Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts

Friday, December 7, 2012

The dark side of a bright idea...

NREGA is at fault but not for the reasons stated by World Bank...

Recently in its ‘World Development Report 2009, World Bank has described the much hyped UPA’s flagship program NREGA as a social barrier. According to the report, since NREGA is confined to rural areas and promises 100 days of employment, it in turn forces the unemployed rural crowd to remain in their villages and await their turn. This eventually reduces the rural migration, which (according to the report) is very important to uplift people from poverty. Now this is where lies the fallacy of World Bank Report. One of the most important reasons for the existence of the slums in India’s urban centres is the huge influx of rural people that happen in all these places all the time. For a country as big as India, it has too few big cities. And in the absence of any vibrant economic activity or infrastructure in most parts of rural India, people over there have no option but to migrate. Yet there is a limit on how much India’s cities can withstand the pressure of the influx. Thus, it becomes important that the right kind of economic activity is created in rural India. And for that to happen it’s crucial to create infrastructure in rural India and to empower the villagers with the right kind of education and health facilities. What actually is being done with NREGA is nothing but the creation of disguise unemployment as there are several restrictions on the use of machines and raw materials in the works done under NREGA. The objective seems not to create social assets like schools and hospitals with local labour or impart skill sets to make them employable but just to keep them engaged with labour work which would never benefit rural India in the long run. This is where NREGA is at fault and not the way as World Bank states. More migration would mean more slums.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Pollution is not a natural outcome of evolution...

The best environmental practices of leading countries, should be replicated in India too...

In developing the list of 25 pollution control and natural resource management metrics that comprise the Environmental Performance Index (EPI, we made a careful review of the scientific literature as well as a broad-based understanding of the challenges that face environmental policymakers. We developed a “model” based on six core categories of environmental activity with a set of six additional sub-categories on which we also report results. This framework was peer reviewed by leading environmental scientists.

With a set of issues to track defined by the theory and practice of environmental science, we then looked to see which of these areas of concern had data to allow us to track results. Where data was limited, we looked for “proxy” variables that provided some gauge of the issue in question. In each case, we look for “output” measures based on actual, on-the-ground environmental results, measured in terms of the distance from established policy targets, such as those set out in the Millennium Development Goals. We draw data from a wide variety of sources including international organisations such as the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme, and the UN Development Programme as well as leading universities and research centres. In every instance, we rely on the best available data in the world. Our effort remains hampered, however, by a lack of reliable metrics available on a comprehensive and methodologically consistent basis across the nations of the world. We are unable to track important categories such as chemical exposures, proper waste disposal, and protection of wetlands due to a lack of data collected across countries on a comparable basis. In other important areas of emphasis like water quality, we rely on data sets that are shockingly incomplete and poorly constructed. As a result, one of our core conclusions is that the world community needs to invest more in developing a solid data foundation for environmental decision making at every level from the community scale to the state, national, and global levels.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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Friday, October 12, 2012

Recession hits the World Bank :-)

Who would’ve thought that the Third World would get to see this day

Damn the recession! One can’t even keep quasi-nationalist and snobbish institutions insulated from the pungent smell of the Third World. Look at what’s going on at poor IMF and World Bank, two institutions who in the past have not only ensured that power and policy is dictated by the western world, but have also ignominiously had their own policies initiating economic crises in various parts of the world. The pretty poor World Bank is planning to introduce some changes in their constitution. In the new set up, emerging economies will get a bigger say in policy and decision making. And how did this doe-eyed garbled monster end up accepting such a huge ego destruction? Look no further than its prettier, and now much poorer cousin IMF.

Surprise surprise, the IMF is now eyeing countries like China, Brazil, Gulf countries, South East Asian countries and India to get some ‘funds’. Though Japan, which has been hit hard by global meltdown, continues to fork out large amounts of money for the IMF and World Bank (Recently, the Japanese government donated a gigantic $100 billion to the IMF), economists say the IMF would still need a minimum of $500 billion to start its ‘good work’ for battered economies globally.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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