From here, the paper moves on to the thorny issue of poverty eradication, and makes the rather unusual point that if poverty eradication is taken as first step, economic growth is bound to "bubble up".

The paper also presents some of Gandhiji’s ideas on gender and poverty, comparing and contrasting it with certain trends that are seen to be emerging both all over the world as well as in India.

The latter parts of the paper look into the trends in India regarding social policy, looking at both failures as well as lessons to be learnt from there, particularly regarding the presence of women in the process of decentralization, a relatively new phenomenon in India.

The reason I am so comfortable with this title is that the trend both internationally and in India is to move from seeing social development, usually described as some kind of financial assistance to elements in the social sector_ education, health, welfare, water, sanitation etc - to macro policy, namely social policy. In my perception, for a social policy as different from a social development programme ,our starting point would have to be with initiating a process to develop social policy frameworks, as we do for economic policy or agricultural policy, in fact we are trying in Karnataka to draft a social policy resolution. I would call this "Beyond Human Development _ Towards Social Policy". My argument is that we need to integrate social development (which is really about providing economic and social security to the poor) with the instruments such as affirmative action (i.e. legal enablements, entitlement) and the political and administrative arrangements (such as local self government, aspects of representation etc). We can call it a Social Policy for Justice. (Mkandiwe: 2000)

I will break up my presentation into the two categories given in the title (1) International Trends and (2) Lessons from India.

If we can think of the Geneva meeting called Social Summit + 5( June 24 to 29), as being a source for understanding international trends, and to this if we can add some of the recent documents coming out of global agencies such as the World Bank and the UNDP, (WDR, 2000 Decentralised Government, UNDP HDR "Human Right and Human Development) then it is possible to cull out of these sources, what I see as international trends. First, the introduction of the rights framework into development language, design and implementation. It is now being understood that however well financed, a social development package,or an anti poverty targeted programme, for those who are in various states of deprivation to access these packages, requires both entitlement and capabilities (Sen). Capability would mean building up their human resource base through a floor of social amenities to be provided by the state. Thus social security has become one of the critical areas being discussed both at the ILO as well as in the World Bank and elsewhere. It is interesting and troubling to find that while most of the advanced countries spend up to 30 to 40 % of their budget on providing social security, international lending institutions insist that developing countries shift the source of funding for these basic social amenities from the State to the private sector.

Thus one important advocacy is for us is to reveal this data and to persuade our own governments that this is an internationally accepted policy which not only builds human capability and therefore the basic resource for development, but also provides stability which is crucial for generating growth. (data from South Asian HDR and ADB).

A brilliant paper by Dr. Francis Steward, the Director of the Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford has data which looks at the gini coefficients, i.e. the inequality measures within a nation and its growth rates. She finds that where inequality is reduced, growth rates are not only higher, but are more sustained and adds that reduction of inequality begins with the provision of a social security base. (Frances Steuart, Mahbub ul Haq Memorial Lecture, Islamabad, 2000)

Having built capability, the next step is entitlement. Without guaranteeing rights, or giving rights to every individual to gain access to these services, the result would be that the very delivery system eats up finance, (see Table in Government Expenditure as % of total national budget) it is also argued that the poor and deprived are neither aware nor able to access services. Thus the UNDP Report 2000 proposes a rights framework to development. It has an introduction written by the Nobel Laureate A.K. Sen, where he reflects the same proposition he puts forward in his latest book "Development as Freedom", (Sen, Amartya,2000,Development as Freedom,Alfred.A.Knopf, New York.) arguing that development is synonymous with freedom and vice versa. To have these rights guaranteed through the Constitution and additional structures such as the National Human Rights Commission, will make it possible for the less privileged to get the power to claim their basic requirement - food, shelter, the right to work etc. the six freedoms (Listed them).

1. Right to Equality,
2. Right to Freedom.
3. Right against Exploitation.
4. Right to Religion
5. Right to Cultural and Educational Rights.
6. Right to Constitutional Remedies

I myself have evolved from seeing the provision of economic support as the panacea, to realising now that the legal- political framework is more useful to the poor than finance. Thus political rights and other rights including economic rights provides the means to the poor to access development. (Jan D, Walking with Human Rights to Development, The Hague 1991). The language of development has now become a language of rights. A paper I have brought on India’s Constitution and how far it has been respected over the last 50 years reveals that while the Constitution guaranteed to the Indian citizen some fundamental rights such as the right to elementary education, to work, to dignity etc. the budgets of our Finance Ministers over the last 50 years have not made any provisions to fulfil the rights. (Jain …..)

The second international trend on social policy is to concentrate on poverty reduction, actually poverty eradication. At Geneva, the International Council for Social Development (ICSD) tried to get a commitment and a global compact on poverty reduction against a given date and argued that all agencies and actors should concentrate only on poverty eradication.

