World Development Report on Mind, Society, and Behaviour: Implications of the judgement on Malom massacre

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By Amar Yumnam

Let me start with an automatic and biased statement on the basis of the discipline on which I have concentrated my little academic capability and a miniscule of that to make my short existence in this planet meaningful and relevant. I am talking of Economics and Development Economics within that. The subject is now in a very exciting phase of expansion and with no restriction of territorial boundaries. It does not feel shy of borrowing ways of thinking and ideas from any discipline highly restrictive of trespassing; Economics today just adopts any approach and idea from any discipline to enrich herself. A friend of mine in a team of consultants for a World Bank Project used to term a Good Road as Sexy. To paraphrase him, we can say that Economics is absolutely Sexy today. A strong reflection of this can be found in the latest World Development Report of the World Bank titled Mind, Society, and Behaviour presented to the world only a few days back on 2 December. This Report symbolises the thinking among Economists and particularly among the development focused ones during the last two decades when it says: `Economics has thus come full circle. After a respite of about 40 years, an economics based on a more realistic understanding of human beings is being reinvented. But this time, it builds on a large body of empirical evidence`”microlevel evidence from across the behavioural and social sciences. The mind, unlike a computer, is psychological, not logical; malleable, not fixed. It is surely rational to treat identical problems identically, but often people do not; their choices change when the default option or the order of choices changes. People draw on mental models that depend on the situation and the culture to interpret experiences and make decisions. This Report shows that a more interdisciplinary perspective on human behaviour can improve the predictive power of economics and provide new tools for development policy.`

On the basis of this new characteristic of Economics, the Report states: `From the hundreds of empirical papers on human decision making that form the basis of this Report, three principles stand out as providing the direction for new approaches to understanding behaviour and designing and implementing development policy. First, people make most judgments and most choices automatically, not deliberatively: we call this `thinking automatically.` Second, how people act and think often depends on what others around them do and think: we call this `thinking socially.` Third, individuals in a given society share a common perspective on making sense of the world around them and understanding themselves: we call this `thinking with mental models.` Based on these principles, the latest World Development Report examines a wide range of issues relating to development, development policy, behaviour of development practitioners including poverty and corruption. In all these, the Report emphasises a contextualised appreciation of problems and evolution of policies.

It is exactly at this moment that we have just had a landmark judgement of the Manipur High Court in connection with the Malom Massacre of nearly a decade and a half back. As mentioned, the latest World Development Report on Mind, Society and Behaviour emphasises contextualised understanding of issues. One of the most dangerous trends in Manipur during the last four decades or so is the rising predominance of violence, whether by state or non-state agents, as a means to score on anything and as indicators of performance. This – resort to violence as a means of action for achieving anything and as symbol of performance `“ necessarily implies inculcating and spreading a culture of dishonouring the rule of law. This is exactly where the significance of the latest judgement lies inter alia. At one stroke the judgement signifies the emphasis on human values, imperative for understanding context of application of interventions and need for instilling the values of honouring the rules of law in any circumstance. However, let me hasten to add, it would be tremendously wrong if we assume that the significance of this judgement applies only to the army; the lesson is for every segment of the society.

Another area where we strongly need a social lesson for Manipur today relates to the widespread notion of inevitability of corruption and both wide and deep practice of corruption as acceptable social norms. Because of the widespread prevalence of it, it also needs an emphatic lesson like the recent one on violence and rule of law provided by the judgement of the High Court. An emphatic shock on this would go a long way in preparing Manipur and giving direction to the nature of character required for effectively joining the unfolding global race for development by getting closer to the economies of South East Asia.

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