Editorial
Adding civic denial to social
exclusion of sex workers
It is a matter of concern that sex workers who have long been the most exploited and deprived group and who should have deserved special incentives and facilities of rehabilitation by way of compensation are even being denied their existing fundamental right. They have not been included in the recent registration of voter identity card for the coming elections on flimsy grounds. By excluding them from voters' registration a new deprivation has been added to these worst-suffering underdogs of society. Yesterday's New Age published a broadsheet feature-report in the Xtra section of the daily exposing the lot of these hapless women who have only met prejudice and hatred from society for no fault of their own. The tragic antecedents of most of them will reveal that they have been relentlessly sinned against rather than sinning. Finding no hope of being lifted from the abyss of poverty and disgrace, they are resigned to their fate. But that does not exonerate the government and society from their responsibility. Living an accursed life they have no job, no shelter and now they are even denied an identity. And the law enforcing agencies far from providing them help and protection are wont to persecute them further.
Our report mentions that of the estimated one lakh sex workers in the country not one of them has been included in the recent registration for the voter ID cards. It is the bounden responsibility of any progressive government to end a profession that degrades womanhood and to arrange for alternative callings and rehabilitation of those women. But when the governments acted, their response was not economic rehabilitation but eviction. Of course, the governments are not to blame entirely, since prejudice of society will make rehabilitation difficult. But both the government and society ought to have realised that sustaining a profession like that of sex workers does not only degrade the women involved but society itself, its dignity, ethics and values and notions of human rights. First society exploits and condemns them to a life of indignity, and then calumniates them as pariahs. Injustice twice over.
The woes of sex workers are nothing new but we fail to understand why a new civic exclusion should be added to their myriad social exclusions. They are citizens of this country, hence their voting right is inborn which they cannot be denied on any pretext. The pretext here is that the sex workers who are either floating or inmates of any of the country's dozen brothels cannot give permanent address or name of father or husband. If father or husband has disowned an unfortunate woman, it is not she who should be punished. Rehabilitation should have begun long before in a free country. Till that happens no new injustice should be inflicted upon them by trying to erase their identity and denying their birthrights.
Biofuel bane
A recent report of the United Nations puts forth yet another strong case why Bangladesh and other poor countries should keep at an arm's length from biofuel production. According to the report, biofuels are not only hurting poor consumers in Asia but also failing to help the region's farmers who have not been able to cash in on the boom. Poor rural farmers not only 'lack the wherewithal to extend their land and adapt to new crops' but can also be 'pushed off their land' by the 'impetus for large-scale farming [of bio-fuel producing crops]'. Meanwhile, the International Rice Research Institute president and a leading economist of the institute, in an interview with the international news agency Agence France-Presse, have warned that there may not be much room for growth in the world for rice and other staple food. They have also indicated that an increased focus on biofuel production may be a reason for the squeeze on land allotment for food crop cultivation.
As has been argued many times over before, increasing production and use of biofuel is a major reason for the sharp rise in prices of staple foods on the global market. Another UN report said global biofuel production has doubled in the past five years and is set to double again in the next four. Major economies, the United States and the European Union for instance, are increasingly shifting towards higher biofuel production and consumption. They are also encouraging developing countries to grow crops for fuel on arable land, instead of food grain.
In recent times, the prices of food grains on the international market have reached unprecedented levels. For example, the spot price of rice has reached closer to $1,000 per tonne. Bangladesh has already felt the shock of the price volatility on the global food market. As we have written in these columns many times before, while much of it may have been due to the crop loss following the back-to-back floods and cyclone Sidr, a lot of the setback boiled down to the government's failure to replenish food stock in time and pay attention to the agriculture sector. The increase in global production of biofuel suggests that the country could again be exposed to food insecurity in the near future if the government, the incumbents and whoever that succeed them, continue to show apathy to the agriculture sector as their predecessors have.
The current state of food insecurity would only worsen if the incumbents or their successors encourage or even allow production of biofuel instead of food grain, especially if such suggestions come by way of friendly advice or prescriptions from lending agencies or larger countries. It would be prudent to revise and modify the land use policy of Bangladesh specifying and prioritising production of food grain besides those that have traditionally been part of local agriculture.
The ‘virtuous cycle’ of the
girl-child’s education
What needs emphasis is that women have made these achievements possible, relying only on the intentions and token gestures of gender parity that the state has provided them with, leaving little doubt as to the immense impacts that the same initiatives could have, if applied with more efficacy and commitment, writes Mahtab Haider
IT HAS been reported in a number of local dailies that more than 48 per cent of the 1.2 million students who enrolled in class nine two years ago have not registered for this year’s secondary school certificate examinations, which kicked off on March 27. This reality is undoubtedly grim, considering that over 50 per cent of the dropouts are girls, and overall confirming that the failure in the country’s retention rate of primary and secondary education students is deepening even as enrolment rates are peaking.
The back-to-back flooding and cyclone Sidr in 2007 have undoubtedly taken their toll on this statistic, not to mention that until January, the government had failed to pay school stipends for July to December 2007, to more than 14 lakh female students whose academic merit had qualified them for this incentive. The military-controlled government’s blinkered vision of governance prevented them from realising that soaring inflation, a stumbling agriculture sector, and the high prices of cereals might have pushed families to send their daughters to school, if not for anything but a cash stipend, and that this could be yet another legitimate route to reaching affected families through a win-win formula.
