Avinash Singh offers some answers and solutions:
- All poverty alleviation programs are highly centralized with inherent inefficiencies and inflexibilities of the system.
- All these programs focus on “giving a fish rather than teaching how to fish”. Hence, they are resource dependent rather than enterprise dependent. They create a mentality of dependence rather than a mentality of empowerment. They fail to create a virtuous cycle of enterprise, production, consumption, and wealth creation.
- The delivery system designed to implement poverty alleviation programs consumes 80-85% of allocated resources thereby leaving just 15-20% for actual utilization for poverty alleviation. .
Update: Looks like Avinash’s post is mostly copied from this post by Mayank Krishna. My apologies to Mayank and to all Blogbharti readers.
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This post by Avinash Singh is almost a complete COPY PASTE job of my blog post written on this subject on April 06, 2007.
Check the link for yourself and compare: http://mayankkrishna.blogspot.com/2007/04/poverty-alleviation-starfish-way.html
I am flattered indeed!!
mayank,
thanks for pointing this out.. i guess i should’ve checked this out. but can’t delete the post now, considering it has already gone into the feed. i”ll add an update linking to your post.
i’m sorry for this.
Interesting. Because of this post, I came to know of the very interesting book (from the reviews) whicj Mayank Krishna refers to:
http://www.amazon.com/Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Leaderless-Organizations/dp/1591841437
I wonder how this ties up with the ideas of social capital of Robert Putnam (Better Together) and how mush of this possible and how in these days when many enterprising people seem to be moving around. In any case, these seem to be interesting ideas to follow up.
swarup garu,
individually, india’s poor gain very little from the social relationships they’re engaged in. you know quite well that positive social capital, or advantages gained from being associated with the right individuals and groups, isn’t something they can build even if they choose to invest in such relationships. they’re mostly excluded from any such associations. i hope someone studies the idea of social capital in india and defines it correctly in the indian context.
mayank’s post focusses on govt run anti-poverty programs – which themselves are an admission that the poor can’t access capital on their own. definitely not social capital. the only associations that have had a positive, but limited, impact on the poor in india are the dwacra (women self-help groups) groups. these again depend heavily on govt funds and facilitation. they don’t represent a triumph of social networks in india – they’re starfish-like but..they’d collapse without support from outside. that’s my limited understanding of the relationship between anti-poverty programs and social networks in india.