Introduction
Author:
Sobhi Mohanty
"What I am perpetually excited by is the complex interaction between social and economic systems, the power to trigger large scale change through a cascade of small-scale changes. I want to help create social reform, both through policy and at the grassroots level. Within this, I am always looking for economically viable approaches to social reform. After a stint in research, I decided I wanted to go from analysing problems to solving them. But as my on-ground work is starting to reveal, coming up with policy solutions is easier than successfully implementing these solutions on ground. Beyond implementation, it can be difficult to even make sense of the political economy of a developing country such as India, even down at the grassroots community level, and despite my deep familiarity with the cultural context. My effort to categorize my writings on development by year intends to capture the path of someone who sets out to effect social change based on deeply held personal beliefs". (May 2013)
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A pilot project in partnership with private institutions, local stakeholders, and the state government of one of the poorest states in India - Orissa. The project focuses on building entrepreneurial capacity among the urban poor, and allowing them to become successful at self-employment. The project also focuses on 'patch' income strategies, i.e. a mixture of self and wage based employment. This official website details the intervention strategy developed in this project, and showcases project data and outcomes.
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How to design an effective policy for micro-enterprise development? How to train, inform and equip micro enterprise owners so that they earn more from their existing business? How to systematically develop entrepreneurial capacity among the urban poor in a developing country? What are the problems with using self-employment as a primary tool for urban poverty alleviation? This blog is a collection of such notes & thoughts resulting from initiating and leading a micro entrepreneurship pilot project in India.
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Social and business entrepreneurs in grassroots urban India
Nayana Devi is an interesting example of entrepreneurs that don't quite fit into categories. She operates not one but multiple small enterprises, where each enterprise is essentially a self-help group. She dictates what the groups do, she invests into the machines used for each enterprise, and she seems to scale up by adding groups and adding to the production scale of some of these groups. She also does marketing for a lot of such self-help groups whose production she is not directly controlling, and takes an earning for her marketing channel. She's given me the perfect case study to explore something that's been a bee in my bonnet for a while - the need for good management of government set up self-help groups, a good business model for such enterprises, and strategies to identify and maintain all the support services required for sustaining the group enterprise over time or making it increasingly profitable. What Nayana Devi seems to have done is take this above need and run with it. Read more ...
The cycle of using micro business loans as subsistence loans
The "let's register a group" NGO/Government syndrome: The first slum we went to was a cluster of just 10-15 households, all living in a small compound that they jointly rented from a city resident. Some of the women in this cluster had registered as a Self-Help Group (SHGs), with each member running their own little business (tea stalls, variety stores etc). They opened an account for this 'group business', and took out a Rs. 25,000 loan. Each took Rs. 5000 and applied it to their own business. When I asked what happened to these business into which Rs. 5000 had been invested, they said that each of those businesses had collapsed but that they had been able to repay the loan completely. So what did they do now? my project coordinator asked.They basically said: "We took more loans". We were astonished. Read more ...
Chicken or Egg ? Sequencing policy reform
Policy makers are usually faced with a number of problems at any given time. These problems may or may not be related to each other and the sequence in which policy makers deal with these issues depends on the various criteria upon which their priority list is based. Judging the appropriate sequence is not simple. Take countries with high levels of corruption both at the national and the local government levels. Or take agriculture-based economies with extremely high inequality of land distribution. How does one plan political reform in these contexts? How can a land redistribution policy lead to effective outcomes? Read more . . .
The idea of polycentric governance
In my time at the Workshop in Political Theory & Policy Analysis, I've obviously spent a substantial amount of time going through the volumes upon volumes of research that Elinor Ostrom has published across decades. One of the concepts of governance that she has developed over time is that of "polycentric governance". What follows is a relatively simple piece of writing where I try to explain what this approach to governance means.
As always though, my focus is on the following question: How can one achieve the dual, often conflicting goals of economic efficiency and socioeconomic equity? Read more...
As always though, my focus is on the following question: How can one achieve the dual, often conflicting goals of economic efficiency and socioeconomic equity? Read more...
