What needs to be changed is the mindset of urban folk who cannot believe that Mahavilachchiya has more computers than most places in the country: see comments 19-22 in http://www.lirneasia.net/2007/10/rural-bpos-corporate-responsibility-or-business/

I was away for some time and could not contribute to this thread. My views in the post no 29 was not to hurt the feelings of any party or individuals. I just wanted to clarify few things about Mahavilachchiya and the remote areas I am working in.
While appreciating healthy discussions on ICT related matters here why don’t we try to work together as a team? Nobody (including me) is perfect and it is high time we got together and stand up. I finished reading ‘World is Flat’ and reading ‘India Unbound’ these days and learnt a lot on how India changed its path to development and broke the barriers collectively. Reforms are needed badly to develop Sri Lanka (with ICT) as well. There is no argument in that. I am not touching other areas of development (non ICT) as I am not an expert like Harsha (de Silva) in such areas. Let us focus on ICT here.

I think we need to start working as a team for the benefit of the whole country to bring these policy changes necessary. Rather than fighting each other here, let’s get together to change economic policies that prevent developing the country.
Hope both LIRNEasia and ICTA will set a good stage for this. Harsh criticisms are needed and we have to tolerate them and respect the views of all parties concerned. Hope ICTA has a more open minded team now than yesteryears and the different opinions will be entertained.

Coming back to the above issue (poverty levels), we are doing major changes in Horizon Lanka website http://www.horizonlanka.org these days and hope we will get the criticisms on children (teenagers) being more ‘fashionable’ in the photographs in the website but this is the reality I see in Mahavilachchiya and other villages. In progressive villages children dress up smartly. We cannot (and should not) restrict their aspirations as I believe. I don’t see anything wrong being stylish while improving their academic skills by retaining the ethics and values they should retain. Open for another debate!!!

just because a person is poor does not mean they need to look disgusting. dont forget, people at the BOP can also wear clean clothes like those who ponificate…

As Mahavilachchiya has been mentioned several times in this thread, I want to make a point very clear. Mahavilachchiya will not be a good example to compare or contrast poverty levels. In Mahavilachchiya, ever since I started the Horizon Lanka project the first thing I wanted to see was a clean, well dressed bunch of children. (Read this page of the cover story of Wijeya Pariganaka in 2003 November. http://www.horizonlanka.org/media/pariganaka2/page_1.jpg )

I did not fancy the idea of selling the poverty of children. All what I wanted was to promote their talents. So, in the Horizon Lanka website or during a visit to Mahavilachchiya you can see a bunch of cleanly dressed kids with smiling faces. This is what I believe in. Everywhere I go I keep on stressing the cleanliness of children. Even in the other villages I work I have made it clear that poverty should not be “sold” and the children should dress clean clothes. It doesn’t cost that much to dress up cleanly.

Keeping the people in poverty forever to get more funding for the projects should be discouraged. In Mahavilachchiya we are even discouraging scholarships help to the students now (We are diverting them to other villages) as too much of rewarding can spoil children. Now children in MV get laptops, web designing assignments, etc. from the donors/clients purely based on their talents. The more you work the more rewarding you will get. (This doesn’t mean that Mahavilachchiya children or Horizon Lanka project has no problems at all. There are problems and the youth and the community are addressing them.)

What I have seen so far is poverty is not a big barrier to develop rural Sri Lanka. (I have never been to India or any other South Asian country.) I am new to urban setting and right now I am helping a project focused on children in the slums and hope I will find new experiences there.

Rather than focusing on poverty levels alone, all what we should do is to help the children and youth to go to the next levels with an open heart. We need to change the attitudes of the communities for that. First, we need to change our own attitudes. Unfortunately, there are people who think that if these youth come out of the jungles or slums with a good knowledge of ICT and English, the former will lose their acceptance in the elite society. Luckily this lot is very small. There are thousands of people who are welcoming young talents. Two Harshas are among them as far as I know.

Well you are absolutely right as definitely am not an academic nor economist. I am someone without any academic background and perhaps it’s my mistake to humbly question the work of you intellects at the first place. I don’t mind you calling me whatever you think of, as I don’t have anything under my title apart from GCE O/L’s and simply passed GCE A/L’s from a local school. So you should not worry about my questioning. As people will NOT take my comments seriously as am not an intellect to comment on a research subject. After this post they will not take me seriously at all since everyone realize now am not an intellect with a solid academic foundation.

However, I will believe / continuously believe what I think is right in “my own” reality and I will always communicate my view and will always question my doubts. I don’t want to prove anything other than getting fair explanation for the “video - survey” part and “BOP definition”. I got fair answers by few people who were involved and was silent about it including the comment made on the video. However, you took my humble questioning on these 2 aspects to a different level and was continuously assumed that am here to prove something to the world.

