On the rise
The Development Assistance Committee, a forum for world's major donors, increased foreign aid by over 10 per cent between 2015 and 2016 agencies do not widely publish the success they have sustained in terms of democratic process, economic growth, institutional building and budgetary support; these are the largest budget lines of donors and it is significant that there is little conclusive evidence on these indicators”.
Susan Engel of the University of Wollongong, Australia, believes the Great Foreign Aid Debate was an illusory debate as the “aid” in it was grossly overestimated. She writes: “Easterly claims there has been $2.3 trillion in foreign ‘aid’… over the past 60 years; yet 60 years ago military assistance was regarded as aid and, although that is no longer the case, aid flows are still dominated by geopolitical concerns, and not by development ones, so the idea that aid flows are all about meeting the Millennium Development Goals is at best fallacious.”
THE AID-BUSINESS NEXUS
Engel is probably speaking the truth. In 2016, journalists at the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, found that in 2014 the money given directly to poor countries amounted to $9.5 billion, which is a mere 6 per cent of a total of $165 billion! So what about the rest? Turns out a good chunk of it is spent through non-profits and private contractors. “Billions of dollars each year,” as they write, “are spent buying goods and services—everything from drugs to consultancy”.
More astonishingly still, their investigation revealed that since 2000, particularly after 2008, the links between big business and the international development aid industry had become even more intimate. To quote from their report, “the 21st century has witnessed a corporate takeover of aid... Big ngos are striking deals with multinationals too”.
Given this cosy relationship with business, it is not at all odd that aid agencies should embrace ideas like cod for disbursing aid. The donors do not want to waste their dwindling budgets on assessing impacts, while for the recipients it is more convenient to show outcomes to get more funding. It’s a win-win for both.
This brings us back to the question of how to assess the success or failure of a programme like
sbm, which is designed to measure only outcomes (toilets built), and not impacts (fewer cases of diseases attributed to open defecation). In fact, critics argue that the cod model, which is subject to the laws and practices of the recipient country, is likely to result in governments tampering with social and environmental safeguards.
For instance, last November, Leo Heller, a UN Special Rapporteur, had criticised the government for its single-minded obsession with building toilets, for, he argued, “eliminating open defecation is not only about building latrines, but requires adequate methods for behaviour change”. The government dismissed Heller as a peddler of “inaccuracies, sweeping generalisations, and biases”.
Meanwhile, the propaganda machine continues to whirr through the cogs of mainstream and social media. As the day of reckoning with the Mahatma looms, and as sbm slips on various targets, the government is reportedly resorting to ploys like diktats, surveillance and public shaming that would have certainly made Bapu queasy in his bowels.
Little wonder, this politically driven frenzy over cleansing India in a hurry is throwing up many caricatures—call them Poo-temkin toilets, a poetic distortion of Potemkin villages, fake portable villages assembled on the orders of a minister called Gregory Potemkin to impress empress Catherine II. In an article on thewire.in, Yamini Aiyer, president of the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, argues that “one casualty in this rush to meet targets is data quality. Two years into sbm and rigorous third-party evaluations on outcomes is scant. The annual latrine usage survey has only just begun.” In fact, in a field survey conducted in 1995, her group found that as many as 1/3rd households reported to have toilet in the government database were actually Poo-temkins!
It might be too early to dismiss aid agencies’ flirtation with new business models as reactionary, politically expedient, and eventually counterproductive, but even if these fears turn out to be true, it shouldn’t surprise anyone should these ideas become par for the course. Not unlike the neoliberal emperor without clothes who continues to lord over the world despite being exposed in 2008.