Incredibly simple solutions

The Clinton Global Initiative is showing the way. All we have to do is follow. What I have learned from lurking about the fringes of this initiative for the past two years is that Bill Clinton’s many years of administrative experience have taught him that often the reason why initiatives to eliminate poverty and deprivation fail is because delivery systems are cumbersome and bureaucratic. Simplifying these systems brings success.

The Clinton Foundation, of which the global initiative is a part, is only three years old and already it has shown how expensive HIV-AIDS drugs can be made available to the poor by persuading pharmaceutical companies to make generic versions available at minimal cost. Indian companies like Cipla and Ranbaxy are involved in this effort. This year the annual meeting concentrated on environmental issues and how we can all contribute by making little changes. Small things can make the big difference — like reusing plastic bottles and using bulbs that last longer and are more environment-friendly.

This is where the cycle rickshaws come in. On Fifth Avenue in the evenings these days you see cycle rickshaws tooling around looking for customers. The rickshaws seem easier to operate but otherwise they are much the same. Unlike in our country where rickshaws are symbols of poverty, they are seen here as symbols of the future — an environment-friendly means of transport. We need to change our attitude to them, because in India they are a vital means of employment for the poorest of our citizens.

And, they could be cheaper and less polluting public transport in congested areas of our big cities if municipalities would stop treating them as a nuisance. The number of cars in our cities is not restricted but cycle rickshaws are. Does this make sense?

In overcrowded parts of our big cities and towns, it would make more sense to restrict motorised transport, but we do not do this because the Indian state sees cars as a symbol of prosperity and rickshaws as symbols of shame. The same attitude exists towards pavement shops. In Mumbai and Delhi, hundreds of thousands of our citizens would escape extreme poverty and join the middle class if they were allowed to run their meagre businesses off city pavements but they are forced back into poverty in the name of civic order.

Pavement hawkers need regulation in terms of cleanliness and areas of operation; they do not need restrictions of the kind that create the vast structure of municipal corruption that currently exists.

But, this is our way. In the name of fighting poverty, we continue to create cumbersome, unwieldy schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, with loopholes for corruption built into them. Schemes of this kind have succeeded mostly in keeping the poor living in extreme poverty while making a lot of officials very rich.

Smaller, localised schemes are what we need because they can be more easily monitored. The big money should be spent on providing roads, clean water and electricity, because these are tools of empowerment and not mere palliatives.

What saddened me in New York last week was to see the best of corporate India wasting time, effort and money on selling ‘Incredible India’ when they could be playing a far more important role by helping the government of India, and our state governments, reinvent their anti-poverty schemes.

As the Clinton Global Initiative has shown, philanthropy works best when it uses the systems and methods of the corporate world and when everybody profits. If the Indian businessmen and bureaucrats who were in New York last week learned only this from their jaunt, the effort would have been worthwhile. There are few areas in which the public-private partnership is more vitally needed.

Meanwhile, I jogged in Central Park and marvelled at its beauty and the fact that this incredible 843-acre park is 150 years old. We do not have a single Indian city that has a park like this and we will not until we confront our problems of urbanisation and poverty. Grim though they seem, there are easy solutions. What we need to do is look for them.