Going around telling stories??? My story / my questions were raised in the open forum at GK3 and Open blog here which is very visible to everyone [including the ONE and ONLY person whom I know at WB which again we met after many years]. And I don’t have time / money or any interest to go around and talk about this research as you very well know now am not qualified enough to talk about academic research. And further why should WB people and others take my comments seriously as your methodology/video etc., are clearly visible to them to make their own judgement. So I was not here to prove anything but was openly questioning on 2 things due to my doubts which you have answered in all fashions in the above post. So I QUIT on this subject!

Wish you a Merry X’ Mas and a Happy New Year!

Harsha Purasinghe

P.S - To readers of this thread - my humble questioning on 2 areas which highlight in my posts are not made in the intention to damage the good work done by lirneasia throughout in many areas of research and policy matters. I am someone who is admiring and continuously reading/contributing to lirneasia research/initiatives in the capacity which I / we have since 2005 [if am not mistaken]. To make this clear to everyone there is NO party / organization other than me & my shadow behind this questioning which is very visible throughout and raised due to my doubts.

you are obviously confused about poverty and BOP issues among other development economics subjects as evident by your recent cut-and-paste comment.

it might help if you read up on the subject and try to understand why the BOP can not be simply defined as below 1 or 2 dollars or 50 cents a day instead of acting like a bull in a china shop. i have tried earlier, but i dont seem to be able to get thru.

further note that in your displaced sense of academic debate you going around telling people [including those at the worlkd bank] that our survey has been conducted in “our homes” is not appreciated. we have explained in great detail on a number of our papers our methodology.

finally, we have defined the BOP and our analyses is based on the same. if you dont like it you there is nothing we can do. please feel free to come up with your own definition and prove to the world what ever it is you want to prove.

thank you.

harsha de silva, ph.d
lead economist lirneasia

I read your linked blog post. You say the tele centre movement is only in rural areas. However in Sri Lanka we have Nanasala tele centres even in urban areas as well. I have seen some Nanasalas along the Colombo Katunayake road. There is also Nanasalas in Kurunegala town and Colombo Fort railway station. So how do you say Nanasalas only in rural areas?

I think ICT Agency has taken all those things into account when they implemented the Nanasala program. Is it fair for you to critisise it even without knowing the true facts?

Do the people in Mahavilchchiya belong to your own category of the poor?

Let me present another view, namely, that of Jeffery D. Sachs, among other things, the authour of ‘The End of Poverty’, on who are poor and who are not.

Sachs divides the 6 billion world population roughly in to four categories, which he calls different rungs of the economic ladder.

The lowest one billion, is the so called ‘poorest of the poor’. They invariably live in developing countries. Poverty does exist in developed world, but not at this level. These are the hungry and dying people who struggle everyday for mere survival. (Sachs’ example: villagers in Malawi, a sub Saharan African country)

The next rung is the upper end of the low income world. This 1.5 billion lives above mere subsistence. Their daily survival is assured, but they continuously struggle to make ends meet. Death is not at their door but chronic financial hardship and a lack of basic amenities such as safe drinking water and functioning latrines are part of their daily lives. (Sachs’ example: Garment factory workers in Bangladesh)

The next rung is the middle income world of 2.5 billion. They constitute the middle class of the developing world, but certainly not in developed world. These are the people who can afford a scooter, or perhaps a second hand automobile. Most of the live in cities, and able to secure some comfort in housing. They have adequate clothing and their children go to proper schools. Nutrition is adequate. (Sachs’ example: Call centre workers in India)

Still higher up the ladder are the remaining one billion which we term as better off.

When seen in this light, the word ‘PYRAMID’ is misleading. As we see the largest is not the bottom most level. 42% of world population is middle income earners. Only 17% live in extreme poverty. So it looks more like a jar than a pyramid.

Also in the bottom most layer, the communication needs receive low priority because they have to spend most of their income on food and other basic amenities. A hungry man will not make a telephone call to be in touch with friends. So it is logical and natural for anyone who research on ICT usage by ‘poor’ to focus more on the second layer from the bottom than the first one.

If we still want to think in terms of ‘pyramid’, we can also combine the last two layers, so we just make it match the next level numerically, but still not larger.

I never wanted to comment further on this subject, but your above post confused me further hence wanted to write a note.

Firstly, thanks for the explanation about the video. Your explanation further confuses me as I was under the impression that “The Survey” part of video is just a video capture of some households but not actual households that were covered by the survey. If they are actual households it’s an interesting BOP!!.