What is the gendering in these initiatives or perspectives? Gendering, I must confess, does not take place automatically. Let us start with the rights framework. In the rights framework as given by UNDP HDR 2000 there is not enough attention paid to the fact that it is women’s rights activism ,which has broadened the definition of human rights, the definition of what is custody, what is a crime and emphasized the importance of universal human rights, universal, individually claimable human rights. The women’s rights movement has shown up the dangers of cultural relativism in adapting rights to suit cultures. It has shown how earlier traditions of human rights have not taken notice of rights violation within families and the kind of special violations that take place in the theatres of armed conflict, which have now been brought into the human rights frame. (Jain – Women’s contribution to Human Rights and Human Development, UNDP/NHRC 2000) .

Yet, in the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2000, while there is reference to Vienna, where the women’s rights movement made its first mark, and to initiatives by women it does not start with what it should have started with, namely, that since amongst the poor, women are the poorest and since amongst those deprived of rights, women are the majority, the ground root , the first step to be taken in making development a human right is to start with women’s Right to development. Similarly, when we come to poverty eradication, it is not being clearly defined that women’s poverty eradication has to be the first step. As Gandhi would often remind, our first step has to begin with the most deprived, with the poorest man, the poorest woman. Gandhi’s daridranarayana is where we must locate our first steps, or with the millions of daridrnarayanis that people the world, for as UNIFEM 2000 and other reports have shown us, women are the poorest among the poor, the most deprived among the deprived, the most discriminated amongst the discriminated

In developing advocacy for such a perspective, we have a strong case because when we remove women’s poverty, we are in fact breaking open the doors for all the poor, as women are the bottom of the pile. When we ensure women’s rights, we are breaking open the door for the rights of all those being discriminated against. While there may be class, race and other basis for discrimination, within that category, women are discriminated as women. There is discrimination within discrimination and therefore shattering discrimination against women breaks open all remaining doors. These would be the arguments for us to bring women on what is called the high priority list in this particular international trend.

Mahatma Gandhi had an interesting response to the given stereotyping of male female roles and codes of behaviour. He suggested that women resist the male order by refusing to marry, to have sex, to wear jewellery, and even to refuse to cook. He believed that such collective resistance by women would be the only way to liberate themselves from the chains of gender apartheid. What happened as a result of all this was a harmonising and equalizing, he persuaded the men to do what are considered " women’s jobs". He tried to shift mental perceptions of the difference between men and women by transposing traditional roles. This is the Scandinavian model for which they get first place in the HDR of 1995. Perhaps if Gandhi had had his way, we in India would have earned that rank long ago, without the immense expenditure of building support systems to provide parental leave! Perhaps a more affordable solution for us in low resource countries.

Some of these ideas may seem extremist and old fashioned, but Gandhi was reacting to what he felt was the terrible fact of female subordination in a caste ridden , hierarchical society.

In the ashrams and collectives that Gandhi built,, roles were constantly transposed to dismantle hierarchies. Every one, men and women had to do manual work, as well as " meditational" work, so that the intellectual would not look down on the manual worker. Brahmins had to lift night soil so that night soil lifting would not carry a stigma, persons belonging to diverse religions had to recite prayers of all religions. All this effaced distance through a muting of the differences that connotes hierarchy.

Women’s struggles and the analysis of poverty and inequality that is coming out of reports like the HDR 1995, the WRD and the WHDR, reveal that the number of poor are increasing and poor women as a proportion of the poor is also on the rise. It does seem clear that the engines of economic growth in operation today are inappropriate for achieving the only stated objectives of economic growth and the spirit of the UN Charter.

Gandhi offers an alternative that he calls his talisman, and which I have chosen to call the "bubbling up theory of growth". According to this line of reasoning , the criterion by which any political choice for economic change is made , is whether it improves the condition of the poorest person. If we deal with removal of poverty, then the rest of the model follows. To quote Gandhi:

In many countries with a large population like India, removal of poverty acts as a spur to demand, and therefore a stimulus to growth. I suggest that poverty eradication is the best engine of growth and that by dealing with the last first, economic regeneration will bubble up_ as economic prosperity has never trickled down. When we are talking of poverty, we tend to talk about redistribution. Let’s grow and then we will give you something. We will do public works to mop up the poor. I would argue that you could actually generate growth if you make poverty removal the first step. How do you do that? When you remove poverty by , say, providing livelihoods, opportunities for people to earn incomes, automatically you have what is called "purchasing power", .i.e. you put purchasing power in the hands of the poor. As many economics will tell you, it is demand that generates production and production in turn generates growth. It is a cycle, which is pushed by demand. As long a large percentage of the population remains poor, and without jobs, an income to spend, you will always have that vicious circle of poverty instead of breaking it out into a spiral of growth. I want to counter the old "Trickling Down Theory of Growth" with this "Bubbling Up Theory"

