Venezuelan President’s Speech On Climate Change In Copenhagen is really a thought provoking one.Here is the pdf document of his speech.
To download click on the link below:
http://rapidshare.com/files/328001749/Venezuelan_President.pdf.html
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
India's Poverty Line Is Actually A Starvation Line
By Devinder Sharma
There is something terribly wrong with growth economics. After all, 18 years after
A report by an expert group headed by Suresh Tendulkar, formerly chairman of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, now estimates poverty at 37.2 per cent, an increase of roughly 10 per cent over the earlier estimates of 27.5 per cent in 2004-05. This means, an additional 110 million people have slipped below the poverty line in just four years.
The number of poor is multiplying at a time when the number of billionaires has also increased. Economic growth however does not reflect the widening economic disparities. For instance, the economic wealth of mere 30-odd rich families in
If these 30 families were to migrate to
Anyway, the complicated arithmetic hides more than what it reveals. Poverty estimates were earlier based on nutritional criteria, which means based on the monthly income required to purchase 2,100 calories in the urban areas and 2,400 calories in the rural areas. Over the years, this measure came in for sharp criticism, and finally the Planning Commission suggested a new estimation methodology based on a new basket of goods that is required to survive – includes food, fuel, light, clothing and footwear.
Accordingly, the Tendulkar committee has worked out that 41.8 per cent of the population or approximately 450 million people survive on a monthly per capita consumption expenditure of Rs 447. In other words, if you break it down to a daily expenditure, it comes to bare Rs 14.50 paise. I wonder how can the rural population earning more than Rs 14 and less than say even Rs 25 a day be expected to be over the poverty line. It is quite obvious therefore that the entire effort is still to hide the poverty under a veil of complicating figures.
If the government accepts Tendulkar committee report, the food subsidy bill will swell to Rs 47,917.62-crore, a steep rise over the earlier subsidy of Rs 28,890.56-crore required to feed the BPL population with 25 kg of grains. This is primarily the reason why the government wants to keep the number of poor low. In other words, the poverty line reflects the number of people living in acute hunger. It should therefore be called as a starvation line.
I remember a few years back, a group of charitable organisations in
Going back to the poverty line arithmetic, the 2007 Arjun Sengupta committee report (officially the report of the National Commission on Enterprise in Unorganised Sector), which had estimated that 77 per cent of the population or 836 million people, were unable to spend more than Rs 20 a day, is probably a correct reflection of the extent of prevailing poverty.
In addition to monthly income, poverty estimates must incorporate the human development index as prepared by the United Nations Development Programme.
Punjab Farmers Slide Deeper Into Indebtedness
By Devinder Sharma
I am at present travelling in
All these years, the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) had asked farmers to increase productivity. The higher the productivity, the more the income from farming, we were repeatedly told. This was however not true. The more the productivity, more has been the outstanding debt. Unfortunately, no one had the courage to question the faulty promise being doled out by the
While the
Newspapers in Punjab have for the last few days been carrying reports based on a study released by Prof H S Shergill of the Institute for Development and Communication in
Rising farm debt in
http://www.southasiapost.org/2009/20091215/edit.htm
FARMERS in
Relief came in dozes. Now after independence and thanks to Green Revolution that pushed into commercial mode the debt has continued to rise as never before. It is true that the entire indebtedness is not due to farming practices and needs, but major portion is due to that. At times the debt ridden farmer finds no other way bit to commit suicide. During the last one decade, over one lakh and fifty thousand farmers have taken this route which is both cowardly and brutal.
Average debt per farm household is Rs 1.39 lakh. 72 per cent of farm households are more heavily involved in debt. 17 per cent cannot pay back even the interest. 60 per cent of the debts trapped are small or marginal farmers.
Last decade
Nearly 72 per cent of farm households are more heavily involved in debt. Out of these around 17 per cent are in virtual ‘debt trap’ in the sense that they cannot pay even the annual interest on their loans from their current farm income. Shergill has said there was little chance of their repaying the accumulated debt from the current income.
Professor Shergill has concluded that the outstanding debt component has increased at a faster rate (14.13 per cent per year) than total farm debt (8.81 per cent per year) over this period. The mortgage debt, however, has declined over this period and may completely disappear in the near future.
Interestingly, the debt of small and marginal farmers has grown at a slower rate (1.29 per cent per year) than the debt of medium and big farmers (2.71 per cent per year). Almost 60 per cent of these ‘debt trapped’ farm households are marginal and small farmers and most of these ‘debt trapped’ farm households (86 per cent) belong to the Malwa region.
When compared to income generated from the farms, the debt amount has increased from being 68 per cent in 1997 to 84 per cent in 2008. Then as a proportion of the value of machinery owned by
Despite steep rise in farmland prices in the state, the amount of farm debt is now (2008) equal to 4 per cent of the total value of farmland of the state, compared to it being 3 per cent in 1997.
Almost 30 per cent of the farm households of the state borrowed some money for long-term, non-productive purposes during the agricultural year 2007-08. The average amount of these loans per borrowing farmer was Rs 1.25 lakh, and the per operated acre amount worked out to Rs 12,826.
Northern Malwa farmers borrowed the highest amount of non-productive loans for reasons such as house construction and repair (44.38 per cent of total amount), marriages and social ceremonies (41.41 per cent of total), and purchase of durable consumer goods (25.41 per cent of total). The main sources of these loans were: commission agents and money lenders (54.48 per cent of total amount) and commercial banks (28.96 per cent of total). The share of Cooperative Credit Institutions in non-productive long-term loans was rather small, being only 3.36 per cent. Interestingly, though not related to the study, but it may be added that the Punjab farmers received only 1.3 per cent of the national debt waiver in the form of relief announced by the union government in its last budget.
Monday, November 30, 2009
25 years After the Bhopal Gas tragedy
Twenty-five years after the world’s worst industrial disaster occurred at midnight on December 3, 1984, the only fact that seems worthy of being reported is that there is nothing about the disaster that is hidden anymore. Nothing that has not been written about; nothing more required to point fingers.
And yet, as the nation mourns the first anniversary of 26/11 through war-like visuals on TV, questions about Bhopal linger. While the perpetrators of 26/11 are being tried in court, justice has not been delivered to the victims of chemical poisoning here.
Even after a quarter century of protests, of misery, of lives lived in the shadow of death.
