From Subsistence to Suprasistence

As posted on yourstory.in

Over half the world simply subsists – caught in a cycle of supporting ones immediate survival. More than half of India is a subsistence economy. The word subsistence is a derivative of the word ‘exist’ which comes from the Latin word existere meaning ‘to emerge’ or ‘to be’. But what does it really mean to subsist? Typically it is thought of in terms of poverty – some amount of money that people earn - but to me it is not equivalent – I think it is better defined in terms of an energy use cycle.

Here’s what I mean. In rural India, according to the NSSO studies, people use 50% to 70% of their income to buy food which means the majority of expenditure goes towards fueling the survival of the body. Compare this to the United States where it is around 20%. Similarly, an NCAER survey in the late 1970s showed that around 90% of fuel consumption in rural areas in India is used for cooking. I assume it’s improved now but venture to guess that it’s probably still in the range of 70% or more. In the United States only 15% of household energy consumption is for the kitchen. Furthermore, fuel consumption in rural India is still largely biomass – firewood ranks highest followed by dung and crop residue. An NIC report (I’m not sure which year) estimated that 89 million households spend 31 billion hours annually in biofuel gathering. That’s a lot of time. The subsistence cycle is thus to eat to sustain the body, use the energy to gather fuel and tend to the fields and livestock and then use the energy from these efforts to once again fuel the body. Petroleum, electricity and LPG together are minimally used not because of availability but because they must be paid for with money rather than time. And in this is an implicit judgement of human worth – that its value is little more than the kCalories expended per unit time to gather fuel or transform food on the cooking stove.

Go on. Innovate!

(as posted at YourStory.in)

You’d think that with almost a billion people out there in the rural areas that there would be amazing innovations to be found there every day. But there aren’t. Search as we might innovation is hard to come by. Implicit in the definition of innovation is change, but the village ethos is about tradition. It’s about holding on to age old practices. Walk into a village and life looks almost the way it did hundreds of years ago. In my column last week I talked about celebrating human innovation. Why is there so little of it? Take a look at what India looks like from the sky, ask people a few questions and the answer is quite obvious really.

Interpreting Poverty through Images

Here is an interesting post that I came across.

Exploring Different Perspectives of Poverty Through Photography
by Duncan McNicholl

Some excerpts:
Many people only experience sub-Saharan Africa through photographs. The teary-eyed child in rags is familiar to all of us as the portrait of poverty charities use to communicate a hopelessness in need of our pity and charity. I reacted very strongly to these images when I returned from Africa in 2008 after a 4 month volunteer placement in Malawi, working with Engineers Without Borders Canada. I compared the images I saw to my Malawian friends – people who embodied intelligence, resilience, and compassion – and I felt lied to.

It seemed that these photos presented by development organizations and the media were deliberately providing only one perspective of rural Africans like my friends in Malawi, which was despair.

.....This photo project, which I am dubbing ‘Perspectives of Poverty’, is not to say that people do not suffer in Africa. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, and we must not lose sight of the fact that millions struggle to get by. But how we interpret the lives of others is critically important since it affects how we support those struggling to overcome poverty.....

The opposite is true of microfinance. As a community it projects only the face of success, making light of the difficulty and struggle of entrepreneurship and a landscape littered with failure.