Individualism

Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so independence and self-reliance.

Introspection is only way of exploring subjective experience depends largely upon the extraordinarily creative interplay between seeing and thinking. And no excellence is possible with a degree of self-doubt. The more people talk about these uncomfortable issues, the more comfortable you will get with being open about what is happening to you.

The correct definition of Knowledge: Developing a coherent body of ideas and creatively reaching out to the unknown with the power of critical and scientific thinking. That can be done in education sector. There is a dire need to promote technical and social innovations in all fields of life. That comes when the feeling of social, cultural and religious identity lapses to give rise to individuality.

Promotion for working at grass root level for development can be given through inclusive education. The mindset of exclusivity is antithetical to education in a democracy. One more matter to be careful of is 'Choice'. Often 'more' is not always better, particularly when we abdicate our power to filter and choose.

In the US, volunteerism is highest in high-tax Massachusetts, and lowest in low-tax Mississippi. In Europe, volunteerism is highest in high-tax Sweden, and lowest in low-tax Eastern European nations.It seems that a thriving state stimulates a thriving volunteering sector – and a shrunken, passive state encourages passivity in the population.

Humans are versatile and multidimensional in nature. That has been proven with the development of various companies. Most of our management rituals were designed (a very long time ago) to promote discipline, control, alignment and predictability—an uni- dimensional model of growth. Yet, new companies having exponential growth in little time like Google, Amazon and Apple have been built around principles like freedom, meritocracy, transparency and experimentation. They are so endlessly inventive and strategically flexible because they provide space and time to each individual.

Anarchism works in the creative destruction of the old institutes. There will always be people giving a voice to the voiceless. An anarchist is an individual with the voices of conscience. To categories dissenters as enemy of state/institutes will be an act of injustice.

Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order. The basic unit is given freedom to grow. Freedom is prerequisite for spontaneous order to take place, rather than liberty being the result of spontaneous order.

India is a divided nation in which the governors and the governed do not share a unifying worldview. While Western liberal democracies are focused on the rights of the individual, India is more concerned with the rights of groups. The politicians and extremists thrive in order to perpetuate conflict between people with the one-dimensional narratives of the problem. That leads us to the path of police state. Only rebels, not reformers are born in such atmosphere of suppression.

Still, progress of an individual without social sustainability lacks farsightedness and vision.An individual should aspire for coherence and relevance for better future of whole environment. Non-sustainable development decimates the environment, the burden of which falls on the poor and unprivileged.

Rural Management - 1

Why Rural economy is always in a poor state ?

Poverty exists in both rural and urban India. Slums are visible signs of poverty in the our cities. Slums are our failure in planning to implement an affordable housing in metros for the poor migrants at the cost of welfare state.

There is an immense migration of the landless labours in cities from the rural areas. Many reasons can be cited for this state such as failure of rural economy, regional nature of growth, absence of basic civic amenities in rural India and caste discrimination in rural India. Poor people can afford the physical torture of the slums but cannot bear the mental torture of rural habitation caused due to caste discrimination. In slums people have only class identity and not caste identity.

There is a huge connection between poverty and caste system in India. Majority of land in rural India is in the possession of minority upper castes. Hence, all the subsidies and growth in the agricultural sector is enjoyed by this minority rich and relatively more educated class. Productive assets must be created for the landless rural population.

Planning and implementation in India are very centralized. Local self-governance is dysfunctional as transparency and accountability is lacking in the institutions. Social-auditing to the rural projects are absent. Local self government Institution should be involved in planning and decision making. Rural projects of the government and working of the local self government should be brought under the purview of e-governance for transparency. But a country with a low literacy rate, e- governance is still a dream.

Poverty can be well understood by this simple example. Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India says that 46 percent of the farmers who own a mobile phone do not have a bank account.We need 'Financial Inclusion' for every citizen of this country. Financial Inclusion means, providing financial services to one and all, irrespective of their income and the place they belong to.

Five Articles on Social and Financial Issues in Rural India:-

1- Money for nothing. And misery for free : Afer a promising start, the microfinance story became one of desperate need on one side and greed and politics on the other, reports Rohini Mohan. Photographs by Vijay Pandey. Microfinance has created deeper crisis socially, about the creation of a life on credit.

MFIs typically borrow from banks at 11- 15 percent interest but charge 24-30 percent, including the operation cost of traveling to remote villages, and factoring in possible defaults. Unlike in an SHG, where the loan is given to the group, the MFI gives loans to an individual who is backed by a group guarantee.

2- Hiware Bazar: Model Village for the Nation ; A five pronged approach has been adopted for the socio-economic infrastructure of the village that includes : Free labour, Ban on Grazing, Ban on Tree Cutting, Ban on Liquor and Family Planning.

3- Tiding over farm woes: Reaping the advantage - Farmers’ unions, who only organise protests demanding higher prices, have failed to educate their members. And only way to pull out farmers from the vicious cycle of indebtedness is to push them out of the Green Revolution model of farming.

4- Living with 'installments' : Many micro-credit loans do no more than allow a family to juggle its finances for a month-to-month existance. As investors embrace this 'market', MFIs are increasingly under scrutiny. Jaideep Hardikar reports.

5- UNDERSTANDING UNTOUCHABILITY: A Comprehensive Study of Practices and Conditions in 1589 Villages [PDF file]--- Navsarjan is one of the leading organizations working for advancement of Dalit rights. Based in the western Indian state of Gujarat,Navsarjan currently organizes more than 3,084 villages to fight the practice of "untouchability” and to improve the economic conditions of Dalits.

Development Management -1

The present economic model is premised on the centrality and openness of markets. But the market forces themselves are a function of economic power and control. In cases in which economic resources and opportunities are widely distributed, economic activity may best be left to individual, private initiative, and market forces, but in societies with a skewed distribution of natural resources and opportunities, a free play of market forces could marginalize an increasing proportion of people, without state intervention through reforms.

Development projects are being initiated and implemented in order to fight against poverty and economic stagnation. It brings to us ethical questions of an inequitable distribution of development's benefits and losses. The principle of the "greater good for the larger numbers," routinely invoked to rationalize social disruptions like forced displacements, is, in fact, abused and turned into an unwarranted justification for tolerating ills that are avoidable. Compulsory displacements that occur for development reasons embody a perverse and intrinsic contradiction in the context of development. The outcome is an unjustifiable repartition of development's costs and benefits: Elite enjoy the gains of development, while majority bear its pains. This raises major issues of social justice and equity.

People believe in aid as a form to get rid of poverty. Aid has empowered only authorities, not necessarily citizens. The Nobel Peace Prize 2006 was given to Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank because contradictory to popular economic axiom, he believes that credit is a fundamental human right despite of one's financial position. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.

Muhammad Yunus delivered his Nobel Lecture on 10 December 2006 at the Oslo City Hall, Norway. Read the full Nobel Lecture and watch a 15 minutes interview.

Mohammad Yunus gives emphasis in his noble lecture : There is a conceptual restrictions imposed on the players in the market. This originates from the assumption that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives - to maximize profit. This interpretation of capitalism insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives. This was done perhaps as a reasonable simplification, but it stripped away the very essentials of human life.

Human beings are a wonderful creation embodied with limitless human qualities and capabilities. Our theoretical constructs should make room for the blossoming of those qualities, not assume them away.
Interview with Muhammad Yunus - Media Player at Nobelprize.org

Food Food Everywhere but not a grain to eat

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]

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 :

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