For the Greater Common Good: On the Business of Development

By Akanksha Sharma

What happens 'in the name of development'?
Who's winning-companies or countries?
Are we underestimating the power of philanthropy?
Can we have prosperity without profits?
What are the equations between politicians, plutocrats and 'others' in between?

In the present global economic order, more than one-third of the 100 largest economic actors today are private companies, and not countries. CEOs of international corporations are seen as dominant players in a country's economic (and often, foreign) affairs. Yet, despite the growing importance of multinational corporations in international relations, there is an equally loud demand that companies contribute towards the agenda of sustainable development. A close look at this scenario reveals a complex interplay of government policies, external relations, multilateral/international organisations, societal needs, etc.

For the Greater Common Good raises an important question-what are those complex systems that are running the world? It aims to deconstruct the blurred boundaries among businesses, governments and foreign policies to redefine the development agenda of nations and institutions. It discusses these less talked about intertwined threads of the business world, policies and diplomacy that impact the common man and details the entire ecosystem from a unique perspective, forging solution for development.

Can we offer a shared future for everyone? Can we make this a better world? Read on to know more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9789354350306

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Over a decade ago, I stepped into the social development space with the sole idea of ‘changing the world and making it better’ and in that pursuit, I worked with many people—rich and poor, privileged and marginalised—with a long list of contrasts between those ‘who have’ and the ones ‘who don’t’.

Now, as I’m writing this account of the shared space between the known and the unknown territories of development space and its layered relationships with many in the interest of sustainable development, I look at the anecdotes of my life like a laundry list of heartaches, torn spirits and broken pieces of many lives I have encountered in all these years. My journey into this oblivion started from a small town and meandered through diverse communities across continents, taking refuge in my bruised heart where I somehow managed to store all these troubling stories. It was the question—where do I put these conflicts?—that compelled me to seek answers and write this book. My little heart was running short of space, perhaps.

During all these years, I have been exposed to a wide spectrum of social issues, both at the grassroots level and in the boardrooms. My foray into this space has made me witness the cries of hunger as well as people suffering due to the lack of healthcare, access to basic amenities like clean water, sanitation, quality education and what not. I have seen little girls being sold as a piece of flesh and understand what it means when people die of deficiencies. I remember some of those days when I used to go and visit community projects, listen to the heart-wrenching stories of people and then come to quaint corporate offices for making project reports. This kind of work comes with its own cost of dealing with internal conflicts that are often unsettling. I looked for answers all through my journey, having worked across the sectors with different organisations ranging from NGOs to bilateral agencies, UN organisations to multinational corporations. Over all these years, as I worked at various levels, I closely saw and understood the intersection of the policies and their implementation at the grassroots level from several lenses with an aim to find scalable solutions to some of the most challenging development problems of our times.

My work has taken me to places—from swanky boardrooms discussing responsible business practices to cattle farms in some remote and drought-affected village of Maharashtra to the bone-chilling cold air of Antarctica, trying to understand what climate change really is. Many of you might connect to the needs and plights of the farmers of Maharashtra, but may tend to believe that visiting Antarctica must have been a good trip or maybe a privilege! But, believe me, the looming fear really dawned upon me when I realised the threat of melting ice caps, which superseded the beauty of the vast white landmass. To believe that the luxurious boardroom, the farmlands and the polar ice-caps are three independent spaces would be the stepping stone of a faulty policy structure. This is how deeply integrated we are! We can no more isolate a small village located in the valley of Himachal Pradesh from the chaos of Wall Street. And in spite of the fact that it has been quite some time that globalisation has been welcomed, we mostly don’t see or include all its elements in their entirety. And the outcome of the existent exclusion is social disparity, exploitation, biased access of resources, environmental degradation, rising risk and uncertainty in every market segment. How do we bridge this gap? One thing is indispensable—we will need resources and an environment that voluntarily and obligatorily induces each player to consider the needs and requirements of others.

