Death Of Dinesh Das, A Third Or Fourth World Journalist

Again there is another death on a Dhaka street. The latest victim is Dinesh Das, a Third or Fourth World journalist. And, it is almost the same tale of a Third or Fourth World city, its traffic management system, and of a part of a society with its indifference, brutality and callousness.

The accident-account is the same old story: an indifferent bigger vehicle’s wheels crushed a smaller one, the smaller vehicle rider was the unfortunate guy, a wrong time and a wrong place for the lone rider, brutal high speed and hapless slow speed, and an ill-managed traffic system in an illogical city. What’s the output of the irrational equation? Last journey of a life.

The story turns unbearable as one gathers information from press: the journalist was without job, without money, without the capacity to enroll his small daughter in school, was failing to pay monthly house rent. The brutal facts are bared before a citizenry: a brutal system – you have to work and work, you have to run and run in a nasty rat race simply for keeping your nose afloat, you have to pass each and every day throughout your life of uncertainty, you have to be faithful to the system, you have to serve the system, and there will be brutal wheels waiting and running for you to crush, to send your spouse to the same circle without any escape route. And, then, all after this “kind” arrangement of the system, you, a journalist, you a teacher, you all have to be diligent to work, be faithful to duty designed by meager salary, be incorrupt, and be the mirror of honesty. And, your knowledge will allow you to be aware of the intricacies of plundering tricks, but your knowledge of alertness will tell you not to tell the tricky plundering truths. Nice punishment sticks are in the wings if you deviate, if you fail to serve faithfully, if you turn rude, if you nourish audacity deep in your bosom. What happens if you turn a renegade to the system? You will be punished, punished with uncertainty, unemployment, grinding poverty, will be pressed to the dust.

In the case of Dinesh, arguments and counter-arguments can be devised and thrown around. To some, he was rude, unscrupulous, disobedient. Thread bare analysis of his character will provide arguments for his character assassination. To many, he was a kind-hearted, honest professional, uncompromising, faithful to humanity, profession and family, a person keeping head high. Different perspectives provide comparative arguments. An individual is a product of the individual’s time and space, a product of social reality. This piece is neither to denounce Dinesh nor to eulogize the dead. Friends and colleagues of Dinesh will carry on the task. Whatever he was, that does not allow anyone to take away his life, does not permit anyone to push his family to den of uncertain days.

This piece is simply to once again tell the vulnerability of life in this city. How fragile life is in this city! How many journalists, students, poor pedestrians have paid with their lives in this city dominated by wheels? A few days back, Nikhil Bhadra encountered a brute fact in this indifferent city. The journalist lost his leg in the city street. Rest of his life? Who knows?

What happens to the families of these victims? Does the society that tries its best to expand informal sector have devised any arrangement for the victims and their families other than begging mercy and help? An inglorious path for mere survival! The social division of labor ensures smooth revolving of wheels of the society, ensures pressed life every day, presents gloomy days throughout life for millions. It ensures this guy shall be a peddler, that fellow will be a journalist, that person will be a policeman, this man shall be a teacher, that woman will be a nurse. Then it demands dutifulness and honesty of millions. Dinesh was only one of those faceless millions. Nikhil is another. Other journalist pressed under wheels months back was another. No social security, no established medical facilities for these victims! Yes, there are mercy and benevolence.

But, doesn’t the society manage bigger affairs and events with bigger money? Doesn’t the society organize bigger arrangements? Yes, there are all those but social security of Dinesh, a jobless journalist who had to rely on the last savings of his wife, only Taka one hundred and fifty or about two dollars diligently saved over months in an earthen pot, in the last day of his life.

Does the society lack that money resource that can ensure social security of journalists, of other working people? The level of surplus labor produced in the society and appropriated and robbed are evident in private celebrations, luxuries, vehicles in the capital city and villas now coming up around. Does logic tell that all after all these huge surplus labor produced working people have to languish in uncertain life, a crushed journalist’s wife has to face uncertain future waiting for mercy and benevolence? Should there be lack of resource to organize a safer traffic management system in the capital city and all over the country? And, for how long shall this state of business move on? Journalists, somebody identifies them as kalam saineek, soldiers of truth armed with pen, now aggrieved and tormented with the painful death of Dinesh Das shall search answers to the questions, the questions of livable, safer city, of a safer traffic management system, social security, and of a decent, dignified life for all journalists, for all working people.

