Are we middle-income yet?

Originally published by the Dhaka Tribune in 2014.

A licenCe to beg

Bangladesh turned middle income on a Thursday afternoon in November. Do not look for this transformation in GDP or national income statistics, because these may tell a different story. This transformation was revealed in three signals on the way to Bangla Academy.

First, a sign at the Gulshan 2 crossing declared it a ‘beggar-free zone’/bhikkhukh mukto elaka). The point was illustrated with a line drawing of a person apparently living a life of great poverty, bent double with age and destitution.

The second sign was an absence: no visible beggars as depicted. The unfamiliar sight of a rule apparently being followed on the Dhaka streets was unsettling. But was the rule being followed? Were beggars staying away because of the consequences? Or was there another reason? Could it be - and rural wages have certainly increased - that everyone is so prosperous and secure that the supply of such beggars had dried up? The rural economy is booming, but this last explanation felt like wishful thinking. People have worked the traffic out of north Gulshan ever since I can remember, and they were often the genuine article: workless northerners escaping seasonal famine, landless southerners fleeing rising waters, unlucky folk from all over. There were none of these hardy souls to be seen that Thursday.

The third signal at Gulshan 2 put a spin on the story. Instead of beggars from up- and down-country, the stalled traffic was descended upon by large numbers of young middle class people, in coordinated saffron gear, collecting donations. This was organised charity, not begging, by and on behalf of the well-regarded Jaago Foundation. Donations were to be receipted if required, or you could sign up to sponsor a child. A leaflet explained the aims of the Foundation included to ‘break the cycle of poverty’, by investing in high quality education and new skills (displaying an excellent grasp of contemporary development language). This was a large volunteer effort of a kind I had never seen in this part of Dhaka. Despite questionable health and safety standards, it looked like fun for the volunteers, and they made clever use of the gridlock. Were they allowed to do this, I asked one young fellow. Yes, he said, they were licensed and everything.

Perceiving poverty

Coming so rapidly one after another, these signals turned my attention to an old preoccupation – the relationship between the Bangladeshi elite and the masses whom they rule. For those who think you can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its vulnerable members, there is much to read here. It feels like a big change. The defining characteristic of the elite-mass relationship in the short life of Bangladesh has been an unusual degree of proximity - affinity, even. Outsiders often scoff when I say this: to those unfamiliar with Bangladeshi society, or indeed with elite behaviour in general, these relations appear coldly distanced, minutely hierarchical, anachronistically feudal.

But this is partly because we conceal little: Bangladeshi society has to date had a comparatively open approach to poverty - a fact, not a dirty secret. We do not banish the poor to an island or the hills or the forest; they live next door. Most middle class city folk are themselves recent rural migrants, at most a generation or two from the village. Media coverage of disasters and human rights abuses keep vulnerability and destitution in the public eye. And middle aged and older people from all classes remember the horrors of the 1974 famine (although we do not talk about it). All of this combines in a tangible, perceptible poverty, which many people of wealth and power have seen up close and personal. Their visibility does not guarantee poor people good treatment, but for what it is worth, they have been difficult to ignore. And so the Bangladeshi elite has to date had a more experiential, face-to-face perception of poverty than their counterparts in Brazil, or the US or South Africa, or even India. And this has mattered in how we have gone about tackling our problems of poverty and vulnerability. I think it helps to explain our modest successes.

To the extent that it replaces the old modes, this new generation’s new model of charity creates a distance between donor and recipient. The face-to-face element is gone, replaced by a relationship of accountability between donor and charity organisation. This in turn is licensed, and receipts donations, and probably audited, too. Perhaps it is more efficient and more transparent, but the relationship is also now a bureaucratised outsourced transaction, not a personal exchange.

It is inherently demeaning and wrong to have to beg, but it has provided a safety net for centuries of beggars across South Asia. There have always been good reasons to give alms: religion, culture, proximity, reputation, kin feeling, social capital. But these are different, more modern times. Perhaps the time has now come, as Bangladesh aspires to middle income status, to do this better, or at least in a less visibly demeaning manner.

The growing unacceptability of begging resonates with other debates about poverty in Bangladesh. In the rainy season, I travelled north with a team studying how to help people cope with climate change and disasters. The old mode is public works schemes, mati-kata kaj as the women call it.

