by Miranda G. McLeod
Staff Writer
Dr. David Swain recently spent a month in Southern Asia where he saw an area of the world that is extremely overpopulated and rife with the problems that accompany such conditions. Poverty, disease, malnutrition and religious issues all make every day life in India and Bhutan a struggle for a vast majority of the people.
With that in mind, it may have been quite appropriate that Swain was the guest speaker at the first Jacksonville Community Council Inc. quarterly Lunch and Learn of the year Tuesday. Swain related his experience to the audience through a series of anecdotes, all designed to explain how an organization like JCCI could easily benefit countries like India and Bhutan.
Swain spent three weeks in India and one week in Bhutan, a country north of India that opened its borders to foreign press and tourists in 1974. He conveyed the stark contrast of life in India and Bhutan, which lack organizations such as JCCI that impact the community through service, with that of life in Jacksonville.
The long-time activist and former associate director of JCCI has supervised more than 16 of JCCI’s annual studies and has assisted countless people in JCCI’s mission of bringing together disparate groups to the same table to talk about solving everyday problems. Through trips to places like India and Bhutan, Swain continues that mission on a world-wide scale.
Swain’s wife Caroline said he was already thinking about the presentation of the two countries before the December trip was over.
“It makes the most sense to talk about this through contradictions,” said Swain, a former professor who began his discussion with India.
He said the once-sacred cow is neglected in India and abused in the “modern” urban environment of the country populated with nearly 1.1 billion people. He said rampant political corruption is to blame for much of India’s woes. His tour guide agreed, saying that politicians are to blame for the rift between Hindus and Muslims.
Swain also recalled a story of stones being thrown at the train he was riding on with his wife. The attack, he surmised, was the result of a recent killing of a government official and was designed to interrupt the country’s transportation system.
“The train was traveling 80-90 miles per hour. It was a political demonstration. A politician had been assassinated and they hoped to shut down the rail system,” he said.
India is also stagnant, according to Swain.
“It’s not improvement oriented. The attempts imposed by the government to institute major change, i.e. birth control, have failed. There’s a serious birth control problem in India,” he said. “The population of India will get bigger than China.”
Swain said there have been attempts to implement birth control, but Muslim and Hindu practices supersede all attempts at government-mandated birth control. It’s that lack of cooperation that would make establishing a JCCI-like group in India difficult because locally JCCI relies heavily on community input and opens lines of communication between citizens and government.
“India would be a tough place to set up indicators,” said Swain.
Indicators is a relatively modern procedure for determining topics for study and measuring the success or failure of policies after changes have been made.
Swain contrasted India to Bhutan, a small country between India and China, the size of Switzerland with a population of 800,000 people. In 1972, new leadership gained control of Bhutan and, because of the Chinese take-over of Tibet, the borders of the previously isolationist country were opened.
Unlike India, the people of Bhutan have taken big collective steps to cherish their culture, according to Swain. However, Bhutan has its issues also, primarily its battle between tradition and change.
More than half of Bhutan’s national revenue comes from hydroelectric power, a source of energy that powers much of the country.
“Eighty-ninety percent of the people are subsistence farmers,” said Swain. “But they all have electricity.”
There’s a movement towards the modern culture by the younger generation of Bhutanis that now have access to global communication via the Internet.
“How do you keep a country together with such cultural changes,” asked Swain.
Just as in India, Bhutan has sacred animals, but it’s not the cow. Dogs run free in Bhutan, roaming the streets in packs while contributing to urban sanitary problems.
Another contradiction of Bhutan is the elite Bhutanese citizens versus the “temporary” Indian/Nepalese menial laborers. The workers live in temporary housing and aren’t afforded the same luxuries as the natives. Men are equal in Bhutan because of the Buddhist value of equality. There is no caste system as in India.
One of the biggest issues facing Bhutan will be how to balance the choices made against conflicting pressures from India, China and the rest of the world, said Swain, who ended his presentation with a hand-out of the Buddhist allegory of cooperation. A painting that hangs in Punakha, Bhutan depicts the relationship with berries to a bird, rabbit, monkey and elephant, each of whom inadvertently rely on each to maintain the cycle of life.
Swain said this as an “elegant illumination of the philosophical foundation for JCCI’s mission — and guidance for communities the world over.”
Swain said previously that JCCI and the city of Jacksonville really led the nation in the concept of indicators. Swain has visited other countries such as Brazil to teach governments how to measure the success of policy. “When I joined JCCI, they had gone from a group that canvassed neighborhoods to talk about education reform to one that was counseling the United Nations on how to get citizens involved in the policy-making process,” said Swain. “It really swept the country and the world.”