Once again, the global spotlight is on malnourished children in India, a country celebrating its achievement of the fifth largest GDP in the world. Twenty years ago, with “India Shining” and celebrating its becoming “the fastest growing free market democracy in the world”, the same question was asked. “Why are there more malnourished children in India (as a percentage of its population) than in poorer African and South Asian countries, even though India’s per capita income is higher, and India has a wealth of economists and scientists?”
This raises two fundamental questions. (1) What is wrong with the shape of India’s growth? (2) What must change in the approach India is taking to solve chronic problems such as malnourishment of children?
The flaw in the shape of India’s growth is very clear. Inequalities within the country are growing with faster growth of GDP. International economists, ecologists, and social scientists, applying methods of systems thinking, have produced a global report “Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity” (2022). They predict that the present approach of pursuing GDP with insufficient action to rectify societal inequities, adopted globally, will lead to environmental and societal collapse later this century. The model also forecasts that by 2050, on its present trajectory, India will be the most unequal society in the world.
A multi-sectoral coalition was formed in India twenty years ago, to examine why the country was not reducing child malnutrition faster. Its members were from the government, NGO, corporate, and international development sectors. Their project was called Bhavishya (future) because the health and education of India’s children, who are expected to produce a “democratic dividend”, is determining India’s future. The coalition was assisted by international consultants, who provided tools of “systems thinking”. Why, they asked, is India not progressing as fast as poorer countries in reducing child malnutrition, even with the largest funded program in the world—the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS)?
The project revealed three fundamental flaws in the approach to solving the problem of child malnutrition, which pervade other areas of policymaking also.
Thinking in silos
Firstly, malnutrition is a systemic problem, caused by a combination of factors. It cannot be solved by only providing more nutrition to children. Diarrhea from polluted water and bad sanitation wastes nutrition in the body. Also, the health of pregnant mothers determines the health of babies at birth which affects their future health. Thus, many social and environmental factors, outside the scope of nutritionists and child health specialists, combine to cause malnutrition and ill-health of children. Experts from many disciplines must think together.
“Systems thinking” is required to solve systemic problems like persistence of malnutrition, increasing inequality, and accelerating climate change. Moreover, systemic problems do not take the same forms in different places. Therefore, solutions must be local. “One shape and size” solutions cannot fit all. Effective systems solutions must be developed within communities.
Working in silos
Systems thinking must translate into “systems action” too. There must be cooperation in the implementation of systemic solutions amongst many government departments in their silos, and NGOs who tend to focus only on their own concerns—whether children’s issues, women’s issues, or climate change issues, and all supported by collaboration amongst experts in many disciplines.
Scientific knowledge, as it advances, is being broken up into narrower specializations. At the same time, the theory of action and organization in all sectors—corporate, government, and NGOs—is to “focus”, and to do one thing well “at scale”. Thereby action breaks into competing programs, each guided by expert advisors, all demanding more recognition and resources. Resources are wasted in multiple programs that do not align with each other to address systemic problems.
Mismeasuring progress
Policy makers like to evaluate complex conditions with single metrics—for example GDP, a simple poverty line, or a single measure of a child’s health e.g. malnutrition. Experts claim this enables objective comparisons of the performance of countries and states, as well as comparisons over time. However, single, quantitative measures hide more than they reveal about real conditions on the ground. In their drive for ‘objectivity’, they strip out factors that are not easy to quantify, which, nevertheless, are often the root causes of problems. Trust in institutions and social solidarity provides the glue for collaborative action. Trust in the abilities of experts in national and international organizations to equitably solve social and environmental problems that affect citizens everywhere is at a very low ebb post Covid, and with repeatedly failing international climate change commitments, and now the looming global economic crisis.
The Commission on the Measurement of Economic and Social Progress (Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi) published a report, “Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why the GDP Doesn’t Add Up” in 2011 calling for a paradigm shift in measurements of progress. Innovations are being developed: a well-known one is Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework.
A new theory of change
“Earth for All” projects two scenarios. One is “Too Little Too Late” if we continue with the present theory-in-use for solving complex problems. The other is a “Big Leap” by applying a new theory of change founded on systems thinking propelled by collaborative systems action.
Top-down solutions are not working. Systemic change must be bottom up. Organizations above communities must listen to, and learn with, communities on the ground. They must also learn to support communities, rather than imposing inappropriate solutions on them.
Local systems solutions collaboratively implemented by communities is the way to solve the global systemic problems summarized in the 17 global Sustainable Development Goals that all nations have signed up for. (They include many factors contributing to child malnutrition). None of these goals can be achieved separately. Their solutions require wider systems thinking combining many scientific disciplines, and collaborative action amongst diverse, often conflicting stakeholders.
(An abridged version of this was published in The Deccan Herald on October 30 2022)