Thank you, Professor Yunus

Thank you, Professor Yunus for your nice observations on microcredit ("Wrong turn for microcredit," Daily Star, Jan. 9. Actually the IHT carried it long ago). It is nice to know from you the state of affairs of microcredit. It seems you are concerned with the character microcredit has taken. Your observations confirm findings of a number of studies and reports that the Bangladesh press carried over the years. It is really a frank confession from one of the leading figures related to microcredit.
You, as your article claims, had no idea that microcredit "would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks. But it has." You have identified the time period since "trouble with microcredit began" in 2005. Microcredit operators began turning into profit makers; empathy towards borrowers disappeared; microcredit debtors were harmed; etc. You have also identified the cause: "Commercialisation has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance."Financial risks are transmitted to the poor;" "commercial microcredit institutions are subject to demands for ever increasing profits, which can only come in the form of higher interest rates charged to the poor." These observations are related to reality.
tive, and the poor are their prey.
Then, the consequence is there: pressing the poor for repayment. Threat, coercion, humiliation, selling of belongings, pulling down of tin roofs, desertion, suicides, are what the poor debtors go through when they get trapped in debt. Their vulnerable lives turn more vulnerable with no survival space.
A number of studies found this even before 2005. Richard Montgomery in his paper Disciplining, or Protecting the Poor? Avoiding the Social Costs of Peer Pressure in Solidarity Group Microcredit Schemes (1995), David Hulme and Paul Mosley in their Finance Against Poverty (vol. I, Routledge, London, New York, 1996), and Aminur Rahman in his study Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh, Anthropological Study of the Rhetoric and Realities of Grameen Bank Lending (Westview Press, Colorado and Oxford) cited the harsh reality debtors face.
Interest rate is a burning problem microcredit debtors face. But it is not the only problem that they encounter. It is not the only factor that traps them in the debt cycle. The source of interest should be looked into before the rate of interest. The source leads one to appropriation of surplus labour.
The premise microcredit stands on is wrong. The poor are asked to be entrepreneurs although most of them do not have the traits that make an entrepreneur, and the environment and conditions are not always present to facilitate entrepreneurship. On the other hand, household-based isolated production/service micro-units are asked to compete with each other and with macro-competitors in a macro market. It is actually an indeterminate equation.
A society overwhelmed with poverty cannot buy its liberation from poverty through thousands of micro-enterprises. Poverty is not only an economic question. It is a political question also; and micro-enterprises do not have the capacity to resolve the political questions related to poverty. Moreover, an economy cannot lift itself through microcredit. Milford Bateman has discussed this in his Why Doesn't Microfinance Work? The destructive rise of local neoliberalism (Zed Books, London, New York, 2010).
Shall "steer microcredit back to course" provide the way out of poverty? Each type of capital has its own character, its trajectory. Loan capital shall not behave like manufacturing capital, usury capital's path of movement shall be different from that of industrial capital, and no one can stop capital looking for gambling from entering a casino. And, all of them have their respective destinies. Is it possible for the poor to find their survival space in company with capital that looks for profit? Utopia has long been left back by political economy.

Farooque Chowdhury Contributes on Socioeconomic Issues, and is Author of Micro Credit, Myth Manufactured.

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This article was published at The Daily Star,  on 14^th January, 2011

I don’t know

The divided reality of disparity in education is known to all. Actually, it has turned out as two educations in two societies in a country. The laughs and smiles, the dreams and aspirations, the leisure and extracurricular pursuits of all the students are not the same. Many of them always live in the narrow precinct of uncertainty, half-fed stomach, unloving environment, and cruelty while a few have the wide arrangements of attention, affection, care, fulfilled requirements, home full with laughs and parental loves, writes Farooque Chowdhury