And further in the video it says “Bottom of the INCOME pyramid”, which links to something which I’ve been questioning. The reason I questioned this was IF the survey was conducted on a different level what’s the credibility of applying the results to “BOP”. My confusion was around the “The Survey” part of the video and the BOP definition.

I am not arguing / questioning or referring to how people at BOP look like nor how they should dress like, this is not about dress codes or painting a picture of people at BOP. But the households which was showcased in the “The Survey” area of the video and considering them as BOP, BOP definition used and video which highlights “Bottom of the income pyramid”

From the hotel which am writing this post which is in India, I can clearly see a large amount of people who are at the real BOP which people here referred to as. It’s probably the real BOP not even slightly above BOP nor the MOP.

Below is an “extract” from an interesting paper I read which is on BOP,

“Both these measures of poverty are widely used in development economics and public policy fields. For example, in 2002 all the 191 United Nations member states agreed to the Millennium Development Goals. The first goal of this declaration is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, and set the target: “halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day” (United Nations, 2005). The World Bank uses both $1/day and $2/day lines. Virtually all research on poverty uses a poverty line somewhere in between $1 to $2 per day. In his book on BOP, Prahalad (2004) uses the $2 per day criterion. We too shall use the $2/day line in this paper.

Most analysts define poverty in monetary terms; but, there is much debate about whether to use consumption or income measures. The World Bank and some researchers (for example, Ravallion 2004) use consumption measures; The United Nations (2000) and other researchers (for example, Sala-I-Martin, forthcoming) use income measures. Ravallion (2004) argues that the consumption poverty measure should be doubled to reflect the items implicitly included in the income measure, which are government expenditure and private investment. Therefore, the $1/day consumption poverty line is roughly equivalent to $2/day income line.1

The BOP argument is inconsistent in its definition of the poverty line, and often uses a level much higher than $2 per day. Prahalad and Hart (2002) started with a definition of the poor as per capita annual income (at purchasing power rates) of $1500 or less. In the next article, Prahalad and Hammond (2002) changed the income level to $2000 per year.

In his book, Prahalad (2004) defines it as $2 per day. These are big differences! There is no discussion at all of how to choose the income level to define the poor.

Any discussion of poverty is surely critically affected by the definition of the poverty line. It is difficult, and probably impossible, to prescribe solutions without first defining the nature and the scope of the problem. The BOP proposition emphasizes selling to the poor people. A household with a per capita consumption of $2000 per year probably would consider purchasing a motorcycle; a household with a per capita income of $1 per day certainly could not contemplate such a purchase. Whether there is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid depends on how one defines the ‘bottom’. Similarly, how to alleviate poverty too depends on the definition of poverty. People who consume less than $1 per day have very different needs and priorities than people who consume more than five times as much.”

Different people have very different notions about what a poor person should look like! And often, there’s a gap between perception/notion and reality. I’m not even talking about people from richer countries who haven’t traveled enough in the majority world to know the complexity of southern reality. There are lots of people in the global South - usually from the urban middle classes - who are equally certain of their certainties as to what the poor must look and what they must need and what they should ask for, etc, etc!

This kind of simplistic presumption and stereotyping - not rooted in reality - does not help anyone, and least of all the poor. When we go on location filming in different parts of developing Asia, we don’t look for the most miserable-looking, emaciated, down-trodden poor person to film or interview (although we know of some film crews who do just that!). We do our own location research to find out what stories people have to tell, and what they represent, and settle for the most authentic and sincere ones we can find. Being willing to be filmed (without payment) is also a consideration.

In the case of Teleuse@BOP film, we turned to A C Nielsen in Sri Lanka and Philippines to track down some of the respondents in their survey. They gave us a mix of male/female, urban/rural and those engaged in different types of work. We chose from among these to film; everyone who was filmed was not eventually used in the final edit, which is not unusual in film-making.

See also my June 2007 blog post titled “The ‘Rural Romance’ lives on in the ICT Age: Urban poor need not apply” which explores another facet of our perceptional prejudices about the poor, poverty and ICT:
http://movingimages.wordpress.com/2007/06/02/the-rural-romance-lives-on-in-the-ict-age-urban-poor-need-not-apply/

PS: Thanks to Harsha P for your kind remark on my quizmaster skills!

The period at the end was the problem. There was a very interesting comment by Rama Bijapurkar, one of the leading marketing experts in India at the talk that she gave at CPRsouth2 today. She said that in today’s India rural people want to dress very much like those in SEC A&B, only they are not willing to pay the same prices!

Rama has a great new book out that is very much worth a read: http://www.ramabijapurkar.com/. Has a good explanation of SEC classification.