Lessons from Bangladesh

The Grameen Bank, whose founder and managing director Mohammad Yunus was in Islamabad last week, is one of two organizations in Bangladesh - the other being Brac, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the largest NGOs in the world - whose work in empowering the poor has earned it international recognition and repute.

Grameen Bank, recognized by the UN as the largest provider of microcredit in the world, is an example of the important role which private foundations and civil society participation play in helping to uplift the poor in a developing country where the government's capacity and efficiency in social and economic development is lacking.

Although the results of Grameen Bank and Brac's work are at the community level, their success have been instructive for national and even global policy initiatives.

The pioneer in micro credit banking in the world, Grameen Bank, otherwise known as the poor man's bank, has done for Bangladesh what the zakat system, as a poverty alleviating instrument, has apparently failed to do in Pakistan.

First started in 1976, Grameen was established as a formal bank in 1983 and grew into a national institution providing income-generating loans, housing loans and student loans for hundreds of thousands of the poor in Bangladesh.

As of August 2004, the bank has disbursed $4.6 billion in loans to 3.8 million borrowers, 96 per cent of whom are women, and its repayment rate is 98 per cent! According to the bank's founder, independent studies by external agencies like the World Bank and the International Food Research Policy Institute on the bank's impact on the poor have found that five per cent of the borrowers come out of poverty every year!

Since the concept of micro credit originated in Bangladesh in 1976, similar micro finance programmes have been implemented in as many as 70 countries, where it is estimated that over 67 million poor and low income people had access to micro finance worldwide in 2003.

Grameen Bank's work and impact on poverty alleviation in Bangladesh was internationally recognized at a UN General Assembly session last month in which the UN under-secretary general and high representative for the least developed countries had lauded the bank in his speech as the largest provider of micro credit in the world.

The bank has a network of nearly 1,300 branch offices in more than 46,000 villages in Bangladesh, serving 3.8 million clients, reported the UN under-secretary general.

Incorporated into the country's national development strategy, micro credit has become Bangladesh's most powerful engine in pursuit of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals on poverty eradication, he commended.

Grameen Bank's innovative work in rural micro credit was also recognized by The Economist, which awarded the bank the Social and Economic Innovation Prize in September 2004 in San Francisco.

Earlier in June 2004, the Grameen Bank was chosen from among 200 over competitors world wide and awarded the first Petersberg Prize for Contribution of Technology to Development (worth 100,000 Euros) for its Village Phone project.

Through this project, 60,000 rural poor women, equipped with mobile phones, now provide telephone service in 80 per cent of villages in Bangladesh. Village Phone has not only created a new class of women entrepreneurs but also improved the livelihood of farmers through modern communication facilities.

The scale of Village Phone's impact is believed to be tens of millions of people. The lessons of Grameen Bank's success for Pakistan is twofold. Firstly, Grameen Bank believes that charity is not the answer to poverty.

It believes that charity only helps poverty to continue as it creates dependency and takes away the individual's initiative to break through the wall of poverty. In Pakistan, the concept of charity, reinforced by the zakat system, has only helped to create a class of professional beggars, who prefer to make a living out of begging than through any gainful economic activity, however humble.

Secondly, unlike conventional bankers who believe that loans have to be backed by collateral, and since the poor do not have collateral, they are therefore not credit worthy, Grameen Bank believes that credit is not only a human right but an empowering and enabling agent, and the poor have the right to be given credit without the collateral requirement, for realizing their potential and skill in income generating activities, and for housing and education.

In Pakistan, micro financing, as exemplified by Khushhali Bank, has only started recently, and its ability to tap, on a large scale, the entrepreneurial abilities of the poor to their own economic advantage remains to be seen.

Complementing Grameen Bank's pro-poor work in Bangladesh is the role played by another NGO, Brac, whose capacity and efficiency in providing health and education services to the poor has been internationally acknowledged as even exceeding that of the government.

Brac's pool of human resources includes 30,471 community health workers, 33,655 school teachers, 7,926 community nutrition workers and 71,910 women nutrition workers. Its programme infrastructure includes 65 healthcare centres, 65 diagnostic laboratories, 7,191 community nutrition centres, 34,000 schools, 7,500 primary schools, 752 libraries and 8,038 school reading centres.

