A couple of weeks ago, as part of my course work at college, I had to go for a field trip. The field trip was to a district near Indore (Where my college is located) called Jhabua. Jhabua is a district in the eastern region of Madhya Pradesh. It happens to be among the most poverty-stricken areas of India, scoring lower than several Sub-Sahara African countries in crucial poverty measures.[1] [You can go and play around with the data, it's fairly interesting to understand] The Purpose of the trip was to understand the living conditions of people residing in villages in the district. We had to administer a questionnaire and understand the living conditions of the individuals we interviewed.
This field trip was probably the toughest field trip I've been on so far. The sun was intense and the walk around the village even more grueling. It gave me an understanding of how tough life is as a tribal person, especially in this region.
For the field trip, we spent an entire day understanding their lives; we even had food with them! Initially, I was hesitant to eat the food they offered due to hygiene concerns, in my defence the water they provided had a yellowish tinge to it. But I powered through, and it turned out to be very tasty as well. I'm glad that I did eat there.
It is important to understand why Jhabua has such high poverty levels. The region has been dealt a bad set of cards; Jhabua has an acute water shortage problem, they lack access to water even for basic purposes. The water shortage makes agriculture very tough and severely limits their ability to grow different crops. The village I had visited had all the villagers growing just one variety of grain, you can begin to understand the constraints they face in their livelihood. Along with this, the failure of implementation of state sponsored programs has led to a double whammy. While these two probably aren't the only reasons for poverty, they are major contributing factors and have to be dealt with.
The entire trip was planned and executed by officials at IIM Indore and the people at ShivGanga. ShivGanga is an NGO that works exclusively in the Jhabua region. The founder of ShivGanga, as I understood provides the know-how and education to the tribals in the area. They aim at creating self-sufficiency among the tribals. The self-sufficiency concept boils down to the empowerment of the tribals so that they don't have to look up to someone and be dependent on them for their own upliftment. Reminds me of the story of giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish. The whole approach also seemed to be very interesting. You could read up more about the foundation here and here.
In essence, it makes sense to train the villagers to look out for themselves and teach them how to get what they need without having to wait for someone to look at them as a charity case.
Now, all the above information is neat, but this is interesting because we learnt this in our Development Economics course right at the start of this term. The name of the theory is the Harrod-Domar Model. Briefly, it says that economic development can be stimulated by the introduction of capital to an economy. The simple act of giving money to an underdeveloped country is sufficient to push it towards growth. One can understand why believing in the theory is tempting, just one simple act is sufficient to bring the worlds poorest out of poverty. You could also argue that it makes sense. Backward countries are backward because they do not have the requisite industries, if we give money to these countries, they'll be able to develop said industries and viola, you'll stimulate growth.
Obviously, the above model failed. It failed so bad that in some literature it is also called the most expensive failed experiment in human history because of the number of policies that were developed based on this very economic theory. The reason for its failure you ask? There is one crucial factor that this model doesn't account for; the human factor. Humans are equally important, if not more important in the development of an economy. Simply put, if an industry doesn't have enough trained labour, what would one do with all the industries. There wouldn't be enough people to run the machines!
This simple fact was well reflected in the field trip. The basic argument being that you need to develop the people for progress, it'll take longer but in the long run, will result in successfully reaching the goal of development. If not entirely right, I did find this relation interesting. In my mind, it did seem like another nail in the coffin of the Harrod-Domar model.
This field trip was probably the toughest field trip I've been on so far. The sun was intense and the walk around the village even more grueling. It gave me an understanding of how tough life is as a tribal person, especially in this region.
For the field trip, we spent an entire day understanding their lives; we even had food with them! Initially, I was hesitant to eat the food they offered due to hygiene concerns, in my defence the water they provided had a yellowish tinge to it. But I powered through, and it turned out to be very tasty as well. I'm glad that I did eat there.
It is important to understand why Jhabua has such high poverty levels. The region has been dealt a bad set of cards; Jhabua has an acute water shortage problem, they lack access to water even for basic purposes. The water shortage makes agriculture very tough and severely limits their ability to grow different crops. The village I had visited had all the villagers growing just one variety of grain, you can begin to understand the constraints they face in their livelihood. Along with this, the failure of implementation of state sponsored programs has led to a double whammy. While these two probably aren't the only reasons for poverty, they are major contributing factors and have to be dealt with.
The entire trip was planned and executed by officials at IIM Indore and the people at ShivGanga. ShivGanga is an NGO that works exclusively in the Jhabua region. The founder of ShivGanga, as I understood provides the know-how and education to the tribals in the area. They aim at creating self-sufficiency among the tribals. The self-sufficiency concept boils down to the empowerment of the tribals so that they don't have to look up to someone and be dependent on them for their own upliftment. Reminds me of the story of giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish. The whole approach also seemed to be very interesting. You could read up more about the foundation here and here.
In essence, it makes sense to train the villagers to look out for themselves and teach them how to get what they need without having to wait for someone to look at them as a charity case.
Now, all the above information is neat, but this is interesting because we learnt this in our Development Economics course right at the start of this term. The name of the theory is the Harrod-Domar Model. Briefly, it says that economic development can be stimulated by the introduction of capital to an economy. The simple act of giving money to an underdeveloped country is sufficient to push it towards growth. One can understand why believing in the theory is tempting, just one simple act is sufficient to bring the worlds poorest out of poverty. You could also argue that it makes sense. Backward countries are backward because they do not have the requisite industries, if we give money to these countries, they'll be able to develop said industries and viola, you'll stimulate growth.
Obviously, the above model failed. It failed so bad that in some literature it is also called the most expensive failed experiment in human history because of the number of policies that were developed based on this very economic theory. The reason for its failure you ask? There is one crucial factor that this model doesn't account for; the human factor. Humans are equally important, if not more important in the development of an economy. Simply put, if an industry doesn't have enough trained labour, what would one do with all the industries. There wouldn't be enough people to run the machines!
This simple fact was well reflected in the field trip. The basic argument being that you need to develop the people for progress, it'll take longer but in the long run, will result in successfully reaching the goal of development. If not entirely right, I did find this relation interesting. In my mind, it did seem like another nail in the coffin of the Harrod-Domar model.
