GREATEST COMMON MULTIPLE

Indians are numbers people. Indians who immigrated to the US like my mom and dad are suspected, and often found to be, either doctors or engineers.

Development is a social science. Prior to my generation, most people began working within development were either political scientists or economists. Out of these two professions, the economists focused on the quantitative and the political scientists focused on the qualitative. My generation boasts a convergence of these two professions: we are political economists. What does this mean? Well, mostly that we don’t know either economics or political science…but hey, we know the ‘bigger picture’, right?

Since the start of my bachelor’s degree six years ago, I have been attending development-related conferences. Every time I witnessed a speaker quote figures, grounding their argument in statistics, I was impressed. The numbers spoke to me – like many, I found the numbers to be more real, more factual than some qualitative observations. Moreover, I didn’t find too many speakers who actually mentioned statistics, so when they did, my ears perked up.

Indians are numbers people. Although I joke that it is in our blood, I think it may be more accurate to say that the GoI invested in this knowledge accumulation through the setting up of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) higher educational system. Indian Americans like myself are simply a result of our parents’, who are products of the IIT generation, encouragement to pursue careers in the fields of math and science.

The conference I attended this past week was a clear reminder that Indians are numbers people. Nearly every audience member asking questions to the panel of speakers, and every speaker on the panel, centered their statements around numbers. It was an obvious change from the development conferences I had attended in the US and Europe. It made sense that quantitative goals were being mentioned as it was on the topic of the five-year plan which sets these goals, however I slowly began to think that maybe this focus on numbers in the field of development can be somewhat of a hindrance to progress.

Sometime between the second and third panels on the first day of the conference, I began to realize that figures were being quoted without mention of sources and without a holistic analysis of their implications or for that matter, their possibility of not having any implications. A few speakers shared my concerns and urged people to stop ‘hiding behind numbers’ and realize that the source of the figures may be fundamentally flawed.

To me, flawed numbers is one thing – it is the responsibility of the policymakers, researchers and intellectuals to work to minimize these problems. On the other hand, what really concerns me is the layman’s concentration on quantitative goals so much so that their only concern is demanding that the government reach them. The purpose of an active civil society in a democracy is not simply to demand what they are told is a good thing, but to critically analyze if policies are the best for civil society.

Ultimately what I found at this conference on the one hand was a very active civil society operating in a working democracy. On the other hand, I found a deep-rooted dependence on the government that resulted in a civil society with expectations of handouts.