Coming to lessons from India, India has been particularly weak in her social policy and social development practices. The paper that I brought on the failure to implement the Constitution is an indictment on neglect of important areas such as education and health of the masses. We are ashamed that our rates of illiteracy, ill health, infant mortality, maternal mortality and disease are some of the highest in the world and South Asia, the sub continent from where I come, compares only with sub Saharan Africa and in some cases is worse in its indicators than sub Saharan Africa. (Tables from South Africa paper – Jain, Devaki: Towards Just Development: Identifying Meaningful Indicators, 1999).

However, what India has, which could be the platform on which change can be engineered, is a very active society. India has had a rich history of philanthropy, charity, and social reform, a concern for social injustice even if social injustice is in fact practiced. Many of you would have heard or felt the concern with the practice of untouchability, a blot on India’s cultural landscape. On gender and caste, India has made advances by having special programmes for women and the scheduled caste and tribes in its development design and administration. (I have a paper called Review of Component Plan, which assesses the approach of special funded package for specially disadvantaged groups. The general finding is that such an approach has not levelled up the groups (ref. Sujaya, D.Jain).

Another positive has been affirmative action, the quota reservation of women in local government. This has been one of the most exciting adventures that India has engaged in.

This aspect , that is the role of women in the process of decentralization is important.

Women’s presence ensures accessible proximate government. They bring to the fore a different set of priorities, a different agenda .The issues they choose to tackle are those of water, alcohol abuse, education, health, domestic violence . The enormous expansion of women’s representation in decentralized government structures has highlighted the advantages of proximity, namely the redress of grievance and the ability to mobilize struggle at a local level where it is most meaningful. (C.P. Sujaya and Devaki Jain, Contemporary Writings ,2000).

The presence of one million women in local politics, even though there are many handicaps, the most important being that a process of political decentralisation has not been followed by or supported by devolution of financial powers, i.e. financial revolution nor economic decentralisation. Thus the localisation of development is more a myth than a reality. But what has been refreshing is the energy and excitement and articulation of these one million women, illiterate as they may be, dominated by their husbands, demeaned by the officials at the local level, critically assessed by academics and journalists as being non entities, they have not only enjoyed, but are grasping political space and are now able to articulate the mistakes in the constitutional amendment which have made them proxies, the mistakes in the legal procedures of the state governments which makes them dummies.

What lessons then can we learn from India?

In India,the population discourse has been an important part of social policy in which we have done some interesting and relevant exercises, and produced a number of recommendations.

Here ,I would like to go over the work of two working groups:

The sub committee of the National Committee

The Expert Group on Population Policy.

This committee looks at recasting the framework for HDI and GDI on alternate pegs, namely poverty and inequality. Traditional population programmes have been influenced by the basic demographic variables, birth, migration and death. These have tended to be treated separately and, in view of the impact the rate of population growth can have on development in general, priority has been given to the issues surrounding fertility. The committee suggested the identifying of possible linkages between fertility and the status of women defined by such variables as levels of education and salaried employment.

The committee also drew attention to the fact that recently stress is on just humane and effective development policies at the centre of which is the well being of all people, so advice is that pop policies should take into account a wide range of phenomena such as access to and distribution of resources, health status, gender relations, sexuality, urbanization and migration, political racial ethnic and other factors that effect women’s and men’s ability to exercise their reproductive health. Concern is also on the hardship that women suffer from birth to death, under nutrition, early marriage unsafe childbirth and inadequate health services. Population policy thus needs to address itself to women’s well being, of which her entitlement to good health and the capability to choose her reproductive path becomes the critical mass.

Among the main proposals of the committee may be mentioned the recommendation to stop the "target" approach, and to select one that is consistent with the recommendations emerging from women’s perspective, and a more holistic approach to women’s health.

This was the Expert group on National Policy which reviewed the experience of India’s 45 years of Family Planning interventions and made a turn about from the old approach.

The key recommendations of this group were :

Scrap all incentives, disincentives, and target orientation from the approach.

Remove the Family Planning department so that the emphasis on health does not get deflected to family planning .This is a revolutionary change for India, which prided itself on being one of the pioneers, first in the world to have family planning intervention.

Shift from bombarding and exhorting people to limit families to giving information on the body and health.

Setting up a National Committee to review the ethics of drugs in the context of the population policy.

The provision of basic social and economic security to all sections of Indian society.

