Tajikistan. Where is it? Somewhere amongst the “-stan” countries, Tajikistan is probably better known for being neighbors with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan than by its own right. The result is a tendency for the unfamiliar outsider to culturally lump it with the bigger “-stans”. At least that was how I mentally understood it until I spent the past week in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital.
On the surface, Dushanbe wasn’t surprising. Gray, communist era building dominated the city’s landscape along neatly planned avenues. A large park plopped in the city center with a grandiose statue to Amir Ismail Samani of the Samanid Empire. Most shops carried merchandise produced in either Russia or China – food products from Russia and all other goods from China. The only thing that I missed seeing were propaganda slogans and posters promoting the dictator.
Samani Statue in Dushanbe's City Center
What surprised me about Tajikistan was the underlying poverty in the country. Informal conversations and online research taught me that the average household in Tajikistan earns 250 – 300 Somoni ( ~$60USD) a month, which means that many families live on less than $2 a day. Goods aren’t cheap either – a loaf of bread costs 1 somoni (~$0.25USD) as does a bus ride. It took me by surprise, because nothing about the city’s appearance would’ve hinted at such poverty levels. In India, the poverty is in your face – children in rags run barefoot through the streets; ramshackle slums of plastic lean-tos next to railway lines. In Tajikistan, the poverty hides under a clean and orderly veneer, a remnant of Soviet indoctrination* and infrastructure development. During the Soviet era, there was funding for public works projects, but after its independence, all the development projects stopped. As a result, Dushanbe looks like it’s a city stuck in the 80’s with everything from cars to hair styles from that era.
According to everyone I spoke with, much of the wealth that comes into the country is through remittances. Out of the 7 million Tajiks, an estimated 1 million Tajik men work in Russia and send back remittances that are supposed to account for 35-40% of the GDP. The other major source of wealth is from foreign donors and international agencies. It seemed like everything was sponsored by some foreign entity – e.g., Dushanbe’s new airport is under construction with support from the French government. There is a Hyatt hotel in Dushanbe, which exists primarily to house international donor agency staff. I wouldn’t be surprised if international funding made up a large portion of the remaining GDP.
The problem with Tajikistan is that it lacks any real wealth generating industries. While there is a lot of subsistence farming, Tajikistan is 90% mountain ranges and not naturally endowed with much fertile land for agricultural crops. The locals kept telling me that Tajikistan was second to Uzbekistan in cotton production for the Soviet Union, but in comparison to nearby India, Tajikistan’s cotton production is miniscule and not competitive. Tajikistan’s Ferghana Valley also produces some excellent fruits, but that one short fruit season hardly seems like the answers to its economic problems. Foundations in the areas are promoting agricultural projects amongst young unemployed Tajiks in rural areas. I had a conversation with a program manager from the Eurasian Foundation about a project funding potato farming, which failed to take off because the domestic markets sourced cheaper potatoes from Russia or China. I’m not an agricultural development specialist, but personally, it seems unlikely that domestic produce can compete with large scale commercial agricultural production from Russia or China. At most, Tajikistan can hope to build a value add industry around processing produce (e.g., potato chip production, tomato sauce processing, etc.)
Aside from farming, I was told that most people found employment in small scale trading, meaning selling goods in the local bazaars. Since there’s virtually no export trade and only import trade, these trading activities aren’t resulting in wealth creation for the country. Currently, there are over 130 micro credit related entities, which provide loans of ~$500 USD to these small scale entrepreneurs.
Tajikistan also lacks any form of service industry that could generate wealth. Most Tajiks don’t speak English, but they do speak Russian, which creates the potential of developing an outsourced service industry catering to the Russian market. Given the growing markets in Russia and Kazakhstan, the potential to leverage Tajikistan’s cheaper labor force is high. The only glitch in this solution is that the country has an extreme shortage of human resources. Any skilled labor immediately leaves the country in search of greener pastures and so there is a significant problem in retaining strong human resources. It seems to me that this should be the moment for government intervention and incentive policies that would make it possible to build human resource capacity in the country. Policies like Singapore’s presidential scholar program that sends students abroad in return for a committed number of years of employment might be one way to address the human resource scarcity.
Although my time there was limited and my understanding of the situation superficial, I find the economic development problem in Tajikistan a fascinating one. I suspect that Tajikistan’s economic problem is highly policy oriented. Unlike India, where development in many parts of the country needs to start from scratch with infrastructure building, Tajikistan appears to have much of the machinery, but no mechanism to get it started. Tajikistan was an eye-opener for me. Apparently, poverty and development problems come in all shapes and hues.
*Apparently there was a Soviet tradition known as “Subbotnik”, from the word for Saturday, where citizens come out to sweep the streets and tidy up public spaces on Saturdays. Walking down Dushanbe’s main Avenue Rudaki on Saturday, I saw men shoveling mud out of the gutters and cleaning a public garden.
Grassroots anecdotes are shared of Dalit (untouchable caste) women in rural villages in Jharkhand, who were helped by social activist groups to utilize the law to obtain their rightful state welfare provisions. These individual victories are a small torch of hope for how the poor may yet be able to overcome corruption.