But there was a new tone to our discussions with government officials and aid donors. This was a discomfort about the sight of women transporting mud with their bare hands under the beating sun, which they do for below-market wages. This labour builds valuable public goods - embankments and canals, in areas prone to floods and waterlogging, yet could be made redundant with the most basic mechanisation, at very little cost. But the labour of poor women is valued little, and those who get international aid are still required to prove themselves ‘deserving’. So women continue to labour on public works schemes (in all fairness, many of them like the camaraderie of the labour crews, and value their ability to earn).

My colleague was puzzled by the discomfort of the policy elites we met. I argued that in present day Bangladesh, to use the labour of poor women in this way was no longer acceptable: it just looked wrong. In much of Africa, he countered, nobody would have even questioned this. It felt like at a moment of flux, when the spectacle of the Third World in our midst jars intolerably with our aspirations for middle income status. We aspire not only to more money and better roads and hospitals, but also to an absence of beggary and to a more organised, less visceral kind of poverty.

the love affair between business & charity

How will poverty be perceived in this shiny new era? The signals at Gulshan 2 reminded me of how charity came to be reorganised in late Victorian England, a place of Dickensian poverty as well as vast wealth and imperial power. The Charity Organisation Society of London, a network of elite men and women, pioneered a ‘rational’ approach to poverty that broke with a view of charity as purely a private, religious duty, and distinguished between poor relief (breeding dependency) and organised charity (helping poor people pull themselves out of poverty). For Bangladeshi social welfare and development organisations, these are familiar distinctions. For the Jaago Foundation, the goal is investment in education of good quality so that bright Bangladeshis are equipped with the skills they need to ‘break the cycle of poverty’. The ultimate point is to render charity redundant. The logic is market-friendly (KFC and Pizza Hut are among Jaago’s sponsors): people can be boosted into work or enterprise, and will thus pull themselves out of poverty. It speaks to familiar aims of transformation through meritocratic social and economic integration.

In Victorian England, organised private charity became more important at a time of rapid industrial and imperial growth. Bangladesh is at present enjoying a period of strong economic growth and growing political power of business. This is no coincidence: business and organised charity go together like gin and tonic. It is partly practical – rapid growth and development casts aside those it deems economically useless, so someone else has to help them. But it is also symbolic: an emphasis on charity separates values of morality and humanity from matters of trade and profit. Charity makes it ok to make big profits at a time of great poverty.

Middle income country problems

The parallels between late Victorian London and the Bangladesh of last Thursday are that these too, are times of economic growth in the shadow of global economic volatility and overhanging threats from rising powers. In Bangladesh and elsewhere, the project of economic growth increasingly depends on the quality of the population. People whose ancestors were poor rural labourers are needed now for industry and the economy: they need to be strong and skilled and capable of competing in global markets. Meanwhile waterlogging and land erosion are pushing thousands to the big cities each year, to live in unplanned unsanitary conditions in a slum near you. Without doubt these are times to be thinking about poverty and insecurity.

So is the third signal the green light in this story? Is organised charity the answer to Bangladesh’s problems of poverty? In Britain, organised charity did not then (and does not now) solve the problem of poverty. But then nor did the progress of capitalist development, which is why the welfare state was so essential for economic growth and human development. In a fast-growing capitalist society like Bangladesh there will always be a need to support those left behind.  Charity and religion plug some of those gaps. Achieving middle-income status means a large, necessary investment by the state in the Bangladeshi people. There will be more, not less, need for strong safety nets and for care of the elderly, disabled and sick. These are protections that only states can provide. No amount of business success and economic growth or charity work can meet this need.

This is no criticism of private charity, or of the Jaago Foundation in particular, about which all I know and hear is good. The energy of the young volunteers is particularly valuable, and should be channelled wisely. But this marker of change in how the elites perceive the poor raises a key challenge, one about the next generation of Bangladeshi elites and the growing young middle class. How will they perceive the problem of poverty? What do they know of rural hardship, famine and disaster? How will their perceptions influence their actions when it is their turn to take charge? That problem of poverty is far from gone, even if officially invisible in Gulshan. 

I passed these signals en route to the Hay Festival – a world class celebration of global literature and the arts in the cultural heart of Dhaka city. Surely we are middle income now?