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A damned dam

Needs A Solomon To Adjudicate

By Sam Rajappa

A 116-year-old dam in Peermedu taluk of Idukki district, Kerala, is giving sleepless nights to the UPA government and the Supreme Court. Constructed by Major John Pennycuick of the Madras Regiment on an 8,000-odd acre piece of land in the high ranges given on 999-year-lease to the then Madras Presidency by the erstwhile Maharaja of Travancore, the 15 tmcft. storage capacity Mullaiperiyar dam was to divert its waters to the rain-shadow region of Tamil Nadu. The idea of diverting the Periyar into Madurai existed for more than 150 years. A small beginning was made in 1850 but was given up as labourers demanded high wages to work in the malaria-infested region. The lease agreement was signed on 29 October 1885, and work on the project was completed in 1895. Ever since, the dam had been under the administrative control of the Public Works Department of Madras and later the Tamil Nadu government.

Apart from providing drinking water to the people of Madurai, Theni, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram, the diverted waters helped irrigate about 70,000 hectares of parched land in these districts. The Kerala government wants to abrogate the lease agreement, decommission and dismantle the dam and build a new one half a kilometer downstream at its cost to ensure uninterrupted water supply to Tamil Nadu at the existing level.

A 130-page government report says: “There is a limit to the number of years one can keep dams in service through maintenance and strengthening measures. In the case of the Mullaiperiyar dam, it has to be there for another 884 years for diverting water to Tamil Nadu as per the lease deed. This is an impossible proposition. All over the world, safety of dams are being reviewed as per modern standards and hundreds of dams have already been dismantled considering the safety aspects of human life and property.”

Age does not wither a dam. Karikala Chola built Kallanai (Grand Anicut), the world’s oldest dam, across the Cauvery, south of the temple town of Srirangam in Tiruchirapali district, in the second century AD. It is still functional and continues to irrigate about 4,000 sq. km. in the delta region, the granary of Tamil Nadu. The secret of the longevity of Kallanai is its regular maintenance. People in the delta are not living in fear of the aged dam bursting. Sir Arthur Cotton transformed the entire Godavari-Krishna delta into rich agricultural lands by constructing the Godavari anicut, and Dowleswaram and Krishna barrages between 1845 and 1855. To get approval for the Godavari anicut, he wrote to the Secretary of State for India in London,: “My Lord, one day’s flow in the Godavari during high floods is equal to one whole year’s flow in the Thames.” All the irrigation structures built by Sir Arthur Cotton are much older than the Mullaiperiyar dam and are functional. Like the more than 1,900-year-old Kallanai in Tamil Nadu, the Andhra Pradesh PWD maintains the Godavari and the Krishna dams and no one in coastal Andhra would dream of demanding decommissioning and dismantling them.

There is a story behind the Kerala government’s demand for demolishing the Mullaiperiyar dam. It does not like the idea of a neighbouring State having control over 8,000-odd acres of land in its territory. Having failed in its attempt to get the 1885 Lease Deed declared null and void through legal means, it sued for upward revision of lease rents and won. In 1970, the enlightened Kerala Chief Minister C Achutha Menon renewed the lease agreement on terms much better than the 1885 ones. He never raised the safety issue of the dam because he had confidence in the ability of the Tamil Nadu engineers to protect it. He wanted the fishing rights in the Mullaiperiyar reservoir to be transferred to Kerala. Tamil Nadu readily agreed. Six years later the Idukki dam, 30 km downstream of the Mullaiperiyar dam on the Periyar, with a capacity to store 71 tmcft. water, was completed as a hydroelectric project. The expectation was the dam would fill to the brim twice in a year, during both the north-west and the south-east monsoons. That never happened in the first two years. It was then the late K Karunakaran and engineers of the Kerala State Electricity Board who came out with the strange idea of creating panic in Kerala that the Mullaiperiyar dam was in danger of bursting and the lives and properties of 35 lakh people living in the districts of Idukki, Kottayam, Alapuzha and Ernakulam were in danger and request the Tamil Nadu government to perform the obsequies of the dam. It was a clever ploy to kill two birds with one stone. Idukki would get its fill and the land lease would become redundant.

It worked in part. The Kerala media excelled in spreading panic among the people. What began in 1978 in the print media has since spread to the electronic media and culminated in the release last Friday of Warner Brother’s English film, Dam 999 directed by Sohan Roy of Kochi at a cost of Rs 50 crore and dubbed in Malayalam and Tamil. A whole generation of Keralites have been brought up on the fear of death by drowning. As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “The great many of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Even a seasoned thinker like the retired Supreme Court Judge, VR Krishna Iyer, could not see through the game. Quoting the Rio de Jeneiro Declaration on Environment and Development of the UN conference (1992), he wrote in an article published in a leading daily, “The Central government is duty-bound to save every Indian’s life. Federalism does not absolve the Centre from failing to avoid the huge casualties that could be caused by an incident of leakage from the Mullaiperiyar dam. The due jurisprudence implied in the Rio instruments are international in impact and it cannot be violated by signatories like India.”

The materials Major Pennycuick used to construct the Mullaiperiyar dam are the same Karikala Chola used for the Kallanai 1900 years ago: stone and surki. In 1930, Tamil Nadu engineers responsible for its maintenance bored 80 holes in the dam and injected 40 tonnes of cement solution to plug seepage. Again in 1933, grouting technology was used to strengthen the dam. In 1960, 502 tonnes of cement solution was injected. All this was done without any outside prodding. After the scare-mongering in 1978, New Delhi deputed an expert team of the Central Water Commission to inspect the dam. Though it did not find any fault with the dam, it recommended temporary lowering of its storage level from 152 ft. to 136 ft., thereby reducing its capacity from 15 tmcft. to just 10 tmcft., to allay the fears of Kerala. Since then, a reinforced concrete cap was put on the dam to increase its weight by 12,000 tonnes and cable anchoring was done to withstand tremors.

In the unlikely event of the dam bursting in spite of all these safety measures, the entire water will flow into the Idukki dam, 30 km. downstream. There are no big towns in this short stretch of sparsely populated forest area. Of the two medium-size towns, Kumuli is located at an altitude of 3,350 metres and Elapara 4,850 metres above sea level whereas the Mullaiperiyar reservoir is at an altitude of 2,890 metres. Therefore, the dam is of no threat to its inhabitants. Kerala’s allegation that the Tamil Nadu government is indifferent to the lives of Malayalees is a travesty of truth. Eighty per cent of the people living between the two dams are Tamils. The States Reorganisation Commission in its report submitted in 1955 found 90 per cent of the population of Peermedu and Devikulam taluks of present-day Idukki district was Tamil and recommended its cession to Tamil Nadu. K Kamaraj, then Chief Minister, refused to stake his claim to annex the two taluks. Had he done so, the present dispute would not have arisen.

After the release of Dam 999, politicians in Kerala have literally gone berserk as their behaviour in Parliament on Monday reveals. The frequent question they ask is: Can’t the people of Tamil Nadu recognise the imminent danger 35 lakh Keralites of central Kerala are exposed to and persuade their government to decommission the Mullaiperiyar immediately on their generous offer of continued supply of the Periyar waters from the proposed new dam to be built on Kerala soil. R Balakrishna Pillai of the Kerala Congress (B), a founding constituent of the ruling United Democratic Front, once declared in the State Assembly when he was the irrigation minister, “Kerala will not give a drop of water to Tamil Nadu.” The entire House applauded. Is it fair on the part of Kerala politicians to ask Tamil Nadu to give up its only legal hold on the Mullaiperiyar, the 1885 Lease Deed, and dismantle the dam when it poses no threat to anybody?
The writer is a veteran journalist and former Director of Statesman Print Journalism School

http://thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&show=archive&id=391673&catid=38&year=2011&month=11&day=30&Itemid=66

We ate it, we watched it, we wore it, we sometimes spoke it, and we missed it, even though we never really knew it.

