The New Nation - Internet Edition

Village credit organisation may boost rural economy

Mahfuzur Rahman

Ranju Mia, a spirited young man of a sleepy village in Gaibandha district, still cannot forget the day when he had to stop going to school due to poverty. Things could have been different in his life had he been able to continue his studies. Even then he has not given up.

"I've buried all my agonies with a new dream -- removing poverty from my village. It's my war against (the vicious cycle of) poverty,"says Ranju, a resident of Amjhukirpar village on the bank of Lenga Khal at Laxmipur union in Sadar upazila.

A father of two children, Ranju now makes sanitary ring-slabs for sale apart from his carpentry work. He started the business with a small amount of money he got by selling his cow.

Ranju recalls: "I had bought a cow at Tk 4,000 I got from the Social Development Foundation (SDF) in 2005 as seed money after receiving vocational training. And I didn't look back since then. I reared the cow and sold it off when it got a calf and invested the money in my ring-slab business.''

Ranju's father Mansur Ali, in his early 80s, is a vegetable vendor. He started the small business with Tk 4,000 he received from SDF as a member of the most vulnerable group of the village. "Whatever I earn by hawking vegetables is not enough for me and my wife. So, my eldest son, Ranju, helps me whenever I need money,''Mansur says.

Ranju also donated a valuable piece of land in front of his house for the construction of an office for Gram Samiti, one of the important village institutions being built by the SDF.

The SDF's main programme is the Social Investment Program Project (SIPP), a government-led initiative supported by the World Bank. SDF has conceptualised the programme to address the extreme poverty as outlined in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) of the government of Bangladesh.

The project was launched on a pilot basis in April, 2003 in Gaibandha and Jamalpur, the two most impoverished districts of Bangladesh. It is being implemented with Community Driven Development (CDD) approach that gives communities the control over planning, decisions making and investment resources. Its main objective is to develop effective financing and institutional arrangements at community level for improving their access to local infrastructures and basic services through community-driven small-scale infrastructures and social assistance.

Under the programme, villagers form development committees identify community priorities and chalk out small projects that benefit the hardcore poor (HCP) and poor.

So far, nearly 2 million people of Gaibandha and Jamalpur districts have been benefited from the project in terms of infrastructure development, seed capital, village development programme, skill development for employment, social advocacy support and utility services, particularly piped water supply in arsenic-affected rural areas.

Unlike the conventional micro-credit system by NGOs and MFIs (Micro-finance Institutions), the village institutions being built under SIPP are entrusted with the task of making savings and operating internal lending.

The village institutions are Gram Parishad, Gram Samiti, Sanchaya Sangrakkhan Committee (SSC), Village Credit Organisation (VCO) and Jibikayan Group. Jibikayan Group is formed with hardcore poor and poor members of a village, and this is the core group among all.

Describing the special features of SIPP, SDF Consultant for Community Financing Shafayet Hossain said the scope of misuse of fund or building personal/self-capital by any individual and or institution is minimal under this community financing system due to continuous monitoring by the community itself.

Shafayet said this community financing ensures quick empowerment of the rural poor and there is little scope for exploitation by any individual institution.

He said, "If the poor villagers are given financial support and access to information, they can effectively organize themselves to identify community priorities and address local problems by working in partnership with other supportive institutions. In essence, the Community Finance emphasises building financial service providers by the HCP community members for future so that they can provide financial services to the HCP and poor at reasonable rate and cost, and offshoot all rural impediments to access to credit.''

While visiting the SIPP areas in Jamalpur in March this year, World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala hoped that the poor villagers would be able to fight out poverty and assured that the Bank would continue its support in this regard.

"Poverty cannot be eliminated overnight; it takes time. But, I do believe you (villagers) will win your fight against poverty and the World Bank is with you,"she told a group of villagers during her visit to Sonakata in Jamalpur.

Overwhelmed by the success of the poor villagers in the SIPP areas, World Bank's Communication Adviser in New Delhi Sudip Mazumder said, "I hope this success (shown by the poor people in Bangladesh) can be replicated far and wide."