The media finds catharsis for the trauma of 26/11 in its footage of the restored Taj Mahal hotel. But there is nothing redemptive for TV about slums full of poor survivors living on contaminated water demanding their right to justice, which are the only images 3/12 has to offer.
Victims of the Bhopal disaster note that while the Indian government submitted several dossiers of evidence to Pakistan over 26/11, it has failed to get one man, a declared fugitive, extradited from the U.S. even after every piece of evidence against him and the corporation he headed, Union Carbide, is public knowledge.
The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal, while issuing a second non-bailable warrant for the arrest of the then Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson earlier this year, held that the “wilful non-execution” of this warrant was a “punishable offence under sections 217 and 221 of IPC” on the part of the Union government and “public servants” concerned.
It also held that the “public servants” responsible for the execution were “Cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar and Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon.”
The industry-sponsored trivialisation of the Bhopal issue, including the Dursban bribery scandal, is not news anymore. There is enough on-the-record information about the captains of India Inc pitching in for Dow Chemical, which now owns Carbide, asking the government to free the U.S. conglomerate of the responsibility of cleaning up the Union Carbide factory premises.
Documents obtained by Bhopal activists through RTI reveal Ratan Tata’s personal letters to Manmohan Singh, Home Minister (then Finance Minister) P. Chidambaram and Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in 2006, urging them to let Indian industry clean up the Bhopal site as it was “critical for Dow to have the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers withdraw their application for a financial deposit by Dow against the remediation cost.”
Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris was more forthright. In a letter to Ronen Sen, Indian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, he wrote:
“Certainly, a withdrawal of application would be a positive demonstration that the GOI means what it says about Dow’s lack of responsibility in the matter.”
In return he offers, “economic growth in India, including key foreign investments that will promote job creation…”
“When we met the Prime Minister in 2008 and brought up the issue, he raised his hands and said he didn’t want to hear a word about Dow, saying tragedies happen and this country needs to move on,” says Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action.
But for those who still live with the contamination all around them, moving on is something they find impossible to do.
ADDITIONAL REPORT:
ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Cleaning Up After Bhopal Gas Tragedy - Not Begun
PrafulBidwai
NEW DELHI (IPS) - A generation after the world’s worst ever industrial disaster occurred at a U.S. multinational-owned pesticide plant in Bhopal, central India, responsibility continues to be evaded on cleaning up thousands of tonnes of toxic chemicals that have contaminated the soil and water in the vicinity.
The U.S. multinational, Dow Chemical, has now offered to partially bear the cost of cleaning the site of the plant that infamously leaked poisonous cyanide gases into the city in December 1984 causing some 4,000 immediate deaths. In return, Dow wants to be freed of legal liability inherited from Union Carbide Corp., which it bought in 2001.
By natural law Dow takes over all its liabilities as well as assets. But Dow has been lobbying hard, both directly and through the U.S. government, to influence senior officials of the Indian government to obtain a ruling in its favour.
If it succeeds, Dow can walk away from its responsibility of clearing the mess left behind by Carbide, which includes over 9,000 tonnes of poisonous chemicals which have contaminated soil and water and affected over 25,000 people living in the plant’s vicinity. Dow is holding out the lure of large-scale investments in India if it is let off the liability hook.
Dow’s latest offer follows numerous pleadings on its behalf by powerful Indian officials in the Planning Commission, (then) Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, as well as the U.S.-India Business Council composed of top-notch business leaders from both countries.
Apart from the deadly leakage of methyl isocyanate and other toxic gases that, activists believe killed at least 8,000 people in the first week there was enormous chemical damage that affected more than 200,000. This may have caused a further 15,000 deaths and continued disabilities and suffering among the survivors, including grievous damage to their lungs and other organs.
Carbide managed to escape civil liability for the faulty plant design and gross negligence which led to the accident by paying the paltry sum of 470 million US dollars in what was regarded as a collusive and unfair settlement in 1989. But its criminal liability still survives.
However, both Union Carbide and its directors refused to stand trial in a Bhopal criminal court and have proved absconders from the law. Dow has, in fact, been sheltering a fugitive from Indian law and selling Carbide’s products, technologies and services in India.
"Dow’s offer confronts the Indian government with a critical choice," says Satinath Sarangi, of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, which first discovered and established the toxic contamination of the soil and groundwater in 1990. "Either it collaborates and cuts a deal with a multinational corporation in a mercenary fashion; or it sides with the victims, who have been affected by chemicals leaching from the industrial waste include some that cause birth defects and cancers and damage to the lungs, kidneys and the liver."
The Indian government is sharply divided over the issue. Its Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers has held Dow legally liable for cleaning the site of the wastes, and demanded in court that the company deposit Rupees one billion (25 million dollars) as initial payment for the cost of the remediation (decontamination) pending adjudication of the matter.
But the Ministry of Law opposes this and says the determination of liability would depend on the terms of the 2001 merger between Dow and Carbide, whose fine print would have to be studied.
According to the organisations of the Bhopal victims, Carbide made a misrepresentation by claiming that it has no liabilities on account of the gas leak disaster. In fact, Union Carbide, some of its directors, including former chairman Warren Anderson, and its Indian subsidiary, stand charged before an Indian court with causing death by a negligent act.
Dow maintains that being a U.S. company, it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Indian courts. The courts have not yet made a ruling on Dow's liability, but only asked that a part of the over ground wastes, some 386 tonnes secured in a warehouse, be removed to a town in Gujarat to be incinerated.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court is however silent on what should be done with the 8,000 tonnes of chemical waste that lies underground at the plant site and also with the hundreds of tonnes that is strewn all over the compound. Victims’ organisations argue that incineration is an unsafe and improper method of disposing of the waste, and that India does not have the right technology to detoxify it.
As an alternative method, they cite the example of Unilever Corp., which was ordered in 2003 by the Madras High Court to take 230 tonnes of mercury waste it had dumped in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu all the way to the U.S. for detoxification.
Two years ago, the victims’ groups, including the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karamchari Sangh, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangarsh Morcha, along with the BGIA, succeeded in getting a contract between Dow Chemical and the public sector Indianoil Corporation annulled. This involved the licensing of a proprietary technology of Union Carbide, which is a 100 percent-owned subsidiary of Dow.
Dow is negotiating the sale of petrochemicals technologies with Reliance Industries Ltd, one of India's largest private sector companies, which belongs to the Mukesh Ambani group.
