What Africa has to Learn from India, or is it Viceversa

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What Africa has to Learn from India, or is it
Vice-versa?

• Richard Palmer-Jones
• School of Development Studies,University of East
  Anglia,South Asian Development, Spring 2007

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Comparisons across continents

• India and China
• Famines, poverty and growth
• Sex ratios
• Female empowerment
• India and Africa
• South Asian pessimism and Sub-Saharan African
  optimism
• South Asian success and Sub-Saharan nightmares
• Malnutrition in SSA less than in South Asia
• Learning from Asia - Agricultural growth and
  semi-arid regions
• Famine and public action
• Entitlement approach to famine and poverty
• employment guarantees
• What role for local politics administration,
  politicians and civil society
• Maharashtra, West Bengal, Rajasthan ???
• Agricultural growth, green revolutions, initial
  conditions and public action
• state support, infrastructure and agricultural
  research
• Irrigation
• agro-ecological conditions, Green Revolution,
  poverty and well-being
• Public action and economic growth

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Entitlement approach to famines

• Food Availability Decline (FAD) or Entitlement
  failures?
• Entitlements and Capabilities
• Extended entitlements
• Famines
• Natural disasters
• Malevolent states
• Conflict
• Unusual and hidden famines
• Sanctions and Iraq
• Complex (political) emergencies
• Natural triggers and political culpabilities
• Regional, national, global
• Rise of the international global humanitarianism

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EGS in Maharashtra, West Bengal and elsewhere

• Political and administrative contexts of MEGS
• Development Innovartion and Political Support
• Rational processes - technical organisations
• Conflictual processes - elite capture
• Organisational environment complex politics
• EGS provide incentives to organise to access
  resources
• Decline over time
• Political shifts and bureaucratic undermining
• West Bengal local participation
• Panchayats
• Lack technical expertise
• Small scale projects with limited productivity
  impact (jurisdictional boundaries)
• Local middle peasant capture
• Kerala?
• NREGA can it repeat MEGS/NREA?

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EGS in India

• What made it politically possible?
• How did politics determine outcomes
• success
• Trajectory origins, rise and decline
• Bureaucratic and political feasibilities
• Changing bureaucratic, economic and political
  circumstances
• Was WB NREP better?
• Panchayats in command but limitations
• Assessing well-being in West Bengal
• What prospects for NREGA?

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Comparing Well-being in Sub-Saharan Africa
South Asia

• How to assess Well-being?
• Under-nutrition
• Food Balances
• Anthropometric Measures
• Populations and sex ratios
• Does SSA have the political and administrative
  characteristics for public action?
• Does South Asia need growth or public action over
  famine and or chronic poverty/under nutrition?
• Agricultural growth, agro-ecological conditions
  and poverty reduction

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South Asian Green Revolution

• State driven
• Development of food commodity chains
• Market mediated
• Markets for farm inputs and outputs
• Output price support
• State credit
• Small farmer oriented
• not large mechanised farms
• Geo-political context
• national food security

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Sex ratio lt 15 yrs
Blue - more females, red more males, white
intermediate