The ethical dilemma of how to fit in a business perspective in the issues of social development of the less privileged has always been on my mind. I am not, and never was, stuck in the (in)famous debate of capitalism and socialism, for I always knew resources cannot be generated without businesses. I have always been concerned about developing a channel through which not only the businesses would contribute to social development but also drive the process. But above all, I want to change the narrative of big businesses being the shotguns for the poor and the deprived. One cannot build a home thinking the engineer who made the blueprint is the villain of the architecture. Big businesses are the drivers of resources and profits, they are required to make development a reality. To tap into that pool of resources, we need them to be on the same page of the narrative. To fight for what’s right, we need the help of our friends and more importantly, we will only get there by making everyone our friend, our ally. We are living in a time that constantly threatens the ethos of justice, equity and co-existence by the rising tendencies of centralisation, corruption, cynicism, crony capitalism, communalism, casteism, carbonisation and to consider the most recent blow—COVID-19. It’s time for the State, market, society, academia and media to come together for a better world and to explore a universe ahead.

I have spent my life in stark contradictions, having worked closely with the philanthropists as well as the poor farmers, their widows and other marginalised sections including transgenders, commercial sex workers, differently abled and many other vulnerable communities. And from all my accumulated experiences, I could only gather that it is a complex system and unless innovative models of collaboration are not encouraged that place businesses at the very centre in the development process, we will keep discussing the problems of resource scarcity and will likely remain caught up with the solution-deprived debates of capitalism, socialism and the entire spectrum in between. This book strives to challenge these age-old rusted concepts and break barriers.

At a personal level, this book is a result of all those silent shouts that were never made but were deeply disturbing. This book intends to share the entire ecosystem from a unique perspective, forging solutions for development. It is a cumulative account of endured experiences, gathered facts and innovative approaches. In some way, it is the outcome of the many questions that have perturbed me for years:

Can hope translate into reality?

Can we offer a shared future for everyone?

Can we really make this a better world?

And many more!

SECTION I

We, the Commons, look at the world with open eyes,

Yet, we fail—

We fail to see what needs to be seen in black and white,

We fail to hear truths that dissolve in the cries of deficiencies,

We mostly base our beliefs on inadequate details and its many institutional versions,

We, the Commons, fail to know the essentials of living in this fluid world.

Development, Businesses, Trade, Policies, Diplomacy, etc.,

We fail to see their many affairs—legitimate and illegitimate,

We fail to understand all that exists beyond the insufficient alibies,

We fail to see our very own magnificent characters despite playing insignificant roles.

We, the Commons, remain caught up in our own little battles,

The battles of survival that has many names,

The many dimensions of inequality, as we call them,

We, the Commons, eventually get consumed in our own little battles.

We draw our convenient narratives of such inadequate truths, after all,

And get used to the vulnerabilities and rising disparities all around,

But the saddest of all is trading-off our pursuits with the acceptance of deficit truths,

And not even shed tears on the graves of our defeats.

Isn’t this the story of you, me and everybody else?

Maybe it’s true that the world, as they say, is run by little else!

1

In the Name of ‘Development’

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

—Mahatma Gandhi

I don’t really understand where to begin when we talk about ‘development’. I reflect on these words of Gandhiji because I grew up in a country that was ruled by the East India Company (EIC) for 246 years (1612–1858) before the imperial British Raj took over and ruled over a population of about 240 million people until its independence in 1947. India is not the only example on the globe. History tells us that ‘all this happened in the name of development’.

In the early 17th century, the EIC deputies entered the foyer of the Mughal durbar for the first time. They came as emissaries to mediate for favourable trade relations with Emperor Jehangir. The initial plan was to penetrate the flourishing spice market of South-East Asia, but this aspiration was frustrated by Dutch supremacy in the market. In 1623, 20 traders—half of whom (10) served the EIC—were tortured and executed in Amboyna (present-day Indonesia) by agents of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). After this incident, the company shifted its focus towards India.

