travelled to Chennai with the college football team to watch an Indian Super League football match. To kill time before the game we visited the city’s mall. Walking through the revolving doors and into the air-conditioned, disinfectant-smelling shopping centre was like stepping 5,000 miles back to London. This was free-market capitalism’s South Indian headquarters. Western consumerism unleashed in Tamil Nadu. Starbucks, Nike, Levis Jeans. If Bishop Heber College’s social work department was heterodox economics then the mall was unquestionably the mainstream. Is this what development looks like? The opportunity to spend 40 times the price of a bus ticket on a Starbucks iced frappuccino? I asked one of the Indian students I was with what he thought of it all, to which he nervously replied ‘good’, in a tone that suggested he did not want to insult what he perceived to be my culture by conveying his true feelings.

I will admit I’m being perhaps somewhat hypocritical given that I’m writing this on my expensive Apple Macbook in my air-conditioned, disinfectant-smelling room. I’m not anti-economic growth or anti-consumption. However, I am most certainly anti-inequality on this scale. It is truly staggering that malls such as this exist in a state where village children defecate on the side of the road because they don’t have access to a toilet. India is becoming a country where high-speed fibre optic cables run underneath dirt roads traversed by bullock carts, where spacecraft on their way to distant planets rise above villages deprived of running water or electricity. This is the natural consequence of the domination of growth-only concepts of development – material prosperity for the few, poverty for the many.

This is not a black and white issue: economic growth or human development. Of course economic growth can be a valuable component of the development process. Recently I visited an orphanage not far from Trichy in which all of the children slept on the floor of one big room. Growth in GDP and incomes has the power to take these children off the floor and put them in beds. Yet India has enjoyed strong economic growth and still they sleep on the floor.  Economic growth should be encouraged only when measures are in place to ensure that it alleviates inequality. Here it seems to exacerbate it. 

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Anti-plastics awareness day 

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Anti-plastic awareness group

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One Month in Trichy

I’ve now been living in Trichy for over one month and to mark the occasion my body decided to contract food poisoning, which is the reason for the recent paucity of posts. I have a suspicion that the damage was done when I ate at a very authentic looking cafeteria in the centre of town with the NGO I’ve been working with. I was hesitant to eat there as I’ve been pretty paranoid about getting ill in India (is paranoia the right term to use after your concerns have vindicated?), but I thought it would be too rude and ungrateful, as they were paying, to refuse. Plus, I was starving. Lying curled up on a bed for 36 hours gives you a lot of time to think. I spent much of those hideous hours contemplating just how much of a health risk I should be willing to take in the interest of politeness and appreciation. There is surely nothing quite so cringingly rude as pulling hand sanitizer from your bag immediately after shaking hands with someone new, yet I am constantly coming into physical contact with people who have developed immunity to a wide variety of things that would make me very ill indeed. Yet these three months are about experiencing new things. Eating new foods, drinking new drinks, shaking new hands. I could sit in my sanitary room with the door locked and the air conditioning on max, eating KFC, drinking Coca Cola. I’d be certain of not getting ill. Or I could go out and say yes when people ask me to taste their culture, and if the cost of this is the occasional spell with my head in the toilet then maybe it’s worth it.

One experience that is particularly different in Tamil Nadu is that of being a student. Here, students are locked in their single sex (of course) hostels from 9pm to 6am and are not allowed to use mobile phones on campus. They must wear long trousers and collared shirts to class, which seems particularly harsh when the temperature approaches 40 degrees Celsius. Alcohol consumption, clubbing and ‘interaction’ with the opposite sex are three things that have come to characterise the British student experience, yet they are almost entirely absent here. On arrival, this student life seemed to me to unbearably tedious and tame and I’m sure my 18-year-old self would have been horrified if he’d been transferred from Loughborough University to Bishop Heber College. My time here so far has challenged my concept of fun and excitement. Going from living in a city where I can expect constant stimulation around the clock to a college campus where practically nothing happens after 9pm has been a big challenge. It was, therefore, very tempting to dismiss this aspect of Indian culture as inferior. Yet to do so would be to ignore the clear happiness of the students here. It is evident that they draw much of their enjoyment and amusement from their close relationships with each other and they display a wonderful warmth towards others. In the last few weeks I have caught myself yearning for more excitement in my life, but I am glad to have this opportunity to experience a different way of living, and I am determined to embrace it, if only for 3 months.

