The Hindu Business Line : For an economic model with a difference

Global economic growth has accelerated to 4-5 per cent per annum now, from a sluggish 1 per cent in the 1980s. Information technology seems to have integrated market forces across the globe.

Today, the number of globizens is on the rise. Developing nations, rich in energy resources, minerals, skilled low-cost manpower, and a large consumer base have become the major destinations for foreign direct investments. The Asia-Pacific region has become the factory of the world.

But, simultaneously, the income disparity and human misery have grown in an unprecedented proportion. The tendency to amass wealth through economy of scale and market manipulation destroys hundreds of sustainable economic sectors.

If a few shining metros suggest that the world has become flat, it is being blind to reality. The glitter merely hides the agony and pain of millions of people living in abject poverty.

According to a report of the World Health Organisation, water-borne diseases claim 3.2 million lives every year; this is approximately 6 per cent of all death globally. Over one billion people do not have access to safe water, while 2.6 billion live without adequate sanitation.

According to the WHO report on ecosystem and human well being, Health Synthesis, approximately 60 per cent of the benefits that the global ecosystem provides to support life on earth is being degraded or used unsustainably. The report predicts human health could significantly worsen over the next 50 years.

Is there any escape from this vicious cycle of economic growth and poverty? There is, and it is quite simple and straight forward too. There is a need to adopt a spiritualised economic model.

This does not mean asking people to adhere to religious codes. The objective is to exorcise human greed and work for global diversity. Without an integrated development of human personality, economic growth will only lead to misery. Production by the mass not mass production — the economic mantra of Mahatma Gandhi for sustainable development — is quite relevant for developing nations.

Their people have the knowledge and the skills to produce a range of food products and a variety of items from bio-degradable substances, and can find an easy market if the trade-distorting measures are removed. This will put developing nations on sustainable economic development track. A UNDP report on sustainable economic development, reflecting Gandhiji's thinking, observes that the world has become increasingly robotised and is less humanised. There is an insatiable greed, which has made globalisation a barbaric enterprise of the rich and the powerful global traders.

An unprecedented growth of industry rapidly erodes natural with many a mass production technique affecting natural resources, compelling developing nations to spend billions of dollars on some thing as natural as drinking water.

Policy-makers must strike a balance between industry and nature to save huge future costs. Dams have their uses, but should they be built on such scale as to dry up rivers, damaging farm and fishery? Often, many large projects are far from what is required on the ground, farther still from being economically viable.

Yet, they are implemented with much fanfare for the political points they score, and the rent-seeking opportunities they might offer.

Why can we not learn to harness natural resources instead of overexploiting them to their destruction? This needs exorcising greed.

(The author is a Pune-based freelance writer.)