Ironically though, recognition of the scale of Grameen Bank and Brac's success in Bangladesh is on the other hand acknowledgement of the government's inability and incapacity to meet the basic social and economic needs of its teeming population. As Grameen Bank's founder himself has said: It is the failure at the top rather than lack of capability at the bottom which is the root cause of poverty.

So while NGOs and other civil society groups in Pakistan should be encouraged to play an active role in helping to eradicate poverty on the pattern of Grameen Bank and Brac, this should not absolve the government of its constitutional commitment to meet the educational, health and economic needs of the population.

In Bangladesh as in Pakistan, where educational, health, and other socio-economic empowering systems are under financed, greater commitment of resources in these sectors in terms of percentage of GDP is urgently required.

NGOs are not the sole facilitators of poverty reduction; their role should not be viewed as an alternative to the government. Their enormous potential can be fully realized only in combination with strong government interventions in education, training, health, and other social protection and economic programmes.

All part of the safari jeep

Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and Indian Held Kashmir are ugly phrases because they smack of official patronage, of government-inspired positions and not even-handed journalism. Why can't we say Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Kashmir and wait for the issue to be resolved before assigning a name it eventually chooses for itself?

It is strange that we in India and Pakistan have learnt to pour scorn on embedded American and British journalists who we believe are adept at endorsing the occupation of Iraq by subtle and, where it works better, crude methods.

Using the same argument, how can we ignore that most of us in the subcontinent have been assiduously practising a similar embedded journalism for half a century or more?

We do this by using a vocabulary that is insidious in intent and which creates an enemy in our neighbourhood instead of an organically structured nation peopled by the same kind of ideological jostling that we find in our own respective national boundaries.

Actually, we in India like to proclaim our love or contempt for Pakistan and Pakistanis depending on the season of the year. Even the movies change their story lines according to the season - Border or Mission Kashmir goes with the season of warmongering and Veer Zara, etc., reflect our maudlin love for the "other" side in less vitiated days.

In Pakistan it has been pretty much the same pattern. Like George Orwell's sheep the media in both countries by and large bleats "Four legs good, two legs bad" and vice versa, depending on the mood in the prime minister's office in our capitals as also, in Pakistan's case, at the General HQ in Rawalpindi.

Those who love or hate Pakistan and Pakistanis care little about the finer points of the problem. They suffer from the deception of the tiger in a wildlife sanctuary. If you stay in the open jeep the lurking tiger is likely to mistake you to be part of the jeep and not attack you as it would any other easy prey.

Indians and Pakistanis who care to concern themselves with each other appear to perceive the other side like the deceived tiger. It is scarcely part of a normal discourse in India, for instance, that there are at least four types of political Pakistanis that we are looking at.

The army, the mullahs, the followers of Benazir Bhutto and the followers of Nawaz Sharif represent the four corners. To an untrained Indian mind, they are all part of the safari jeep called Pakistan.

That's how a Hindutva rabble-rouser like Narendra Modi could get away by painting all Pakistanis as children of General Pervez Musharraf! Which of course is not very different from the description given by Mr Modi's Hindu fanatics to Indian Muslims - that they are all children of Mughal emperor Babur who kept Hindu slaves and who built the Babri Masjid after razing their scared temple in Ayodhya, as the Hindutva mythmaking has it.

It eventually would take an educated Indian leader like Arif Mohammed Khan to object to Mr Modi. And he did, proclaim even if somewhat impishly: "We are Pathans, we had fought the Mughals. Please do not abuse us."

Last week a large group of Pakistani journalists arrived in India. We are told the Indian government had sponsored the trip. How this media trip was going to be any different from the recent ones organized by some media NGOs is difficult to divine.

Some of these journalists were quoted last week as saying how keen they were to meet former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. General Musharraf had asked them to meet Mr. Vajpayee, one of them said. They would also meet Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. But Mr. Vajpayee appeared to be someone special.

