New Delhi, Jan 29: Shining India may have been the big story at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) this year, but a new and possibly more important sub-text seems to have emerged in this giant annual meeting of the world’s powerful business interests.

To wit: a recognition of the need for more constructive participation between what Martin Wolf has called the “threatened incumbents” and “distressed outsiders” of globalisation.
No doubt, the World Social Forum, organised a little ahead of the WEF in Mumbai, can be credited with exerting some influence — as can, to be fair, the ritual anti-globalisation protests that accompany Davos and every session of World Trade Organisation parleys.
At macro-level, this understanding has generated a buzz-word that is gaining currency in India: public-private partnership. What it means is closer collaboration between public policy and business interests for the greater good of society. Or: closer cooperation between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and corporations.
This sounds like the perfect relationship. NGOs are, after all, corporate custodians of public welfare; conscientious corporations should, therefore, find it easier to work with them, correct?
Surprisingly, several NGO workers I spoke to on this head seemed extremely uncertain of the benefits. Their point was that there was often a thin line between collaboration and collusion. The subject of hot debate at the time was an NGO that had collaborated with a consumer goods manufacturer to set up rural women’s self-help groups to distribute its products in rural markets.
This sounded like a great mutuality of interests: rural women would get to earn some independent income and the consumer goods company would achieve its objective of penetrating rural markets.
The NGOs argued that the consumer goods manufacturer was the bigger beneficiary, not the rural distributors. It was persuading rural folk to buy its shampoos, soaps and toothpaste but wasn’t really giving anything back in terms of development — better sanitation, for instance, or women’s health.
My argument was that the choice did not lie between detergent and better sanitation; and, anyway, the rural consumer could take the decision not to buy the manufacturer’s products. I rather thought I’d won this debate, till I read a 3,000-odd-word, even-toned piece titled “Handwash or Eyewash?” by journalist Lalitha Sridhar. Written on August 19 last year, the article may be slightly dated but the message is not.
It talks about two sanitation projects that were urging more people to wash their hands with soap. One project was called “Health in Your Hands” and was launched in Kerala in 2001 by the World Bank in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the Kerala government and Hindustan Lever.
This project, writes Sridhar, “soon ran into slippery ground, teetering between angry protests and undecided authorities, till it finally fell apart on August 12, 2003 when the Kerala government opted out. What had raised the hackles of activists and residents alike is that the whole idea appeared to be more about selling soap rather than sanitation.”
In June 2003, another programme was launch in Delhi — called WASH, it had impressive backers — the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), Geneva which comprises UN agencies like UNICEF, UNDP and UN HABITAT, the World Health Organization, the Asian Development Bank, the governments of India, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, NGOs and private sector partners like Suez and Vivendi, the World Bank and LSHTM.
This time, with Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ravi Shankar Prasad and actress Katrina Kaif as attractions, the thrust was more purposeful. It suggested that lack of sanitation was the cause of many killer diseases worldwide. “If people could wash hands properly, most of these deaths could be under control,” Sridhar quotes Sir Richard Jolly of the WSCCC as saying.
The message is clearly skewed. It can be nobody’s case that disease caused by lack of sanitation should not be eradicated. But surely the focus of public policy should be on providing sanitation and clean water to citizens rather than exhorting them to use soap?
Surely, it is more important that fewer people live in slums than use soap? As Sridhar points out, “The program attempted to make a shift from concentrating on sanitation infrastructure development to hygiene behaviors.”
The point about such programmes is that they get replicated across the developing world — in Ghana, Guatemala and El Salvador, for instance — and have corporate sponsors like Colgate Palmolive and Levers.
In India, it is significant that with growth in urban consumer markets slowing, it’s in the rural and mofussil markets that consumer goods manufacturers are looking for sales.
As Sridhar puts it, “The projection of market-expansion as a social service makes sound business sense.” But in terms of a meaningful public-private partnership, it suggests that Davos and Mumbai are still worlds apart — and the distance is not just geographical.