In the last two decades Mahbub ul Haq has arguably had a greater impact than anyone else on the lives of the world’s poor. His friend from Cambridge days and collaborator, Amartya Sen, has contributed enormously to the intellectual understanding of deprivation and the need to enhance choices and capabilities. But it is the Pakistani economist who, by pioneering the human development revolution, has managed to change both thinking and practice. Intellectually, the idea of human development today offers an effective counterpoint to the Washington Consensus. Human development, which focuses on quality-of-life attributes like life expectancy and educational and health attainments, has become the focus of policy wherever it has successfully fought poverty.
The first human development report was published under the leadership of Mahbub by UNDP in 1990. In 2005, over 500 national and sub-national HDRs were written. The Millennium Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2000 marked the culmination of an intellectual process which began in the sixties. Human development and the intellectual platoon that made up the human development report office at UNDP were important links in the process. A lot of the global acceptance of his ideas came after he died in 1998 but intellectually his day, in its full splendour, is still to come. How prophetic he was can be gauged form the longish para quoted in this collection of essays from a speech he made in Washington in 1980:
“In the next two decades, almost 90 per cent of the additional population will be born in the Third World....it is a matter of power because that is where the markets are going to be….The real problem has been that the world has moved very fast towards interdependence because of technological revolution, without discovering the institutions of interdependence. Three institutions — an international central bank, a system of international taxation…, and global management of scarce resources of the world (including oceanbeds) will simply have to emerge.”
He had clearly anticipated four major challenges of our times — the importance of emerging markets, globalisation and its discontents, sustainable development and the current global economic turmoil in the absence of an effective international economic order.
After a brilliant academic journey through Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, he joined Pakistan’s Planning Commission in the late fifties (during Ayub Khan’s rule) and went on to effectively write the country’s second and third five-year plans as a practitioner of traditional growth economics. But his thinking changed as it became clear that though Pakistan was achieving exemplary growth, the lot of its poor failed to improve. A landmark in his intellectual life was the “22 families” speech he gave in Karachi in 1968 which highlighted the power and wealth of a few families. It was a summery indictment of the government from within.
In 1970 when Bhutto came to power Mahbub left Pakistan to join the World Bank as chief policy adviser to McNamara. He was a key architect of the bank’s new role in directing attention and assistance towards the poor. Then through the eighties (1982-88), as the foremost economic minister under Zia ul Haq, he guided the country’s economic policy. He introduced many innovations; some worked, some didn’t. There was special emphasis on grassroots primary education (mosque schools) and women’s development. Among the losers were a forerunner of India’s MPs’ local area development scheme, indexation of government salaries and black money unearthing scheme.
He was willing to experiment; above all, he wanted to get things done. He did not hesitate to work under military dictators even as he criticised the size of third world military budgets. He seldom read out a prepared speech and his own writings carried few academic references. In creating the HDR and the human development index, he encouraged others to assume ownership of the project by freely incorporating their ideas. Paul Streeten recalls: “It was astonishing how he, combining the skills of a politician and a thinker, succeeded in molding these diverse ideas into something better and bigger, that could be applied to policymaking.”
Human development combines the “basic needs” thinking of the seventies and eighties with of the capabilities approach, which has in turn drawn on the thinking of political philosophers and political economists. In this intellectual journey Mahbub brought drive, eloquence and intellectual passion, and Sen helped formulate concepts and underlying theory, relating them to philosophical and intellectual debates. Mahbub’s intellectual legacy is to successfully challenge the “unqualified worship of the goddess of GNP growth” and “stand development theory on its head”. He led the world in moving away from taking care of GNP which will take care of poverty, to taking care of poverty which will take care of GNP.
PIONEERING THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REVOLUTION
Pioneering the Human Development Revolution An Intellectual Biography of Mahbub ul Haq
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Ed Khadija Haq and Richard Ponzio
OUP
Rs 595; 266 pages