Agents of change

A recent news item about the Finance Minister to tell CEOs to tone down their lavish lifestyle, had a quote from Tarun Das of CII :
"People in India think the corporate sector is not doing enough for the society,” he said. It was time, for instance, that the top 10 Indian corporates set aside Rs 1,000 crore each for providing safe water, good quality education and medical facilities for the poor, he said.
“More than money, the corporate sector has the management skills to execute programmes without leakages. They must join the government in its efforts,” Das said.

Perception-wise this is correct, the general feeling is that the corporate sector can do much more. Yet public perception of the government not doing enough either is also very strong.
However, mandating limits is not the right way to go about it, it is in fact a rather bureaucratic solution and it is doubtful whether public perception will change much even if such amounts are spent.
What would prove more useful would be to see how much does the corporate sector actually do, and here a study by the CII would be valuable as a benchmark.

More interesting though was his second point, that the corporate sector should join the government in its efforts and help execute programmes without leakages - now that will be a big step ahead. There are of course instances where this is already happening, e.g the UID project - Nandan Nilekani has opened the doors to volunteers :What we are finding in many companies there are a lot of youngsters who want to do something meaningful for a couple of years in the social world. So we have volunteer sabbatical programme. We generally want this to be a public participative project because it is not limited to a few people. It is about getting everybody energized. So anyway they can help we’ll be happy.

Another example of the corporate sector aiding the government in raising efficiency is TeamLease Services, which has tied up with the Karnataka government to revamp the defunct employment exchanges in the state:
According to TeamLease, India currently runs about 14,000 government employment exchanges with about four crore registered candidates. Only two lakh jobs were created last year.  Under the new public-private model, TeamLease would set up the building and infrastructure to run the service, and government would contribute to the training costs. This means registered candidates will get trained for free.
Small steps maybe but in the right direction.

And then there is the news that Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze are back with the National Advisory Council. What is heartening is that 'Both see the state as part of the problem, not the solution. Dreze frankly says he continues to find the government and its functionaries “elitist” and “repressive”; Roy, that ordinary people and their concerns are far away from the priorities of those in power in Delhi' Yet, there they are, working with the government, doing their bit to get a better system worked out.

Of course, all these efforts will work only if the government is open to such assistance and is willing to work out change in its own functioning. As PK Dubashi points out in a piece on dealing with the Naxal challenge,'Dedicated leaders and selfless people like Baba Amte and his sons, Vikas and Prakash, spent years in tribal areas, providing them medical service. So do the couple, Abhay Bang and Rani Bang. They are respected by the tribal society but the government does not feel it necessary to consult them and take their guidance. Instead selfish leaders from the tribal communities rule the roost and instead of helping their own community they promote their own interests and those of their families.'
His solution: 'We will have to refashion our administration of the tribal areas. A large number of young people with dedication and idealism, conversant with tribal language, culture and way of life, would have to be put in service in administrative positions in the tribal areas. The sooner such a new approach is adopted, the better.'

 There is no dearth of such people, but the question again arises, will the current administration allow such a change..or rather to phrase the question more constructively - what will it take for the current administration to allow such a change? If we look at the examples of currently successful efforts like the UID, the change has to come from within, whether it is the corporate sector, social activists or volunteers ready to work, they cannot work with the government unless the government works with them. It is when the hand of help is accepted that public perception will change, for both the government and the corporate sector.

This time for Africa!

Read about a very interesting project in Africa, under the Millennium Project initiative, a new health application based on mobile phone Child count+ which allows community health centres to monitor every single child in their area and follow up on the progress. With networks now all in place, such ICT initiatives are set to explode all over the continent. For more particulars check this.
 Matt Berg, Director of ICT for the Millennium Villages project, indicated that, as of this year, all MVs are wired for Internet and mobile phone service, thanks in large part to partners Zain and Ericsson. These systems are connected to the larger fiber networks now in place through much of Africa. “The infrastructure is in place,” Berg said, and “Africa is ready to code.”
The ChildCount+ Goals

Register every child – Create a “living” registry of all children under five in a community. This list provides the basis for CHWs to monitor the health status of their children.
Screen for malnutrition every 90 days for children from 6 months to 5 years. When a child with acute malnutrition is detected, the program provides support for Plumpy’nut based malnutrition treatment.
Monitor for malaria and diarrhea – track and treat the two major preventable causes of death in children under five. ChildCount+ provides support for home based malaria RDT testing and ACT dosing, and oral rehydration salt (ORS) usage.
Full child immunization support - Group all children in monthly age groups to know when a particular immunization is due. Record all immunizations and follow up with all children who are behind with their immunization schedule. Help manage vaccination campaigns.
Register all newborns and record when child deaths occur to enable local CHWs and communities to understand why.

The system can even be used to transfer wages to CHWs and monitor their productivity. 

It shouldn't be too hard to get similar programmes underway in India.Though the Minister of State for Health Dinesh Trivedi just went on television complaining about the red tapism in his own ministry -

"Roadblocks are that these people (bureaucrats) are not innovative. They don't understand technology. Young people fresh out of college would be able to run the Health Ministry better that these bureaucrats," he said. 

So will we catch up with Africa someday on public health programmes?