Is there nothing else in India for Pakistanis, more so their journalists, to be interested in? Have they ever tried to meet the ordinary people, people in the villages, in small towns, in the discotheque? How about meeting the Naxalites, the only people, as far as one can remember, who came out in droves in the streets against the war hysteria that was whipped up by Mr. Vajpayee and tacitly endorsed by Ms Gandhi's party through much of 2002?

These orchestrated visits of journalists reminds me of the time when I was under the impression that I was allowed to travel alone in Iran during the Khomeini era. I went to to the Davamand mountain resort north of where the Imam lived in Teheran's Farmaniyeh district.

There I found on the snow-laden slopes of the mountains the most amazing sight - scores of women bereft of the hijab were skiing across the picturesque hills. Rock music was blaring from all corners.

And the revellers - men and women - were using their skis to write large love messages in the snow to each other, some so large that they could be read from an aeroplane. It was a completely different world to the one we were tutored to believe in.

Click, click, click went my camera. I hadn't of course noticed the 'shadow' that was tailing me, not until the next morning when the camera mysteriously disappeared from the locker in my hotel room.

Never mind that. The memories of the Davamand experience are still fresh in my mind. The day this experience becomes possible for Indians and Pakistanis to savour freely in each other's country, small bits of the Orwellian nightmare might begin to wane.

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Celebrated British historian Eric Hobsbawm is in Delhi at the invitation of the Book Review Literary Trust. The 87-year-old Marxist scholar sparred with younger historians and delivered a lecture in memory of the late communist activist and journalist Nikhil Chakravarty.

A young student of history questioned Prof. Hobsbawm's emphasis on the historian's craft of being essentially to explain the past as opposed to the search for meaning. "You meet a beautiful girl, you fall in love and you get married.

That's a sequence of facts that explain themselves. But if you look for a meaning into why you fell in love, or why you should marry the one you love - that would be the more useless part of your inquiry," he declared matter of factly.

Hearth and home

A Karachi-based architect friend may not agree with everything that Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian who coined the term "global village" - believed in. But she does, in part, subscribe to his theory of the "medium is the message".

"It's all about showing off and entertainment," she says. "People seek help in building houses (as opposed to homes) with the intention of providing entertainment.

Over the years, I've noticed people have further divided their private spaces into separate family areas and begun giving more space to bringing guests together. They want to ensure that there are open spaces around the dining and drawing room areas that can be put to use for a larger number of guests."

According to her, it is the entertainment area, and not family space comprising bedrooms and lounge, that is uppermost in the client's mind. To prove her point, she says, of the eight or so houses that her firm is building, five have outdoor jacuzzis and outdoor showers, and not for private use, but for entertainment purposes.

These are located either on the first floor or the rooftop and not in the regular bathrooms. "Almost every client who comes to us wants a home theatre which means a fairly big room," she says.

Even kitchens are divided. There are very small "hot kitchens" for the cook. The cosy relationship that cooks had with the begums has undergone a sea change with a big, air-conditioned, shining stainless steel and granite-finish, but hardly ever used, pantry in between. Orders are placed through the intercom.

"It's not the information the medium is providing but the medium itself that alters lifestyles," argues the architect, alluding to McLuhan's theory of how technology becomes an extension of the human body.

While there is nothing wrong with adopting newer technologies, the hazard of 'amputations' (the counterpart to extensions) that McLuhan talks of is what worries this young friend as every technological extension is at the cost of amputating or modifying some previous extension which may have been beneficial.

"We should be wary of the consequences of the technologies man develops," she cautions. However, there is another side to the theory, says another friend who is not an architect. An overdose of technology often makes us yearn for the older lifestyle.

He fondly remembers summer nights in Lahore when the whole family slept out on the rooftop on a charpoy under a mosquito net, and told anecdotes and jokes before drifting off to sleep, and then getting up early to the chirping of birds. With the coming of air-conditioners, the rope beds were given away and the nets never used again. One went to sleep to the drone of the machine without stories to share.

In the wrong line

Karachi's Jinnah International Airport has all the trappings and facilities of a modern airport as a traveller can expect to find in any part of the Third World. Thanks to America's exaggerated concern for security after 9/11, the airport has also been equipped with the most modern and sophisticated technology to screen passengers.

