Elevating financial profile of a community is much easier than perceived.

By – Anoop Jha

Creating community potential inventory and building capacity

When it comes to economic development of a region or community, there are always two choices available for the governing authorities. First, to let the business go on as usual that is apparent in majority of cases, second, to take deliberate catalytic measures to enhance the economic profile of a community as a whole and hence elevating financial profile of the individuals and households. In the first case, all the efforts of government remains targeted to somehow sustain the past economic growth rate of the region, general governing psychology is to please the community with showing little increment in overall growth rate, hence securing the vote bank and if that is not possible there are so many tricks to present even weak economic profile and data in number of glorified ways. If you want to taste a flavor of statistical manipulation, a widely recommended book is “How to Lie with Statistics -by Darrell Huff”. Anyway, coming to the second case, it takes a vision, intelligence and determination of government and policy makers to elevate the financial profile of a community and individuals in a real sense, which is after all not that difficult as historically projected by government itself by blaming lack of resources or by policy makers, relying too much on age old economic theories, failing to understand and tap emerging possibilities, or by mainstream media which is more concerned about blaming administration and debating on trivial statistics rather than educating and helping community to find out other additional possible economic resources and options.

There is one fundamental flaw in the way government approaches the community economics. Their current method and thrust is to gather information form community, derive inferences from its analysis, propose measures to tackle it and allocate the fund to achieve the same for the given time period and done for a while. But this model is not sustainable because in this model community is totally dependent on external aid and support while their potential remains untapped. Community needs an economic model which puts community economic growth on autopilot mode; of course they need some kind of assistance from government also in terms of strategic structure, creating infrastructure and some monitory help in the beginning. A better model of economic growth for a region would be to extract the previously untapped potential of a community, every household, and every individual for their own development. A community holds key of its own success, they have huge unrecognised potential in totality, which if tapped and nourished can help them create a much better economic profile.

Census or community data are mostly related to demography and they are quantitative in nature. Here is a list of data items collected during survey by Census of India. http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/data_item_collected_in_census.aspx  

What is lacking here is the qualitative data.  Qualitative data is essential to understand the potential of individual and community as a whole, and to formulize a holistic economic strategy for the region and community which is beyond time or resources.  Government should also include qualitative items in census survey while asking questions to individuals and household like what is their strength, what economic activity they would like to peruse given a choice or if made mandatory? What are their economic aspirations? What are their hobbies or talent in which they would like to get training and government support to take it further as an additional household economic activity? What are the three immediate measures and assistance they are expecting from government as an individual or household to peruse their dream leading to economic development? What are they good at? What are the excess resources which they would like to share or transfer to society or community if needed, whether its material, time or knowledge?

Government need to prepare the inventory of potential and talent lying within the community itself. They have to find and create and nourish entrepreneur in every household and should provide every possible support and training for the same, if they want to raise the economic profile of any community, society or region. These entrepreneurial activities can be in addition to their primary economic activities. They need to create entrepreneur out of every housewife, out of every teenage, out of senior citizens. Each one of them have latent talent which need to be unlocked for they own sake and for the sake of better and autonomous society. All they need to do is to identify the potential, building capacity on that direction and create linkage between talent and market, rest of economic activities and growth will follow on its own.

Rural market urban goods – Why rural commodities haven’t succeeded to make niche position in urban market

By – Anoop Jha

Breaking the inertia of urban business dominance over rural communities

In the developing countries like India, when it comes to consumer needs the urban rural gap seems to be disappearing, which was not the case a decade ago.  The rural reliance on urban goods have been an increasing phenomenon in recent past due to higher standard of living, increased affordability, choosy customers etc. Take for example a very essential commodity of daily needs i.e. “Milk”, which is supposedly product of villages due to usual abundance of cattle, buffalos and cows, but imaging the growing dependence of rural population on “packaged milk” which is produced in some remote dairy farm and travels thousands of kilometers before being consumed in this particular village, which is quite ironical. 

