Correct injustices, reduce inequality

Policymakers should act to correct injustices in the society and reduce inequalities to build an inclusive and peaceful society and avoid the risk of social unrest, a leading economist said yesterday.

“We live in dangerous times which are likely to become even more dangerous if we do not correct the injustices which divide our society,” said Prof Rehman Sobhan, founding chairman of Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).

He said a stable democratic order would be sustainable only if enough people across South Asia could be invested with a sufficient stake in defending this order against challenges from a variety of extra-democratic forces.

His remarks came at a session of the two-day Ninth South Asia Economic Summit that ended yesterday.

The CPD and four other organisations from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal arranged the summit at La Meridien Dhaka.

Sobhan said significant progress had been made in South Asia in reduction of income and economic inequality but social disparities widened across the region.

He said the issue of poverty reduction had been included in the policies of all governments in South Asia but less attention had been given to the widening of inequalities.

But the policies are flawed because of emphasis on addressing the symptoms of the problem rather than challenging the sources of injustice, Sobhan noted.

According to him, injustice originates from four sources -- inequitable access to assets, inequitable participation in the market, inequitable access to human development and unjust governance.

“If we aspire to build more peaceful societies we must recognise that a social order where millions of people remain condemned to lives of insecurity, poised on the margins of subsistence, where the quality of their education condemns them to a life of toil, where an episode of ill health could drive their entire family into destitution, is neither just nor sustainable,” said Sobhan.

An economic order where millions of young women are condemned to earn $50 a month and a handful of people can aspire to a first world life style because such low wages make their enterprises more export-competitive, is neither just nor sustainable.

 “The income gap between the garment workers of South Asia, living on subsistence wages, and the owners of these enterprises who enjoy first world life styles, remains offensive to any notion of justice or economic rationality,” he said.

He also spoke of the unequal access to credit and market as well as the growing disparity in the quality of education.

“In such societies today, the principal inequity in the education sector is manifested in the growing divide between a better educated elite with access to private as well as foreign education and the resource poor who remain condemned to remain captives within an insufficiently funded and poorly governed public education system, supplemented by poor quality private or denominational schools.”

In an increasingly knowledge-based global economy, which is driving the IT revolution, inequitable access to quality education, relevant to the dynamics of the market is emerging as a source of exclusion for poor and projects itself as one of the principal features of an unjust society, he warned.

He said insufficient and inequitable access to health care is also compounding the inequities in education.

Ill-provisioned public and private health services expose the poor to a life of insecurity where earning opportunities can be disrupted by episodes of ill health, he said.

He said this inequitable and unjust social and economic order was compounded by a system of unjust governance.

Sobhan said excluded people were denied adequate access to representation in the systems of democratic governance from the local to the national level.

“Representative institutions tend to be monopolised by the affluent and socially powerful who then use their electoral office to enhance their wealth and hereby perpetuate their hold over power,” he said, adding that the benefits of democracy remained the privilege of the elite supported by small collectives of sectional power.

“Electoral institutions are captured by money, increasingly monetised and administrative process is increasingly becoming commoditised,” said Sobhan.

He suggested that policymakers expand the ownership and control of poor people over assets, strengthen the capacity of poor to compete in the market, democratise their access to a knowledge-based society and ensure quality healthcare for all.

Selim Jahan, director, Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme, said that equality of opportunity and outcomes in a society should be norms, not an exception.

SR Osmani, professor of University of Ulster, UK, said that South Asia was doing poorly in addressing the underlying reasons of injustice.

Justice within home is a precondition for economic prosperity and regional integration, he said.