Squatter Communities aka Bostee

Robert Neuwirth a journalist who has lived in squatter communities in parts of Africa, Brazil, India and Turkey, talks below about how squatter communities develop (or could develop in some cases) into livable towns and then hopefully into cities of the future. First policy rule he outlines: do not evict! Anybody listening in Dhaka shohor?

I dealt with legal rights as a way of dealing with rapid urbanization and the informal economy it brings with it in the "Lungi Post" on UV a few months back. Neuwirth disagrees with De Soto, whom I quoted on that post, on the value of property rights. He states that a guarantee to not evict is the better option, combined with "access to politics" or political rights.

Third World Engineering

Warning: this video contains support for micro-credit, micro-enterprise and non-Western engineering attempts designed to benefit poor people in the Majority World. As such you are free to regard this as yet another attempt to keep that World "underdeveloped", and suspect an Indo-American alliance behind it.

Interesting snippets

1. Professor Jalal Alamgir writes a very interesting piece in the Daily Star today about the record of our two parties. He cites studies that find no difference between their records on economic growth, but finds the Awami League government's record on human rights and quality of governance a lot better.

What interests me is that he does not look at the state of income distribution across time, through the reign of military and political governments. It's a widely accepted fact that Bangladesh's unprecedented growth rate has been due to the falling of trade barriers worldwide following the fall of the Berlin Wall. So the presence of a political government overseeing high growth rates is a happy coincidence at best. Military governments can achieve as much growth as civilian ones (e.g. Ayub). No one asserts that they can achieve the same level of development. Decreasing inequality has everything to do with development.

I'll probably have more to say about Professor Alamgir's choice of indicators for "human rights" and "quality of governance indicators". Nevertheless, an important piece and a timely reminder not to be swayed by "fashions in thought". You reading this, DS columnists? Just a tiny reminder to Prof. Alamgir though: stereotyping an entire 150 million group of people (our cousins in Calcutta are of course NOT hujugey, they're still stuck with notions of superiority!) to prove that stereotyping an elite sub-set is wrong, sounds ridiculously like saying "all white people are racist". If all Black people in the U.S. were rich and powerful that is.

2. Interesting addition to the microcredit scheme in India as reported here. An Indian economist and activist has opened up a school for rural women where they can take courses "in entrepreneurship, accountancy, bank finance, marketing skills and confidence-building for a piffling Rs150 (US$3.70) for a three-month basic course and Rs600 for a six-month advanced one." A degree also ensures automatic eligibility for receiving loans. Name: Udyogini Business School. I'd say that translates well.

Three small snippets

1) Grameen Bank allowed to work in urban areas.

Why this is important: By some measures, the %age of urban people in poverty is increasing in Bangladesh, even as the %age of rural people in poverty is decreasing (VERY SLOWLY!).

2) NYT reports on rising suicides in South Korea, some apparently assisted by the Internet.

Why this is important: South Korea is/was one of the Asian Tigers. Growth does not necessarily mean development. A lesson we should take to heart now.

3) Maninder Singh, former Indian cricketer and piss-poor commentator, arrested on drug charges.

Why this is important: In 1999, commenting on the aftermath of Bangladesh's famous win against Pakistan, this "expert" offered the ICC this solid piece of advice: "Don't give them test status before they win at least 70 one-dayers". I saw it myself. Charu Sharma, to his credit, replied, "But Maninder, even Zimbabwe has not won 70 one-dayers!". Too late, the damage had been done. Of course, one can now excuse Mr. Singh's comments as the ravings of a doped-up wash-out. Especially after India's loss to a certain striped team.

"A cow can be a cellphone"

I've been meaning to post this here ever since I saw it on a friend's blog.



Special thanks to ZaFa and Rezwan.

Will Grameen and the entire microcredit industry become targets for revenge?

Will Grameen become a target if the BNP or the AL come to power? A while ago, I saw someone express this very fear on one or another of the blogs I frequent, I forget which. I dismissed it as slightly paranoic. What sounded like paranoia at the time became a bit more real to me as someone whose blog I read and who reads mine put up a post criticising Grameen's business practices.

Now I won't link to this blog. As I said, I do read it now and then, and I'm not looking for a food fight here. I'll reproduce some key aspects of the argument against Grameen and give my humble opinion on it.

The biggest complaint against Grameen seemed to be that it charges high interest rates. Funnily and predictably, a lot of people who used to disbelieve or ignore this accusation when it was made by certain quarters, are now buying this wholesale since it has been repeated by a different quarter.

