Now that the first burst of excitement over the Nobel Prize has passed, we can afford to take a dispassionate look at Dr Yunus, his microcredit and his Nobel. The awarding has been in the air for the past few years and almost became a foregone conclusion after Bill Clinton made a plea in Yunus’ favour. A citizen of this country cannot but feel happy at the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a fellow Bangladeshi who has distinguished himself through his long and dedicated service to the poor, as it is assumed. Poverty alleviation has been interpreted as a way of promoting peace. We may agree. Mother Teresa also won the prize for her service succouring the poor. Poverty may be a destabilising factor but the implied linkage between prosperity and peace cannot be stretched too far. Indeed, some of the poorest countries of the world are nowhere near the scenes of world’s turbulence and turmoil.
   At any rate, Dr Yunus is said to be quite a lovable person who leads a simple life bereft of ostentation. One should, therefore, be ungrudging in thanking the Nobel committee and congratulating the winner. If Dr Yunus through his words betrayed a streak of immodesty when giving his reaction to the announcement of the prize, it should be condoned considering that the country itself became ecstatic over the award and for some time objectivity and sense of proportion were pushed to the back burner.
   To shake up the rural society, to make the underprivileged women come out of their ruts and think of improving their life and surrounding through cooperative efforts is a significant achievement. But to say that all this owes itself to Dr Yunus and the Grameen Bank will be an unpardonable exaggeration. Our Bengali mind is too impassioned. Our love is infatuation; our hate is rancour. This has been evinced in many instances, as in the limitless adulation showered on Rabindranath Tagore who has been credited with ideas and deeds which were not even remotely within his purview. Microcredit has no doubt helped to enhance the empowerment of women but many other NGOs have contributed in the same way. The trauma of the liberation war itself steeled the nerve of the country’s women. After liberation the family planning drive with its emphasis on field work and coverage of poor rural women was only partially successful but there was an incidental gain in that women were being convinced, even if on a limited scale, that they must have more control over their own reproductive function, their household and household income and spending.
   The Nobel citation would be more understandable if instead of linking the prize with poverty alleviation the committee had linked it with work in the field of women’s development. That was how Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel Peace Prize had been perfectly justifiable. But whether microcredit has made a dent in rural poverty is a claim yet to be proved. Programmes like microcredit, and most NGO programmes for that matter, have the covert purpose of stalling industrial revolution in the Third World. The rich countries and their representatives the lending agencies, want the people in the poor countries to go for dairy farming, poultry, manufacturing farm-based products rather than think of industrialising. But their income should be raised so that they can consume imported industrial goods. Microcredit ensures that the people in this country remain agricultural producers and industrial consumers. Whoever helps to implicitly promote this racist thesis is a great development planner, social scientist. Never mind, but is microcredit mitigating poverty?
   There is no direct evidence that microcredit as an economic prescription has benefited the people. There are instances galore to prove the contrary. The concept of microcredit does not appeal to common sense. Big entrepreneurs who invest crores of taka cannot be certain of the outcome, the vagaries of business climate being what it is. Then how can a small poor investor unfailingly realise his invested amount and make enough profit to pay the creditor 35 per cent interest? And at this time globalisation has left very little space for the small self-employed entrepreneur and even governments no longer operate the levers of power when almost everything is decided by the market. No wonder the poor borrowers who borrow from different NGOs become defaulters. There are so many reports of the poor losing whatever assets they possessed to their distraining creditors in the form of the Grameen Bank. If some have been able to improve their lot, many more have been rendered destitute. If default rate is low in the case of the Grameen Bank, the reason is that the debtor is intimidated, she stands to lose her hearth and home and in her desperation she contracts loan from other sources (there are competing microcredit projects of other NGOs) to repay and save her skin. There are reports that the Grameen Bank’s ‘field officers’ try to attach property (often nothing more than the CI sheets of the roof and walls of the dwelling) without a court decree. Also in many cases repayment is a concealed fresh loan against which the old instalments are adjusted. Thus the borrower remains perpetually borrower. And to intimidate the borrower a large army of field officers has to be employed which explains the need for the high interest rate. These retainers going to attach the homesteads of the poor as a routine phenomenon, and that too without legal authority, creates bitter social relations. It also helps muscle power prevail and thus undermines peaceful social order. This Peace prize winner’s project undermines peace.
   And Dr Yunus is having it both ways. If he is for the poor, he cannot take a position against the interest of the country’s workers. His call for ‘opening up’ the Chittagong Port is against the interest of dock workers, that is, the poor of another category. The country has very large multitudes of poor completely left out of Dr Yunus’ thinking and activities. Privatisation of the port will serve the interest of the rich and accord with the World Bank-IMF prescription. The consequence of toeing the lines laid down by these lending agencies should be obvious to everyone by now. Thousands of workers were suddenly rendered jobless when the Adamjee Jute Mills, the nation’s industrial pride, was closed down. Dr Yunus had nothing to say about these jobless poor. He had nothing to say when the poor farmers were losing their lands to the predatory advances of the real estate pirates. He did not open his mouth when the slums of the city, the habitats of the poorest of the poor, were going up in flame one after another to create land for the multi-storied builders. When anti-poor budgets are formulated, anti-people policies are pursued, progressive economists and conscientious citizens do protest but Dr Yunus’ role is one of quiet acquiescence.
   Silence is golden. These masses of the poor are outside the ambit of his poverty alleviation programme; he has spread his net only for his borrowers and potential borrowers. His poverty alleviation is limited to those women who are able to pay him 35 per cent interest on loan. And those who cannot meet this usurious demand stand to lose their all. It is vociferously claimed that the GB has brought the poorest sections within the fold of the country’s banking. They are given loan without collateral which is not the practice of conventional banking. Fine, but the much dreaded rapacious village money lender, the mahajan also gives loan without collateral and at exorbitant rates of interest. Then what is the difference? Of course, the GB’s loan recipients are women, which, we concede, is a material difference. The lifeline of the rural poor is agricultural credit, which is the responsibility of public-sector banking. The GB could bring a change in rural poverty if it supplemented the Krishi Bank’s efforts by providing farm loan at competitively low interest rate. But such things are farthest from the mind of our peace laureate.
   And who said the poorest sections need banking to come out of poverty? The need is for industrialisation, mass employment, pro-poor state policies. Let Dr Yunus gloat over his prize but industrialisation and job creation must not be halted just because the GB has warped perception of poverty alleviation.