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Kathmandu Saturday January 12, 2002 Paush 28, 2058.
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Poor, statistics and
professionals
By JEEVAN RAJ SHARMA
Time has come to understand poverty from a wider
perspective. The understanding of poverty as an issue has been widening since 1950-60s.
The much-debated recent World Development Report 2000/01 titled "Attacking
Poverty" came with a multidimensional perspective for looking at poverty, and
alleviating it. But, there is an uncontested terrain in the field of poverty. When we talk
about poverty alleviation, we are not merely concerned with the issue but also with the
professionals involved and the methodology they follow. These latter categories are very
important as they shape the world of poverty alleviation. This article is concerned with
these uncontested categories in the Nepalese context.
A lot of negative statistics has been presented
on Nepal’s poverty; pessimism dominates Nepal’s policy dialogue and public
debate. These negative statistics have been analyzed and conclusions have been drawn with
new lines of recommendations. However, poverty remains a great political and policy
rhetoric in Nepal.
In Nepal, the 8th and 9th plans focused
extensively on poverty alleviation. The Tenth Plan is again coming up with the same slogan
of poverty alleviation. The repeating of the same objectives in the new policy document
necessarily means failure of the earlier policies. If one attempts to review the studies
and assessments of these failures, these are full of tables and statistical figures. The
bottom line is that these tables with statistical figures do not present the poverty
situation in Nepal. Such a reductionist approach has never studied the poor people, their
life and their misery. The problem lies with the statistical nature of these studies and
evaluations that form the base of poverty alleviation efforts. The contemporary need is to
look beyond such statistical facts that tend to define poverty, and thus the alleviation
efforts, narrowly.
The issue is how we came to such a situation in
Nepal and how we can take this issue seriously. Development discourse all over the world
has definitely dominated the policy discourse in Nepal. The availability of resources both
monetary and human has led us to this situation. Our planning authorities are dominated by
economists, demographers and geographers socialized in the positivist tradition and they
continue to claim that they can understand and derive the best possible ways to alleviate
poverty. It is very clear that these planners have preferred to understand poverty as a
technical subject and not consult or involve those who believe in defining poverty in a
holistic manner. Nor do they seem interested to understand poverty as a process. I did not
find any studies that have made an attempt to understand poverty as a process. All the
studies seem like evaluation studies that attempt to assess the individual programs and
projects. There is definitely lack of a comprehensive study that looks at poverty in a
comprehensive manner, studies various policy inputs and considers local cultural and
historical variables.
The second issue would be the financial
constraints. Are the donors available and willing to invest resources to tackle poverty as
a process? There is a need to shift away from paradigm that understands poverty as mere
statistical figures. Though the rhetoric of a participatory approach has become an
official language when policy makers meet and in policy documents the question is what do
we understand when we say participatory? Poverty alleviation programmes continue to be
drafted and planned by so-called experts at the centre. Decentralization in planning is
virtually non-existent. The documents continue to state that there exists a nexus between
different problems but there does not seem any coordination between different stakeholders
involved in different issues. Another issue is that poverty alleviation has been a
project, and not a social movement. Some micro level successful projects have not been
found successful because of the very nature of such attempts as projects and not as
movements. NGOs have not been able to transform themselves as sustainable movements and
are found troubling with issues of status quo.
Let me share my own experience of discussing
with women in a village about poverty. The issue was who is poor and why? One woman said,
and later others too supported her that she is poor because her husband is physically
weak. The issue is how to understand such a state of poverty? My question would be how
Nepali policy makers look at such an issue? This is just one case that I was confronted
with in the field; there are lots of such cases.
Poverty has been a big issue and a lot of world
resources are spent on this issue. The most dominant practice has been to study the
numbers of poor people and plan out resources accordingly. Under this approach, poverty
alleviation efforts have been curative in nature and have failed to look at preventive
aspects.
That poverty is not a technical fact but a
social, economic, cultural and political process demands an active role by policy makers
academically and professionally socialized in a context different and wider than that
traditionally accepted for economists, demographers and geographers. Academic discourse
has taken place on how social scientists like anthropologists and sociologists and
professional social workers can play an increasingly important role in policy formulation.
To sum up, poverty is not an absolute concept,
but a construct. Professionals and policy-makers in this field play an important role in
this process of construction. The dominant way poverty has been defined, studied and
worked upon needs to be deconstructed, rethought and redefined so that a new paradigm will
emerge. In a democratic polity, a democratic representation of different views can give a
new perspective to poverty alleviation efforts. The challenge lies in how to change the
dominant culture of thinking and presenting poverty alleviation in terms of negative
figures.
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