"Evidently, all manner of entrenched interests are at work to help Dow duck its legal liability and obligation to clean up the site," says Nityanandan Jayaraman, of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. "It’s truly appalling that the Indian government is bowing to their pressure, and that too at a time when large volumes of foreign direct investment, exceeding ten billion dollars this year, are flowing into the country."
Jayaraman added that this showed up the ‘’utter servility on the part of the government towards the U.S. and giant transnational corporations, a phenomenon that has been in evidence ever since 1984. Clearly, high rates of GDP growth and India’s claim to be an emerging economic superpower have not prevented it from acting like a Fourth World country, which puts corporate investment above the life and well-being of its citizens."
If the Indian government succumbs to pressure from Dow, from powerful Indian industrialists like Ratan Tata (who lobbied on the company's behalf), and from some of its own pro-neoliberal ministers, that will only add further insult to the colossal injury the victims have suffered, say activists.
Most of the Bhopal victims received less than 150 dollars for extensive injuries and prolonged suffering. Even families of the dead got as little as 5,000 dollars. A good deal of the compensation was alleged to have been siphoned off by corrupt officials, politicians and middlemen.
And yet, as the nation mourns the first anniversary of 26/11 through war-like visuals on TV, questions about Bhopal linger. While the perpetrators of 26/11 are being tried in court, justice has not been delivered to the victims of chemical poisoning here.
Even after a quarter century of protests, of misery, of lives lived in the shadow of death.
The media finds catharsis for the trauma of 26/11 in its footage of the restored Taj Mahal hotel. But there is nothing redemptive for TV about slums full of poor survivors living on contaminated water demanding their right to justice, which are the only images 3/12 has to offer.
Victims of the Bhopal disaster note that while the Indian government submitted several dossiers of evidence to Pakistan over 26/11, it has failed to get one man, a declared fugitive, extradited from the U.S. even after every piece of evidence against him and the corporation he headed, Union Carbide, is public knowledge.
The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal, while issuing a second non-bailable warrant for the arrest of the then Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson earlier this year, held that the “wilful non-execution” of this warrant was a “punishable offence under sections 217 and 221 of IPC” on the part of the Union government and “public servants” concerned.
It also held that the “public servants” responsible for the execution were “Cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar and Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon.”
The industry-sponsored trivialisation of the Bhopal issue, including the Dursban bribery scandal, is not news anymore. There is enough on-the-record information about the captains of India Inc pitching in for Dow Chemical, which now owns Carbide, asking the government to free the U.S. conglomerate of the responsibility of cleaning up the Union Carbide factory premises.
Documents obtained by Bhopal activists through RTI reveal Ratan Tata’s personal letters to Manmohan Singh, Home Minister (then Finance Minister) P. Chidambaram and Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in 2006, urging them to let Indian industry clean up the Bhopal site as it was “critical for Dow to have the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers withdraw their application for a financial deposit by Dow against the remediation cost.”
Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris was more forthright. In a letter to Ronen Sen, Indian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, he wrote:
“Certainly, a withdrawal of application would be a positive demonstration that the GOI means what it says about Dow’s lack of responsibility in the matter.”
In return he offers, “economic growth in India, including key foreign investments that will promote job creation…”
“When we met the Prime Minister in 2008 and brought up the issue, he raised his hands and said he didn’t want to hear a word about Dow, saying tragedies happen and this country needs to move on,” says Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action.
But for those who still live with the contamination all around them, moving on is something they find impossible to do.
ADDITIONAL REPORT:
ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Cleaning Up After Bhopal Gas Tragedy - Not Begun
PrafulBidwai
NEW DELHI (IPS) - A generation after the world’s worst ever industrial disaster occurred at a U.S. multinational-owned pesticide plant in Bhopal, central India, responsibility continues to be evaded on cleaning up thousands of tonnes of toxic chemicals that have contaminated the soil and water in the vicinity.
The U.S. multinational, Dow Chemical, has now offered to partially bear the cost of cleaning the site of the plant that infamously leaked poisonous cyanide gases into the city in December 1984 causing some 4,000 immediate deaths. In return, Dow wants to be freed of legal liability inherited from Union Carbide Corp., which it bought in 2001.
By natural law Dow takes over all its liabilities as well as assets. But Dow has been lobbying hard, both directly and through the U.S. government, to influence senior officials of the Indian government to obtain a ruling in its favour.
If it succeeds, Dow can walk away from its responsibility of clearing the mess left behind by Carbide, which includes over 9,000 tonnes of poisonous chemicals which have contaminated soil and water and affected over 25,000 people living in the plant’s vicinity. Dow is holding out the lure of large-scale investments in India if it is let off the liability hook.
Dow’s latest offer follows numerous pleadings on its behalf by powerful Indian officials in the Planning Commission, (then) Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, as well as the U.S.-India Business Council composed of top-notch business leaders from both countries.
Apart from the deadly leakage of methyl isocyanate and other toxic gases that, activists believe killed at least 8,000 people in the first week there was enormous chemical damage that affected more than 200,000. This may have caused a further 15,000 deaths and continued disabilities and suffering among the survivors, including grievous damage to their lungs and other organs.
Carbide managed to escape civil liability for the faulty plant design and gross negligence which led to the accident by paying the paltry sum of 470 million US dollars in what was regarded as a collusive and unfair settlement in 1989. But its criminal liability still survives.
However, both Union Carbide and its directors refused to stand trial in a Bhopal criminal court and have proved absconders from the law. Dow has, in fact, been sheltering a fugitive from Indian law and selling Carbide’s products, technologies and services in India.
"Dow’s offer confronts the Indian government with a critical choice," says Satinath Sarangi, of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, which first discovered and established the toxic contamination of the soil and groundwater in 1990. "Either it collaborates and cuts a deal with a multinational corporation in a mercenary fashion; or it sides with the victims, who have been affected by chemicals leaching from the industrial waste include some that cause birth defects and cancers and damage to the lungs, kidneys and the liver."
The Indian government is sharply divided over the issue. Its Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers has held Dow legally liable for cleaning the site of the wastes, and demanded in court that the company deposit Rupees one billion (25 million dollars) as initial payment for the cost of the remediation (decontamination) pending adjudication of the matter.
But the Ministry of Law opposes this and says the determination of liability would depend on the terms of the 2001 merger between Dow and Carbide, whose fine print would have to be studied.
According to the organisations of the Bhopal victims, Carbide made a misrepresentation by claiming that it has no liabilities on account of the gas leak disaster. In fact, Union Carbide, some of its directors, including former chairman Warren Anderson, and its Indian subsidiary, stand charged before an Indian court with causing death by a negligent act.
