Daily Times

Struggle against poverty, famine, disease and high infant mortality must be closely correlated with a general strategy toward social modernisation. A major condition for its implementation involves measures for population control. The United Nations and countries in Asia and Africa support population control programmes to meet challenges of overpopulation in terms of socioeconomic as well as political consequences.

Thomas Malthus had feared that population growth would tend to outstrip growth in food production, leading to ever-increasing famine and poverty. Later, more sophisticated and realistic models were presented indicating the need for developing reliable demographic data and a focus on human development as a major factor in socioeconomic development and societal advancement in terms of creating an enabling culture and developing tools and techniques and methodologies for social modernisation. A census is one of the direct methods of collecting demographic data. Analyses are conducted after a census to estimate how much over or undercounting took place.

A global approach to human development is desirable. The progress of human civilisation could be considered an achievement of all humanity. Since spoken and written language and scientific thinking were among the main contributors to progress, they could not be attributed to any single group of people, nation or race, but should be seen as adaptive innovations accumulating over centuries developed by human species as a whole. The growing human capabilities for rational activity have demonstrated certain important traits of the evolutionary process. The aim has been the relatively narrow one of mastering the material world in order to satisfy immediate human needs at the expense of dimensions of human development. The ideology reflected the thinking that in the universal context people were more rational, and societies more developed if they had demonstrated greater capability to master the material world.

The new aim should be development of global rationality through the application of human rationality toward the guidance of the global evolutionary process. Global rationality can develop only as a result of a conscious decision to develop appropriate ideologies and values and establish adequate institutions. It is to be a continuous process. Disparities need to be removed for global stability and equity. Some of the greatest challenges worldwide now are terrorism, extremism and excessively increasing polarisation. What is needed is development of global brotherhood, global equity and global rationality.

The need is to focus on links between education, skill structures, employment and new technologies. The aim is to define the direction what changes in educational and training systems must guide to cope more flexibly with shifts in human skills required in context of economic and technological restructuring, and with employment problems that exist and may arise in the future. Supervisors and managers have to lead from the front and interact with diversity and pressures on the job, “getting good people to stay, “as Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans wrote in their famous book, Love them or Lose Them.

How people think about people is important. Management is now expected to be consultative in nature. There must be a new concept of administration. An administrator must first understand and learn how to deal with the informal social organisation as well as the formal organisation. The second need is semantic in nature, the development of a language that permits people to communicate on a cooperative basis. This will be language of mutually interdependent relations, of togetherness, of equilibrium, of adaptation, and of growth. The administrator must learn to conduct himself in an environment of two-way communication. He has to listen to the subordinate’s point of view without evidencing perturbation.

Finally, there is need to distinguish the realm of feelings from facts and logic. A discussion of this subject is not complete without some reference to the relation of job skills to supervisory ability. Managers have to be accomplished performers in the jobs of those whom they supervise. Furthermore, liberation of man’s intellect is vital. Opportunity for the same must be provided for human development and growth and maturity of complex organisations.

Management culture accepts many of the devices of participation. In general, three broad substantive fields of participation are: (1) Personnel policy, (2) High Fiscal Policy, (3) Production Policies. The first involves the area covered by collective bargaining contracts and civil service laws in which employee participation is well established. Senior personnel have to be trained to speak freely and with confidence, in conferences and meetings. They have also to be provided skills in job analysis approaches. Also needed is training to make delegators know what goes on around the work place and the real advantages of delegating authority. Cooperation through committees is an interesting experience that contributes to effective management though training in human development.

Experts on human development suggest a policy with restoration to the individual of a maximum of initiatives so that they can shape their own life pattern. It amounts to profound changes in social and cultural domains of society, with a view to achieving a better balance between remunerative work and other aspects of human life. In the face of lower rates of economic growth and continuing upward trends in technology and labour productivity, the need is to move from a defensive to constructive attitude. The proposed policy package, equitable and efficient, would imply an important adaptation of the welfare state in favour of giving individuals more initiative and scope to shape their own lifestyle and moving away from fixed, government-imposed patterns, except where they are strictly necessary. By this proposal, weaker groups in society, who are now becoming increasingly more vulnerable, would become strong as they are given additional opportunities to return to education and other forms of self-improvement. I would support argument on this subject by Louis Emmerij, “Responsible growth.”

The human factor as the key to progress has its significance well accepted. However, we know from history that qualitative benefits of life are reserved for the elite, while the quantitative aspects are dealt with by uneducated majority, who neither understands nor cares about the abstract objectives determined by their rulers. Society accepted hierarchy as the natural system of operation and regarded ultimate physical power through the use of force as a legitimate means to discipline the poor classes. In west Europe, the immediate impact of the industrial revolution was a demographic explosion of the highest magnitude. Millions of migrants left the old continent to find new options in North America, South America and Australia.

The key lies in the development of human potential through education and training as applied to agriculture and industry, looking for all means to achieve competitive advantage. Side by side with consumer society there exists a garbage society, asymbol of poverty and misery. Human dignity should be the basic objective of development. Make the human factor the real human capital.

The writer is a former director of the National Institute of Public Administration, a political analyst, a public policy expert and an author. His book Post 9/11 Pakistan was published in the US