Emperor Jehangir allowed the EIC to start building its base and factories along the eastern as well as westerns coasts of India. Operating from such an advantageous location, the EIC set forth to build a mighty trade empire. It started trading in spices, textiles and luxury goods and parallelly tapped into the skills of Indian artisans. Meanwhile, the EIC, which was a joint stock company whose ownership was shared between its shareholders, made headway in the distribution of risks and costs associated with the voyages amongst its investors. The company expanded in size as well as influence. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the shares of the EIC, though bullish in nature, had become a stimulant for the British economy, which drove the company to become one of the most powerful financial institutions of Britain.

Further, in the name of development, the company reduced India from a power centre in politics to a ‘colony of exploitation’. The slogans of development have continued since the wars of independence during the colonial past, in which many lost their lives, to now, over 70 years of independent India, yet the poor continue to struggle and basic human necessities like roti, kapda aur makaan elude the majority. However, election manifestos, public policies, business treaties, foreign policies and media all talk about development as if it is some invisible demon.

I’m not getting into the definitions of development, which has already been defined by many great people in different times and circumstances. I have experienced a life of sheer ‘inequality’ of all kinds, and the objective pursuit that triggered this book is to look for some possible solutions for a ‘less unequal’ world.

Consider the following:

In October 2015, the World Bank came up with a new extreme poverty threshold, which was pegged at $1.90 per day (earlier it was $1.25) with a comparison base being purchasing power parity terms of 2011. Thus, poverty is measured by the number of people surviving below a sum of $1.90 per day. Though efforts at reducing poverty have been effective, inequality is stubbornly rising, especially in developing countries. In addition to the measurement of extreme poverty, the World Bank also added two other thresholds for measuring poverty: one for the low-income countries and another for higher-middle-income countries, which are pegged at $3.20 and $5.50 per day, respectively.¹ Owing to the new thresholds of poverty, the poverty estimates in countries like Brazil, which are not seen as poor countries specifically, have also inflated. In Brazil, the number of people living below the cumulative poverty threshold rose from 8.9 million to 45.4 million, which is almost equal to one-third of the country’s population.² Being poor in Bangladesh, Lebanon or Madagascar is not the same as being poor in Brazil. In a global shared-prosperity narrative, considering the measurement of poverty as defined by the World Bank, both the absolute and relative extent of poverty mirror a very grim image.

In India—the seventh-largest country in the world with an area of 3,287,263 square kilometres and the second-most populous county in the world after China—around 1.4 million children die each year before they attain the age of five! India, along with Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, is one of the most malnourished countries of the world. A study by international children’s charity, SOS Children’s Villages, shows that as high as two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 per day.³ According to the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2019 published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), India is home to almost 370 million poor people, one of the largest domestic poor population shares in the world. The report further states that though India managed to pull around 270 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the line back to square one where 260 million people, who were earlier on the brink of the poverty line, will now be pushed back to definite poverty.⁴