India was a country which had an almost mythical status in my childhood. The place we heard about from our parents, but rarely visited.

Stories about India fascinated me as a child; tales of my mother playing games as a child in Delhi, where she grew up, recollections of my parents beautiful wedding, or the tale of the cow who used to arrive at my dad’s house in Madras (now Chennai) every morning to deliver fresh milk.

Decades after her parents left India, the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan is making the return journey

I was born and brought up in Milton Keynes, a city only ever known for cows of the concrete variety, but right from my childhood I felt a strong connection to India and its culture and customs.

We celebrated Christmas, but we also got new clothes for Diwali. We went to see Hollywood films but we also watched Bollywood movies on VHS, with mum translating in real time. We ate cottage pie, but we also ate chana masala.

Our lives were delicately balanced between two time zones, two countries and two cultures.

The hardest part for all of us was being away from our grandparents and relatives. A crackly phone call every Sunday, or the arrival of a blue airmail envelope would delight me for at least a week. I’d reply, writing to family whose appearance I wasn’t even familiar with, let alone their personalities.

I went to India for the first time at the age of three, a trip I barely remember. The next time was when I had reached the more "grown up" age of 10. It was after that visit that I first truly felt the pull between East and West.

I recall landing back at Heathrow, holding my dad’s hand as we walked through immigration. "Dad. I’ve just realised that everyone looks different again."

He laughed, but the naive realisation that I also "belonged" somewhere else, a place where everyone had the same skin tone and cultural mannerisms, continued to bug me.

Surprising contrasts

India as a 10-year-old surprised me. I ate pizza, I drank Pepsi, I went to a theme park, I visited the Taj Mahal.

Rajini’s father (left) emigrated to the UK in 1966 with £75 in his pocket

Every time I visited I wrote a diary. It was a kind of ode to the land I never really knew, but the place my parents called "home".

"Really modern, like London," I wrote, "Millions of shops, hotels, restaurants, markets and skyscrapers.

"It’s not rare to see a cattle standing in the road and occasionally its droppings.

"People portray India full of villages, there are, but cities too," I continued, with my pre-pubescent observations.

When I returned and gave a class presentation on the trip, I remember excitedly explaining what I had done, and how much I loved it.

"My dad went to India and said he wouldn’t even get off the plane it smelt so much," said one girl in the class, unaware perhaps, of the dagger she had landed in my stomach.

I went home and cried to my mum about it. I couldn’t understand why people would have such a negative perception of such a beautiful country.

Continue reading the main story

MAKING THE MOVE

Richard Heald, CEO, UK India Business Council

"If you step off the plane in India today there is a tangible feeling "carpe diem". I defy any person between the age of 18 and 25 not to be excited by India in its current environment. This is the reason why we are seeing an increasing number of Indians from Britain moving to India. My daughter went to India for two months on a work placement and she loves the place. Opportunities in India are immense and it is a dynamic economy. Sectors such as digital entertainment, innovation, advanced engineering, healthcare, infrastructure and education are very attractive. It doesn’t mean you do not have to work hard but the optimism and enthusiasm that you find there is much more compared to that found in Europe today."

I’d often ask my parents why they ever left India, the life they had there always seemed far more exciting and interesting than the Buckinghamshire suburbs. My grandfather worked for the United Nations and met India’s first Prime Minister Jawarhlal Nehru, the President of India (Venkataraman) was at my parents’ wedding, and we had a large and interesting family.

Yet despite the personal pull they had to India, they saw far more opportunity in the UK.

My parents left India decades ago, and now call England their home; they revoked their Indian citizenship for UK passports a long time ago. They did that seeking a better life for their unborn children. And now, one of them has chosen to head back.

India is more dynamic and vibrant than it has ever been. Its economy, population, brains and spending power are being courted by the entire world.

But even with a narrative which is set to propel India’s power on the international stage even further, the decision to start a life here, and extend my posting beyond the initial six months I’d signed up for, baffles my parents.

Rajini (second from right) wrote in her diary her impressions of India when she visited aged 10

"You really want to live in India?" exclaimed my mother when I told her. "Hundreds of people are going to great lengths to come and live in the UK, and you’re sure want to stay?"

I am sure, and I’m not alone – many of my friends here in Mumbai have made the same journey. They’re running their own companies, making money working for big corporations, or spreading social good with charities. The sense of opportunity is palpable. I was surprised at the numbers of educated, articulate young Indians born in America, the UK and Australia who have come here to tap into the opportunity.

‘Best place to be’

At dinner parties it’s normal to discuss the business opportunities or ideas we will launch onto the Indian market to make our millions.

It’s not just us "outsiders", there are dozens of educated Indians who are no longer leaving to make their millions. A good chunk of my friends here are entrepreneurs setting up their own businesses, just in the same way thousands once left these shores for the UK to set up some of Britain’s most successful firms.

There is a sense among all of us displaced Indians, if you can call us that, that this is the best place for us to be in the world. The fact we have cultural ties adds to the idea that we can be more productive, and make more of a difference here.

Rajini’s grandfather (centre) was well-connected, seen here with India’s first PM Nehru

Coming to live here is in some way attending to unfinished business.

You can meet a person a few times, speak to them on the phone, or online, but only when you live with them do you really know them.

My flirtation with India is now real. I’m about to make this place my home for the next few years.

My dad left India in May 1966 and landed at Heathrow as a bright-eyed student. My mother followed a decade later. They both live in the UK, are integral members of the local community, and have raised three successful daughters.

Forty-five years on, and I’m doing the reverse. I share the same fears as my father did as he stepped off the plane with only £75 in his pocket, but just as he found new success and a home in England, I hope to in India.

Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like this. “After decades of mediocrity and stagnation under ‘Nehruvian socialism’, the Indian economy achieved a spectacular take-off during the last two decades. This take-off, which led to unprecedented improvements in income per head, was driven largely by market initiatives. It involves a significant increase in inequality, but this is a common phenomenon in periods of rapid growth. With enough time, the benefits of fast economic growth will surely reach even the poorest people, and we are firmly on the way to that.” Despite the conceptual confusion involved in bestowing the term ‘socialism’ to a collectivity of grossly statist policies of ‘Licence raj’ and neglect of the state’s responsibilities for school education and healthcare, the story just told has much plausibility, within its confined domain.

But looking at contemporary India from another angle, one could equally tell the following—more critical and more censorious—story: “The progress of living standards for common people, as opposed to a favoured minority, has been dreadfully slow—so slow that India’s social indicators are still abysmal.” For instance, according to World Bank data, only five countries outside Africa (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen) have a lower “youth female literacy rate” than India (World Development Indicators 2011, online). To take some other examples, only four countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar and Pakistan) do worse than India in child mortality rate; only three have lower levels of “access to improved sanitation” (Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti); and none (anywhere—not even in Africa) have a higher proportion of underweight children. Almost any composite index of these and related indicators of health, education and nutrition would place India very close to the bottom in a ranking of all countries outside Africa.

Growth and Development

So which of the two stories—unprecedented success or extraordinary failure—is correct? The answer is both, for they are both valid, and they are entirely compatible with each other. This may initially seem like a bit of a mystery, but that initial thought would only reflect a failure to understand the demands of development that go well beyond economic growth. Indeed, economic growth is not constitutively the same thing as development, in the sense of a general improvement in living standards and enhancement of people’s well-being and freedom. Growth, of course, can be very helpful in achieving development, but this requires active public policies to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are widely shared, and also requires—and this is very important—making good use of the public revenue generated by fast economic growth for social services, especially for public healthcare and public education.

