Well, now we do. What has changed in the years since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is that India has ceased being a land that could be relegated to the margins, a place of exotic inconveniences, full of snake charmers impaled on beds of nails. It's now a country that counts, populated by software geeks who might be making your airline reservations and reading your MRIs, a land that foreigners can no longer afford to be ignorant about. Even Hollywood moguls. If Jones ever got out of Indiana, what he'd find in our country today isn't a temple of doom, but something quite different. Call it a template of dhoom—the Hindi word for having a blast.
63. Heroines of Rural Development
DURING A RECENT VISIT TO KERALA I addressed what was among the most remarkable audiences I have ever seen: some seven thousand rural women, gathered under a tent in the courtyard of a school in the small dusty town of Kollengode. Many of them had traveled great distances to attend an event celebrating the Society for Rural Improvement, a microcredit venture run by an ex-NRI returned from America, Dr. “Ron” Prabhakar, which had touched their lives directly in ways that decades of official development projects had not.
We all know that poverty persists in our country, and we have to stop regarding it as a sad but inescapable aspect of the human condition. We know from example after example around the world that, over a very short time, poverty and maternal and infant mortality can be dramatically reduced, while education and gender equality can be dramatically advanced. Rural microcredit projects like SRI (as Dr. Prabhakar's society dubs itself) are showing the way.
The poor rural women I addressed have exploded the myth that they are not credit-worthy. They have proven that, if given the opportunity, they know how to wisely invest their money for economically viable and environmentally sustainable income generating activities, repay their loans with almost a 100 percent repayment rate, and become the masters of their own destiny without the interference of their men. This idea was first tested, and proven, in Bangladesh by the Grameen Bank of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who was awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements. Dr. Prabhakar has taken the same idea and successfully replicated the Grameen Banking System of Bangladesh in Kerala's Palakkad District.
It is no accident that microcredit is provided only to women. The fact is that in most of the world, poverty has a female face. Women experience poverty more than men. Generally, when money is given to men it seldom trickles down to the family: the toddy shops of Kerala flourish on the self-indulgent spending habits of men. Women take far more seriously the responsibility of bringing up their children, and they bear the brunt of this task. The result is that when a woman is empowered, a family is empowered.
So the women patiently assembled from several villages around Kollengode were the true heroines of development. They had shown yet again that we must not underestimate the entrepreneurial skills of poor rural women merely because they are poor. In turn, SRI accepts that its job is to help the women to help themselves — not to micromanage the efforts of the rural women, but to provide the necessary assistance, guidance, leadership, and capital and let the women themselves get on with their own work to pull themselves out of poverty.
Of course, poverty alleviation is not simply throwing money into the hands of poor women and enforcing repayment. This is done by unscrupulous agents who go from door to door in the villages (opportunistic people who lend money to poor women at exorbitant interest, exploit their vulnerable situation, and addict them to perpetual borrowing). These lending agents in the villages are called “blade companies” because of their cutthroat interest rates.
SRI is different: it seeks to build social assets along with economic assets. Poor work ethics and a distorted notion of the dignity of labor have limited the development of Kerala. The SRI project — whose beneficiaries make and sell reusable, economical, and eco-friendly items using indigenous material like areca nut leaves — is breeding a new-generation workforce, imbued with professionalism and a sense of customer service. Dr. Prabhakar has taught them that there is no greater dignity of labor than doing your work well and with pride.
In addition, SRI is providing free education and computer training to about two hundred poor and needy students. Learning is important, but besides academic subjects, they are taught the basic tenets of discipline, good behavior, and civic duties. If they cannot only overcome poverty but be groomed into responsible, productive, and law-abiding citizens when they grow up, society will be the winner.
Microcredit is not a panacea: it cannot be the perfect solution for all our socioeconomic ills. But it can be a precious tool in the empowerment of poor rural women. Yet not everyone in Kerala has shown the open-mindedness to support such creative and innovative efforts. Dr. Prabhakar tells me that the banking system is still cumbersome, complicating his efforts to deliver the small loans on which his microcredit system depends. Credit delayed can be worse than credit denied, and it is time that our banks and government funding agencies showed flexibility and imagination in supporting microcredit efforts.
SRI has proved that the Grameen Banking System, with suitable modifications, can be successfully replicated worldwide. A Chinese proverb says that those who say something is impossible should not stop those who are actually doing it. Projects like SRI's can show us all that ending poverty is not only not impossible — it is happening in the lives of our own people in India, here and now.
64. Kerala: Open for Business
DESPITE ALL THE STRENGTHS OF KERALA — ITS LIBERALITY, its pluralism, its literacy, its empowerment of women, its openness to the world — it's difficult to deny that the state has acquired a less than positive reputation as a place to invest. “Keralites are far too conscious of their rights and not enough of their duties,” one expatriate Malayali businessman told me. “It's impossible to get any work done by a Keralite labor force — and then there are those unions!” He sighed. “Every time we persuade an industrialist to invest in Kerala, it ends badly. The late G. D. Birla put a Gwalior Rayons plant in Mavoor — it has long since closed. The Doshis of Mumbai started the Premier Tyre factory in Kalamassery — you know the fate of that plant? The late Raunaq Singh set up the first Apollo Tyres plant in Chalakudi, but all the expansions of Apollo Tyres since then went to other states such as Gujarat, as neither Raunaq or his son Omkar could deal with the politically charged trade unions.” He shook his head. “I am a Malayali,” he declared, “but I would not advise anyone to invest in Kerala.”
It was with his words ringing in my ears that I stepped gingerly into my home state in May 2007. Newly freed from my career as a UN official, I wanted to see what I could do for Kerala's development, in particular by opening the eyes of foreign investors to what the state had to offer. What I saw and heard there convinces me that my friend's pessimism is, at the very least, out of date.