To say the least, the income-based definition of poverty and data analysis done on the basis of income do not reflect even the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the measure fails to capture the intrinsic and exhaustive fundamentals of poverty. In India, the poverty line is measured on the basis of the cost of consuming 2,400 calories in rural and 2,100 calories in urban areas. Absolute income or fixed per-day consumption ability does not even capture the difference in the standard of living between those immediately below the poverty line and those failing to earn subsistence income. It is an apathetic simplification that glaringly discounts the definition of poverty. To believe that a person who consumes 2,000–2,500 calories a day is not poor is probably one of the most distorted ideas ever. I wonder how we managed to legitimise such gross disposal of basic human sustenance as norms of adequacy and dignified survival. The criticality of ‘essentials’ for an adequately dignified life cannot start and end with meals worth 2,500 calories a day. It principally requires a whole lot of things like access to basic and higher education, clean drinking water, quality healthcare and sanitation facilities, adequate nutrition for the overall growth of an individual, suitable living spaces, avenues of skill development, assurance of employment, fair remuneration, social security and, last but not least, representation in decision-making processes and positions. While income- or consumption-based measures categorically fail to capture the ability of the poor to avail these ‘critical essentials’, the quality differentials in these essentials do not even come into the picture. This is a vicious circle where poverty is both the cause and the consequence—inaccessibility to opportunities of growth and development renders individuals unfit (unskilled) for new-age jobs, thus putting a lid on their employability. With stagnant employability, the opportunity to come out of poverty and reach a position of representation gets thwarted in silence. Besides, in the Indian context, even if we are to consider the relevance of the absolute income- or consumption-based measure of poverty, if the thresholds of 2,100 and 2,400 calories are even slightly tweaked to arrive at 2,500 calories while keeping other things constant (that is, no change in the standard of living), the poverty rate will shoot up from 24% to 40%. And, if we are to apply the methodology adopted by the US to measure poverty, then almost 95% of the Indian population will end up below the poverty line.⁵

The tip of the iceberg—the iceberg being ‘development’—is composed of many components, and poverty is just one of them. And so, does lying above the poverty line, in any way, ensure accessibility of the ‘critical essentials’ required to live an adequate life? A country’s annual total produce could overshoot with no major change in its poverty situation. Rising gross domestic product (GDP) can reduce the absolute number of ‘classified poor’ of a country, but per capita consumption, which is derived by dividing GDP with the population of the country, is a highly distorted indicator of development, especially in a country where the richest 1% of the population holds 42.5% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds a tiny 2.8%.⁶ The richest 1% can go on adding more and more to its businesses, thereby, adding to the GDP and, thus, to the growth of the country, but they might not show any improvement in the development landscape. While India is hailed as a growing economy and a rising player in the international fraternity, social inequality in the country is brazenly overshooting. The last three decades saw a hyper increase in inequality in the country. While the endowed ones are growing richer and richer, the poor ones are struggling to earn subsistence level income where access to quality healthcare and educational facilities is still a pipe dream. According to the report ‘India: Extreme Inequality in Numbers’ by Oxfam, 73% of the wealth generated in the year 2017 went to the pockets of the richest 1%. In the same year, the poorest half of the population, which roughly estimated at around 67 million Indians, witnessed a mere 1% increase in their wealth. A healthcare facility is less of a necessity and more of a luxury in India. To quote the report,

Many ordinary Indians are not able to access the health care they need. 63 million of them are pushed into poverty because of healthcare costs every year – almost two people every second…. It would take 941 years for a minimum wage worker in rural India to earn what the top paid executive at a leading Indian garment company earns in a year…. It would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a technology company makes in one year.

What is scary is the fact that in a country like India—where we are fighting a vast array of social evils like deep-rooted gender discrimination with palpable bias against the girl child, rising crime against women, rampant open casteism, communalism, ghettoised regionalism atop rising modern-day social evils like suicide amongst teenagers and youths, drug abuse and cyberbullying—these economic and empirical evidence reflect the dark underlying current of social conditioning that foster incapacity to come out of the borehole of poverty and inequality. These trends are not restricted to India alone. All underdeveloped and developing countries are following more or less a similar growth trajectory and, for the sake of this discussion, a similar development paradigm, with some exceptions like China.

The Cost of Breaking Sacred Promises

The fractured development narrative is not an isolated trend. Governments, billionaires, corporate nations, multilateral organisations, the United Nations (UN), cultivated masses and public intellectuals, media hubs, social reformers, professionals and experts, all are aware of what needs to be done. The answer is loud and clear—all influential and informed economists of the world unanimously agree that eradicating poverty and inequality is the prerequisite for a fair and just world that actively promotes equal opportunity and development for all. However, in spite of such a widely acceptable common goal towards equality and development, we live in a world where our news reports reflect the persistence of poverty, farmer suicide, girl-child selling, lack of educational opportunities and suitable jobs, prohibitive healthcare services, political conflict, the refugee crisis, etc., the list is never-ending, quite literally.