We referred to this process as “growth-mediated” development in our 1989 book, Hunger and Public Action. This can indeed be an effective route to a very important part of development; but we must be clear about what can be achieved by fast economic growth on its own, and what it cannot do without appropriate social supplementation. Sustainable economic growth can be a huge force not only for raising incomes but also for enhancing people’s living standards and the quality of life, and it can also work very effectively for many other objectives, such as reducing public deficits and the burden of public debt. These growth connections do deserve emphasis, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also very much in Europe today, where there has been a remarkable lack of understanding of the role of growth in solving problems of debt and deficit. There is a tendency to concentrate only on draconian restrictive policies to cut down public expenditure, no matter how essential and no matter how these policies kill the goose that lays the golden egg of economic growth. There is a neglect of the role of economic growth in economic and financial stability in the European debate, with its focus only on cutting public expenditure to satisfy the market and to obey the orders of credit rating agencies.

Yet it is also important to recognise that the impact of economic growth on living standards is crucially dependent on the nature of the growth process (for instance, its sectoral composition and employment intensity) as well as of the public policies—particularly relating to basic education and healthcare—that are used to enable common people to share in the process of growth. There is also, in India, an urgent need for greater attention to the destructive aspects of growth, including environmental plunder (e.g. through razing of forests, indiscriminate mining, depletion of groundwater, drying of rivers and massacre of fauna) and involuntary displacement of communities—particularly adivasi communities—that have strong roots in a particular ecosystem.

India’s growth achievements are indeed quite remarkable. According to official data, per capita income has grown at a compound rate of close to five per cent per year in real terms between 1990-91 and 2009-10. The more recent rates of expansion are faster still: according to Planning Commission estimates, the growth rate of GDP was 7.8 per cent in the Tenth Plan period (2002-03 to 2006-07) and is likely to be around 8 per cent in the Eleventh Plan period (2007-08 to 2011-12). The “advance estimate” for 2010-11 is 8.6 per cent. These are, no doubt, exceptional growth rates—the second-highest in the world, next to China. These dazzling figures are, understandably, causing some excitement, and were even described as “magic numbers” by no less than Lord Meghnad Desai, who argued, not without irony, that whatever else happens, “the government can still sit back and say 8.6 per cent”.

India does need rapid economic growth, if only because average incomes are so low that they cannot sustain anything like reasonable living standards, even with extensive income redistribution. Indeed, even today, after 20 years of rapid growth, India is still one of the poorest countries in the world, something that is often lost sight of, especially by those who enjoy world-class living standards thanks to the inequalities in the income distribution. According to World Development Indicators 2011, only 16 countries outside Africa had a lower “gross national income per capita” than India in 2010: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Lao, Moldova, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen. This is not exactly a club of economic superpowers.

Having said this, it would be a mistake to “sit back” and rely on economic growth per se to transform the living conditions of the unprivileged. Along with our discussion of “growth-mediated” development, in an earlier book, we also drew attention to the pitfalls of “unaimed opulence”—the indiscriminate pursuit of economic expansion, without paying much attention to how it is shared or how it affects people’s lives. A good example, at that time (in the late 1980s), was Brazil, where rapid growth went hand in hand with the persistence of massive deprivation. Contrasting this with a more equitable growth pattern in South Korea, we wrote “India stands in some danger of going Brazil’s way, rather than South Korea’s”. Recent experience vindicates this apprehension. Interestingly, in the meantime, Brazil has substantially changed course, and adopted far more active social policies, including a constitutional guarantee of free and universal healthcare as well as bold programmes of social security and economic redistribution (such as Bolsa Familia). This is one reason why Brazil is now doing quite well, with, for instance, an infant mortality rate of only 9 per 1,000 (compared with 48 in India), 99 per cent literacy among women aged 15-24 years (74 per cent in India), and only 2.2 per cent of children below five being underweight (compared with a staggering 44 per cent in India). While India has much to learn from earlier experiences of growth-mediated development elsewhere in the world, it must avoid unaimed opulence—an undependable, wasteful way of improving the living standards of the poor.

India’s Decline in South Asia

One indication that something is not quite right with India’s development strategy is the fact that India has started falling behind every other South Asian country (with the partial exception of Pakistan) in terms of social indicators, even as it is doing so well in terms of per capita income (see table below).

The comparison between Bangladesh and India is a good place to start. During the last 20 years or so, India has grown much richer than Bangladesh: per capita income was estimated to be 60 per cent higher in India than in Bangladesh in 1990, and 98 per cent higher (about double) in 2010. But during the same period, Bangladesh has overtaken India in terms of a wide range of basic social indicators: life expectancy, child survival, fertility rates, immunisation rates, and even some (not all) schooling indicators such as estimated “mean years of schooling”. For instance, life expectancy was estimated to be four years longer in India than in Bangladesh in 1990, but it had become three years shorter by 2008. Similarly, the child mortality rate was estimated to be about 24 per cent higher in Bangladesh than in India in 1990, but it was 24 per cent lower in Bangladesh in 2009. Most social indicators now look better in Bangladesh than in India, despite Bangladesh having barely half of India’s per capita income.

No less intriguing is that Nepal also seems to be catching up rapidly with India, and even overtaking India in some respects. Around 1990, Nepal was way behind India in terms of almost every development indicator. Today, social indicators for both countries are much the same (sometimes a little better in India still, sometimes the reverse), in spite of per capita income in India being about three times as high as in Nepal.

To look at the same issue from another angle, Table 2 displays India’s “rank” among South Asia’s six major countries (excluding tiny Maldives), around 1990 as well as today (more precisely, in the latest year for which comparable international data are available). As expected, in terms of per capita income, India’s rank has improved—from fourth (after Bhutan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) to third (after Bhutan and Sri Lanka). But in most other respects, India’s rank has worsened, in fact, quite sharply in many cases. Overall, India had the best social indicators in South Asia in 1990, next to Sri Lanka, but now looks second-worst, ahead of only Pakistan. Looking at their South Asian neighbours, the Indian poor are entitled to wonder what they have gained—at least so far—from the acceleration of economic growth.

India and China

One of the requirements of successful growth-mediated development is the skilful use of the opportunities provided by increasing public revenue. There are interesting and important contrasts in the policies followed by different countries in this respect. Since China is often cited by advocates of a single-minded focus on economic growth, it is interesting to compare what China does with what India has been doing. China makes much better use of the opportunities offered by high economic growth to expand public resources for development purposes. For example, government expenditure on healthcare in China is nearly four times that in India (after adjusting for “purchasing power parity”—the gap is even larger otherwise). China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even as a ratio of GDP, public expenditure on health is much higher in China (about 2.3 per cent) than in India (around 1.4 per cent).

As Table 1 illustrates, China has much higher values of most social indicators of living standards, such as life expectancy (73 years in China and 64 years in India), infant mortality rate (16 per thousand in China and 48 in India), mean years of schooling (estimated to be 7.6 years in China, compared with only 4.4 years in India), or the coverage of immunisation (very close to universal in China but only around two-thirds in India, for DPT and measles). While India has nearly caught up with China in terms of the rate of economic growth, it seems quite far behind China in terms of the use of public resources for social support, and correspondingly, it has not done nearly as well in translating growth into rapid progress of social indicators. While there are also, undoubtedly, other factors behind the China-India contrast, the differing use of the fruits of growth for social support would seem to be an important influence in this contrasting picture.

It is not at all our purpose to argue that India should learn from China in every respect. India has reasons to value its democratic institutions. Even with all their limitations, these institutions allow for a wide variety of voices to be heard, and facilitate significant opportunities for various forms of public participation in governance. There are, of course, many failings of Indian democracy (which we have discussed in our writings), but there are big democratic achievements as well, and also the hindrances can be addressed through democratic battles to remove them. If China officially executes more people in a week than India has done since Independence (and this is true of a shockingly large number of weeks every year in China), this comparison, like many others involving legal and human rights of citizens, is not to India’s disadvantage. If there is something to learn from China, especially about how to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are more widely shared, then that is a case for learning from what there is to learn, not a case for blind imitation.

