the Human Development Report 2013

I am not sure what it is with the Human Development Report and the UNDP, but it must be for at least the second or third time, I was invited to talk at its launch in Colombo.  This time I was  part of a panel, moderated by Dr Indrajit Coomaraswamy, and with His Excellency, John Rankin, the British High Commissioner and Dr B M S Batagoda, Deputy Secretary to the Treasury as co-panellists.  Mr Subinay Nandy, UN Resident Coordinator and Resident Representative, chaired the proceedings, and the Hon G L Pieris, Minister of External Affairs made the keynote address, and stayed on as a panelist.

Overall, the latest HDR seems to be a very different document to its predecessors.   A conversation on the semantics of the HDR and the etymology of the words used could be interesting.   Entitled “The rise of the South: Human Progess in a Diverse World” and focused on the ‘dramatic rebalancing of world economic power’ the report can be read as one that highlights how southern  (read non-OECD)  countries are now converging towards higher levels of  human development (Sri Lanka is now in the high human development category!) and increasing trade. In the 1950s Brazil, China and India comprised only 10% of the world economy, by 2050 they are predicted to account for 40%.  And if these big economies don’t stifle the smaller ones (i.e. the 49 least developed countries that are struggling with growth) the HDR sees this rebalancing as an ‘opportunity for greater human progress as a whole’. 

But what is this ‘human progress’?  By definition, the HDR is expected to define human progress broader than the economistic  focus on GDP, but economic growth and wealth creation is embedded in the HDR, and one wonders whether the report is beginning to lose sight of its raison d’être.   It was E F Schumacher who said ‘infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility’.  In that context is it correct for us to celebrate unconditionally the fact that millions of people are moving up the ‘development ladder’? Is increased wealth creation, the way the economists define it, what we mean by human progress?

My first question is, where does the development ladder end? When is enough enough?  How much growth does a country, a region, a family need?   If as Mahatma Gandhi said, 'the earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed’ where should we draw the line? 

The main argument for continuous growth comes from the economists who insist that if we do not continuously grow the cake, there will be not enough to share around.  But we do know that growing the cake doesn’t mean it gets shared equally. The gap between the top income earners and the lowest can get proportionately larger, even as the cake gets bigger. The space  between the rungs of the ladder can widen.   In Sri Lanka, for instance, the income gini co-efficient, the economists’ measure of inequality, is a high 0.49 and increasing.  More worrying is the fact that the poorest 20% households in our country, command only 4.5% of the total household income, while the share of the richest 20%, is 54.1%.  The Hon Minister of Foreign Affairs mentioned that ‘growth needs to be reflected in the lives of the people’  – but is this how we want it to be reflected?  What happened to the good old fashioned concept of redistribution.  To quote the Mahatma again, should we not go with his standard that “a nation’s greatness is measured by the way it treats its weakest members”?

But income inequalities are not the only inequalities that need to be addressed if we want human progress. The Minister talked about the government’s drive to reduce spatial inequalities by developing infrastructure, especially transport infrastructure.  But what about horizontal inequalities?  The HDR says that women’s education is essential to reduce gender inequality, but has this happened in Sri Lanka?  Has the relatively high level of education of women and men served to reduce the inequalities perpetuated by patriarchy?  We have less than 6% women representatives in Parliament, the lowest in the South Asia region, low labour force participation (just 34.7%) and increasing incidence of gender based violence.  What does this say for a highly educated nation?

The HDR also talks about investing in peoples’ capabilities, and the importance of education, health care, legal empowerment and social organization as drivers of development transformation.  Sri Lanka’s early legislators had this vision (which is why we have such high levels of human development today), but they failed to combine it into a virtuous cycle of growth and social policies reinforcing each other.  Today, despite consistent economic growth,  education spending has reduced from 3.2% of the government budget in 2007 to 2.7% in 2011 and 1.9% in 2012.  Health expenditure also reduced from 5% in 2007, to 4% to 2011 where it remained in 2012 (at 4.1%). We need to be careful that in achieving our growth figures we don’t go the other way, and compromise the social policies that already exist.  Dr Batagoda pointed this out.  Good for him. 

My second question is: can we deplete our natural resources at this pace, just so we can get to the top of the ‘development’  ladder?  We hear ad nauseum about Arahat Mahinda’s first sermon where he admonished King Devanampiyatissa, that as the ruler he was only a trustee of the land and the environment and that he had no right to destroy these assets which rightfully belong to future generations.  The Minister talked about this too in his keynote speech.   How then can we condone our disregard for the environment?   Take  the destruction of Sri Lanka’s dry zone forests: sections of the Wilpattu national park for road building and resettlement; the Somawathi forest reserve for banana cultivation, Lunugamvehera and Handapanagala, also for banana cultivation and Yala also for banana and maize cultivation, Maduru Oya for Deyata Kirula and Buddangala for a Dayata Kirula car park, sand mining in the Abanganga in Wasgamuwa and 2388 acres of virgin forest cleared in Mullaitivu, Mannar and Vavuniya for resettlement.   

The argument is that these are important, essential projects.  They create jobs, people need to be resettled post war etc etc.  But environmental laws  were not enacted to stymie growth, but to ensure that the country’s natural wealth is preserved for the next generation.  What is the wealth we are creating?  What is the wealth we are destroying?

Finally, the HDR contains the following paragraph:

Progress requires more than average improvement in the HDI.  It will be neither desirable nor sustainable if increases in the HDI are accompanied by rising inequalities in income, unsustainable patterns of consumption, high military spending and low cohesion.

A sound warning to a country that is now in the ‘high human development ‘ group.