That however is not a refutation of Grameen's policy to charge high interest rates. The refutation you will find here, here and everywhere on the web.

Here the questioning minds and the party-flock alike might ask: but why not simply give them the money? Charity, you will say. By all means, let us be charitable. Especially in times of floods and monga and to people who are barely alive. However, if charity were a long term solution, there would be no need for progressive taxation either. Something to think about.

Asif Dowla (no relation) in a beautiful article recalls the efforts in the 70s by successive governments (both AL and BNP) to institute credit to the poor. He asserts that these essentially became charities, which is something Grameen consciously strove not to do (pg. 19-20). They did not instil a culture of repayment and he traces their failure to precisely this cause. And mind you by "failure", I refer not to their failures as commercial enterprises (after all, my taxes ensure that no government enterprise ever reaches bankruptcy, simply that their workers remain unpaid!). By "failure", I mean failing to service the neediest of our people. The direct quote from the #1 villain in the scheme, igNobel Yunus himself at the start of page 17 says that most of the loans forgiven by the government in the wake of the '91 floods went to the land-owing, wealthier rural inhabitants, not the landless, poorer ones. Sounds familiar? But then, what does he know about lending to the poor, anyway? He was probably scheming to grab power in 2007, even as he was writing in 1999. You can peruse the entire aricle here, but why bother going through 46 pages? Better to believe your leaders and close your eyes. Life is easier that way. Trust me, I know. Amiyo Bangladeshi.

A third complaint against microcredit is that it does not work. Fair enough. I'm not going to be a polemicist and argue that there is CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE that it works. But neither has anyone produced a conclusive study to show that it does not work. A simple look at the Wikipedia article on microcredit could tell anyone that not enough research has been done on it. Furthermore, no one I know of has come CLOSE to arguing that it is actually HARMFUL to society. Of course it isn't hard to find people who are skeptical of micro-credit when it is presented as the mother of all solutions for all our problems, as "First-World" donors seem to do now and then. I'm one such skeptic. But it's articles like this that probably form the basis of spinning that healthy skepticism into downright dismissal of microcredit. I don't think someone as knowledgable and respected as Dr. Sobhan would ever make such a broad and blanket dismissal. Even the author of the article does not make that dismissal, but notes accurately: "not as effective". Quite a few people I know have cited this book as a complete refutation.

A fourth complaint is that Grameen has a monopoly on microcredit. This is downright inaccurate. Read the New Age article, and it mentions that BRAC, ASA and Proshika also engage in microlending. And those are the just the largest ones. The only difference is that Fazle Hasan Abed, Shafiqul Haque Choudhury (founder of ASA) or Qazi Faruque Ahmed (President of Proshika, N.B.) did not declare that they wanted to challenge the hegemony of the two political parties and run for office. Thus, the only microcredit operation in Bangladesh is Grameen, because that's the only one we'll choose to focus on for the moment. Reality is what you make of it inside your head. Is this postmodernist audience power at work or a really bad dream? Either way, the charges of usury and monopoly stick.

So what to make of all this? I fear that whoever comes to power will take their revenge on Grameen, or on the microcredit sector as a whole through lower interest-rate caps or "microcredit sector reform". Worse, they will justify it using this sort of rhetoric on the part of ordinary people like us. For the sake of the poorest of my people, I hope they just take it out on Grameen through some sort of special committee chaired by a bunch of partisan sheep, and leave the rest alone.

And if this were to happen, what lessons would the innovators and risk-takers of my generation draw from it? Simply to innovate elsewhere, far away from the green Delta so close to our hearts. Because, perchance you become too big for your boots in trying to help your people, the politicians (a family caste apart) will warn you not to enter their strata and make life difficult for you if you choose not to heed. And they will do this with the support of the very masses you sought to help in the first place.

N.B. Proshika itself has been the target of the BNP government during the past few years, proving once again that if there is a new low to be attained, both our parties will compete hard to attain it. Read about Proshika's troubles here and here.

Fear and Loathing at Nagorik Shokti - or why I supported Yunus and now am terribly disappointed

(Funny update below)

And so it ends not with a whimper, but a bang. Eliot's poetry holds no metaphor that can capture the enormous amount of pessimism with which I regard the immediate short-run in Bangladesh. Yes, you heard me right: the author of the Wasteland has failed to match my mood.