The China-India contrast does, however, raise another interesting question: could it be that India’s democratic system is a barrier to using the fruits of economic growth for the purpose of enhancing health, education and other aspects of “social development”? In addressing this question, there is some possibility of a sense of nostalgia. When India had a very low rate of economic growth, a common argument coming from the critics of democracy was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard, at that time, to convince the anti-democratic advocates that fast economic growth depends on the friendliness of the economic climate, rather than on the fierceness of political systems. That debate on the alleged contradiction between democracy and economic growth has now ended (not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India), but a similar scepticism about democracy seems to be now emerging, suggesting an alleged inability of democratic systems to pursue public health, public education and other socially supportive arrangements.

It is important in this context to understand how democratic decisions emerge and how policies get adopted. What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on the issues that are politicised, which contributes to their advancement. Some issues are extremely easy to politicise, such as the calamity of a famine—and as a result famines tend to stop abruptly with the establishment of a democratic political system. But other issues—less spectacular and less immediate—present a much harder challenge. Using democratic means for remedying inadequate coverage of public healthcare, non-extreme undernourishment, or inadequate opportunities for school education demands more from democratic practice—more vigour and much more range.

Authoritarian systems can change their policies very quickly, when the leaders want that, and it is to the credit of the Chinese political leaders that they have focused so much on social interventions in education, healthcare and other supportive mechanisms to advance the quality of life of the Chinese people. But authoritarianism does not, of course, provide any kind of guarantee that the social commitments will emerge (they clearly have not in North Korea or Burma), or that they would invariably be stable and non-fragile (there have been sharp variations in the past even in China, including its having the largest famine in world history during the failure of the Great Leap Forward initiative).

Even China’s commitment to broad-based public healthcare has had ups and downs, and came close to being undone: the coverage of the rural cooperative medical system crashed from 90 per cent to 10 per cent between 1976 and 1983 (when market-oriented reforms were initiated), and stayed around 10 per cent for a full 20 years. During this period of abdication of state responsibility for healthcare in China, the progress of health-related indicators (such as life expectancy and child survival) slowed down sharply. This led eventually to another U-turn, around 2004-5, when the rural cooperative medical system was rebuilt, with the coverage rising again to 90 per cent or so within three years (Shaoguang Wang, ‘Double Movement in China’, Economic and Political Weekly, Dec 27, 2008).

You call this education? A government school in Lucknow. (Photograph by Nirala Tripathi)

There is, in fact, no real barrier in India in combining multi-party democratic governance with active social intervention. But what would be needed is much greater public engagement with the central demands of justice and development through more vigorous democratic practice. The development of the welfare state in Europe has many lessons to offer here. As it happens, public debate is quite powerful in India, but the range of engagement has often been quite limited. The India-China comparisons tend to concentrate mostly on the horse race of relative rates of overall economic growth rather than the variations in mediation for development. Underlying this dialogic narrowness, there is a social picture. A big part of the Indian population—a fairly small minority but still quite large in absolute numbers—has been doing very well indeed, through the process of high growth alone; they do not depend on social mediation. In contrast, more vigorous mediation would be very important for other Indians—many more, in fact—whose lives are affected by ill health, undernourishment, lack of healthcare and other deprivations.

Power Imbalances, Old and New

The neglect of elementary education, healthcare, social security and related matters in Indian planning fits into a general pattern of pervasive imbalance of political and economic power that leads to a massive neglect of the interests of the unprivileged. Other glaring manifestations of this pattern include disregard for agriculture and rural development, environmental plunder for private gain with huge social losses, large-scale displacement of rural communities without adequate compensation, and the odd tolerance of human rights violations when the victims come from the underdogs of society.

None of this is entirely new, and much of it reflects good old inequalities of class, caste and gender that have been around for a long time. For instance, the fact that not even one of the 315 editors and other leading members of the printed and electronic media in Delhi surveyed recently by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies belonged to a scheduled caste or scheduled tribe, and that at the other end, 90 per cent belonged to a small coterie of upper castes that make up only 16 per cent of the population, obviously does not help to ensure that the concerns of Dalits and adivasis are adequately represented in public debates. Nor is India’s male-dominated Lok Sabha (where the proportion of women has never crossed 10 per cent so far) well placed to address the concerns of women—not only gender issues, but also other social issues in which women may have a strong stake. A similar point applies to rural-urban disparities: a recent study found that rural issues get only two per cent of the total news coverage in national dailies.

Some of these inequalities are diminishing, making it easier for disadvantaged groups to gain a voice in the system (even the proportion of women in the Lok Sabha, abysmally low as it is, is about three times as high today as it was 50 years ago). However, new or rising inequalities are also reinforcing the vicious circle of disempowerment and deprivation. For instance, the last 20 years have seen a massive growth of corporate power in India, a force that is largely driven—with some honourable exceptions—by unrestrained search for profits. The growing influence of corporate interests on public policy and democratic institutions does not particularly facilitate the reorientation of policy priorities towards the needs of the unprivileged.

It is important to recognise the influence of elements of the corporate sector on the balance of public policies, but it would be wrong to take that to be something like an irresistible natural force. India’s democratic system offers ways and means of resisting the new biases that may emanate from the pressure of business firms. One instructive example both of a naked attempt to denude an established public service and of the possibility of defeating such an attempt is the long saga of attempted takeover of India’s school meal programme by biscuit-making firms. The “midday meal” programme, which provides hot cooked meals prepared by local women to some 120 million children, with a substantial impact on both nutrition and school attendance, had been eyed for many years by food manufacturers, especially the biscuits industry.

A few years ago, a “Biscuit Manufacturers’ Association” (BMA) launched a massive campaign for the replacement of cooked school meals with branded biscuit packets. The BMA wrote to all members of Parliament, asking them to plead the case for biscuits with the minister concerned and assisting them in this task with a neat pseudo-scientific precis of the wonders of manufactured biscuits. Dozens of MPs, across most of the political parties, promptly obliged by writing to the minister and rehashing the BMA’s bogus claims. According to one senior official, the ministry was “flooded” with such letters, 29 of which were obtained later under the Right to Information Act. Fortunately, the proposal was firmly shot down by the ministry after being referred to state governments and nutrition experts, and public vigilance exposed what was going on. The minister, in fact, wrote to a chief minister who sympathised with the biscuit lobby: “We are, indeed, dismayed at the growing requests for introduction of pre-cooked foods, emanating largely from suppliers/marketers of packaged foods, and aimed essentially at penetrating and deepening the market for such foods” (Hindustan Times, Apr 14, 2008).

The bigger battle is still on. The BMA itself did not give up after being rebuked by the Union minister for human resource development. It proceeded to write to the Union minister for women and child development, with a similar proposal for supplying biscuits to children below the age of six years under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Other food manufacturers are also on the job, and despite much vigilance and resistance from activist quarters (and the Supreme Court), they seem to have made significant inroads into child feeding programmes in several states.

Similar concerns apply in other fields of social policy. For instance, the prospects of building a public healthcare system in India are unlikely to be helped by the growing influence of commercial insurance companies, very active in the field of health. India’s health system is already one of the most privatised in the world, with predictable consequences—high expenditure, low achievements and massive inequalities. Yet, there is much pressure to embrace this “American model” of healthcare provision, despite the international recognition in the health community of its comparatively low achievement and significantly high cost.

Rosy picture Himachal leads the way in social indices. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

However, recent events have also shown the possibility of fighting back, not just in terms of winning isolated battles against inappropriate corporate influence, as happened with the biscuits lobby, but also in terms of building institutional safeguards against abuses of corporate power. The Right to Information Act, for instance, though not directly applicable to information held by private corporations, is a powerful means of watching and containing the state-corporate nexus, as the biscuits story illustrates. Regulations and legislations pertaining to corporate funding of political parties, corporate social responsibility, financial transparency, environmental standards, and workers’ rights also have an important role to play in disciplining the corporate sector.