Dow maintains that being a U.S. company, it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Indian courts. The courts have not yet made a ruling on Dow's liability, but only asked that a part of the over ground wastes, some 386 tonnes secured in a warehouse, be removed to a town in Gujarat to be incinerated.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court is however silent on what should be done with the 8,000 tonnes of chemical waste that lies underground at the plant site and also with the hundreds of tonnes that is strewn all over the compound. Victims’ organisations argue that incineration is an unsafe and improper method of disposing of the waste, and that India does not have the right technology to detoxify it.
As an alternative method, they cite the example of Unilever Corp., which was ordered in 2003 by the Madras High Court to take 230 tonnes of mercury waste it had dumped in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu all the way to the U.S. for detoxification.
Two years ago, the victims’ groups, including the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karamchari Sangh, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangarsh Morcha, along with the BGIA, succeeded in getting a contract between Dow Chemical and the public sector Indianoil Corporation annulled. This involved the licensing of a proprietary technology of Union Carbide, which is a 100 percent-owned subsidiary of Dow.
Dow is negotiating the sale of petrochemicals technologies with Reliance Industries Ltd, one of India's largest private sector companies, which belongs to the Mukesh Ambani group.
"Evidently, all manner of entrenched interests are at work to help Dow duck its legal liability and obligation to clean up the site," says Nityanandan Jayaraman, of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. "It’s truly appalling that the Indian government is bowing to their pressure, and that too at a time when large volumes of foreign direct investment, exceeding ten billion dollars this year, are flowing into the country."
Jayaraman added that this showed up the ‘’utter servility on the part of the government towards the U.S. and giant transnational corporations, a phenomenon that has been in evidence ever since 1984. Clearly, high rates of GDP growth and India’s claim to be an emerging economic superpower have not prevented it from acting like a Fourth World country, which puts corporate investment above the life and well-being of its citizens."
If the Indian government succumbs to pressure from Dow, from powerful Indian industrialists like Ratan Tata (who lobbied on the company's behalf), and from some of its own pro-neoliberal ministers, that will only add further insult to the colossal injury the victims have suffered, say activists.
Most of the Bhopal victims received less than 150 dollars for extensive injuries and prolonged suffering. Even families of the dead got as little as 5,000 dollars. A good deal of the compensation was alleged to have been siphoned off by corrupt officials, politicians and middlemen.
Monday, November 23, 2009
India after the opening up of the economy (post 91)
Liberal Benefits?
Debarshi Dasgupta
The opening up of the economy post-’91 boosted scam monies into the stratosphere
Total scam money (approx) in Rs crore since 1992:
73000000000000
- 1992
Harshad Mehta securities scam Rs 5,000 cr - 1994
Sugar import scam Rs 650 cr - 1995
Preferential allotment scam Rs 5,000 cr
Yugoslav Dinar scam Rs 400 cr
Meghalaya Forest scam Rs 300 cr - 1996:
Fertiliser import scam Rs 1,300 cr
Urea scam Rs 133 cr - 1997
Sukh Ram telecom scam Rs 1,500 cr
SNC Lavalin power project scam Rs 374 cr
Bihar land scandal Rs 400 cr
C.R. Bhansali stock scam Rs 1,200 cr - 1998
Teak plantation swindle Rs 8,000 cr - 2001
UTI scam Rs 4,800 cr
Dinesh Dalmia stock scam Rs 595 cr
Ketan Parekh securities scam Rs 1,250 cr - 2002
Sanjay Agarwal Home Trade scam Rs 600 cr - 2003
Telgi stamp paper scam Rs 172 cr - 2005
IPO-Demat scam Rs 146 cr
Scorpene submarine scam Rs 18,978 cr - 2006
Taj Corridor scam Rs 175 cr - 2008
Pune billionaire Hassan Ali Khan tax default Rs 50,000 cr
The Satyam scam Rs 10,000 cr
Army ration pilferage scam Rs 5,000 cr
The 2-G spectrum swindle Rs 60,000 cr
State Bank of Saurashtra scam Rs 95 cr
Illegal monies in Swiss banks, as estimated in 2008 Rs 71,00,000 cr - 2009:
The Jharkhand medical equipment scam Rs 130 cr
Rice export scam Rs 2,500 cr
Orissa mine scam Rs 7,000 cr
Madhu Koda mining scam Rs 4,000 cr
***
Had Madhu Koda been a chief minister even 25 years back and a Rs 4,000-crore mining scam had been exposed, the entire nation would have been outraged. There would have been rallies in the streets baying for his blood, Parliament would have been up in a storm. And for the guilty, the stigma would have been such they would never live it down. But we are in post-liberalised
What
- Build: 2.4 crore primary healthcare centres. That’s at least 3 for every village, at a cost of Rs 30 lakh each.
- Build: 24.1 lakh Kendriya Vidyalayas at a cost of Rs 3.02 crore each, with two sections from Class VI to XII.
- Construct: 14.6 crore low-cost houses assuming a cost of Rs 5 lakh a unit.
- Set up: 2,703 coal-based power plants of 600 MW each. Each costs Rs 2,700 crore.
- Supply: 12 lakh CFL bulbs. That’s enough light for each of
- Construct: 14.6 lakh km of two-lane highways. That’s a road around
- Clean up: 50 major rivers for the next 121 years, at Rs 1,200 crore a river every year.
- Launch: 90 NREGA-style schemes, each worth roughly Rs 81,111 crore.
- Announce: 121 more loan waiver schemes. All of them worth Rs 60,000 crore.
- Give: Rs 56,000 to every Indian. Even better, give Rs 1.82 lakh to 40 crore Indians living BPL.
- Hand out: 60.8 crore Tata Nanos to 60.8 crore people. Or four times as many laptops.
- Grow the GDP: The scam money is 27% more than our GDP of Rs 53 lakh crore.
So how well-entrenched and blatant is corruption in the system? Since 1991, when the Indian economy was opened up to make way for reforms—reforms that were aimed at unshackling the licence raj and reducing the scope for corruption—financial scams have ironically become the norm. This is what Professor Arun Kumar at
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But notwithstanding the bewildering scale and regularity to be seen presently, corruption in independent
In some ways, it’s not surprising that scams before 1991 were few and far between. The biggest one was Bofors in 1985-86, which touched Rs 64 crore. It still haunts Indian politics even after Rs 250 crore has been spent trying to solve the case. Kumar, author of a book on corruption, points out that between 1991-96, just after liberalisation, there were as many as 26 cases. Of these, 13 involved more than a thousand crore each. The number of zeroes have only kept increasing since, pushing scam amounts to astronomical sums. The spectrum allotment scam of ’08 is reportedly worth Rs 60,000 crore—that’s the kind of territory we routinely inhabit now.