NOW, we all know the best educational institution at the higher secondary level in the country. And, next to that, the better nine similar institutions have also been identified. The honour is for one year, till next higher secondary certificate exam results come out, and sets a new honour list or reconfirms the present one.
   It’s really nice in a society. At least, if not the whole, a section or an institution shows its mind: its utter eagerness to encourage pursuit of knowledge, its longing to recognise honest and tireless efforts, and a reflection of intellectual exercise the institution engages with. It shows the section’s concern for better education, good wishes to honour the institutions imparting education in the best and better ways.
   This way of honouring or identifying the best, etc is not new at all. Every year, along with the Higher Secondary Certificate examinations results the country comes to know a similar honour list. The secondary-level examinations also produce a similar list. But are there some problems in the waiting? I don’t know exactly. But my ignorant mind ponders.
   As far as I recollect from news reports that there are now many schools that impart HSC-level education. But all colleges have not added to them a junior wing: Secondary School Certificate. How the comparison will be made next year: between colleges and schools? Will that be between a group of institutes engaged with formal education only with HSC or HSC and post-HSC levels, and another group with SSC and HSC levels? Will that be a fair comparison? Shall not that complicate confusion? Probably a secular scale will be innovated. But that I don’t know.
   Probably an environment for competition will settle down in the world of education and will make it an arena for competition. Probably, there will be an aura for healthy growth, growth for mind and knowledge. But is the comparison gearing competition fair, even among the institutes engaged only with HSC-level education? Do all the institutes have the same facilities and the same capacities? Are all the students coming from the same socioeconomic background? Do all of them have the same opportunities, at the educational institutes they attend to and the homes they live in? The food? The living space? The space for study? The help, encouragement and motivation at home? The money power to avail private tuition, which has turned out an appendix to educational institutions? Are the capacities of teaching staff the same? Does exam result reflect labour and endeavour of teachers only? Should a college sustained by a poverty-ridden rural community be compared to an institution having learners from well-off background? Are all the teachers remunerated evenly? Are these also factors that influence performance or excellence? Then, is the way of identifying best and betters fair? I don’t know. My ignorance has not allowed me to have answers to these questions.
   There are students coming from poor, working families who have to engage in income earning activities to help their families. There are girl students who have to help their mothers. The income earning activities vary: part-time engagement with the enterprise the student’s mother or father has floated with micro-credit or take care of the younger brother or sister while the mother engages with micro-credit enterprise or with household chores or work as a farm hand. In areas, especially in the rural areas, seasons determine study clock of students and their attendance in educational institutions. Power of poverty pushes out many students from the temple of knowledge. Some of them are fortunate enough to have the strength to be stubborn and decline the diktat of poverty. They pursue their dream: get formal education. These students overwhelm many colleges.
   There are colleges that are fortunate enough that they don’t have the opportunity to enrol half-fed, hard-pressed students, students coming from low-income families. The divided reality of disparity in education is known to all. Actually, it has turned out as two educations in two societies in a country. The laughs and smiles, the dreams and aspirations, the leisure and extracurricular pursuits of all the students are not the same. Many of them always live in the narrow precinct of uncertainty, half-fed stomach, unloving environment, and cruelty while a few have the wide arrangements of attention, affection, care, fulfilled requirements, home full with laughs and parental loves.
   Doesn’t this reality get reflected in the performance of respective students, and in turn in the performance of respective colleges? What role the teaching staff can play in overcoming this gap that determines the performances? Then, should there be a comparison? Is the comparison fair? Hasn’t the inequality in education taken away the base for comparison? Was there even a posture of fairness by the Roman Empire as a gladiator was provided with arms to face either a beast or another armed gladiator? I don’t know the answers.
   All these are probably trifling questions. Probably institutes concerned with education, quality of education, level of performance of educational institutions should not overwhelm them with the questions of inequality in the lives of sections of students. Those institutions should not get influenced by the inequality that influences students’ performance. Probably the deity of judgement sits somewhere blindly only to deliver an impartial judgement. These facts are difficult for me to perceive.
   Despite these unknown answers I continue pondering: does performance of an educational institute gets reflected in exam results only? Is it the only duty of educational institutes to deliver exam result? Then, does performance of educational institute mean only appearing and performing in exams by students? How will that educational institute be judged that teaches its students to serve humanity, to put labour for humanity, to help educate deprived children? Probably there are some more ‘things’, maybe those are values, practices, views, senses, educational institutes are to imbibe with the learners, the students. Is performance in exam the only goal of a learner? Does that goal uphold the goal of education?
   It may happen as now is a performance oriented time, as it is an achievement-oriented market. But what’s the definition of performance and achievement? Are not capacities of teachers required even for performing solely by educational institutes? What are the factors that influence that capacity of teachers? Is there any relationship between that capacity and material condition of teachers? Does that capacity grows over a year and withers away next year? Answers to these questions are not known to me. But I search for. But I don’t know where and how to search.
   But my very ordinary sense tells me that these questions are alive in the minds of the concerned. Obviously they know all these facts; they are well aware of the overwhelming fact of inequality that influences performance. Then, what is the reason behind this hullabaloo by a section? Is it related to marketing? Has education been made a commodity? Or, it may happen that education is not a commodity, but aspirations of young learners and their parents have been made a commodity. Do aspirations turn commodity? Have there interests grown up centring these aspirations to market with? These questions are difficult to answer for me. But I find advertisements in the press. Advertisement is expenditure. That is part of investment. A return should accompany an investment. For me, riddle indeed.
   I don’t know that whether inequality bitten teachers and students will be haunted by these questions or not. I don’t know that whether educational institutions striving to imbue their students with moral values will be frequented by these questions. I don’t know that whether student activism will get out of morass of non-questioning and engage with the questions.
   Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues.

This editorial published at The NEWAGE, Daily newspaper, one of the leading English dailies in Bangladesh