The Case for a Comprehensive Approach

The need for growth-mediated development has not been completely ignored in Indian policy debates. The official goal of “inclusive growth” could even claim to have much the same connotation. However, the rhetoric of inclusive growth has gone hand in hand with elitist policies that often end up promoting a two-track society whereby superior (“world-class”) facilities are being created for the privileged, while the unprivileged receive second-rate treatment, or are left to their own devices, or even become the target of active repression—as happens, for instance, in cases of forcible displacement without compensation, with a little help from the police. Social policies, for their part, remain quite restrictive (despite some significant, hard-won initiatives such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), and are increasingly steered towards quick fixes such as conditional cash transfers. Their coverage, in many cases, is also sought to be confined to “below poverty line” (BPL) families, a narrowly defined category that tends to shrink over time as per capita incomes increase, which may even look like a convenient way of ensuring that social welfare programmes are “self-liquidating”.

Cash transfers are increasingly seen as a potential cornerstone of social policy in India, often based on a distorted reading of the Latin American experience in this respect. There are, of course, strong arguments for cash transfers (conditional or unconditional) in some circumstances, just as there are good arguments for transfers in kind (such as midday meals for school children). What is remarkably dangerous, however, is the illusion that cash transfers (more precisely, “conditional cash transfers”) can replace public services by inducing recipients to buy health and education services from private providers. This is not only hard to substantiate on the basis of realistic empirical reading; it is, in fact, entirely contrary to the historical experience of Europe, America, Japan and East Asia in their respective transformation of living standards. Also, it is not how conditional cash transfers work in Brazil or Mexico or other successful cases today.

In Latin America, conditional cash transfers usually act as a complement, not a substitute, for public provision of health, education and other basic services. The incentives work for their supplementing purpose because the basic public services are there in the first place. In Brazil, for instance, basic health services such as immunisation, antenatal care and skilled attendance at birth are virtually universal. The state has done its homework—almost half of all health expenditure in Brazil is public expenditure, compared with barely one quarter (of a much lower total of health expenditure) in India. In this situation, providing incentives to complete the universalisation of healthcare may be quite sensible. In India, however, these basic services are still largely missing, and conditional cash transfers cannot fill the gap.

Poor initiatives Jairam and Montek discussing the poverty line at a press conference. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

The pitfalls of “BPL targeting” have become increasingly clear in recent years. First, there is no reliable way of identifying poor households, and the exclusion errors are enormous: at least three national surveys indicate that, around 2004-05, about half of all poor households in rural India did not have a “BPL card”. Second, India’s poverty line is abysmally low, so that even if all the BPL cards were correctly and infallibly allocated to poor households, large numbers of people who are in dire need of social support would remain excluded from the system. In 2009-10, for instance, the official poverty line in Delhi was around Rs 30 per person per day. This is just about enough to buy one kilogram of rice and a one-way bus ticket that would take you three stops down the road. Third, BPL targeting is extremely divisive, and undermines the unity and strength of public demand for functional social services, making a collaborative right into a divisive privilege.

The power of comprehensiveness in social policy is evident not only from international and historical experience, but also from contemporary experience in India itself. In at least three Indian states, universal provision of essential services has become an accepted norm. Kerala has a long history of comprehensive social policies, particularly in the field of elementary education—the principle of universal education at public expense was an explicit objective of state policy in Travancore as early as 1817. Early universalisation of elementary education is the cornerstone of Kerala’s wide-ranging social achievements.

Less well known, but no less significant, is the gradual emergence and consolidation of universalistic social policies in Tamil Nadu (see ‘Understanding Public Services in Tamil Nadu’ by Vivek S., PhD thesis, 2010, Syracuse University, and the literature cited there). Tamil Nadu was the first state to introduce free and universal midday meals in primary schools. This initiative, much derided at that time as a “populist” programme, later became a model for India’s national midday meal programme, widely regarded today as one of the best “centrally sponsored schemes”. The state’s pioneering efforts in the field of early child care, under the ICDS, has made great strides towards the provision of functional anganwadis (child care centres), accessible to all, in every habitation. Tamil Nadu, unlike most other states, also has an extensive network of lively and effective healthcare centres, where people from all social backgrounds can get reasonably good healthcare, free of cost. NREGA, another example of universalistic social programme, is also doing well in Tamil Nadu: employment levels are high (with about 80 per cent of the work going to women), wages are usually paid on time and leakages are relatively small. Last but not the least, Tamil Nadu has a universal public distribution system (PDS), in both rural and urban areas. Tamil Nadu’s pds supplies not only foodgrains but also oil, pulses and other food commodities, with astonishing regularity and minimal leakages.

Protests against Vedanta in Orissa

Himachal Pradesh began this journey much later than Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but is catching up very quickly. This is most evident in the field of elementary education: starting from literacy levels similar to the dismal figures for Bihar or Uttar Pradesh around the time of India’s Independence, Himachal Pradesh caught up with the highest-performing Kerala within a few decades. This “schooling revolution” was based almost entirely on a policy of universal provision of government schools, and even today, elementary education in Himachal Pradesh is overwhelmingly in the public sector. Like Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh has a well-functioning pds, providing not only foodgrain but also pulses and oil and covering both “BPL” (Below Poverty Line) and “APL” (Above Poverty Line) families. Himachal Pradesh has also followed comprehensive principles not only in the provision of essential social services (including schooling facilities, healthcare and child care) but also in the provision of basic amenities such as roads, electricity, drinking water and public transport. For instance, in spite of adverse topography and scattered settlements, 98 per cent of Himachali households had electricity in 2005-6.

It is perhaps not an accident that Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh also tend to have the best social indicators among all major Indian states. For instance, a simple index of children’s health, education and nutrition achievements clearly places these three states at the top (Dreze, R. Khera, S. Narayanan, 2007, ‘Early Childhood in India: Facing the Facts’, Indian Journal of Human Development, 1(2), Jul-Dec 2007). Despite wide historical, cultural and political differences, they have converged towards a similar approach to social policy, and the results are much the same too. There is a crucial lesson here for other Indian states, and indeed for the country as a whole.

A Concluding Remark

We hope that the puzzle with which we began is a little clearer now. India’s recent development experience includes both spectacular success as well as massive failure. The growth record is very impressive, and provides an important basis for all-round development, not least by generating more public revenue (about four times as much today, in real terms, as in 1990). But there has also been a failure to ensure that rapid growth translates into better living conditions for the Indian people. It is not that they have not improved at all, but the pace of improvement has been very slow—even slower than in Bangladesh or Nepal. There is probably no other example in the history of world development of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of broad-based social progress.

There is no mystery in this contrast, or in the limited reach of India’s development efforts. Both reflect the nature of policy priorities in this period. But as we have argued, these priorities can change through democratic engagement—as has already happened to some extent in specific states. However, this requires a radical broadening of public discussion in India to development-related matters—rather than keeping it confined to simple comparisons of the growth of the gnp, and naive admiration (implicit or explicit) of the high living standards of a relatively small part of the population. An exaggerated concentration on the lives of the minority of the better-off, fed strongly by media interest, gives an unreal picture of the rosiness of what is happening to Indians in general, and stifles public dialogue of other issues. Imaginative democratic practice, we have argued, is essential for broadening and enhancing India’s development achievements.

