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Bangladesh:
Towards Economic and Women’s LiberationVia Grameen Bank
By Garda Ghista
 
Introduction
The ‘paradox’ of Bengal, or Bangladesh, is that on the one hand it has immensegeographical, geological, agricultural resources and hence potentiality fordevelopment into a (so-called) first world nation. However, despite these abundantresources, it has remained in abject poverty, or to use the term of Paul Farmer, ‘direaffliction.’ Bangladesh has a population of 133 million people, but the plight of themajority is heart-rending. Ten percent of the people own more than 60 percent of theland. Sixty percent of the people own less than ten percent of the land. Illiteracy isnearly 40 percent. Infant mortality is 80/1000. More than 50 percent of the peopleare landless. These landless people survive as sharecroppers or worse, as daily wagelaborers, with men earning 33 cents daily and women 20 cents. Hence for themajority, at least one of the five necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, health careand education) are missing. In macro-economics, this is defined as absolute poverty.At the local level, the wealthy rural landowners have control because they own mostof the land. The worst legacy of the British in Bangladesh/greater Bengal was toprivatize the land and create a class of wealth landowners (zamindars) who wouldgive the British blind support. To survive, the landless laborers are compelled to takeloan from moneylenders at an annual interest rate of 150 percent! At the nationallevel, the government cooperates and colludes with the rural landowners. Hence thepoorest of the poor have no solution. They cannot turn to any authority for redress of their grievances. Perhaps most damaging of all is the foreign aid. USAID providesunilateral aid which means, we give you money, you buy our goods. Hence it is aidwith a selfish motive. Multilateral agencies like UN, UNESCO, WB and IMF give
 
money. But WB and IMF give with heavy strings attached,that read: “We give you loans, you implement ‘structuraladjustment,’ a euphemism to give TNCs and MNCs freereign to exploit, plunder and transfer profits back to theirhome base. Structural adjustment says, drop tariffs, allowfree trade, allow foreign ownership of land/resources, andplant single cash crops for export – so we make moneyregardless of collateral damage, i.e., you landless peoplestarving on the roadside. Structural adjustment has beendevastating by increasing the poverty, increasing the gapbetween the rich and the poor, and destroying traditionalfamily life. The foreign aid coming in the form of cashgoes into government pockets and is used to strengthenthe military so as to consolidate and maintain politicalpower. The question looms large: how to raise the massesout of abject poverty?There is hope. Professor Mohammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, along with a handful of other sincereNGOs are leading the way in bringing relief to millions of impoverished, landless women and their families.Proshika has worked for years expressly to raise socialand political consciousness among the poorest of thepoor, so that they begin to use the strategy of civil disobedience to demand theirhuman rights. What follows is a detailed study of the Grameen Bank, its effects,limitations and summary of its results for the people of Bangladesh in being able toalleviate poverty, remove corruption, break the grip of fundamentalism and herald anew dawn for the people of this sweet, simple, magnificent land.
Birth of Grameen Bank
The cause, the impetus that created the Grameen Bank Project was the famine of Bangladesh in 1974. At that time, Muhammad Yunus was Professor and Head of theEconomics Department at Chittagong University, located at the southeasternextremity of the country. Skeleton-like people began filling the train platforms andbus stations, and then the roads. They were everywhere. Old people looked likechildren and the children looked like old people. Muhammad Yunus writes:
The starving people did not chant any slogans. They did not demandanything from us well-fed city folk. They simply lay down very quietly onour doorsteps and waited to die.
[1]Death by starvation happened so quietly, so inexorably, Yunus wrote, and all for lackof a handful of rice! Seeing the mass starvation everywhere around him, Yunusbegan to question himself, and began to dread his own lectures. What was the use of all his complex economic theories if right outside the classroom people lay on theground waiting to die? Thus developed in him the desire to understand the practicaleconomics of the poor person’s existence.Next to Chittagong University was a village called Jobra. Jobra became his laboratory.He and his students went there almost daily to learn about the people in the village.What he learned in the village of Jobra became the foundation for the concept of micro-lending, later known as the Grameen Bank. Little did he realize that the seedhad been planted for the “bank for the poor,” today serving 2.5 million people.
 
Earlier in 1964 Yunus had gone to Vanderbilt University, USA, where he completedhis Ph.D. in economics under the guidance of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Thelessons he learned from his adviser were to remain with him his entire life.Georgescu-Roegen taught him simple, precise economic models that would later helphim develop Grameen. He also taught Yunus that there is no need to memorizeeconomic formulas. Rather, the important thing is to understand the underlyingconcepts driving the formulas and making them work. He also impressed Yunus thatthings are not complicated, and economics is not complicated. It is only humanarrogance that leads people to give complicated answers to simple problems.Georgescu-Roegen further made Yunus understand that without the human side, “economics is just as hard and dry as stone.”[2]On December 16, 1971 Bangladesh won its independence, but during the war threemillion Bangladeshis died and another ten million left the country as refugees.Millions more were victims of rape and other atrocities committed by the Pakistaniarmy. Bangladesh was destroyed economically and socially. Millions of people neededsocial, moral and spiritual rehabilitation. Yunus knew he had to go back andparticipate in the process of rebuilding his country. On his return he was invited tohead the Economics Department at Chittagong University. And thus, after the famineof 1974, he began his research into the lives of the poor. He and his students wenttime and again to Jobra, asking the villagers questions: What crops did they grow?Did they own cultivable land? How did the people without land survive? What skillsdid the villagers have? What did they want to do to improve their lives? How manyfamilies could feed themselves and how many could not? Who were the poor, andwho were the poorest of the poor? Dr. Yunus also became angry. He realized that thebrilliant economists of the world do not spend time discussing poverty and hunger,because they believe that if the right economic model is implemented, poverty andhunger will be automatically alleviated. Economists spend all their time analyzingdevelopment and prosperity but hardly any time on the development of poverty andhunger.[3]The first experience Yunus undertook was growing more food for the villagers of Jobra. He began studying rice – low-yielding local varieties and high-yieldingvarieties developed in the Philippines. He and his students personally went into thefields and taught the farmers the importance of planting the seedlings at regularintervals and in a straight line, to maximize crop yields. Many local people laughedcontemptuously at his efforts. But, it only made Yunus more determined in hispassion to uplift the lives of the poor. This was his singular most powerfulcharacteristic – his endless drive to bring a better life to those living in dire affliction.In the winter of 1975 he began studying the problem of irrigation and found unuseddeep tube wells that lay idle and abandoned by the farmers. He formed anagricultural cooperative with the farmers, saying he would contribute the cost of fuelto run the deep tube well, the seeds, fertilizer, insecticide and technical know-how.The sharecroppers and farmers would contribute their labor. With great difficulty heconvinced them to try growing rice in the winter season, and the project ended insuccess, with a bumper crop of rice for all. As Yunus writes, there is nothing sobeautiful as farmers harvesting their crop of emerald green standing rice![4]Dr. Yunus continued his research on the poor of Jobra. He learned that it wasessential to differentiate between the poor and the very poor, the very poor and thepoorest of the poor. A ‘poor person’ could mean a lot of things. Furthermore, whentalking about poor people, reference to women and children was not mentioned.
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