Nobel winner Ostrom's work relevant for India

The concepts of people's management propounded by political economist and this year's Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom may find relevance in India a country that has suffered for many decades from an inefficient handling of basic natural resources and from looking askance at their privatisation for a better delivery, academicians and researchers said on Tuesday.

The Indiana University researcher has demonstrated through her lab-tests and elaborate proposition that if people' are made the owner-managers of a nation's resources which she calls commons' the results are more likely to be better than when the management of these resources was left entirely to the government or to private sector, the scholars told TOI.

Ostrom showed how common resources forests, fisheries, oilfields, grazing lands and irrigation systems can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies. "What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people as opposed to just having somebody in the country's capital... make a rule," Ostrom had told reporters in a brief session in Bloomington, Indiana after the prize was announced.

Deepa Gupta, director of Symbiosis School of Economics, said Ostrom's views can be extended to Indian conditions in looking at moving the management of natural resources from a government mechanism such as Gram Panchayat to people's groups. "In a country as vast as India, smaller and sharply local groups of people will be able to plan the use of resources to optimise them," Gupta said. Ostrom's work challenges economist Milton Freidman's argument that oligopolies (many business units that have an equal knowledge of opportunities and equal capability to tap them) will not work in the long run, Gupta pointed out, adding that implying the initiative of local people in planning will help optimise resources such as irrigation.

Rashmi Tripathi, economist with the Bank of Maharshtra, said the very fact that a woman's work in economics is recognised for such a high honour has proved that women are no inferior to men when it comes to complex areas such as economics and this will inspire many young girls in our country.

Calling Ostrom's getting the Nobel prize a great achievement, Vallery Rath, researcher and chief economist at public sector Indian Bank said community management and local area planning is important in a populous country such as India. "Ostrom's research has a very high scope for implementation in our country where poverty and illiteracy are big hurdles in people's involvement in development. This is one of the important approaches to taking planning to the grassroots," Rath said.

Ostrom's proposition does not, however, hold out as a magic wand for India and may not work as a total replacement of the current system. The thesis put forth by Ostrom has the potential to transform rural India though we need to examine how we can mould it to suit the local context, Rath said. "We need to particularly study how the organisational infrastructural for management of public resources by people can be developed or the funding aspects of the concept. However, Ostrom has certainly provided us with the guiding light," she concluded.