The Quick Switch…

• CM’s opposition to the N-plant at Koodankulam a manifestation of differences with the Centre
• Jayalalitha is upset Centre not clearing Rs 2.5 lakh-crore for TN
• She has done a volte face on the plant, first seeking an end to the stir, then changing her mind

***

It seems Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalitha has now chosen to make the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) a handle to beat the Centre with. As the Centre squirms over the agitation in Idinthakarai, Tirunelveli district, against setting up the nuclear plant, Jayalalitha has done nothing to ease things. The antipathy has only grown over the Centre not clearing the Rs 2.5 lakh-crore Tamil Nadu has sought for clearing its financial mess. At the National Development Council meeting on October 23, Tamil Nadu finance minister O. Paneerselvam read out the chief minister’s speech in which she said the Centre was treating states as if they were “glorified municipal corporations”. She has often said the UPA “does not seem to understand that people living in non-Congress states are as much citizens of India” as those in Congress-ruled states.

One of Jayalalitha’s first promises on becoming chief minister was that she would solve the power crisis within three months, which she later extended to “by 2012”. This led many to think she would help bring the KKNPP into early operation, for the state was entitled to a substantial share of the power generated. (In fact, the prime minister has written to Jayalalitha that Tamil Nadu would be allocated 925 of the 2,000 MW to be generated by Units 1 and 2 of the plant.) But she seems in no hurry on the already much-delayed project. Or perhaps, she has changed her mind.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) is building the reactors with Russian technology, the deal for which was signed way back in 1988, when Russia was still the USSR. After many a hiccup, a new deal was signed with Russia, land was acquired from the state government and construction began. Rs 13,000 crore has been spent so far. “One reactor will be commissioned soon; 95 per cent of the work on the second has been completed,” says Dr Kashinath Balaji, project director, KKNPP. According to the new MoU signed with Russia in 2008, four more reactors are to be set up.

Power supply, industrial and domestic, has been precarious in Tamil Nadu: last month, a CAG report said the state had added only 290 MW in generation capacity against the required capacity addition of 3,977 MW. The state’s inability to meet a big chunk of the power demand—the deficit sharpening in peak period—was a big minus point against the previous DMK regime. The demand is for 10,500-11,500 MW, and the state has an installed capacity of 10,237 MW, of which 8,000 MW is available, resulting in a shortfall of some 3,500 MW.

Well aware of this, Jayalalitha had at first appealed for an end to the agitation against the project. This was when S.P. Udhayakumar, convenor of the People’s Movement Against Atomic Power, began leading a fast by some 127 agitators in Idinthakarai on September 11. Over the next few days, as hundreds of fisherfolk and other locals joined the protest, she changed track and demanded the project be stopped till their fears were allayed. Given that local body elections were scheduled for October, she wrote on this issue to the prime minister. And on September 23, the Tamil Nadu cabinet adopted a resolution demanding suspension of work on the project.

In any case, as Udhayakumar puts it, the agitation is actually focused against the Centre. It regathered steam on October 9 after a lull, but made allowance for the local body elections on October 17; it was suspended that day and resumed on the next. In the current phase of the agitation, protesters are picketing all gates leading to the plant. “Only 100 employees are working, in three shifts,” admits Dr Balaji. Thousands of contract workers hired for the Koodankulam plant by NPCIL from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand have gone away. The local economy has been hit badly: fishermen are being allowed to leave the picket lines in turns to go to sea and earn a living.

What has added to the locals’ fears—other than Fukushima, of course, and their own experience of the 2004 tsunami—was a deafening noise heard within four kilometres of the plant. The explanation offered by Prof B.C. Pathak, the chief construction engineer of the project, that the noise was caused by steam being used continuously to flush out pipelines, has no takers at present. “The world has a history of nuclear disasters,” says Nityanand Jayaraman, an activist. “Nuclear technology is inherently unmanageable,” he adds. Pathak’s attempts to explain to a gathering of protesters that Fukushima was 300 km from a tsunamigenic area, whereas Koodankulam was 1,500 km away from the source of the last tsunami, did not seem successful. Incidentally, the Madras Atomic Power Station (MAPS) in Kalpakkam, 70 km from Chennai, had set off worries after the 2004 tsunami: it was shut down for a bit.

The bottomline, however, is that the PM, who had staked his government on the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008, is unlikely to backtrack on the plant. “They (the government) will divide and conquer,” says Gnani Sankaran, a writer and activist. But the shadow of Fukushima looms large, and the prime minister will have to negotiate the crisis carefully. He does have a secret weapon, though: former president Abdul Kalam, who speaks Tamil and has a background in science and overseeing nuclear projects, could be persuaded to allay the fears of the locals. Being a man from those parts may also lend Kalam’s voice some acceptance. Should the prime minister’s committee of experts fail to convince locals, Kalam might well be recruited. With Jayalalitha playing difficult, that might prove necessary.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/why-i-left-india-again/

By SUMEDH MUNGEE

Arko Datta/ReutersA car and two bullock carts make their way through traffic in Mumbai.

The Hindi movie on my “return to India” flight on Dec. 13th, 2006 was “Swades” (literally: “My country,” a story about a patriotic NASA engineer who returns to India to help improve his homeland).

The idea that you can fix India’s problems by adding more people to it — even smart people — is highly suspect. No, I wasn’t going back to fix things; I was leaving the U.S. to go back to Shri Thomas Friedman’s India: an India that offered global companies, continental food, international schools and domestic help; an India that offered freedom from outsourcing and George W. Bush.

I was excited about moving to India and I thought I had the right expectations—after being away for eleven years (I grew up in Mumbai), I was prepared for India to feel less like home and more like the flight’s “Indian vegetarian meal”: visually familiar but viscerally alien.

Our move was a success by any metric. My wife and I are software professionals, and our careers flourished at an Indian rate of growth (R.I.P., “Hindu rate of growth”). Our daughter attended a preschool in Bangalore whose quality matched any in the Bay Area. Our three-bedroom flat in Defence Colony, Indiranagar, was so comfortable and so American-friendly that my friends called it the Green Zone.

And yet, two years and nine months after our move to India, on one of our regular evening jogs along our impossibly leafy street, my wife and I found ourselves discussing not whether we should return to the U.S., but when.

A month later, we were back in California.
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Anyone who’s written about India has at some point claimed that there are two or at most three Indias, whether “airplane India” or “scooter India” or “bullock cart India.” Maybe they stop at three because it is difficult for the reader to imagine more.

Early on, all the metaphors rang true. I’d see bullock-cart India beg from scooter India while scooter India was getting honked at by airplane India.

But then the metaphors started to fade and the daily grind set in. I stopped noticing India’s newness, oldness and juxtapositioned-ness. Within weeks, I had joined the honking swarm driving in Bangalore. I knew a guy who could repair anything from my daughter’s talking Barney to our Bose Wave radio. I could sweet-talk an auto-rickshaw driver into not fleecing me (even though I was Kannada-challenged). Everything felt familiar, normal, unremarkable, as it should be; I was in India.

That’s when it started going wrong.

Three months after our return, after a friend told me that his two children were sick with amoebiasis — he thought they got it from their maid — my wife and I designated a separate set of dinnerware for our maids. It’s more hygienic.

Within six months, I’d brusquely refused my driver an emergency loan of 500 rupees ($10) to attend his grandmother’s funeral. I’d learned my lesson after our previous driver scammed me into paying for his son’s broken leg (as it turned out, he had no son). It only encourages them to ask for more; besides, they’re all liars.

Near the first anniversary of our return, I had my first road-rage incident: I verbally abused a hawker who was blocking the road. I’m not going to let bullock-cart India make my daughter late for her school admission test.

The hawker glared but scampered away, the road cleared, and, as I walked back to my car, I saw something new and disturbing in my driver’s eyes: respect. I don’t know how my daughter felt because I couldn’t look her in the eye.

Was this even a real problem? Make your peace; it is how it is.At the end of a long phone call to my mother in Pune, she said, “Don’t think so much. Just work hard and you can get whatever you want.”

But I never doubted what I could get; I hated what I was becoming.