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Kumar believes the present size of the black economy in
The nexus between money and politics is also undergoing a shift with the former gaining the upper hand. Referring to the recent spate of money-tinged political scams—including those involving Madhu Koda, Union telecom minister A. Raja and the Reddy brothers of Bellary—Jayaprakash Narayan of the Lok Satta Party in AP points out that they “dramatically” demonstrate the next phase of this relationship. “It is no longer politics being just influenced by money. Today, it’s actually dictating terms,” he says. “There’s no wealth creation. The state’s natural resources are given away arbitrarily to private parties, the only consideration being the malafide intent of building private empires.”
The CPI’s A.B. Bardhan agrees: “The power of big money hovers like a dark cloud over our democracy. Crores are being spent on elections, even those to elect ward representatives. This keeps the poor and the parties of the poor from contesting elections successfully. Koda may have been caught but there are many big fish who have not been. For instance, it’s been reported that the average worth of the re-elected Haryana MLA has grown by Rs 5 crore. Even Jaganmohan Reddy’s assets are said to have jumped manifold. How do you explain it? This influence of money on democracy is eating into our moral fibre. We are in the midst of a moral crisis where very many people think corruption is now natural and normal.”
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What’s worse is that the powers that be have little urge to act against this ongoing plunder. “Neither the politicians—and that includes the PM—nor the judiciary have the will to act against corruption,” says noted lawyer Shanti Bhushan. It may have been easy to act against Koda since he is out of power but what about A. Raja, whose party, the dmk, is a key component of the upa? Jayaprakash Narayan says if the government has any sense of genuine responsibility, it must act against Raja and cancel all the agreements executed under him. “The government’s survival may be challenged but at least it will send the message that we are not legitimising the private appropriation of the state’s resources on a monumental scale.”
While the poor are mute spectators to this plundering, the elite have in their own ways benefited from the network of corrupt politicians, business houses and the executive. Sarma also believes that politicians have “opiated the masses” with hugely expensive welfare schemes that run with little transparency and accountability. “The Indian public stands thoroughly anaesthetised, numb, unable to express any concern,” he adds.
The failure to act on corruption is almost systemic—with a few exceptions, politicians by and large have not been brought to book. Take a random episode, say the Jain hawala case—all 55 accused in the case were exonerated—which only goes to make people feel more and more convinced that corruption is de rigueur and that it will go unpunished. Since conscience today prevents only a few, a lack of fear of any action has made corruption all the more pervasive and, in a way, acceptable. “I still remember a time when people would not socialise with those who were suspected to have made money by dirty means,” recalls Arun Kumar. “But people today do not question anybody who has an unusually flashy lifestyle. There are many cricketers, filmstars who flaunt their black money but that doesn’t prevent them from being held up as idols.”
Even the judiciary hasn’t escaped the corruption taint—allegations of land-grabbing against the Karnataka High Court Chief Justice P.D. Dinakaran is a recent case in point. The possibility of action here was curtailed after the Veeraswami judgement in the early ’90s—it restrains criminal investigation of judges without the prior written permission of the Chief Justice of India. “Not a single permission has since been granted,” says Bhushan. Another check—the bureaucracy—had even earlier fallen prey to corruption and there are few insiders willing to speak out. One such voice is that of Vijay Shankar Pandey, a serving 1979-batch ias officer from UP, who was behind the unique poll that was held twice in 1996 and 1997 among the babu lobby to elect through secret ballot the top three corrupt officers from the state. “If somebody tells you that money for development is scarce, he or she is lying. The truth is that corruption has almost become a non-issue among bureaucrats and it has killed us all,” says Pandey.
Nonetheless, there are some who are not so sceptical. Transparency International India chairman retired admiral R.H. Tahiliani is one of them and he refers to the Supreme Court judgement in March 2003 that mandates all candidates to declare their assets while filing nominations. “Corruption is at its apex in the electoral system. One therefore can’t let go of the politicians, more so because the tone is set by the rulers,” he says. Narayan, on the other hand, offers an interesting analogy: water at 99 degree Celsius is hot but it has no energy. Add a degree, it starts boiling, develops steam and gains tremendous energy. “Just like that, those against corruption need to keep up the struggle. You never know when those few extra degrees may come. After all, the Berlin Wall still came down without a single shot being fired, didn’t it?” he asks.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Why do GM scientists lie
Every time I meet an agricultural scientist, especially those who are engaged in Genetic Engineering, I am shocked at the blatant manner in which they lie. They are not even remotely ashamed of telling a lie, although they know they are not speaking the truth.
I thought telling a lying was a prerogative of the agricultural scientists alone. But over the past few years I am noticing that molecular geneticists, whether they work for the Royal Society in London or Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or even the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have picked up the art (or should I say science) of lying, and that too right through their nose.
Genetic Engineering has surely come of age. It has become synomenous with lying.
It didn't shock me when I was told last week that the Royal Society in London had come out with a report, which warns that if Britain does not adopt GM crops, it should be ready to face hunger and starvation. Feeding another 2.3 billion people by the year 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of farming would require GM crop research to be taken up vigorously, the study says.
Both the points stressed in the report -- producing more food to feed an additional 2.3 billion people, and the use of GM crops to offset any environmental damage accruing from intensive farming systems -- are simple lies. Neither do GM crops produce higher yields (in fact, the GM crops in market by and large produce less than the normal varieties), nor are they environmentally safe. World over the debate is about its biosafety and environmental impacts, and look at these scientists associated with the Royal Society, they don't even bat an eyelid before speaking lies.
Oh dear ! Where is science headed to? If this is the level to which the scientists can stoop down to, you should be ready for the worst.
What a climbdown? What a disgrace for modern science? I am so glad my children did not pick up science in their graduation.
The other day I was in a TV discussion on Bt brinjal. There were two scientists on the panel -- one from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the other from Jawaharlal Nehru University. If you had watched that programme, I am sure you would have been appalled at the number of times they lied. I was particularly very disturbed when I found one of them having the courage to tell a blatant lie, and that too starkly. There is no difference in the development of high-yielding crop varieties and the transgenics like Bt brinjal, the scientist said.
