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Bottom of the pyramid: hopes & despairs
K. CHANDRASEKARAN
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …”
Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities
A scene that portrays, nay, characterises the situation in France just before the Revolution. The powers that be did not realise the imminent catastrophe! They paid dearly for their short-sightedness! (I am incidentally amused at a clipping from a newspaper on a Minister from Andhra Pradesh. He seems to have advised the poor, who were complaining about the rising price of rice, “Why do you insist on rice? It is better to have a chicken, two eggs and a glass of milk e
very day. It is wholesome food…”) What followed in France was very painful bloodshed and slaughter of innocent and uninvolved people. I see such a situation, clearly depicted by those immortal sentences in the book, developing very fast in India at this moment.
Glaring disparity
Take a typical scene from a Chennai slum where once in five years, the springs of hope appear for a very short period before turning into winters of despair. Consider three families who have been living together in adjacent and so called “homes” under identical economic conditions and with the same amount of education or the lack of it. A member of one of these families gains an employment in a nationalised bank in a menial position. One from another family is employed in an IT major in a similar position. The third and unfortunate family has a member employed in a private household as a servant.
In three to six months, these families witness a glaring economic disparity among themselves! The one at the lowest rung of employment is unable to understand how this could have happened! They do not understand the global economy, the power of collective bargaining or the selective flow of money.
This small area becomes a potential point of volatility, leading to an understandable frustration turning into an uncontrollable anger at society. And there are thousands and thousands of such slums elsewhere in the country.
No wonder these lead to the anarchic situations we have been witnessing in recent times. How are you going to convince these multitudes of angry people that their turn would come?
Like any other typical middle-class Indians, given to unswerving optimism moderated with a deep conviction of fatalism, I had grown to believe that the global economy and the IT revolution would magically move every Indian from rags to riches in a decade!
Indeed many good things have happened. The ordinary men and women, who were patiently waiting their turn for a quality life while changing governments with fond hopes of a change of fortunes, recognised that education brought in empowerment.
Unaffordable education
But the growing inflation, high cost of the much wanted but growingly unaffordable education, unprecedented competition, and the avarice of middlemen and unprincipled politicians, prevented many of the really needy and downtrodden people from reaping the benefits of the technological empowerment.
In fact, their lot became much worse, caught between aspirations and unending frustrations. The divide between the rich and the neo-rich on one hand and those who were really at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” kept on increasing to unbearable levels.
I am convinced about Prahalad’s argument about the need for empowering the disenfranchised lot who also have aspirations, ambitions and capability to uncover the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. There have been arguments against this proposition.
“Real equity is a myth,” some say. Nobody denies that. What is relevant is, accepting the fact that it is a highly inequitable world, but trying to provide “equality of opportunity” to groups of people who have the same capabilities, the same levels of knowledge and who are in similar situations. Why don’t we have a serious discussion on how to educate the needy and poor to empower them through appropriate knowledge? Why don’t we involve the various genuinely concerned NGOs to help arrive at a strategy that would provide inclusive education and opportunities? It is time we generated a public debate on this.
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