I struggled, I regressed, I improved, I tried learning from others — except so many seemed (to me, not to them) worse off: an offensive Sardar joke here (even the kids laughed), a not-so-subtle inquiry about my caste (I’m still furious with myself for answering), tips on how to keep our maid “in her place” — it just didn’t stop. Et tu, airplane India?

And so it goes.

In any breakup, there is this moment when a person who was a part of you just an instant ago becomes a surrealistically familiar stranger. After that moment, inertia and denial can only delay the inevitable.

On my last night in Bangalore I drank an egregious amount of my favorite takeout Chinese hot-and-sour vegetable soup, and I cried; I knew this second goodbye was final. When I first left India in 1996, I left for the U.S. When I left India in 2009, I left India.
___

Why do I feel better in the U.S.? Maybe it’s not because I’m at home here, but because I’m an alien. Perhaps three thousand years of history have made us Indians a little too familiar with one another for our own good. We’ve perfected Malcolm Gladwell’s “blink” — the reflexive, addictive and tragically accurate placement of other Indians into bullock carts, scooters, airplanes and who knows what else. These issues exist in all countries, but in India, I could see the bigotry in high fidelity and hear the stereotypes in surround-sound — partly because it is worse in India, mostly because I am Indian.

India’s wealth and lifestyle disparity is still impossibly great; I probably spent more on pizza than on my maid. She knew this too, because she was often the one who handed the pizza delivery guy his money. Everyone in India has to deal with this, but I coped in the worst possible way: by dehumanizing her and other people like her, ever so slightly, ever so subtly — chronic amoebiasis of the soul.

Though my return to India failed, I came back feeling more optimistic than ever about India’s long-term success. India is regaining her leadership position — the position she held ever since humans were civilized, a position she lost only because of a few uncivilized humans (at least give us back our Koh-i-noor!). I know India will rule the future. It’s just that I’ve realized — I’ve resigned myself to the fact — that I won’t be a part of that future.

I’m glad I went back to India, and I’m glad to be back in the U.S. Life has come full circle but the center has shifted. I didn’t go to India to find home, but I did find it; I now know where I belong. As Laozi might have said, sometimes the journey of a single step starts with a thousand miles in the opposite direction.

(There was no Hindi movie on the flight back to the U.S. Or maybe I didn’t check.)
__
Sumedh Mungee lives in the United States.

Report on Fukushima Dai-ichi incident

P K Sundaram

To people who are asking is this the village-centric India that Mahatma Gandhi wanted to build, the government is sending its scientists who are in love with their reactor designs. Could a state be farther removed from its citizen?

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not a single person’s greed”: Mahatma Gandhi

Nuclear Expansion and Democracy:

The drive for neoliberal ‘development’ in recent decades in India, and in particular its nuclear expansion is marked with undermining of democratic ethos. Not only was the parliament bribed and undermined to get approval for the Indo-US nuclear deal, the ruling establishment in India is using repressive, undemocratic and divisive means to push for the planned massive expansion of nuclear power program.

While PM Manmohan Singh lauded Indo-US nuclear deal as a great rendezvous between ‘world’s oldest and largest democracies’, he has shown scant regard for people’s aspirations and their grassroots democratic institutions. Local self-governance bodies (Panchayat) have passed resolutions to oppose nuclear power plants in their backyards not only in Koodankulam, but also in Jaitapur and Fatehabad. Same is true in case of Uranium mining in Jadugoda.

Scholars have identified this urgency, violence and flouting of democracy as intrinsic to the historical modernist project of creating industrialized societies and nuclear states.

Mere over-reaction to Fukushima?

Reducing the nature of massive protests to misplaced apprehensions triggered by Fukushima accident is nothing but an elitist contempt for the people and their wisdom stemming from real life experiences. Koodankulam movement has raised a wide range of questions pertaining to displacement, livelihood, environmental damage, safety and economics of the project. So have done the people in Jaitapur and Fatehabad in Haryana. But the government has largely handled this issue as a PR problem: awareness and education of people. To people who are asking is this the village-centric India that Mahatma Gandhi wanted to build, the government is sending its scientists who are in love with their reactor designs. Could a state be farther removed from its people !

However, even our experts are avoiding the crucial question in Koodankulam: why this reassurance when the Russian agencies themselves have questioned the safety of VVER design being built in Koodankulam, in their post-Fukushima safety audit. And how ‘scientific’ it is to impose reactors on people when radiation has a life of thousands of years while the knowledge about reactor safety, seismology, environment and climate change, radiation and health etc is still evolving and is based on a data of few hundred years at the most. Apart from natural factors, we also have human factors like political turmoils, sabotages and terrorism – how can our technocrats and policy makers pre-empt them for thousands of years when we know how volatile human history has been.

Dividing protests on communal lines: A dangerous precedent

The intelligence agencies in Koodankulam are reported to be doing religious profiling of the agitators. This is a very unfortunate precedent and totally unacceptable when the state itself is doing so. Incidentally, majority of the fishing communities in the region is Christian and it results in active participation of their community and religious organisations. The two decade old protest in Koodankulam has been entirely non-violent, broad based and multi-religious.

Independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had an innocent belief that scientific advancements bring scientific temper in the society. Today, when the most undemocratic regimes like North Korea can acquire nuclear weapons and technology, we need to seriously question the promise of social enlightenment that is supposed to necessarily follow great technological advancements. In fact, nuclear industry is known for indulging in worst forms of racism throughout the world. Nuclear accident in Fukushima, like the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima has resulted in social ostracism of radiation-victims. Not unsurprisingly, the nuclear tsars inIndia have also indulged in malicious tricks, cover-ups and callous indifference for people’s health and lives.

For a nuclear-free world, we need a new society

When it comes to nuclear energy, we can’t avoid its linkages with the overarching societal, systemic and civilisational questions. Nuclear issues concern public health, environment, labour and human rights, economic and political transparency, accountability and above all – an evolved and mature society that reprioritises its consumption pattern. The insane rush to economic growth and American dream comes as handy justifications for nuclear energy in a ‘risk society’ (although even this is untrue: nuclear energy production on global scale is on a consistent decline worldwide and actually no source of energy can feed the current growth fetish.)

A Nuclear-free society cannot just be today’s society without nuclear reactors and weapons. The unending ‘consumption’ that capitalism deems necessary for human existence and growth, and for which nuclear energy is supposed to be essential, is nothing but a farcical mirage. Despite large growth of electricity production in the country in last two decades, the actual consumption in rural areas has increased only marginally. In the present growth model, only a limited part of electricity generated goes for actual consumption and the rest is wasted in energy-guzzling sectors such as advertising, military industrial complex, excessive bureaucracy etc.

Seeking Strength in Non-Violence

The anti-nuclear movement recognizes that it can pursue its goal only by fighting for this larger perspective. In context of Fukushima disaster also, leading thinkers of Japan have outlined this necessity. Strengthening democracy and practising non-violence is an imperative in this regard that the anti-nuclear movement has always adhered to. It’s not a coincidence that India’s anti-nuclear activism found its cradle in Gandhian institutions. Anumukti, a group engaged consistently in opposing nuclear energy and weapons, and mobilizing public opinion against them since 1980s runs under the leadership of Shri Narayan Desai, a veteran Gandhian who spent 25 years of his life with Mahatma Gandhi.

Despite attempts by some to instigate violence, S P Udayakumar, spearheading the movement in Koodankulam for last two decades has also shown an for decades and finally it has brought the government to accept phasing out of country’s nuclear program.

Our policy elites would do well to listen to the soul of India as reflected in these grassroots voices rather than push the country into a dangerous and unsustainable future.

