It becomes imperative, therefore, to strike a balance between the economic and social functions of land. A model of development that excludes one in the favor of the other loses out on the very basic meaning and purpose of development.
Public Distribution System (PDS) :
Public Distribution System in short PDS means distribution of essential commodities to a large number of people through a network of fair price shops (FPS) on a recurring basis. The commodities are as follows:- Wheat · Rice · Sugar · Kerosene
PDS evolved as a major instrument of the Government’s economic policy for ensuring availability of food grains to the public at affordable prices as well as for enhancing the food security for the poor. It is an important constituent of the strategy for poverty eradication and is intended to serve as a safety net for the poor who number more than 330 million and are nutritionally at risk. PDS with a network of about 4.99 lakh fair price shops is perhaps the largest distribution network of its type in the world.
PDS is operated under the joint responsibility of the Central and the State Governments. The Central Government has taken the responsibility for procurement, storage, transportation and bulk allocation of food grains, etc. The responsibility for distributing the same to the consumers through the network of FPS rests with the State Governments. The operational responsibilities including allocation within the State, identification of families below poverty line, issue of ration cards, supervision and monitoring the functioning of FPSs rest with the State Governments.
India State Hunger Index
The India State Hunger Index (ISHI) is a tool to calculate hunger and malnutrition at the regional level in India. It is constructed in the same fashion as the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2008 and was calculated for 17 states in India, covering more than 95 percent of the population.
It combines three equally-weighted indicators:
1. the proportion of undernourished as a percentage of the population (reflecting the share of the population with insufficient dietary intake);
2. the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five (indicating the proportion of children suffering from weight loss and / or reduced growth); and
3. the mortality rate of children under the age of five (partially reflecting the fatal synergy between dietary intake and unhealthy environments).
Full report of INDIA STATE HUNGER INDEX Comparisons of Hunger Across States Purnima Menon, Anil Deolalikar, Anjor Bhaskar [PDF file]
Please have a look on - Land Reform in India: Issues and Challenges by Manpreet Sethi [ PDF file]
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
Understanding Economics - 2
Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef: US Is Becoming an "Underdeveloping Nation"
Never in human history has there been such an accumulation of knowledge like in the last 100 years. What was that knowledge for? What did we do with it? And the point is that knowledge alone is not enough, that we understand very little. When you’re separated, you can accumulate knowledge. And that is—that’s been the function of science. Now, science is divided into parts, but understanding is holistic.
And that happens with poverty. One understood poverty only by experience. And then you begin to learn that in that environment there are different values, different principles from—compared to those from where one is coming. Economists look at the poverty from the outside, instead of living it from the inside.
And you learn extraordinary things. The first thing you learn, that people who want to work in order to overcome poverty and don’t know, is that in poverty there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive.
The whole language as an economist is not coherent with those situations and conditions. The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in one fundamental value and principle five postulates.
The fundamental AXIOM to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.
1- The economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.
2- Development is about people and not about objects.
3- Growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.
4- No economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.
5- The economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.
The Threshold Hypothesis :
Growth is a quantitative accumulation. Development is the liberation of creative possibilities. Every living system in nature grows up to a certain point and stops growing. But we continue developing ourselves. So development has no limits. Growth has limits. And that is a very big thing, you know, that economists and politicians don’t understand. They are obsessed with the fetish of economic growth.
Economist Ha-Joon Chang on the G20 Summit, Currency Wars and Why the Free Market is a Myth
Never in human history has there been such an accumulation of knowledge like in the last 100 years. What was that knowledge for? What did we do with it? And the point is that knowledge alone is not enough, that we understand very little. When you’re separated, you can accumulate knowledge. And that is—that’s been the function of science. Now, science is divided into parts, but understanding is holistic.
And that happens with poverty. One understood poverty only by experience. And then you begin to learn that in that environment there are different values, different principles from—compared to those from where one is coming. Economists look at the poverty from the outside, instead of living it from the inside.
And you learn extraordinary things. The first thing you learn, that people who want to work in order to overcome poverty and don’t know, is that in poverty there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive.
The whole language as an economist is not coherent with those situations and conditions. The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in one fundamental value and principle five postulates.
The fundamental AXIOM to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.
1- The economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.
2- Development is about people and not about objects.
3- Growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.
4- No economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.
5- The economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.
The Threshold Hypothesis :
In every society there is a period in which economic growth, conventionally understood or no, brings about an improvement of the quality of life. But only up to a point, the threshold point, beyond which, if there is more growth, quality of life begins to decline.
