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Source: https://theprint.in/economy/bangladesh-is-better-off-than-india-not-a-poor-backward-neighbour-anymore/132363/

PRIYAMVADA GROVER 11 October, 2018

Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971, registering impressive performance on economic and social indicators.

New Delhi: India, the fastest growing major economy, is seen as the powerhouse of South Asia, but this may soon change.

Having already stolen a march over India on key social indices, small neighbour Bangladesh is now on the verge of establishing a lead on the economic front too.

According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bangladesh is expected to post a growth rate of 7.5 per cent in 2018-19 against the 7.3 per cent projected for India.

India’s eastern neighbour saw a GDP growth of 7.28 per cent in the last financial year, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), while India grew at 7.1 per cent.

The country’s per capita income is also growing at a pace three times India’s: According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development figures cited in a Dhaka Tribune report, while India’s per capita income rose by 13.8 per cent between 2013 and 2016, Bangladesh’s grew by 39 per cent.

According to some estimates, if the country continues to keep up its gross national income (GNI) and GDP growth at the same pace for the next two years, it will overtake India’s per capita income by 2020.

A long journey

Formed from the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971.

The country’s GDP growth rate in 1972 was recorded at negative 14 per cent. Two years later, Bangladesh was steaming ahead with a growth rate of 9.6 per cent when a catastrophic famine, which killed an estimated 1.5 million people, brought the country on its knees again. The ensuing economic crash saw the GDP growth rate slip to a negative 4 per cent.

A long journey

Formed from the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971.

The country’s GDP growth rate in 1972 was recorded at negative 14 per cent. Two years later, Bangladesh was steaming ahead with a growth rate of 9.6 per cent when a catastrophic famine, which killed an estimated 1.5 million people, brought the country on its knees again. The ensuing economic crash saw the GDP growth rate slip to a negative 4 per cent.

Although Bangladesh’s health expenditure as a share of GDP is still lower than India’s, several initiatives taken by the government have helped boost education and women empowerment.

The government has made primary education free and compulsory, giving girl students stipends and scholarships for their entire school education. The government has a strong social safety net for women with initiatives such as four to six months of paid maternity leave, and allowances for divorced and destitute women.

Women now make up nearly 70 per cent of Bangladesh’s garment industry and over 60 per cent of fish farmers.

Bangladesh has set an example for developing economies with its women empowerment initiatives, with the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranking the country number one in gender equality among south Asian nations in 2017 as well as 2016.

It has also registered an impressive performance on reducing poverty, a parameter on which India has made significant advances as well.

Bangladesh was ranked seventh, a good eight slots ahead of India (15), in the political representation of women on the WEF gender gap index.

This is because 50 of the 350 seats in the Bangladesh parliament, roughly 14 per cent, are reserved for women. Meanwhile, in India, 62 of 543 MPs elected in 2014, or 11 per cent, are women, with a law on reservation yet to see the light of day.

Don’t forget the NGOs

“Bangladesh’s high economic growth can be attributed to the sustained investments that Bangladesh has made in enhancing people’s productive capacities, especially by way of promoting basic health and education,” said development economist Dr A.K. Shivakumar.

“That life expectancy at birth is higher and child mortality lower in Bangladesh today than in India, when it was not so during the early 1990s, is testimony to the better access that Bangladeshis have to basic social services,” he said.

“To an extent,” he added, “the high growth has also been fuelled by the social transformation brought about by the greater freedoms young girls and women enjoy in Bangladesh today.

“The growing employment opportunities for young women in the garment industry, as well as the collectivisation and empowerment of women brought about by the spread of the microfinance movement, has contributed to it as well,” he said.

Experts are also unanimous in crediting NGOs for the turnaround in Bangladesh’s fortunes.

“Non-government organisations have played a critical and complementary role to the state in reducing poverty and in expanding social and economic opportunities for a vast majority of Bangladeshis,” said Shivakumar.

ORF’s Sengupta agreed, even as she expressed scepticism about the government’s role.

“It is not a very nice picture in Bangladesh,” she said. “They have a very authoritarian government which has completely suppressed dissent. Women are working without wages.”

By 2017, Bangladesh was being lauded for becoming almost open-defecation free, a journey India is striving to complete. Between 2003 and 2015, Bangladesh’s open-defecation rates have fallen from 42 per cent to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Indian government’s sustained fight to make the country open-defecation free with Narendra Modi’s pet ‘Swachh Bharat mission’ began only in 2014.

Under this mission, 76 per cent of India’s villages have been declared open-defecation free as of October 2018. India has taken a leaf out of Bangladesh’s Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) model, introduced in 1999, which focuses more on generating demand for basic indoor toilets than releasing subsidies.