It is not that we are unable to identify the crisis around us. However, like many other developing countries, the developmental crisis of India has also been underreported. If we can speak and pontificate about growth and development in every forum, on every podium and at every discussion, then why do we not see the same in reality? Have we identified the backlogs of development just so we could have something to discuss, debate and disagree till time runs out? Will we never have a world where differences due to levels of development—underdeveloped, developing and developed—will cease to exist? With such humongous awareness about the disadvantaged and impoverished sections of the global population, I wonder what is going unnoticed, for we can’t deny the fact that words and actions of the global population, at this point in time, are not in sync.

In 2015, the UN came up with a set of 17 universal goals called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. It was a call to action to all governments to actively join hands in building a fair and just world while preserving the planet. The SDGs or Global Goals are: (i) eradicating poverty, (ii) ending hunger, ensuring food security and improving nutrition, (iii) good health and well-being across demography, (iv) inclusive, dependable education and skill learning, (v) achieving gender equality while empowering girls and women, (vi) availability of clean drinking water and sanitation for all, (vii) accessibility to clean, affordable and sustainable energy, (viii) promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth and decent, productive employment for all, (ix) developing infrastructure, industrial capacity and promoting innovation, (x) reducing inequality within and amongst countries, (xi) building safe and sustainable cities and human settlements, (xii) promoting responsible consumption and production, (xiii) combating climate change and global warming, (xiv) conserving marine resources and protecting oceans and seas, (xv) protecting and restoring flora, fauna and ecological systems on land,; combating deforestation, desertification and land degradation, (xvi) ensuring peace and justice and inclusive and accountable societies for all, and (xvii) strengthening global partnerships for sustainable development.

These 17 SDGs are not a bunch of fresh revelations; discussions on development around the SDGs have been going on for quite some time now. But before we move ahead, first a quick look at the logic behind the universal goals that the world has set for itself. My reasoning behind listing the SDGs has three underlying implications:

1) These 17 universal goals provide us with a precise and strategic list of what all needs to be achieved in order to bridge the developmental gap between societies. While the world is struggling hard to deal with the scourge of poverty, inequality, unemployment and political backlash within the complex dynamics of the modern-day world, it is very easy to lose sight of the goals that the global family needs to adhere to. These SDGs have 169 sub-targets, which serve as measuring milestones in the process of achieving the larger goals. Amidst all the functionaries and directives of governance, interactions and networking of businesses, consumption and expenditure of common people, production and profits of entrepreneurship, diplomacy and collaborations between and amongst different agents of growth and welfare, these SDGs listing provide us with an anchor that will prevent us from drifting away from the development goals. To my understanding, the list could not have been any more inclusive. So, reminders of these SDGs are extremely crucial while drafting and signing deals and integrating eco-socio-political operations and processes.

2) The SDGs drafted by the UN were more or less accepted by all the participating countries. Even global business leaders endorsed the listed goals. A comprehensive focus on all the 17 SDGs will allow us to understand that these SDGs are mutually exhaustive of all the causes, and when realised will definitely lead us to a better, fairer and just world. While most of the countries and agents of development agreed on the list, countries like Japan and the UK found the list to be impractical and unwieldy, suggesting that a narrower brief would have been easier to implement and relatively achievable. For instance, David Cameron, the British PM from 2010 to 2016, stated that instead of 17 there should have been 10 calls to action parameters for the governments. ⁷ What I am trying to imply is that even though there had been ifs and buts, the world, in general, was in sync with the SDGs listed by the UN. Thus, the need for collaboration was accepted worldwide. With some additions and subtractions here and there, the decision-makers of the globe were on the same page.

3) The SDGs set by the UN are both colossal and arduous, and the realisation of the same will require massive investment and resource pools. The