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in my view, the Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor. The third force was a more amorphous

group. It was made up of many people who gave passive support to the antiglobalization

movement from many countries, because they saw in it some kind of protest against

the speed at which the old world was disappearing and becoming flat.

The fourth force driving the movement, which was particularly strong in Europe and

in the Islamic world, was anti-Americanism. The disparity between American economic

and political power and everybody else's had grown so wide after the fall of the Soviet

Empire that America began to-or was perceived to-touch people's lives around the

planet, directly or indirectly, more than their own governments did. As people around

the world began to intuit this, a movement emerged, which Seattle both reflected and

helped to catalyze, whereby people said, in effect, "If America is now touching my

life directly or indirectly more than my own government, then I want to have a vote

in America's power." At the time of Seattle, the "touching" that people were most

concerned with was from American economic and cultural power, and therefore the demand

for a vote tended to focus around economic rule-making in386

stitutions like the World Trade Organization. America in the 1990s, under President

Clinton, was perceived as a big dumb dragon, pushing people around in the economic

and cultural spheres, knowingly and unknowingly. We were Puff the Magic Dragon, and

people wanted a vote in what we were puffing.

Then came 9/11. And America transformed itself from Puff the Magic Dragon, touching

people around the world economically and culturally, into Godzilla with an arrow in

his shoulder, spitting fire and tossing around his tail wildly, touching people's

lives in military and security terms, not just economic and cultural ones. As that

happened, people in the world began to say, "Now we really want a vote in how America

wields its power"-and in many ways the whole Iraq war debate was a surrogate debate

about that.

Finally, the fifth force in this movement was a coalition of very serious,

well-meaning, and constructive groups-from environmentalists to trade activists to

NGOs concerned with governance-who became part of the populist antiglobalization

movement in the 1990s in the hopes that they could catalyze a global discussion about

how we globalize. I had a lot of respect and sympathy for this latter group. But in

the end they got drowned out by the whether-we-globalize crowd, which began to turn

the movement more violent at the July 2001 Genoa G-8 summit, when an antiglobalization

protester was killed while attacking an Italian police jeep with a fire extinguisher.

The combination of the triple convergence, the violence at Genoa, 9/11, and tighter

security measures fractured the antiglobalization movement. The more serious

how-we-globalize groups did not want to be in the same trench with anarchists out

to provoke a public clash with police, and after 9/11, many American labor groups

did not want to be associated with a movement that appeared to be taken over by

anti-American elements. This became even more pronounced when in late September 2001,

three weeks after 9/11, antiglobalization leaders attempted a rerun of Genoa in the

streets of Washington, to protest the IMF and World Bank meetings there. After 9/11,

though, the IMF and World Bank canceled their meetings, and many American protesters

shied away. Those who did turn up in the streets of Washington turned the event into

a march against

the imminent American invasion of Afghanistan to remove Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

At the same time, with the triple convergence making the Chinese, Indians, and Eastern

Europeans some of the biggest beneficiaries of globalization, it was no longer

possible to claim that this phenomenon was devastating the world's poor. Just the

opposite: Millions of Chinese and Indians were entering the world's middle class

thanks to the flattening of the world and globalization.

So asthe how-we-globalize forces drifted away, and as the number ofThird World people

benefiting from globalization began to grow, and as America under the Bush

administration began to exercise more unilateral military power, the anti-American

element in the antiglobalization movement began to assume a much louder voice and

role. As a result, the movement itself became both more anti-American and more unable

and unwilling to play any constructive role in shaping the global debate on how we

globalize, precisely when such a role has become even more important as the world

has gotten flatter. As Hebrew University political theorist Yaron Ezrahi so aptly

noted, "The important task of enlisting the people's power to influence

globalism-making it more compassionate, fair, and compatible with human dignity-is

way too important to be wasted on crass anti-Americanism or left in the hands of only

anti-Americans."

There is a huge political vacuum now waiting to be filled. There is a real role today

for a movement that could advance the agenda of how we globalize-not whether we

globalize. The best place such a movement could start is rural India.

"Both the Congress [Party] and its left allies would be risking India's future if

they draw the wrong conclusion from this [2004] election," Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who

heads the Center for Policy Research in Delhi, wrote in The Hindu newspaper. "This

is not a revolt against the market, it is a protest against the state; this is not

resentment against the gains of liberalization, but a call for the state to put its

house in order through even more reform . . . The revolt against holders of power

is not a revolt of the poor against the rich: ordinary people are far less prone to

resent other people's success than intellectuals suppose. It is rather an expression

of the fact that the reform of the state has not gone far enough."

This is why the most important forces righting poverty in India today, in my view,

are those NGOs righting for better local governance, using the Internet and other

modern tools of the flat world to put a spotlight on corruption, mismanagement, and

tax avoidance. The most important, effective, and meaningful populists in the world

today are not those handing out money. They are those with an agenda to drive reform

retail at the local level in their countries-to make it easier for the little man

or woman to register his or her land, even if they are squatters; to start a business,

no matter how small; and to get minimal justice from thelegal system. Modern populism,

to be effective and meaningful, should be about reform retail -making globalization

workable, sustainable, and fair for more people by improving their local governance,

so that the money that has already been earmarked for the poor actually gets to them

and so that their natural entrepreneurship can get unlocked. It is through local

government that people plug into the system and get to enjoy the benefits of the

flattening world rather than just observe them. The average Indian villagers cannot

be likethe Indian high-tech companies and just circumvent the governmentby supplying

their own electricity, their own water resources, their own security, their own bus

system, andtheir own satellite dishes. They need the state for that. The market cannot

be counted on to make up for the failure of the state to deliver decent governance.

