
Fritz Schumacher got an invitation to visit Burma as an
Economic Advisor in 1955. By this time, Schumacher was trying to synthesize
various seemingly disparate strands – Gandhi, Buddhism, energy supplies of the
future, industrial development and “war on poverty”. The visit provided a great
opportunity to experience the East and feel some of these elements first-hand –
especially Buddhism. One of the core questions Fritz carried with him was, “Can
one really help Burmese without harming them?”
After a few days in Rangoon, Schumacher wrote to his wife
Muschi, “There is an innocence here which I have never seen before”. Pretty
soon he realized that poverty and backwardness weren’t the real issues Burma
was facing. It was the way the West was altering the aspirations and concepts
of “development” of Burmese people which he found scary. Burmese people had few
wants and they were happy. He realized that the wants make a man poor and that
made the role of the West very dangerous. He urged Burmese government not to
pay excessive attention to industrial development as advised by the Western
experts. He felt that focus on self-sufficiency especially rural development
was crucial. Nobody paid any attention to this.
What might have been a discouraging experience was more
than compensated when Schumacher got an opportunity to learn meditation in a
highly respected Buddhist monastery of Burma. His first exercise was only to watch
the rising and falling of his abdomen sitting in a monk’s cell. The monks
taught him how to cope with the distractions; merely to note them but not to
follow them. The next stage was to walk up and down the monastery garden
concentrating on each movement of his body as he walked. The stillness he experienced
towards the end of the course was something he had never felt before. He wrote,
“I came to Burma as a thirsty wanderer, and there I found living water.”
Schumacher felt that the economics as defined in the West
was based on materialistic progress. It encouraged expansion of wants. In fact,
big car, big house, big salary were indicators of progress. He felt economic
progress is good only to the point of sufficiency, beyond that it is evil,
destructive, uneconomic. Secondly, he felt there is a need to make a
distinction between “renewable” and “non-renewable” resources. He looked at development
activity robbing earth of its non-renewable resources as regressive.
It has been over forty years since Buddhist Economics was
proposed. The GDPs of India and China have soared since then. The wants of the
countrymen represented especially by the scale of scams in India have soared
too. Robbery of non-renewable resources is progressing well. Net-net, have these countries become richer or poorer?
Source:
Barbara
Wood & Robert McCrum, “Alias Papa: A life of Fritz Schumacher”, Green
Books, 2011 (chapter 17, The Breakthrough).
Photo source: TheHindu.com
, A severely burnt Buddhist monk receives treatment after clashing with police
while protesting against Chinese backed copper mines in Northern Myanmar (Nov, 2012)
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