There are tiny cameras to photograph the passenger's eyes which is a substitute for finger printing as each individual's pupils are said to be quite distinct from those of others.

One is no longer required to fill in the embarkation and disembarkation card either because our computer savvy immigration officers type in directly the details of every passenger from his/her passport and ticket. Mercifully, their typing speed has improved with practice, and the queues are not as bad as they used to be a few months ago when the new system was introduced.

But all this modernity notwithstanding, the Pakistani mindset has yet to change. The jumping-the-queue syndrome still afflicts far too many passengers than is tolerable.

In the immigration section the various desks are, as is the case in most airports, classified for passengers with Pakistani passports, foreign passports, diplomatic passports, businessmen and so on. We have one for "Unaccompanied women and children" too.

A friend returning home from abroad found some "unaccompanied" male passengers in the queue before the desk for women to gain a quick exit through immigration. When the friend asked the immigration officer why the men were allowed in that queue, he replied: "They insist on chaperoning their women."

"But there are no women with them and if the women were accompanied they should have gone to the other queue," our friend, a stickler for propriety, remarked. All the immigration officer could do was to shrug his shoulders.

It would make more sense to have no classifications in the immigration section. Just take down all the boards and treat all passengers equally, allowing them to line up before any desk on a first-come first-served basis. Canada does that - no distinction between the Canadians and the foreigners.

Police accommodation

"Set a thief to catch a thief", so the axiom goes. One may add, "Ask a policeman to pay a policeman in his own coin". Don't think the police don't suffer at the hands of their own colleagues.

A policewoman performing security duty in a public place fell into conversation with a visitor waiting for her car. When asked where she lived and where she had to report for duty every day, the policewoman replied that she lived in Buffer Zone and had to commute to her thana in Saddar every day. "That's a long way, isn't it? You have police quarters with the thanas. Why haven't you been given one?" she was asked.

"It is difficult," she confided. "There are not enough residential quarters and they are in great demand. Hence there is a pugree system of sorts in vogue. Anyone who is vacating a quarter sells the occupancy rights for Rs 100,000 to any colleague who is willing to pay. I

don't have so much money. So I prefer to live in my own house and spend on the bus fare instead." And as can be expected, housing is not regulated by a set of rules managed by a superior officer.

A truly wild safari

A visit to Karachi's much-hyped Safari Park proved a disappointing experience for a colleague. For one, garish decorations give the place a seedy look, and he failed to understand why amusement parks have a penchant for multi-coloured lights that keep on blinking ad nauseam.

It appeared that instead of handing the responsibility of landscaping the park to professionals, the task had been left to the imagination of short-sighted city government officials with their own ideas on creativity.

There are two rides in the park. There is a mini-train that makes a small trip along one of the roads, showing nothing in particular, and then there is the ride on the coach that takes the visitors into the actual wildlife enclosures.

These coaches only operate when they are full. The windows cannot be rolled down - for obvious safety reasons - and the air-conditioning is usually not enough to keep the occupants comfortable.

The real disappointment, he said, starts with the safari ride itself. The bus plays a video of National Geographic on its television screen, and loud and vulgar Indian songs throughout the ride.

There is no guide - only a young man who disembarks several times during the trip to open and close the gates of the enclosures. So visitors remain clueless about the wildlife they are supposed to see, as there are no signs to explain the identity or origin of the animal.

The animals, though well-fed, appear bored. The bus usually does not complete the established route and takes some short cuts to save time and fuel. Within 20 minutes, without any information or guide, the tour is all over.

Despite a sign restricting entrance to families, on Sundays, the park seems to be overrun by single men with nothing better to do other than ogle at women. The place is swamped by eateries, and the colleague was struck by the fact that people preferred to gorge themselves on snacks instead of spending some peaceful moments in the open. Thanks to a general lack of civic sense, garbage was strewn all over the park transforming it into a refuse dump.

While there is much potential in the Safari Park that could be turned into a truly educational and recreational experience, it seems that the city government has neither the vision nor the inclination to work on it. Instead, he complained, what we get at the taxpayer's expense is an experience that should never be repeated.

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com.