The state has to get better. Precisely because the Indian state opted for a

globalization strategy in 1991 and abandoned fifty years of socialism-which had

brought its foreign reserves to near zero-New Delhi had reserves in 2004 of $100

billion, giving it the resources to help more of its people into the flat arena.

Ramesh Ramanathan, an Indian-born former Citibank executive who returned to India

to lead an NGO called Janaagraha, dedicated to improving local governance, is

precisely the kind of new populist I have in mind. "In India," he said, "clients of

public education are sending a signal about the quality of service delivery: Whoever

can afford to opt out does so. The same goes for health care. Given the escalating

costs of health care, if we had a solid public health-care system, most citizens would

opt to use it, not just the poor. Ditto for roads, highways, water supply, sanitation,

registration of births and deaths, crematoria, driver's li389

censes, and so on. Wherever the government provides these services, it [should be]

for the benefit of all citizens. [But] in fact, in some of these, like water supply

and sanitation, the poor are actually not even getting the same basic services as

the middle class and the rich. The challenge here is therefore universal access."

Getting NGOs that can collaborate on the local level to ensure that the poor get the

infrastructure and budgets to which they are entitled could have a major impact on

poverty alleviation.

So although this may sound odd coming from me, it is totally consistent with this

whole book: What the world doesn't need now is for the antiglobalization movement

to go away. We just need it to grow up. This movement had a lot of energy and a lot

of mobilizing capacity. What it lacked was a coherent agenda for assisting the poor

by collaborating with them in a way that could actually help them. The activist groups

that are helping alleviate poverty the most are those working at the local village

level in places like rural India, Africa, and China to spotlight and fight corruption

and to promote accountability, transparency, education, and property rights. You

don't help the world's poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone

through McDonald's window. You help them by getting them the tools and institutions

to help themselves. It may not be as sexy as protesting against world leaders in the

streets of Washington and Genoa, and getting lots of attention on CNN, but it is a

lot more important. Just ask any Indian villager.

Collaboration in poverty alleviation is not just for NGOs. It is also for

multinational corporations. The rural poor in India, Africa, and China represent a

huge market, and it is possible to make money there and serve them -if companies are

ready to collaborate horizontally with the poor. One of the most interesting examples

I have come across of this form of collaboration is a program run by Hewlett-Packard.

HP is not an NGO. HP began with a simple question: What do poor people need most that

we could sell to them? You cannot design this stuff in Palo Alto; you have to cocreate

with the user-customer beneficiary. In order to answer that question, HP created a

public-private partnership with the national government in India and the local

government in Andhra Pradesh. Then a group of HP technologists convened a series of

dialogues in the

390

farming village of Kuppam. It asked residents two things: What are your hopes for

the next three to five years? and What changes would really make your lives better?

To help the villagers (many of them illiterate) express themselves, HP used a concept

called graphic facilitation, wherebywhen people voiced their dreams and aspirations,

a visual artist whom HP brought over from the United States drew images of those

aspirations on craft paper put up on the walls around the room.

"When people, particularly people who are illiterate, say something and it gets

immediately represented on the wall, they feel really validated, and therefore they

get more animated and more engaged," said Maureen Conway, HP's vice president for

emerging market solutions, who headed the project. "It raises self-esteem." Once

these poor farmers living in a remote village got loose, they really started aspiring.

"One of them said, 'What we really need here is an airport,'" said Conway.

After the visioning sessions were complete, HP employees spent more time in the

village just observing how people lived. One technological thing missing in their

lives was photography. Conway explained: "We noticed that there was a big demand for

having pictures taken for identification purposes, for licenses, for applications

and government permits, and we said to ourselves, 'Maybe there is an entrepreneurial

opportunity here if we can turn people into village photographers.' There was one

photo studio in downtown Kuppam. Everyone around [is] farmers. We noticed that people

would come back in from villages on a bus, spend two hours, get their pictures taken,

come back a week later for the pictures, and find out that they were not done or done

wrong. Time is as important for them as for us. So we said, 'Wait a minute, we make

digital cameras and portable printers. So what is the problem?' Why doesn't HP sell

them a bunch of digital cameras and printers? The villagers came back with a very

short answer: 'Electricity.' They had no assured supply of electricity and little

money to pay for it.

"So we said, 'We are technologists. Let's get a solar panel and put it on a backpack

on wheels and see if there is a business for people here, and for HP, if we make a

mobile photo studio.' That is the approach we took. The solar panel can charge both

the camera and the printer. Then we went to a self-help women's group. We picked five

women and said,

'We will train you how to use this equipment.' We gave them two weeks of training.

And we said, 'We will provide you with the camera and supplies, and we will share

revenue with you on every picture.'" This was not charity. Even after buying all their

supplies from HP and sharing some of the revenue with HP, the women in the photography

group doubled their family incomes. "And to be honest, what we found out was that

less than 50 percent of the pictures they took were for identification pictures and

the rest were people just wanting pictures of their kids, weddings, and themselves,"