Nuclear safety in India: Some Crucial Questions

• On the VVER design being installed in Koodankulam, the Russian agencies themselves have raised serious safety issues, while our nuclear theocrats are giving it a clean chit.
• In case of Jaitapur, more than 3000 serious safety issues with Areva’s EPR reactor design have been highlighted by safety regulatory bodies of Finland (STUK), UK (HSE), France (ASN) and EU. Engineers working on the EPR have serious apprehensions of a “Chernobyl style” meltdown in the design because both the materials and workmanship were substandard, as per leaked EDF documents. In 2009, safety authorities had issued a joint request for EPR design improvement. The American Nuclear Regulatory Council (NRC) has also delayed the safety certification for the EPR for a year. Independent experts have raised serious questions on safety and viability of EPR projects.
• Contrary to the government’s claims, India has a poor record when it comes to nuclear safety. A list of serious nuclear accidents in the recent past can be seen here.
• Far from being open about safety issues, the DAE is known to be utterly secretive and undemocratic. The nuclear establishment has a history of avoiding public scrutiny by labelling its own safety audits ‘top secret’. The nuclear establishment has also badly victimized the whistle blowers and critics in the past.
• The post-Fukushima safety review in India has been hastily done by the NPCIL, the public nuclear operator itself, in one month whereas the other countries have gone for detailed process. The report does a rather selective reading of events in Fukushima in the first place and, not surprisingly, has come out with reassurances about nuclear installations in India being totally safe. In the wake of Fukushima, people and independent experts had raised serious issues but for the government it remains just a public relations exercise.
• In case of a Fukushima-like accident, people of India are left helpless as the government’s Nuclear Liability Bill caps the maximum liability arbitrarily. Even the watered-down provision for suppliers liability is not acceptable to the American and other international nuclear corporate and these countries are pushing India to do away with the suppliers liability and ratify the CSC.
• The proposed Nuclear Safety Authority and Regulatory Bill 2011 which the PM has lauded in his letter to Ms. Jayalalitha, has been widely criticized for being toothless. Not only the new NSRA’s jurisdiction and role be even more limited than the existing AERB, the govt has overarching powers to supersede it and take any installation out of its purview citing ‘national security’ imperatives. The NSRA bill provides no security to the whistle-blowers. The NSRA will operate under the under a Council of Nuclear Safety (CNS) headed by the PM. Experts have raised questions about real independence and efficacy of this new mechanism.

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Colonial era sedition law contained in section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code, makes creating hatred or contempt for or disaffection towards the government established by Law in India, an act of sedition punishable with imprisonment for life, whether such disaffection, hatred or contempt is created by words spoken or written or by signs or visible representation. This section forms part of chapter VI of the Indian penal Code that deals with “offences against the State”, a passage that deals with serious offences including waging war against the State.

Section 124 A was introduced by the British Government in 1870 when the colonial government felt that such a draconian law was needed to suppress the freedom struggle. Some of the most famous sedition trails of 19th and early 20th centuries were those of Indian nationalist leaders including Tilak, Gandhi and Maulana Azad. All the repressive laws used by the British against the freedom struggle have been retained in Independent India, despite constitutional provisions mandating scrutiny.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s views were totally against this provision when he said in 1951, “Take again Section 124 (A) of the Indian Penal Code. Now so far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place both for practical and historical reasons, in any body of laws that one might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.”

In fact, it is the constitutional right of every citizen to expose the misdeeds of the government he/she disapproves of and create disaffection and disloyalty among the people and work for throwing it out of power through democratic means – of course without resorting to violence. Hence, the law is incompatible with democracy in which anybody who is dissatisfied with the government has the right to create disaffection against it and seek its removal at the next election. In fact, it is the legitimate right of every citizen to expose the misdeeds of the government it disapproves of, create disaffection and disloyalty among the people and work for throwing it out of power. Disloyalty to a government is different from disloyalty to the State. Of late this provision is being used by the State to suppress the peaceful people’s movements and Human Rights activists.

Using sedition law to silence peaceful criticism is the hallmark of an oppressive government. The Indian parliament should immediately repeal this Colonial Era Sedition Law.
http://repealseditionlaw.in/

Updated: October 11, 2011

Saranda, literally meaning a forest of seven hundred small hills, is known as the largest sal forest in Asia, situated in West Singhbhum district of Jharkhand. Approximately 125,000 Adivasis / 10,000 families live in these forests, which have rich iron ore deposits.

A 30-year-old woman was repeatedly gangraped by security forces for a week during August in the Saranda forests of Jharkhand. Jawans of the anti-Naxal Cobra force captured her house, and made her to live with and cook for them. Today, she does not dare speak out against the barbarity since the jawans subsequently arrested her son for being a Maoist. She fears more for the life of her son, than speaking out against the atrocity that was heaped on her.

This woman’s story is not an isolated one. Innumerable accounts of gross human rights violations are trickling out of the Saranda forests where the anti-Maoist exercise Operation Anaconda was carried out in August. More than 500 Adivasis were brutally tortured by the forces and 15,000 directly affected by the atrocities, according to rights activists.

During Operation Anaconda, which was carried out jointly by the Jharkhand police and the paramilitary forces, the jawans ate up, mixed and spoiled foodgrains in many villages, besides destroying the harvest. They also ate up the meat that villagers had in stock. In many places, the security forces broke down doors and destroyed houses. They gobbled up the edible materials in three private ration shops, and later destroyed them. They also damaged most of the utensils (made of steel and silver) and seized the bronze ones, traditional weapons, axes, clothes and agriculture equipment to show that these were recovered from Maoist camps. The security forces destroyed land entitlement papers, ration cards, education certificates, voter identity cards and job cards in Tholkobad, Gundijora, Baliba, Tirilposi and Bitkilsoy villages.

Schools remained closed even now and mid-day-meals were suspended in 25 villages during the anti-Naxal operations. The jawans even ate up the foodgrains meant for the mid-day meals of schoolchildren in Baliba, Tirilposi and Tholkobad villages. They captured the primary school in Tholkobad, and destroyed books, schoolboxes and science kits. The jawans severely beat up a teacher, and destroyed the utensils, land patta and voter card of the convener of the mid-day meal committee. The construction works of two new school buildings were stopped at Baliba and Tirilposi villages. No one now dares sending their children to schools.

There are no health facilities available within 30-50 km of the Saranda forests. Villagers have to depend on the “jholachap doctors” (untrained medicine practitioners) or traditional medicine practitioners for treatment. The National Rural Health Mission does not exist for any practical purpose. The security forces have created a livelihood crisis by terrorising, torturing, raping and even killing villagers. Most of the youth in the 25 villages have fled. The region remains cut off. The forces have cordoned off the villages, and mediapersons barely have access to the area.

The ostensible reason behind the anti-Maoist operations in the area is mining. A Chinese company, Electro Steel, has been given a lease of the Dinsumburu mines, which is situated near Baliba and Kudliba villages. This is where the most heinous atrocities were committed by the security forces. There are 17 other groups/companies – including the Tatas, Mittals and Jindals – which have been given mining leases in the Saranda forests. The Adivasis have not been given land entitlements under the Forest Rights Act 2006. Without these, the mining companies can comfortably acquire the forest and environment clearance for mining purposes.

Saranda, literally meaning a forest of seven hundred small hills, is known as the largest sal forest in Asia, situated in West Singhbhum district of Jharkhand. Approximately 125,000 Adivasis / 10,000 families live in these forests, which have rich iron ore deposits. Maoists rule the area, and hence the security operations. Operation Anaconda was the last of these.

A team from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) visited the area in September following a plea filed by the Jharkhand Human Rights Movement (JHRM). Senior police officials of the region however tried to sabotage the visit, according to JHRM. First, they tried to cancel the visit by giving NHRC false information about heavy rains in Saranda. When this disinformation was refuted by the JHRM, the police and the administration changed the route chart for the investigating team. They coordinated the visit in a manner to ensure that the team did not reach the most affected villages. Tirilposi village was even struck off the itinerary.

http://www.write2kill.in/columns/deadline-delhi/1012.html