To use the existing institutions of governance, namely, the Panchayati Raj system, to advantage. The idea of locally designed and implemented and monitored services with accountability provided by the elected body was to ensure that delivery is proximate to the users.Words like user oriented, locally designed, women designed have all been enshrined as the second pillar of the expert group’s proposals.

The reason I elaborate on these experiences is two fold:

Almost all the elements of the Indian approach and strategy exactly match what the Indian Women’s movement, and in fact the international women’s movement recommended and has been highlighting on the grounds of justice and efficacy

To show that the articulation of the Women’s movement is not rhetoric and ideals alone, but that it translates itself to practical elements of a national policy.

Another lesson from India is the importance of a critical mass of women in any movement and a disclaimer on the question whether that mass has to be initially educated and trained or just be allowed to begin to access power. I think the second is my opinion. Two, linking the social security programmes to the Labour Ministry and availing of the international conventions on social security. Three, organising women across party lines and across divides for providing the leadership in designing policy at the grass root level.

One recent project is what I will end with. This is called ‘Associating women in Panchayati Raj into a Federation’ (Singamma Sreenivasan Foundation – shared spaces). Apart from initiating this idea of associating them into a membership organisation - even though their political lives may be temporary, they would continue to be members -of a National Federation of Local Women Politicians’, across party, across region, just like the National Association of Women Parliamentarians. They would then be enabled to address two or three basic development areas and transform these.

One, designing development, i.e. designing the way funds need to be used at the local level. South Africa has initiated the idea of gender budgeting and has critiqued budgets to see how far they not only respond to the concerns of women, but to the advise of women. This would perhaps be in terms of allocations to the social sector as well as the allocations to specific needs of women. In India, what we are trying to do is not get so much involved in the national fiscal allocations (South Africa, Gender Budgeting) since we already have a system by which the national budget and the national plans have a 30 % reservation of funds to be used entirely for women. We call this the Component Plan Approach. We also have systems by which each state level and national budget puts aside an amount for what are called ‘women targeted schemes’. Thus when 30 % of sectoral budgets are reserved for women, whether it is industry, agriculture, science and technology and there has been an experience in what is called sub planning, which is taking the region let us say with a majority in proportion of tribal people and then ensuring that that area gets an additional allocation to be used only for the tribals.

We are moving to enabling women to design fiscal policy. Our experience, which I have brought in a paper, (INPUT to Policy : ……… design fiscal policy) has shown that this fund reserved approach to improving the condition of women has not worked. We now feel that women designed, women led projects where the funds are in their hands, will probably be better than the national fiscal approach. Thus we have now got a project called ‘Building Budgets from Below’, where we have enabled women to understand the budget as it has already been developed and designed by the municipal, village or local self government body. We then enable them to think through what would be the kind of tax collection and expenditure they would have liked to see. We think that by putting this budget next to the national budget, we will be giving them a tool for informed advocacy when they go the meetings of the local self-government.

Both our countries have great leaders, Mahatma Gandhi in India, and here in Africa, there is Nelson Mandela, who built their identities and their language with the lives of the poor. Nelson Mandela talked of bread, salt and water as the first promise of a free South Africa, and Mahatma Gandhi’s ways were always taking into consideration the life of the poor. He would walk, he would spin cloth, he picked a fistful of salt as the symbol of mobilization towards a self reliant India.

Social policy must begin there, at the bottom, where the poor are waiting to claim their right to life, to work and livelihood, and to equity, and equality.

1. Mkandiwe :2000
2. World Development Report 1999 –2000, World Bank. OUP, New York, 2000.
3. Human Development Report, 1995, UNDP, OUP, New York.
4. Human Development Report, 2000, UNDP, OUP, New York.
5. Sen Entitlment Capability
6. Franes Stewart, Mahbub UlHaq, Memorial Lecture, Islamabad, 2000.
7. Sen, A.K : Development as Freedom.
8. Jain, Devaki : Working with Human rights, The Hague, 1991.
9. Jain, LC : Are our budget faithful to the constitution of India ? A Tour of Budget 1947 – 2000, Inaugural lecture on National Budget – As if people Mattered, March 2000 : National Centre for Advocacy Studies, Pune.
10. Jain, Devaki : UNDP/NHRC 2000.
11. Progress of the world women 2000 – UNIFEM Biennial Report : UNIFEM, Newyork, 2000.
12. Devaki Jain : The South Asian Drama, Paper presented at the state of the World Forum, New York (September 4 – 8,2000), in the theme: Development Cooperation for poverty reduction in South Asia.
13. Jain, Devaki, Sujaya, C.P: Writings , 2000.
14. S.S. F : Associating Women in Panchayat Raj into a federation.
15. South Africa : Gender budge.ting.

Tables :

Data from South Africa – HDR/ADB