Urban  dominance over rural  business 

There might me many reasons behind this particular scenario of using packaged milk in spite the availability of local fresh milk like - readily available - on demand goods, local small storage facilities for perishable goods, direct linkages to urban market, awareness to quality of goods, similar hierarchical product packaged for different affordability group, either manipulated by monopoly of big dairy owner or trying to break the monopoly of local milkman who at times manipulates with the quality of milk, availability of goods to cater to seasonal bulk demand etc. etc.

 
Question is, why the urban commodities have been able to penetrate the rural market but rural products except agro products have only been limited to the small urban cultural markets, like, Pragati maidan, Delhi Haat, seasonal artesian mela etc. Are there any utilitarian perception attached to the rural goods in urban context or has it become a showpiece item to be decorated in the drawing room or to be worn on occasional events or is it that urban merchants are way smarter than the rural counterparts? Is it that rural community has been deprived of knowledge of cunning and manipulating business skills of urban nature, which seem to be a common survival practice expansion strategy of urban businesses?  Is it that rural business lack the skill set to sell their product in quantum. Is it that intermediate agencies involved in the urban rural dynamics are taking the advantage without rural community being aware of such possibilities?  Whatever it is, this issue can be dealt with little business motivation, rural community participation, capacity building and involvement of public agencies.  

Policy makers and administrators need to strengthen and expedite urban rural forward-backward linkages along with providing business education, training related to workmanship, strengthening local art and craft, teaching ethical value of quality control, asking for community participation to benefit rural market. 

Pro-poor Regional Planning: Strategic proposal

By- Anoop Jha

Mainstream Socio – economic Integration of poor and underprivileged

Impact of Regional Planning is slow but it is long-lasting. It is directly related to growth of region hence it has to be inclusive for downstream befits. It has evolved to cater to a much larger population base. It shapes the socio-economic future trends of the region and even the nation. There are different strategies which can and should be adopted as part of the Regional Development Plan and Regional Tourism and transportation Plan. Some of the pro-poor strategies for regional planning are as follows –

Social Integration of poor and underprivileged strata of society

Reviving and reinforcing local art, culture, history, of the region   

Promoting local Artisans, craftsman and artists,

Establishing Service and food processing industries

Creating zonal art, craft, food-grain, Wholesale and retail markets as active and vibrant nodes

Networking nodes through all weather road

Small scale industries

Training

Storage facilities

Hospitality

Natural eco tourism, Food and eateries 

Rural tourism

Culture trekking

Nurturing talent pool

Resource mobilisation,

Micro financing and community based program 

Perception of space – a function (f) of day and night

Dramatic shift in Perception of Space during Day and Night.

Day and Night, an ever existent inseparable phenomenon, it’s an external influence on the perception of space, architecture and built form, an environmental influence which alter the experience of space in dramatic way, but we pay very little attention on such a wonderful aspect of such powerful influence while planning an urban setting, or while designing interior of a building. 

In day sun light is ambient and almost omnipresent when it comes to outdoor urban setting with an interplay of light and shadow, but mostly the experience of any specific outdoor space is more or less uniform and little monotonous throughout the day, while night provides infinite possibilities to create, mould, play with space, volume and ambiance outdoor as well as indoors using variety of light sources. Volume of space is directly proportional to intensity of light source, sources of artificial light give a totally different perception on a dark night compared to day time since the space that we perceive and experience in night time. In this case the bright perceived space slowly merges into the  dark sphere of night. Hence night provides ample scope of creating user experience in an urban setting and its responsibility of planners, and architects  and landscape architects to plan and design lighting of public spaces as well interiors of a building with an aim to provide a unique experience of end use in night period. 

Ever - Shrinking Living space in Urban Area

By- Anoop Jha


Pigeonhole like housing clusters

Constant influx of population to urban areas leads to shortage of living space in city, and developers and governments are trying to find the ways to accommodate this ever-growing population into already populated city, they collectively come up with some economic housing solution with ever-shrinking living footprint and decreasing level of lifestyle, which almost resemble pigeonholes (dovecote).