At Acumen Fund’s recent five-year celebration, Suketu Mehta (the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found“) shared his insights about Acumen Fund’s work. His keynote remarks appear below.

On July 27, 2005, Bombay experienced the highest recorded rainfall in its history - 37 inches of rain in one day. The torrent showed up the best and the worst about the city. Hundreds of people drowned. But unlike the situation after Katrina hit New Orleans, there was no widespread breakdown of civic order; even though the police was absent, the crime rate did not go up. That was because Bombayites were busy helping each other. Slumdwellers went to the highway and took stranded motorists into their homes and made room for one more person in shacks where the average occupancy is seven adults to a room. Volunteers waded through waist-deep water to bring food to the 150,000 people stranded in train stations. Human chains were formed to get people out of the floods. People stood on the streetcorners to hand out packets of food and water to commuters walking home. Most of the government machinery was absent, but nobody expected otherwise. Bombayites helped each other, because they had lost faith in the government helping them. On a planet of city dwellers, this is how most human beings are going to live and cope in the twenty-first century.

The trouble with trying to understand India is that everything you can say about it is true and false - simultaneously. Yes, it could soon have the world’s largest middle class, but it today has the world’s largest middle class. I studied two general elections in India for my book, and came to the conclusion that what we are seeing in modern India is the greatest transfer of power in world history: the real devolution of power to the real majority of the one billion people that live there. This is a country that is 82% Hindu, yet has a Sikh prime minister, a Muslim president, and an Italian Catholic widow who’s leader of the governing coalition. By contrast, the United States, in two and a quarter centuries after independence, yet has to elect anybody who’s not Christian, white, and male - even as vice-president. (Although that may change in 2008). The difference between the world’s two greatest democracies is that in India, the poor vote.

India has been remarkably successful in devolving political power. The challenge for India now - and this can’t take sixty years - is in devolving economic power. The economic pie has grown, indisputably - India has the highest growth rate of any democracy - it could approach 10% this year - but it needs to be shared more equitably.

India ranks 126 out of 177 nations in the UN’s index of human development. Two-thirds of the country has no access to sanitation, 40% is illiterate, and the levels of malnutrition are higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the UN, the human development figures actually worsened during the period of economic reforms, from 1990 to 2004. This does not mean that reforms are bad. It does mean that the government is not managing the fruits of reforms well. We cannot rely on government alone to redistribute the rewards of success. It’s got to be done by the citizens.

The Acumen Fund invests in private initiatives to move people out of poverty, and that is to be welcomed. My own family’s experience in the diamond industry shows what private enterprise can achieve. Eight out of ten diamonds in the world are cut and polished in India today, most of them in tens of thousands of small factories in Gujarat and Maharashtra.

In a couple of decades, I saw the diamond merchants come up from a group of poorly educated Gujarati traders working long hours in dark rooms to become ‘diamantaires’ living in lavish villas in Antwerp, and bringing prosperity to cities like Surat and Bombay. Because it is labor-intensive, the diamond industry gives employment to hundreds of thousands of people; it allows them to live with dignity. And the diamond merchants did all this without government help. There were no subsidies, no tariffs. The Indians took on the Americans, the Belgians, the Israelis - and won. They won because India is a nation of natural entrepreneurs; we were born to trade.

Tonight, I want to salute Jacqueline Novogratz and all the great people who work at Acumen and fund its activities, in India and Africa. All of you have given up lucrative opportunities in this most mercantile of cities because you have good hearts and good minds. Minds alert enough to realize that if we don’t do something about global poverty quickly, all our wealth will be worthless. The planet will be destroyed, and our fancy apartment buildings overwhelmed by a tide of economic and ecological refugees. We in New York should care about what happens in Nairobi and Karachi if for no other reason than that the next generation of New Yorkers is being born in Nairobi and Karachi today.

But more importantly, all you people at Acumen do this work because your parents brought you up right. They brought you up with love. I remember an article in the New York Times during the Rwandan genocide, in which the reporter asked an ordinary Hutu housewife, Mrs. Bernadette Ntakirutinka, why she had sheltered Tutsis in her home at great personal risk. “Because I was born among human beings,” she replied. “I am a human being. I have loved. I was loved.”

It’s that simple. So I want to say this to everybody at Acumen: on behalf of India, of Pakistan, of Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, thank you. You are doing your dharma. In your work, you have loved. You are loved.

The Acumen Fund believes that the poor, if they are given a helping hand, are perfectly capable of helping themselves. I found the best illustration of this on the incredibly crowded local trains of Bombay. The manager of Bombay’s suburban railway system was recently asked when the system would improve to a point where it could carry its six million daily passengers in comfort. “Not in my lifetime,” he answered. Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover’s embrace was never so close.

Asad bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloguing numberless communal flare-ups and riots, seeing first-hand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid and paraded them through town as an example. Asad, of all people, has seen humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about human beings.

“Not at all,” he responded. “Look at the hands from the trains.”

If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals. As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the compartment. The rest is up to you; you will probably have to hang on with your fingertips on the door frame, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened: your fellow-passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train, and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable, or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning, or whether you live in Malabar Hill or Jogeshwari, whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to work in the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

These, then, are the hands reaching out from the Bombay trains, from some of the poorest people in the city to the newcomers. If they can make space, reach out a helping hand, so can we. Let us all stretch out our hands, from the engines of our prosperity, let us hold out our checkbooks, and let’s each of us help the Acumen Fund make room for one more person on this wonderful blue-green planet.

Suketu Mehta
Acumen Fund Fifth Anniversary Celebration
November 14, 2006