I realise that the GM scientists have a tremendous task at hand to justify what they are doing in their labs (and also outside labs, when they hobnob with biotech company officials). The mere fact that they have to resort to all kinds of lies to justify the tinkering of plant genome, and the mindless insertion of Bt genes in every crop they can lay their hands upon, speaks volumes about what is happening behind the closed doors of the GM laboratories.
I can cite numerous other instances when GM scientists have lied. But I think I would rather have you tell me if you were also faced with a pack of lies. GM scientists are liers, and let us make that public. We would be doing a great service to the society, to humanity, and to mankind.
I thought telling a lying was a prerogative of the agricultural scientists alone. But over the past few years I am noticing that molecular geneticists, whether they work for the Royal Society in London or Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or even the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have picked up the art (or should I say science) of lying, and that too right through their nose.
Genetic Engineering has surely come of age. It has become synomenous with lying.
It didn't shock me when I was told last week that the Royal Society in London had come out with a report, which warns that if Britain does not adopt GM crops, it should be ready to face hunger and starvation. Feeding another 2.3 billion people by the year 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of farming would require GM crop research to be taken up vigorously, the study says.
Both the points stressed in the report -- producing more food to feed an additional 2.3 billion people, and the use of GM crops to offset any environmental damage accruing from intensive farming systems -- are simple lies. Neither do GM crops produce higher yields (in fact, the GM crops in market by and large produce less than the normal varieties), nor are they environmentally safe. World over the debate is about its biosafety and environmental impacts, and look at these scientists associated with the Royal Society, they don't even bat an eyelid before speaking lies.
Oh dear ! Where is science headed to? If this is the level to which the scientists can stoop down to, you should be ready for the worst.
What a climbdown? What a disgrace for modern science? I am so glad my children did not pick up science in their graduation.
The other day I was in a TV discussion on Bt brinjal. There were two scientists on the panel -- one from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the other from Jawaharlal Nehru University. If you had watched that programme, I am sure you would have been appalled at the number of times they lied. I was particularly very disturbed when I found one of them having the courage to tell a blatant lie, and that too starkly. There is no difference in the development of high-yielding crop varieties and the transgenics like Bt brinjal, the scientist said.
I realise that the GM scientists have a tremendous task at hand to justify what they are doing in their labs (and also outside labs, when they hobnob with biotech company officials). The mere fact that they have to resort to all kinds of lies to justify the tinkering of plant genome, and the mindless insertion of Bt genes in every crop they can lay their hands upon, speaks volumes about what is happening behind the closed doors of the GM laboratories.
I can cite numerous other instances when GM scientists have lied. But I think I would rather have you tell me if you were also faced with a pack of lies. GM scientists are liers, and let us make that public. We would be doing a great service to the society, to humanity, and to mankind.
Indian scientists and politicians working as agents to US seed companies
Bt brinjal -- India's first poisonous food crop
I am not the least surprised. Knowing that the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) is merely a rubber stamp for the biotech industry, the environmental approval to India's first genetically modified food crop -- Bt brinjal -- is no surprise. You couldn't have expected anything better from a bunch of stupid bureaucrats and scientists/officials masquerading as regulators. I am sure Michael Moore, if he had followed the ways of GEAC, would have already penned down a sequel to his The Stupid White Men.India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh therefore has a monumental task on his hands. He has to appreciate the role of the GEAC (which falls under his ministry) even knowing they have done a shoddy job, and at the same time seek the help of the public at large before taking the final decision pertaining to the commercial release of India's first poisonous food crop. Not a simple task, and I know the tight-rope walking Jairam Ramesh will have to do in the days to come.
His task becomes more difficult when one learns that within days of the GEAC giving its nod, the seed company seeking the approval -- Mahyco -- had already made a presentation to the Prime Minister Office. And let us not forget, Jairam Ramesh's senior colleague and the sugar baron, the Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar is already known to have thrown his weight (and we all know how heavy he is ) behind GM crops.
In fact, I sympathise with the chairman of the Expert Committee-II (called EC-II), Dr Arjula R Reddy, who is also the vice-chancellor of the Yogi Yemana University in Hyderabad, to have worked under such difficult conditions. If I were in his place I would have tendered my resignation rather than stamp a report which is clearly the handiwork of USAID and Mahyco. Knowing the incompetence of the members of the EC-II (and I tried to talk to several of their colleagues before saying this) I doubt if they could ever write such a clean copy. Ask them to write two pages, and you will get to known what I mean.
About USAID, the little said the better. I have always referred to it as: US Artificial Insemination Department. And if you have ever been to Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh city, you will understand what I mean.
Nevertheless, coming back to the report of the EC-II, it is a complete sham. There is no other word to describe it. I wonder how could the so-called scientists on the panel be so stupid. I can understand the vested interest of the Cornell University scientists, but how come our own breed of scientists be so idiotic? Isn't it a reflection on the kind of people who dominate the corridors of scientific research in the country? This of course holds true for the advisors in the Department of Biotechnology, but I always thought that at least some scientists working in the ICAR and ICMR system would still be engaged in good science. Perhaps that category of scientists has already been marginalised.
This itself is a dangerous trend, too threatening for the future generations. It wouldn't therefore be unfair to say that Indian science is literally in a pit. Only Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh Sauchalaya can pull it out.
Now let us look at some of the conclusions arrived at by the EC-II. On page 2 of the report entitled: Report of the Expert Committee (EC-II) on Bt brinjal EE-1 developed by: M/S Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company Ltd. (Mahyco), Mumbai; University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Dharwad; and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore (this report is available on the website of the Ministry of Environment and Forests), it states the following:
"Based on the recommendations of the EC-1, the GEAC in its 79th meeting held on Aug 8, 2007, permitted the conduct of large scale trials (LST) of By brinjal for two season under the direct supervision of Director, Indian Institute of Vegetable Research (IIVR), Varanasi to conduct some additional biosafety related studies by M/S Mahyco. the field trials were subjected to compliance of the following conditions:
1. Maintaining an isolation distance of 300 metres.
2. Submission of validated event specific test protocol at limit of detection (LOD) of at least 0.01 per cent to detect and confirm there has been no contamination.
3. Designated a lead scientist who would be responsible for all aspects of the trials including regulatory requirements."