Finance and fisheries

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) workshop organised by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, the Conservation Action Trust (CAT), the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and the Green India States Trust (GIST) was inaugurated by an unlikely candidate for this task, RBI Deputy Governor, Usha Thorat. I wonder why someone from the RBI, a 'layperson who needed to learn the jargon', as she put it,  was chosen for this seminar - all I could find was that the TEEB Study Leader, Pavan Sukhdev, has extensive connections with the finance world and the RBI.
Whatever the reason, it was good to see this speech on biodiversity on the RBI website. Her speech makes for an interesting read and took me onto Haldane's paper, linked below.
Excerpt from her speech:
In a speech at the Financial Student Association, Amsterdam, on 28 April 2009, Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England, drew an interesting parallel between the recent global crisis and ecosystems. He cited the collapse of fisheries that came to a head during the 1970s. and 1980s, leading to the imposition of fishing quotas for various species. In setting quotas, no account was taken of interaction between species and the surrounding eco-system. Relating this to the global crisis, he observed that the existing regulatory rules for financial institutions echoed the fisheries management of the 1970s. Risk quotas are calibrated and applied node by node, species by species approach, which takes no account of individual nodes’ system-wide importance – for example, arising from their connectivity to other nodes in the network or their scale of operations. Apart from interconnectedness, Mr Haldane also uses the natural relationship between diversity and stability to show how lack of diversity was a reason for collapse of the financial system. Studies of coastal eco-systems, he said, reveal some dramatic patterns. For around 800 years, between the years 1000-1800 AD, fish stocks and species numbers were seemingly stable and robust. Since then, almost 40% of fish species across the world’s major coastal eco-systems have “collapsed” - defined here as a fall in population of greater than 90%. That is systemic by any metric. There appear to be many environmental reasons for this collapse, some natural, others man-made. The financial system, Mr. Haldane observed, has mirrored the fortunes of the fisheries, for many of the same reasons. Since the start of crisis many banks have seen their market capitalization fall by a significant amount- the fisheries equivalent of collapse. But what took marine eco-systems two hundred years to achieve has been delivered by financial engineers in two!! In explaining the collapse in fish and finance, lack of diversity seems to be a common denominator

The speech by Haldane cited by her is fascinating:
It considers the financial system as a complex adaptive system. It applies some of the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to the financial sphere. Peering through the network lens, it provides a rather different account of the structural vulnerabilities that built-up in the financial system over the past decade and suggests ways of improving its robustness in the period ahead.

The financial system evolved in a way that by 2007 showed more complexity and less diversity. As Haldane says:
But in just about every non-financial discipline - from ecologists to engineers, from geneticists to geologists - this evolution would have set alarm bells ringing. Based on their experience, complexity plus homogeneity did not spell stability; it spelt fragility. In understanding why, it is useful to explore some of the wider lessons from
those disciplines, taking in turn the effects of complexity and diversity on stability.


The tentative policy prescriptions he puts forth:
The experience of other network disciplines suggests a rather different approach to managing the financial network than has been the case in the past, if future systemic dislocations are to be averted. Three areas in particular are discussed: 
• Data and Communications: to allow a better understanding of network dynamics following a shock and thereby inform public communications. For example, learning from epidemiological experience in dealing with SARs, or from macroeconomic experience after the Great Depression, putting in place a system to map the global financial network and communicate to the public about its dynamics;
• Regulation: to ensure appropriate control of the damaging network consequences of the failure of large, interconnected institutions. For example learning from experience in epidemiology by seeking actively to vaccinate the “super-spreaders” to avert financial contagion; and 
• Restructuring: to ensure the financial network is structured so as to reduce the chances of future systemic collapse. For example, learning from experience with engineering networks through more widespread implementation of central counterparties and intra-system netting arrangements, which reduce the financial network’s dimensionality and complexity.

Ostrom again, and the management of commons

Excerpts from Ostrom's recent interview :

I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

We tend to want simple formulas. We have two main prescriptions: privatize the resource or make it state property with uniform rules. But sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons.

Fran: Is there a role for government in those situations?    Elinor: We need institutions that enable people to carry out their management roles. For example, if there’s conflict, you need an open, fair court system at a higher level than the people’s resource management unit. You also need institutions that provide accurate knowledge. The United States Geological Survey is one that I point to repeatedly. They don’t come in and try to make proposals as to what you should do. They just do a really good job of providing accurate scientific knowledge, particularly for groundwater basins such as where I did my Ph.D. research years ago. I’m not against government. I’m just against the idea that it’s got to be some bureaucracy that figures everything out for people.
Fran: How important is it that there is a match between a governing jurisdiction and the area of the resource to be managed?     Elinor: To manage common property you need to create boundaries for an area at a size similar to the problem the people are trying to cope with. But it doesn’t need to be a formal jurisdiction. Sometimes public officials don’t even know that the local people have come to some agreements. It may not be in the courts, or even written down. That is why sometimes public authorities wipe out what local people have spent years creating.

The following is almost Gandhian in concept:  The need to get people away from the notion that you have to have a fancy car and a huge house. Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

What we need is a broader sense of what we call “social ecological systems.” We need to look at the biological side and the social side with one framework rather than 30 different languages. 
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This interview reminded me of this case study done of Bhutan, where the forest resources, traditionally managed by the communities, was faced by outside commercial interests - the govt response, the impact and the evolution of the current system where communities share in the management are all detailed in this study.

The Royal Government of Bhutan has taken a very strong stance on conserving their rich natural resources base, and were very successful in doing so. However, some of the conservation measures had negative side-effects on the quality of some CPRs. The most prominent example is the nationalisation of all non-private land into ‘Government reserved forest’. This took away the control and responsibility away from the local communities. As monitoring was limited (especially for non-timber resources), open access was created, which led to ‘tragedy of the commons’.

On the other hand, during the last 5 years, several government initiatives had sprung up to facilitate CPR management and commercialisation in close cooperation with local communities. A few success stories are emerging. Moreover, new legislation to encourage community participation in common resources management is coming up.