INDIAN DEVELOPMENT economist and activist Devaki Jain, a noted Gandhian, on Monday suggested a new paradigm for growth, collectively developed by a group of feminist economists that she described as the bubble-up growth.
“As opposed to the traditional economic theory of trickle-down growth, the bubble-up growth would be driven by empowering women at the poorest level by guaranteeing employment and this would then power production that would lead the growth and move the economy in a broad-based manner,” Dr Jain, 78, said at a seminar in London on women as agents of change.
She said for women in poverty to escape that poverty trap, “we need a new vision of what is economic growth, who determines it and to redefine the growth paradigm.”
The Brics, which are growing rapidly, should adapt different paradigms of growth and not just the traditional ones, which have failed the Western nations, as evident during the recent global economic crisis, Dr Jain said.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the keynote speaker, who later launched Peace and Democratic Society, a follow-up to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s 2007 report Civil Paths to Peace, said that real change would come only when women themselves would become agency of change.
He quoted one of the early Bengali long poems from 16th century, called Phullorar Baromasha, to show how a woman at that time talked of how tough life of women was as compared to the men.
“It was timely in the 16th century and I suspect it was timely in the 12th also, and it is timely today and I hope it may not be timely again at some time in future,” Prof. Sen said, adding however that there has been a lot of progress.
“The whole issue of the status of women in social realisation on one side and the agency of social change on the other has been something which deserved attention for a long time, got some attention, but never quite an adequate amount,” he said.
Raising the issues of inequality and neglect within the family faced by women and girls, Prof. Sen said that they suffer from “tyranny of the family,” borrowing the title of a book on the subject co-authored by Devaki Jain.
Women face this tyranny in a vast range of dimensions, from the life expectancy to health care, nutrition, primary education and then higher education, and even over the issue of comfort, Prof. Sen explained. “There is a battle of food within the household, it is not a safe place. It’s a place where poor women and poor girls fight for survival,” Dr Jain said.
“The battles facing the women have changed from mortality from to the fertility front now,” Prof. Sen said. Dr Jain also talked about the growing incidence of intra-family discrimination that is manifested in the selective female foeticide among more educated and affluent women in India.
“They have one girl child, but they don’t want another. The whole approach to control sex selective abortion in India has been to ban the machines that facilitate this is perhaps wrongly addressed,” she said, adding that perhaps raising the self-esteem of women could be the way to counter this.
Prof. Sen quoted Indian Census figures to show how fertility rate of more than 5.5 per couple had declined to 1.8 and even 1.2 in some Indian districts over the years to explain the influence of agency of women, or the change actively brought about by women themselves.
“The two reasons for the decline of the fertility rate were women’s education and women’s gainful employment,” he said.
Raising the issue of women’s political participation, Prof. Sen said that South Asian countries had elected women leaders in a way that had not happened in the United States as yet. Having women leaders does have a positive impact, he said and added that it was not just because the women’s perspective may come more easily to women than men, but it’s also because building up women’s leadership leads to better participation of women, which he said was nowhere near the make-up of the population.
As the founder of Feminist Economist magazine, Prof. Sen said he often gets letters addressed to Dear Ms Sen since his first name ends in “a”. “My favourite is the one which went, ‘Dear Ms Sen, They will never understand us’.”