This is what is called as clear manipulation of the scientific norms. You first lay out conditions that are suitable for you to arrive at the conclusion you are aiming at, and then you make the recommendation based on the flawed parameters laid out. In the research trials at IIVR, the isolation distance between crop fields is kept at 300 metres (because you don't want the contamination to exceed the LOD of 0.01 per cent). Mahyco therefore got the result it was looking for.
But please tell me where in the country can you conform that Bt brinjal is grown with an isolation distance of 300 metres? Shouldn't the IIVR have known this? If not (and we all know that maintaining an isolation distance of 300 metres at the farm level is practically impossible) than the entire scientific experiment began on a faulty premise. The correct experiment should have been to measure the gene flow on adjoining crop fields of brinjal. That would have given us the correct picture. The experiment therefore was designed wrongly to yield the right results.
This is not the only flaw. I can point a number of glaring flaws in the way the experiments were conducted. Only stupid scientists could have endorsed these results.
Now move to the annextures. From page 66 onwards, the EC-II has responded to the issues raised by NGOs, National and International Groups on Bt brinjal biosafety studies. This is a very interesting section, and all you can say is how ashamed you are if this is the scholarship of so called distinguished scientists/officials on the panel. Take the response to the studies conducted by Prof G Seralini, University of Cannes, France. The response of the EC-II generally is: The EC-II is of the view that no additional information regarding toxicity and allergenicity needs to be generated.
Again it uses the same stupid arguement: Cry1AC protein has a history of safe use for human and animal consumption as GM crops such as Bt maize and Bt potato containing Cry proteins including Cry1AC protein have been consumed by millions of people without any adverse effects. [Each of the responses is simply a cover up. I will take that up subsequently]
I thought the EC-II was a research panel. Instead it has produced the relevant literature to justify its position while ignoring a plethora of scientific research that questions the claims. In any case, the EC-II should have conducted more research to address the issues and concerns raised rather than simply brushing them aside. Let us not forget, history is replete with examples where what was approved as safe by scientists had eventually turned out to be killer. The Orange Gas used by Monsanto in the Vietnam war is a class example. Even now, thousands of people are dying from the residual impact of the gas, which was once considered to be safe. DDT is another example.
Coming to food, we have numerous such examples. Trans fatty acids were once considered to be safe and of course essential for the processing industry. Today, several US States have banned the use of transfats. In fact, food has now become the biggest killer in the United States. More than 400,000 people die from food related ailments, including obesity, every year in the US alone.
Further, I want to ask the chairman of the EC-II a simple question. If I eat Bt brinjal, which you consider as absolutely safe, and I fall ill, is there any way I (or my doctor) can find out whether it was from the alien gene in the brinjal I ate? Do you have any medical assay anywhere in the world which can even pinpoint an ailment or a disease to an alien gene in the GM foods? What will happen Dr Reddy if your wife or children get seriously ill from eating Bt brinjal and your hospital treatment is unable to detect the real cause?
The answer is simple. It is because you allowed premature approvals for poisonous GM crops and foods, without asking the companies to first hold human clinical trials. My sympathy for you surely disappears. Scientists like you should be held responsible, and I think the time has come to make provisions for stringent possible punishment for the approval committees (inlcuding GEAC) if anything goes wrong. Scientists cannot be allowed to play with human lives, animals and the environment.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Mr Chidambaram’s War
The war waged by the pro-capitalistic Indian government (with the support of the corporates) against Naxalites and Moaists in Northern India is mainly done to wipe out the tribes occupying the mineral rich forests and mountains situated around Jarkhand,Orissa and West bengal.So that the MNC's such as the TATA's,VEDANTA,POSCO,MITTAL,JINDAL can easily exploit the mineral rich area.India is following the similar path of the Genocide Srilanka.Those who support Human rights in the Naxal region is branded as Naxal supporter by the police and the governmnet.This same policy was followed by the war criminal Rajapakshe in the Elam war against the Srilankan Tamil's.In srilanka numerous human rights violations happened during the war.But any one who exposes it and speak about it is branded as an LTTE supporter by the Lankan government.If whole of the Indian judicial system, and the so called welfare measures went against the tribes of the forest.They have no other choice other than to take the arms and fight against the corporate backed government police.In the name of curbing the Naxals Pro-capitalistic government is planning to wipe out the whole tribes from the mineral rich area compeletely.This step not only ruins the livelihood of millions of innocent tribes but also the Ecological cycle and will pose a huge thread to many rivers flowing around those regions.Its shame that a left party like CPI(M) is also acting in support of corporates.Along with this post i publish an article written by Arundhati Roy.
Mr Chidambaram’s War
A math question: How many soldiers will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ?
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| Red terror?: A tribal woman with her children in Dantewada |
Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Aggarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.
If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.
In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.” Some even say, “Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country, Europe, the US, Australia—they all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t “we”?
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Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist)—CPI (Maoist)—one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian State. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, one-and-a-half million people attended their rally in Warangal.) But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.
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Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called Independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.
Elections ’09: Ask not where the two billion dollars came from
If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have—their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to “develop” their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.
Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian State, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.
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The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to.... They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.
VT, 26/11: Odd that the Centre was ready to talk to Pakistan even after this, but is playing hard when it comes to the poor
In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard. It’s not enough that Special Police—with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions—are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the “people’s militia” that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving three hundred thousand people homeless, or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in “self-defence”, the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.
Fire at whom? How in god’s name will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the Superintendent of Police showed me pictures of 19 “Maoists” who “his boys” had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, “See Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside.”
Licence to kill: Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras.... Now the IAF can fire in self-defence, a right the poor are denied.
What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know? Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And called Maoists of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay while they worked in the area.
Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Islamist Terrorism’ with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Red Terrorism’. In the midst of this racket, at Ground Zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened. The ‘Sri Lanka Solution’ could very well be on the cards. It’s not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers.
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Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised a series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn the tide and stop the war. The absence of Dr Balagopal, one of the best-known civil rights activists of Andhra Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around us like a physical pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political thinkers of our time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I’m sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker displaying the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the political acuity and, above all, the real humanity of the community of activists, academics, lawyers, judges and a range of other people who make up the civil liberties community in India. Their presence in the capital signalled that outside the arclights of our TV studios and beyond the drumbeat of media hysteria, even among India’s middle classes, a humane heart still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the Union home minister recently accused of creating an “intellectual climate” that was conducive to “terrorism”. If that charge was meant to frighten people, to cow them down, it had the opposite effect.