Meanwhile, the Social Development Foundation has set up 26 cluster offices in Gaibandha and Jamalpur districts, 13 in each district, aiming to infuse dynamism into its SIPP activities and ensure better participation of the beneficiaries in the programme.

No place to hide

Barkha Dutt

They say that some things are too strange to be anything else but real. So we can all debate whether it is life that is imitating art or the other way around, but the elaborate and intricate set of revelations that trail every terror attack in India leave one breathless.

This time, we are being told, that a woman ascetic on a motorcycle collaborated with a serving Army officer and possibly a mahant from Jammu, to set off retributive bombs in Maharashtra. Not just that; the police now say they may have had a role to play in the bombs that went off on the Samjhauta Express and killed 66 Indians and Pakistanis on the Lahore-bound train. In 2007, when the peace train was attacked, security analysts had blamed terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. These new allegations, if proven, will not just be embarrassing diplomatically (can't you just see the headlines across the border?); they will challenge our very sense of self as a nation.

But will we ever really get to know the truth? Or will this investigation also get entrapped in a maze of incomprehensible detail and then inevitably fade from public focus? Will competitive politics yet again obscure the facts and leave us only with contradictory rhetoric?

If the Jamia Nagar encounter - that apparently killed the men responsible for all the serial blasts last year - was devoured by the politics of denial within the UPA, the Malegaon whodunit has sections of the NDA apoplectic.

And isn't it serendipitous how the protests in either case tie in perfectly with the vote banks our politicians imagine are being targeted? So, depending on your point of view, or rather, your brand of politics, questioning the police in one case is a travesty and in the other, entirely legitimate.

The rest of us - cynical and bewildered - no longer know what to believe or question. In our understanding of India, everything is just as likely true as it is false.

Perhaps, even more disturbing, than the new and easy religious tagging of terror, is the implication of a soldier in the case. We can believe that the military is capable of excesses, even brutality and violations, especially while serving in conflict zones. But never before has there even been a hint of shadow on its innate secularism. The word itself - secularism - may have become disputed, politicised, ambiguous and impossible to define. But in its most common sense and simple application, the fauj is secular.

It's the reason why when communal clashes go out of control, India often turns to the army to restore sanity.

The charges against Lt. Colonel Purohit go against the very grain of what the army stands for. So, if the army believes he is innocent, it should be aggressive and unabashed in his defence.

And if it believes the allegations are true, it should swiftly make an example of him. In this case, it's tough to understand the Army's reticence and its unwillingness go beyond public assurances of cooperating with the investigations, while privately seething. If the army has a point of view, it needs to express it without fear or favour.

Because, the scary suggestion that the lines between nationalism and terrorism may have blurred, even in a single, isolated incident, is enough reason for a pluralist country to worry about itself.

In fact, I don't want to sound like a dreary doomsday type, but these are really depressing times. Terrorism tails us like a shadow and whether you label it 'Hindu' or 'Muslim', the truth is that either way the enemy now lies within. Our most cosmopolitan city is diminishing in both spirit and spunk and is suddenly debating whether it has room for 'outsiders.' We can get all worked up over a racist slur about Sikhs made by a BBC radio host in Britain. But at least Sam Mason was sacked for suggesting that a turbaned taxi driver would frighten her daughter.

That's more action than we have managed to take against Raj Thackeray who has led the violent hate campaign against north Indian migrant workers.

It would have been much simpler if one were able to dismiss his party as the loony fringe. But you can't do that anymore because the sad truth is that whether it's the Congress, the Shiv Sena or the NCP, there isn't a politician in Maharashtra who has a fundamentally different position on the 'Marathi first' motto. The old political distinctions between centrist and right wing have come to mean less and less.

Our Christian minorities have been under attack and foreign Heads of State get to question us about them. But our government can't take a clear position on groups like the Bajrang Dal that openly perpetuate violence, because that would first require it to take a clear position on fundamentalist outfits like Students Islamic Movement of India. And that it can't or won't do because of the arithmetic of political survival. Naxal violence is now an everyday fact that unfolds far away from a disinterested media. If that weren't enough, our MPs in Tamil Nadu are openly championing the cause of the LTTE, which assassinated the leader of the party they are now in alliance with. And finally, you can't hide any of this behind the great growth story anymore.