Nonetheless, anecdotal causes aside, the current dropout rate is consistent with a trend that has dogged the education sector for much of the last decade. One of the most significant reasons behind Bangladesh’s consistently poor performance in terms of dropouts is of course economic pressures on male students to become earning members of their families, and a cost-benefit analysis by the family – as far as female students are concerned – which leads most parents to decide that the costs of keeping their daughters in school are too high and potential benefits too low, given that opportunities for the gainful employment of women in the rural economy are limited, even if the social taboo aspect is ignored. Many young women at that age are also married off which results in a discontinuation of their education given their responsibilities in the household.
While the endemic corruption in the education sector and the characteristic failures in successive governments’ commitment and imagination in developing more effective education strategies may paint a grim picture of the overall state of the sector, there is now emerging a variety of research findings that suggests that in the past two decades Bangladesh has actually scored a first round of victories in primary and secondary education. The evidence of this is not so much observed in the education sector as much as it is in a wide range of social indicators that suggest that the thrust in gender-parity in primary and secondary education is yielding overall social benefits of immense magnitude.
Shared welfare
According to a 2008 report released by the aid agency Save the Children, every year nearly 10 million children across the world die before the age of five – that is one child every three seconds. ‘Nearly 4 million children die within their first 28 days, during the “neonatal” period’ and ‘3 million babies die within one week of birth,’ the report Saving Children’s Lives reveals. Among the countries that are being celebrated for their tremendous achievements in reducing child mortality is Bangladesh, which has reduced its infant-mortality rates from 92 per 1,000 births in 2000 to 69 per 1,000 births in 2006. While there has been a tendency in the past to link such indicators to the overall economic development of a country, that relationship is breaking down in the face of rising inequalities which have seen a number of countries achieve miracle rates of economic growth without the benefits of that growth percolating to the bottom quintile of the population whose children are most vulnerable to malnutrition and premature mortality. In this respect, Bangladesh’s achievements clearly outstrip those of India even though the emerging economic giant has attained a consistently higher rate of economic growth. According to the Save the Children report, India’s GNI per capita has increased by a staggering 82 per cent from $450 in 2000 to $820 in 2006. Its child mortality rate declined from 94 per 1,000 births to 76 per 1,000. Over the same period, Bangladesh saw a much smaller 23 per cent increase in GNI per capita, from $390 in 2000 to $480 in 2006, but its child mortality rate dropped from 92 to 69 – evidence that it is much more effective in tackling child mortality despite limited resources.
‘In fact,’ the report continues, ‘Bangladesh is one of only seven countries (out of the 60 that account for 94 per cent of child deaths worldwide) that is on track to meet MDG 4 by 2015.’ A new Wealth and Development Index that compares a country’s economic prosperity with its achievements in combating child mortality shows that Bangladesh has 32 fewer child deaths compared to its level of national income than India which has 0.37 more child deaths than is expected at its level of national income.
One of the principal factors that is being credited for this remarkable achievement of resource-strapped Bangladesh is the progress it has made in bringing more and more girls and young women into the fold of mainstream education, despite a high drop-out rate, in the past decades. Public health professionals identify a number of key factors as pivotal in determining the survival prospects of a child. Among them are access to healthcare, nutrition, the availability of clean water and sanitation, and notably, female literacy.
India’s Kerala state confirms this thesis as it has managed to curtail child-mortality to as low as 14 per 1,000 live births, and one of the key factors that have contributed to this extraordinary achievement is that it has an overall literacy rate above 90 per cent.
According to Saving Children’s Lives, ‘research findings from 35 demographic and health surveys suggest that children of mothers with no education are more than twice as likely to die or to be malnourished compared with children of mothers who have secondary education or higher qualifications’. And that’s not all; mother’s literacy has been identified as having the potency to trigger a ‘virtuous cycle’ which sees other factors such as malnutrition, gender parity within the household, and the likelihood of children receiving education rising significantly as a result. While the urgency to save children from mortality need not be argued beyond the immensely powerful moral responsibility that belies its mandate, it is also interesting to note that new research is suggesting that that a 5 per cent improvement in child survival rates raises economic growth by 1 percentage point per year over the subsequent decade.
Bangladesh has, in fact, seen a wide spectrum of achievements in gender parity over the past decade which, the World Bank says, ‘now dwarfs India and Pakistan in many areas’. A report from the World Bank released last week reveals that between 1971 and 2004, Bangladesh has halved its fertility rates…girls secondary education exceeds that of boys, [and] the gender gap in infant mortality has been closed’. Once again strides in female literacy are among the keys to these achievements. ‘The negative linkages between female literacy and fertility appears to be, on the whole, empirically well-founded,’ wrote Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom. ‘Such connections have been widely observed in other countries, [and] the unwillingness of educated women to be shackled to continuous child rearing clearly plays a role in bringing about this change,’ Sen wrote.
Similarly, unlike most other countries in South Asia, there has been a sharp increase – about one and a half times – in the number of women employed in gainful employment in the country’s labour market between 1995 and 2003. As the immense economic potential of one half of the working population enters the labour market, economic growth will be inevitable. The link between female education and their potential in gainful employment need not be laboured over, given the self-evident cause and effect scenario.
What needs emphasis is that women have made these achievements possible, relying only on the intentions and token gestures of gender parity that the state has provided them with, leaving little doubt as to the immense impacts that the same initiatives could have, if applied with more efficacy and commitment.
If it is so that the female-student stipend project is riddled with corruption and irregularities (the facts suggest it is), it will have to be the corruption and the irregularities that will have to be combated instead of the absurd suggestion that the stipend programme be abandoned, as has recently been reported. Similarly, if it is the drop-out rate that is preventing many young women and men from completing their secondary education, then the government must seek more creative ways of keeping children in school. In this regard, the mid-day meal programme that India has just introduced could be a pioneering move that would at once see to it that drop-out rates declined, while considerable progress was made in childhood nutrition in a country that clocks among the highest rates of malnutrition in the world.
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