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Ripped Off By Rickshaw Drivers

The room opposite to mine in the International Students Hostel is occupied by a French guy named Alex. One of Alex’s favourite things to do in Trichy is to barter with local rickshaw drivers. I might even go so far as to say he has a passion for it. He knows the fair price for every journey that he takes and flat out refuses to pay more. The only time he overpays is to reward a driver who accepted a fair price. This policy was taken to the extreme when we arrived back in Trichy after travelling overnight in a sweaty, smelly and cramped train compartment. Alex knew a rickshaw should cost 100 rupees but no driver would go below 130, so he suggested, despite our state of travel exhaustion, that we walk to the bus station and take a bus. His willingness to add another 45 minutes onto an already eye-wateringly long trip demonstrates the lengths Alex is willing to go to avoid overpaying by 30 pence. 

When a bus that I needed to catch a few days ago did not arrive, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to take a rickshaw alone, meaning I’d have to bargain with the driver myself. The driver of the nearest rickshaw insisted that I pay 200 rupees because the roads were bad and there was a lot of traffic. The roads are always bad in Trichy. There is always traffic. I was (prematurely) being taken for a ride. I saw another rickshaw waiting nearby and saw an opportunity to put my training in microeconomics into practise. Competition drives down the price. Or so I thought. As I approached the driver of the new rickshaw he merely grinned and pointed me back to the original driver. Collusion! It appeared that the rickshaw market in Trichy was not perfectly competitive (I must remember to notify the World Bank of this economic blasphemy). The walk of shame back to the first rickshaw was rather embarrassing but the driver was mercifully magnanimous in victory and agreed a price of 180 rupees. As we set off I was a little annoyed at having to pay probably double the going rate.

The first time I took a rickshaw with Alex he vehemently explained to me that rickshaw drivers will try to rip me off because I am white. He is certainly right. It’s a form of racial discrimination that initially compelled me to demand a fair price. However, the more I think about it the more I think this course of action to be wrong. I feel confident in saying that the majority of rickshaw drivers don’t try to rip me off because they are greedy, it’s because they are poor. The financial opportunities and comparative wealth that I enjoy simply by virtue of being born in a Western country far outweigh the cost of having to pay perhaps 50 pence over the going rate for a taxi. It is also important to remember that the reasons why my country is advanced and his is still developing are not entirely unrelated. In fact, they are very much related.

As the rickshaw driver drove me to my destination he told me about his life. He said that he was newly wed with a young child and that this was a part time job to support him family while he studied for a degree in biochemical engineering. I immediately felt horrendously guilty for trying to argue 50 pence off the cost of my journey.

When I reached my destination I paid the driver 500 rupees for the journey. This got me thinking about the morals of charitable giving. Many might say that I shouldn’t have done this because I didn’t know what he’d spend it on. I’ve used this reason (excuse?) before and Alex has told me about a time a rickshaw driver asked him for extra money so he could go and get drunk. Maybe this guy went straight to the nearest wine shop.  Maybe he wasn’t a student at all and didn’t have a family. But maybe he was and maybe he did. Maybe he used it to buy a textbook. The point is that there is little way for me to have known. Does the possibility that someone in need might spend the money on alcohol or drugs absolve me of the moral imperative to help them? Am I supposed to conduct a risk assessment every time I consider giving to the needy, or over tipping a part time rickshaw driver? If the probability it will be used for ‘good’ minus the probability it will be used for ‘evil’ is greater than X then we should give the money? Who decides what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’? Who decides the value of X? Should X be related to the amount of money in question? This is a difficult issue. A moral minefield with no firm right answer. My normal policy in the past has been only to give money through recognised, registered charities. Yet this negates the possibility of helping those I meet on a day-to-day basis.

What was my motivation for my giving £5 to this rickshaw driver? Was it a genuine desire to help out a guy trying to better himself for the sake of his new family, or was it to reduce the guilt I felt at having tried to deny him 50 pence of my money? Did I do it for the wonderful feeling I got seeing the happiness on the guy’s face? Does it matter? The benefit for him of gaining 500 rupees is no doubt greater than the loss for me of losing £5, and that’s all that counts. Right?

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Village Inequality

Last week my friend Ravi, the Extension Officer at the college, took me to visit the village in which he grew up. The college has adopted the village and so students now run various social projects for the people living there. 

The journey from the city to the village, from urban India to rural India, only took about 20 minutes but the differences were considerable. As we drove, Ravi explained that his department was providing toilets for the village and had set up an event that night promoting their use. The necessity of the project was graphically demonstrated by two young boys squatting by the side of the road openly defecating.

 The village had a tired tarmac road running through its centre, which divided the villagers along caste lines: upper caste houses to the left, lower caste huts to the right. Such brazen structural inequality is not something I’ve come across before. In England, it isn’t quite so obvious.

 Each side of the village had its own Hindu temple. The upper caste side’s temple was markedly bigger and grander. People from the lower caste side were not allowed to enter the upper caste temple, so it’s not hard to guess where this pernicious preoccupation with the hierarchical division of human lives comes from. As one NGO worker pointed out to me, in traditional communities such as these, the rich believe they are rich and the poor believe they are poor because God wills it. This idea that your position in life is determined by some higher power creates a social structure of alarming immobility and represents a significant barrier to human development.

