Suicidal to go back to old economic order, Mohd Yunus tells Rahul Gandhi
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 31
Leading economist and Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus on Friday said Covid had afforded the world a unique opportunity to rethink the economic order and it would be suicidal to go back to things as they were in the pre-pandemic era.
In a half-hour conversation with Congress leader Rahul Gadhi, Yunus advised governments across the world to uplift informal and rural economies and create mechanisms whereby people can live and prosper where they are.
“COVID has suddenly stopped the economic machine. Now the focus is on recovery. What is the hurry to go back? Should we go back at all? That world was a horrible world. It was creating global warming. Why do we have to go back to that world, a world with global warming, to a world where Artificial Intelligence is taking away jobs? Going back will be suicidal. COVID has given us an opportunity to think anew. This is the time to take outrageously bold decisions, not to quietly go back to where we were,” Yunus said in the conversation.
The leading micro credit finance specialist who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to lend collateral free loans to the poor entrepreneurs, Yunus said financial systems worldwide are designed in wrong ways.
“COVID has revealed the weaknesses now. Poor people are all over. We knew they existed but suddenly we saw millions of migrants on the highway. We have to recognise these people. The economy does not recognise them. If we can finance them they will move up the ladder. We are engaged with the formal sector. When we gave micro credit to women they showed how much capacity they have. The whole world has accepted micro credit,” said Yunus advocating a new economic system where governments finance the poor to create a life in villages.
He said we follow the western model of economics even when we have tremendous capacity to make things happen.
“In the western model, urban economy is the hub and rural economy is the supplier of labour. Why can’t we build an autonomous economy? Yunus asked saying today we have the technology, infrastructure and communications to ensure thriving economies in villages.
Why can’t we create an economy where people work where they live? he asked stressing the need to trust micro entrepreneurs.
Grameen Bank, he said, is the sole bank in the world which is lawyer free and which gives collateral free loans to the poor and the money comes back with interest. He said this becomes possible when people trust each other and their capacities.
To an intervention by Gandhi that a micro credit system for women he created in UP was destroyed by the BJP government, Yunus said, “If people enjoy what you are doing it would be a temporary disruption. It will spring back at other places with a bigger force. Good ideas are indestructible.”
Yunus said COVID has given the world a chance to reflect how big, bold decisions can be taken. “We have a choice whether we go back to that terrible world which is going to destroy itself anyway or we go someplace else and build a new world where there will be no global warming, no wealth concentration, no unemployment,” he said.