I woke up this morning to find that Yunus has decided not to float his party after all. It's a true testament to the times that I got the news first off Drishtipat, then off the Daily Star. Because with the press restrictions in place, the media has become increasingly worthless as a source of REAL news.

Full disclosure: I am not related to him, nor have I ever been an employee or intern at Grameen organizations. I have met him once. I got a photo and an autograph out of it, neither of which I really wanted at the time but was pushed into by my parents. And no, my parents are not the Dhaka "secular humanist", "ekatturer chetona"-types. In fact, they are highly skeptical of this whole "NGO-thing" as they call it.

No I came to respect Yunus later on, in college, in a land far, far away from the humidly green Delta. And then too, only for his creativity. That a man at the height of the "Cold War" ("an ethnocentric term" - Naveed Sheikh) could rise above the two petty ideologies - which had needlessly polarized Bangladesh as well as the rest of the world where the war was anything but "Cold" - and do something different for the "Third World" came as a nice little surprise. That he was from Bangladesh filled my heart with joy. The only thing that could have been more perfect was if he had been from my beloved Dhaka, but alas....

So when he announced his political ambitions, I hoped again that he would be able to overcome the AL-BNP political polarizations and the whole secular-Islam social polarization: both needless, both meaningless, both absolutely artificial. After all, this was the man who had overcome that other spectacular piece of binary thinking - market vs. central planning. After all, he was neither KZ or SH, not even loosely related. After all, he had declared proudly that he had gone and prayed after winning the Nobel Prize. I didn't think he would make all this change immediately, but in the long-term through example.

I remained skeptical of his short-term goals, especially as any news of his policies were not forthcoming. I remained skeptical too of his conflict of interest with being both in government and still regarded as being part of "civil society". You are either one or the other, no exceptions. Yet, one remained optimistic.

I heard criticisms of him. Most were irrelevant to say the least. Let me just reproduce some major strands of argument:

1)Don't come into politics. It's not for clean people. And oh yes, we need reform.: I don't think refuting this is worth my time or effort.

2)He's a market-centric bastard in the pocket of MNCs: Yes. He is market-centric. And he does deal with MNCs. Fortunately, unlike most of us, he became a master of the market system and an almost-equal partner of MNCs, instead of remaining their snivelling or frightful slave like the rest of us. This one came mostly from ex-communists and the odd conformist-non-conformists who did not like all the hype surrounding Yunus.

3)Grameen doesn't really work. Yunus is a sham: SH is nothing like Mujib (indisputably the Greatest son/daughter of this Soil in known history) and KZ or TR is nothing like president Zia. The day you call them "shams" to their face, I'll believe you're not a partisan hack.

3)Just because he made a poverty-reduction scheme work doesn't mean that he knows how to run government: Oh yeah? Then what ensures that you know how to run government? Degrees from American colleges with no practical experience? Practical experience in siphoning off cash to INVEST in other countries (no degree required)? Being someone's widow or daughter or son or grandson? Being convicted of running ethnic-cleansing hit-squads in '71? Being an accountant, a lawyer who has found more loopholes in the constitution than he has fixed, a general who wrote poetry and made a mockery of his own religion and country? This list is seriously endless. So why are people so ready to dismiss him without giving him a chance when we've given every third-rate BCL/BCD "cadre"-leader a try without asking for his resume? Or is that an uncomfortable question?

Then there was 1/11. Rumour flew that he had been approached to become Chief Advisor. Rumour also had it that he turned it down. Well, good job I said. Who wants to be a figurehead anyway? I mean, look at Fakru! And Iajuddin before that. (And on the topic of Iajuddin, has a scholar ever harmed his country more?)

And now of course he's decided to call it quits. People suspect the AL's rhethoric but that's probably giving the AL too much credit at this point. More likely (and this is PURE SPECULATION), he did not want to get involved in the only party that will probably have power over the next five years: a sort of hegemonic party like the NDP in Egypt, the Baath in Syria or the JP under Ershad. Our way or the highway seems to be the rule from hereonin. He chose the highway.

Yet... yet... if had stood up to the powers that be at this point, formed his party and called for elections, he would have been the hero of the people. He decided to take the quiet route, Lord knows under what sort of pressure. Another high, followed by yet another low. Goodbye Nagorik Shokti and hello Vegas. My friend, I missed you.

Update: Best reaction to this news comes from shadakalo's blog: "OK, its official. Worldwide poverty alleviation is easier than leading Bangladesh." Even at the worst of times, our sense of humour has rescued us.