The global recession has hit where it hurts and the great economic boom can no longer disguise or soothe our other wounds.

It's fashionable to say that India's evolving democracy has emerged out of its chaos and thrives on it as well. Maybe so, but the fissures pulling at our faultlines these days go well beyond benign confusion. Perhaps like the Sensex, this is a cycle in which the good times will return. But for now, there is a simmering anger just beneath the surface that could crack us open. If we don't watch it, India could implode.

Closing Guantanamo

Elisa Massimino

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama repeatedly vowed to close Guantanamo if elected. Now, as the countdown to inauguration day begins, people are asking how and when he'll make good on his pledge.

Some are urging Obama to close Guantanamo by executive order on his first day in office. But signing an executive order or announcing an intention to close the prison camp is just the first step. Nearly seven years have passed since the United States brought the first prisoners to Guantanamo, and the policies underlying the prison's existence are firmly embedded in law and executive pronouncement.

Closing Guantanamo will require more than the stroke of a pen. It will take comprehensive policy changes and a major investment of domestic and international political capital. But it can be done, and it can be done in the new administration's first year.

How it's done will be as important as when. One thing we have learned over the last seven years is that Guantanamo is more than just a place. It is a symbol of injustice, of expediency over fundamental fairness, and of the United States' willingness to set aside its core values and beliefs. If the prison is closed, but the policies pursued there persist in another venue on United States soil, then Guantanamo won't be closed; it will just be moved.

Closing Guantanamo requires a plan for what to do with the people being detained there. Nearly 800 men have been imprisoned at Guantanamo since 2002. The vast majority -- about 520 -- have been released without charge.

Approximately 255 prisoners remain. These fall into three groups: prisoners not suspected of any criminal activity; prisoners suspected of criminal activity in third countries; and prisoners suspected of having committed crimes against the United States.

The first group, those against whom we have no - or insufficient - evidence of a crime, should be released. The United States simply cannot afford to continue holding prisoners on an abstract belief or fear that they could be dangerous if released. The costs of continuing this policy are too great. Prolonged detention without charges at Guantanamo has harmed US interests by undermining counterterrorism cooperation with our allies and fuelling terrorist recruitment.

This plan will require the cooperation of our allies. To the extent Guantanamo has promoted terrorist recruitment, this is more than just a US problem now. And our allies have a shared responsibility to help fix it. Gaining their cooperation may depend on our own willingness to resettle some Guantanamo prisoners on US soil.

The Bush administration's early pronouncements that the men at Guantanamo were all the "worst of the worst" undoubtedly prejudiced our allies against the idea of resettling prisoners inside their own borders. Accepting a small number of prisoners into the United States would send an important message to our allies and establish the goodwill necessary for negotiating resettlement agreements in the year ahead. Those prisoners suspected of having committed crimes in their home countries or in third countries should be transferred for prosecution in accordance with international fair trial standards.

We should assist third countries in their efforts to conduct just prosecutions by providing them with evidence we have gathered, including witness names and statements, interrogation reports and exculpatory information or leads. Some law professors say the answer to the Guantanamo conundrum lies in concocting yet another substitute system for detaining and trying terrorist suspects to replace the Guantanamo model of detention without trial and military commissions -- a specialised court for terrorism cases.

But such a detour risks embroiling the new president in prolonged legal challenges that would obviate many of the advantages of closing Guantanamo and ending military commissions.

Most importantly, no new system has been proven necessary. As many federal prosecutors and judges can attest, the federal criminal justice system has proven itself highly adaptable in dealing with the challenges of complex terrorism cases.

The federal system is not perfect, and there is no doubt that some of these cases have strained the courts.

But experienced judges and a broadly experienced bar have handled these challenges well, balancing the need to protect sensitive national security information with defendants' fair trial rights.

For nearly seven years, Guantanamo has been a trap, not just for the prisoners held there but for American moral authority and global leadership. We have had the keys to unlock it all along. It is up to President-elect Obama to use them.