 The answers to such sickeningly stubborn social issues are no doubt complex, yet the prime driver of change is education. Only through education can people become aware of the injustices they face and, consequently, demand a fairer deal. Literacy enables the poor to engage in society and so engenders greater social mobility. It is, therefore, fitting that the village school is situated on the dividing road and encouraging that children from both sides are educated together. It is in consideration of issues such as these that the broader benefits of education emerge. It is not just a means to improve the economic usefulness of the population. Schools must not be seen as skills factories, but as places that can facilitate positive social change.

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Visit to the village

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First Impressions and Experiences

Studying development economics without ever having been to the developing world has always made me feel a tad disingenuous: as if I were hoping to be appointed Secretary of State for Education without ever having been a teacher. So I’ve come to India to experience it for myself and I’m glad I have, because if there is one thing I have learnt in my first few weeks here, it is that India defies containment in the pages of textbooks. As a masters student at SOAS and having extensively studied the South Asian region, I knew what India was like, yet five minutes on the subcontinent was enough to show me that I really did not understand what India was like. Stepping out of the airport I was staggered by just how Indian India was. The heat, the noises, the smells, the buildings, the people, the colours, the language, the traffic. All were in clamouring competition for the attention of my reeling senses, creating, what seemed to a guy fresh from calm, sterile Buckinghamshire, a cacophony of chaos.

After having just handed in my dissertation for my MSc course in Development Economics, I’ve come to live for 3 months at a college in the city of Tiruchirappalli, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I’ll be teaching some English and working with some local NGOs.

My first few weeks here have been all about adapting to this new place. The differences between Waddesdon and Trichy are so monumental, so extensive, so persistent that it is very difficult to imagine them coexisting in the same world. The disbelief at the scale of the disparities is by no means unidirectional. When visiting a slum on the edge of Trichy with some social work students, the first young boy I met gazed up at me with such wide-eyed incredulity that I got the distinct impression he was trying to figure out if this giant light-skinned creature looming over him was in fact human. I smiled, waved and said hello, sending him into uncontrollable fits of hysterical laughter, as if I was the most ludicrous thing he’d ever seen. Maybe I was.

Indeed, I am such a novelty in this part of the world that I have attained a strange kind of celebrity status: wherever I go I am openly stared at, I’ve been asked for so many selfies that I now must be a prominent figure in Tamil social media, and I have even had multiple requests for autographs. On one occasion I was left feeling a little alarmed when a man stopped me in the street to tell me he’d been “watching” me for the past ten days. I think (hope) he meant he’d seen me around rather than that he’d been sitting outside my bedroom window at night with a set of binoculars and a thermos of coffee.

Everywhere I go people seem overjoyed to meet me and are intensely interested in what I have to say. But why? What have I done to warrant such acclaim? I am certain that to a certain degree this treatment I’ve received from complete strangers is driven by good-natured curiosity on the part of an inherently friendly and welcoming people, yet it makes me ever so slightly uneasy. Uploading a picture of yourself next to a somewhat awkward looking white man seems to have a desirability here that I fear is symptomatic of some misinformed notion of white superiority. I am made particularly uncomfortable by this because, given my SOAS education, I am well aware of the contempt with which my society has treated theirs in the uneasily recent past. As yet, I can’t quite figure out whether strangers’ interest in me, which often borders on wholly unearned reverence, is driven by pure inquisitiveness, or if it is the result of perceptions of white superiority initiated by colonialism and reinforced by the determined globalisation of Western culture.

I’ve come to Tamil Nadu in the hope of understanding what development might look like in this part of the world and what it might mean to the people I meet here. In my first few weeks I have visited a number of NGOs whose work has, while wishing to avoid sounding hyperbolic, reinforced my faith in humanity. ISIS beheadings and Boko Haram kidnappings have come to set the tone of Western media’s coverage of non-Western countries over the past few years, yet so far I have seen in Trichy a genuine social conscience that lies beyond the attention of the Ten O’clock News. My first impressions of life here have suggested that it is this belief in helping the less fortunate that is driving development here. Not development in terms of rising incomes and consumption through World Bank structural adjustment loans, but development as the emergence of this social conscience. But where does this come from? How does it develop? How does it flourish? These are questions of intense importance, especially in a social structure that has in the past been characterised by a caste system that labelled the lower sections of society as ‘untouchable’.

Since arriving I’ve spent time with the college’s social work students. Young people who are dedicating their lives to helping Tamil society’s most vulnerable people. I asked two of them why they have chosen this career, to which they smiled and replied, almost in perfect unison, “because it is my passion”. I look forward to learning just where this passion comes from.