Bangladesh's misleading stories of development
Development agencies applaud Bangladesh for its growth and development from mid-90’s onwards. But the caveats and questions attached to the development achieved by Bangladesh must be taken into account. The fact is, the NGO-led development of Bangladesh does not address the structural causes of poverty and inequality. What mainly contributed to such development is public awareness campaigns and NGOs’ role of filling the ‘capacity deficit’ caused by the absence of good governance.
When 24.1 million people become ‘extreme poor’ during the pandemic caused by COVID-19 and the state fails to provide them with enough food to eat, it means that this development is not sustainable. Secondly, like most of today’s developed world, Bangladesh’ development has not led to an improvement in governance, which is popularly called the ‘virtuous cycle’.
Government leaders use the word ‘development’ so much that it has become an empty term. They draw an easy equation between development and economic growth but the fact that growth is a misleading indicator of development is almost axiomatic in development economics. Yet there is an unhealthy tendency in Bangladesh government circles to tout economic growth as the most significant indicator of development. The question we should ask is: whose development? Development for the few or development for all?
Amartya Sen has defined development as removal of hindrances towards realization of life’s opportunities. But opportunities for those who oppose the government in Bangladesh, has been a far cry. Abductions and extrajudicial killings became regular practices by the government forces. At least 1,920 cases were documented from January 2009 to December 2018.
We often tend to consider only macroeconomic indicators and miss out indicators such as democracy, individual freedom, existence of opposition parties in the parliament, free media, freedom of speech, independent instruments of the state organ, being the integral parts of Sen’s concept of development, which are totally absent in Bangladesh now.
Freedom House, a Washington-based research organisation designated Bangladesh as a partly free country in 2020. No international agencies recognized Bangladesh’s general elections in 2014 and 2018. Bangladesh’s rank in the list of countries produced by the Freedom House reflects those two general elections. Bangladesh doesn't even exist in the list of democracy index of this organisation. In the global freedom index, Bangladesh ranks 39, ninth from the bottom. In political rights and civil liberty, Bangladesh obtains only 15 and 24.
While knowledge is the basis of development, Bangladesh performs very poorly in the Global Knowledge Index 2020, lowest in South Asia and 112 out of 138 countries. It is alarming because it indicates a shallow education system. Needless to say, development requires a strong industrial base, financial technology and a rich superstructure, for which an efficient and effective education system is a must.
Those who are mesmerised by the stories of development don’t know the real stories lying beneath the gloss, the social inequality, rampant corruption and periodic denial of human rights that constitute a significant aspect of this development
Is inequality a problem? Theory suggests that inequality makes people unhappy. According to Wealth-X, a US institute, reveals that from 2012 onward in 5 years the number of billionaires has increased by 17 per cent. Bangladesh has surpassed China in respect of the increase in the number of billionaires. At the same time, Bangladesh ranks 5th in he world in respect to the number of poor. That means that Bangladesh is one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The Amartyan concept of happiness transcends the mere utility extracted from their economic activities; it rather calls for a pure joy through fulfilling their desired social activities. Amartya suggests that humans enjoy self-independence and that the state, the society and the family do not interfere in an individual’s own domain.
From this viewpoint, is Sen’s favourite country, Bangladesh, a happy country? No doubt, there is growth, there is affluence, there is upward mobility in the developmental indices but there is no happiness because it depends on a multitude of other factors. For the people to be happy they must have the right to vote, right to wealth, right to gather and the right to live one’s life in his or her own way. But the people in Bangladesh do not enjoy these rights at all.
Women in Bangladesh have made the country indomitable in the international apparel market and brought about a revolution inside the country. Bangladeshi migrant workers have been continuously increasing the reserves of the central bank through remittances even during the pandemic. Peasants have continued to toil hard and increase production even after the advent of COVID-19. Therefore, the main architect of Bangladesh’s development is the working people yet the working class is the least paid. Those who are mesmerised by the stories of development don’t know the real stories lying beneath the gloss, the social inequality, rampant corruption and periodic denial of human rights that constitute a significant aspect of this development.
Dr. NN Tarun Chakravorty is a Visiting Professor of Economics at Siberian Federal University, Russia and Editor-At-Large, South Asia Journal. [email protected]
Dr. Subho Basu is an associate professor of South Asian History at McGill University. [email protected]