Combining bad economics with proto-geography

The World Bank has released a new report on Sri Lanka. The title, Sri Lanka: Connecting People to Prosperity, sounds very attractive. Looking at the title of the report, one may wonder if the report professes something different from making people prosper since one may connect people to prosperity but at the same time leaving them as poor as they were before. The Report has revealed, using three dimensional maps, that 17 per cent of Sri Lanka’s poor people (421,000), in fact, live closer to ‘the mountain of prosperity’, i.e., in the Western Province. Figure 1 shows that density of poor people and the mountain of prosperity have close association. In other words more poor people live in and around the prosperous areas. Of course, as the report has explicated both ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors have been in operation compelling the poor to migrate internally to prosperous areas in anticipation of a better way of life. And it is much easier for them to do so. The presence of slums and shanties in the middle and outskirts of big cities in the developing countries may be attributed to these dynamics; the process David Harvey pained as the primitive capital accumulation by dispossession. This process is somewhat similar to the process what Jayati Ghosh described in another context. She wrote: "But it is a darker process, often more perverse and painful, always more fraught and fragile, indicating in depressing ways the continuing failures of our development projects and how little we have actually achieved for most of our citizens. In fact, the nature of our economic growth—which incorporates people in the process even while excluding them from the benefits of growth—may be forcing more of them to be mobile at great human cost" (Outlook India, Counter Column).