Growth is a quantitative accumulation. Development is the liberation of creative possibilities. Every living system in nature grows up to a certain point and stops growing. But we continue developing ourselves. So development has no limits. Growth has limits. And that is a very big thing, you know, that economists and politicians don’t understand. They are obsessed with the fetish of economic growth.
Economist Ha-Joon Chang on the G20 Summit, Currency Wars and Why the Free Market is a Myth
Sunday, December 26, 2010
The Max-Neef Model of Human-Scale Development
Manfred Max-Neef is a Chilean economist who has worked for many years with the problem of development in the Third World, articulating the inappropriateness of conventional models of development, that have lead to increasing poverty, massive debt and ecological disaster for many Third World communities. He works for the Centre for Development Alternatives in Chile, an organisation dedicated to the reorientation of development which stimulates local needs. It researches new tools, strategies and evaluative techniques to support such development, and Max-Neef's publication Human Scale Development: an Option for the Future (1987) outlines the results of the Centre’s researches and experiences
Max-Neef and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy of human needs and a process by which communities can identify their "wealths" and "poverties" according to how these needs are satisfied.
Human Scale Development is defined as "focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy, and of civil society with the state." (Max-Neef et al, 1987:12)
The main contribution that Max-Neef makes to the understanding of needs is the distinction made between needs and satisfiers. Human needs are seen as few, finite and classifiable (as distinct from the conventional notion that "wants" are infinite and insatiable). Not only this, they are constant through all human cultures and across historical time periods. What changes over time and between cultures is the way these needs are satisfied. It is important that human needs are understood as a system - i.e. they are interrelated and interactive. There is no hierarchy of needs (apart from the basic need for subsistence or survival) as postulated by Western psychologists such as Maslow, rather, simultaneity, complementarity and trade-offs are features of the process of needs satisfaction.
Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation(in the sense of leisure, time to reflect, or idleness), creation, identity and freedom. Needs are also defined according to the existential categories of being, having, doing and interacting, and from these dimensions, a 36 cell matrix is developed which can be filled with examples of satisfiers for those needs.
Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: eg, the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity - the examples are everywhere.
Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organisations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games.
This model forms the basis of an explanation of many of the problems arising from a dependence on mechanistic economics, and contributes to understandings that are necessary for a paradigrn shift that incorporates systemic principles. Max-Neef and his colleagues have found that this methodology "allows for the achievement of in-depth insight into the key problems that impede the actualisation of fundamental human needs in the society, community or institution being studied" (Max-Neef et al, 1987:40)
This model provides a useful approach that meets the requirements of small group, community-based processes that have the effect of allowing deep reflection about one's individual and community situation, leading to critical awareness and, possibly, action al the local economic level.
Max-Neef and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy of human needs and a process by which communities can identify their "wealths" and "poverties" according to how these needs are satisfied.
Human Scale Development is defined as "focused and based on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy, and of civil society with the state." (Max-Neef et al, 1987:12)
The main contribution that Max-Neef makes to the understanding of needs is the distinction made between needs and satisfiers. Human needs are seen as few, finite and classifiable (as distinct from the conventional notion that "wants" are infinite and insatiable). Not only this, they are constant through all human cultures and across historical time periods. What changes over time and between cultures is the way these needs are satisfied. It is important that human needs are understood as a system - i.e. they are interrelated and interactive. There is no hierarchy of needs (apart from the basic need for subsistence or survival) as postulated by Western psychologists such as Maslow, rather, simultaneity, complementarity and trade-offs are features of the process of needs satisfaction.
Max-Neef classifies the fundamental human needs as: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation(in the sense of leisure, time to reflect, or idleness), creation, identity and freedom. Needs are also defined according to the existential categories of being, having, doing and interacting, and from these dimensions, a 36 cell matrix is developed which can be filled with examples of satisfiers for those needs.
Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: eg, the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity - the examples are everywhere.
Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organisations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games.
This model forms the basis of an explanation of many of the problems arising from a dependence on mechanistic economics, and contributes to understandings that are necessary for a paradigrn shift that incorporates systemic principles. Max-Neef and his colleagues have found that this methodology "allows for the achievement of in-depth insight into the key problems that impede the actualisation of fundamental human needs in the society, community or institution being studied" (Max-Neef et al, 1987:40)
This model provides a useful approach that meets the requirements of small group, community-based processes that have the effect of allowing deep reflection about one's individual and community situation, leading to critical awareness and, possibly, action al the local economic level.
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