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People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that in places like Orissa, they seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people—anyone who was seen to be a dissenter—were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the fifty million people who had been displaced by “development” projects was suddenly able to identify 1,40,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists for more than 300 Special Economic Zones, India’s onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the Supreme Court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of ‘public purpose’ in the Land Acquisition Act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of ‘public purpose’ to give to private corporations. They asked why when the government says that “the Writ of the State must run”, it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police—anything that would make people’s lives a little easier. They asked why the ‘Writ of the State’ could never be taken to mean justice.
There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like these, people were still debating the model of “development” that was being thrust on them by the New Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model is complete. It is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists agree on that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to dismantle it?
An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate world, had come along for one of the meetings out of morbid curiosity about a world he knew very little about. Even though he had disguised himself in a Fabindia kurta, he couldn’t help looking (and smelling) expensive. At one point, he leaned across to me and said, “Someone should tell them not to bother. They won’t win this one. They have no idea what they’re up against. With the kind of money that’s involved here, these companies can buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks, they can run their own NGOs, their own militias, they can buy whole governments. They’ll even buy the Maoists. These good people here should save their breath and find something better to do.”
When people are being brutalised, what ‘better’ thing is there for them to do than to fight back? It’s not as though anyone’s offering them a choice, unless it’s to commit suicide, like the 1,80,000 farmers caught in a spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the distinct feeling that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)
For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal—some of them Maoists, many not—have managed to hold off the big corporations. The question now is—how will Operation Green Hunt change the nature of their struggle? What exactly are the fighting people up against?
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| SEZ who: Is it development? |
It’s true that, historically, mining companies have almost always won their battles against local people. Of all corporations, leaving aside the ones that make weapons, they
probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical, battle-hardened campaigners and when people say ‘Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge (We’ll give away our lives, but never our land)’, it probably bounces off them like a light drizzle on a bomb shelter. They’ve heard it before, in a thousand different languages, in a hundred different countries.
Right now in India, many of them are still in the First Class Arrivals lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy predators, waiting for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) they have signed—some as far back as 2005—to materialise into real money. But four years in a First Class lounge is enough to test the patience of even the truly tolerant. There’s only that much space they’re willing to make for the elaborate, if increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (rigged) public hearings, the (fake) Environmental Impact Assessments, the (purchased) clearances from various ministries, the long-drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is time-consuming. And time, for industrialists, is money.
So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal, soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is 2.27 trillion dollars. (More than twice India’s Gross Domestic Product). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about 4 trillion dollars. A trillion has 12 zeroes.
Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7 per cent. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market. So, while for the adivasis the mountain is still a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith, the keystone of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation, it’s just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to be accessible. From the corporation’s point of view, the bauxite will have to come out of the mountain. If it can’t be done peacefully, then it will have to be done violently. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.
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There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. We’re talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain. Somehow I don’t think that the plans that are afoot to destroy one of the world’s most pristine forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will be discussed at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of Maoist violence—and making them up when they run out of the real thing—seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder why?
Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10 per cent comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology.
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What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times more than India’s GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian citizens in Swiss bank accounts? Where did the two billion dollars spent on the last general elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that political parties and politicians pay the media for the ‘high-end’, ‘low-end’ and ‘live’ pre-election ‘coverage packages’ that P. Sainath recently wrote about come from? (The next time you see a TV anchor haranguing a numb studio guest, shouting, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for elections? Why don’t they come in to the mainstream?”, do SMS the channel saying, “Because they can’t afford your rates.”)
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| Not Quite PC: CEO, Op Green Hunt |
What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, the CEO of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations? What are we to make of the fact that he was a non-executive director of Vedanta—a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group?
What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the Supreme Court, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court that he too had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s own expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice Kapadia gave this clearance without rebutting the report of the Supreme Court’s own committee.
Salwa Judum: Inaugurated just days after an MoU with Tatas
What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal ground-clearing operation disguised as a “spontaneous” people’s militia in Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in 2005, just days after the MoU with the Tatas was signed? And that the Jungle Warfare Training School in Bastar was set up just around then?
What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on October 12, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel’s Rs 10,000-crore steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive security, with a hired audience of 50 tribal people brought in from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government jeeps? (The public hearing was declared a success and the district collector congratulated the people of Bastar for their cooperation.)
What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the prime minister began to call the Maoists the “single-largest internal security threat” (which was a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?
The mining companies desperately need this “war”. It’s an old technique. They hope the impact of the violence will drive out the people who have so far managed to resist the attempts that have been made to evict them. Whether this will indeed be the outcome, or whether it’ll simply swell the ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.
Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, in an article called ‘The Phantom Enemy’, argues that the “grisly serial murders” that the Maoists are committing are a classic tactic, learned from guerrilla warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built and trained a guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian State, and that the Maoist ‘rampage’ is a deliberate attempt on their part to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian State which the Maoists hope will commit acts of cruelty that will enrage the adivasis. That rage, Dr Mitra says, is what the Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed into an insurrection. This, of course, is the charge of ‘adventurism’ that several currents of the Left have always levelled at the Maoists. It suggests that Maoist ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the very people they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution that will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had a ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the ’60s and ’70s in West Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them something of a disservice.
Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh where, up to now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest we forget—the current uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off over the chief minister’s visit to inaugurate a Jindal Steel factory. And where there’s a steel factory, can the iron ore be very far away?) The people’s anger has to do with their desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of the police and the ‘Harmads’, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years.
Even if, for argument’s sake, we don’t ask what tens of thousands of police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh, and we accept the theory of Maoist ‘adventurism’, it would still be only a very small part of the picture.
The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous ‘growth’ story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to look as though the 10 per cent growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible. To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85 per cent of India’s people off their land and into the cities (which is what Mr Chidambaram says he’d like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists. (Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is that why the RSS has expressed open admiration for Mr Chidambaram?)
It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary troops, the Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade headquarters, the Unlawful Activities Act, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act and Operation Green Hunt are all being put in place just to flush out a few thousand Maoists from the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether or not Mr Chidambaram goes ahead and “presses the button”, I detect the kernel of a coming state of Emergency. (Here’s a math question: If it takes 6,00,000 soldiers to hold down the tiny valley of Kashmir, how many will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?)
Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy, the recently arrested Maoist leader, it might be a better idea to talk to him.
In the meanwhile, will someone who’s going to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen later this year please ask the only question worth asking: Can we please leave the bauxite in the mountain?
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