New Delhi: The day since cracks started appearing in the houses of the residents of Joshimath in Uttarakhand, there have been extensive write-ups in the national and regional dailies and on web portals. Almost all of them invariably have highlighted the imminent need for intervention and the faulty outlook towards the Himalayas, which are considered to be a super tourist destination and wealth extraction zone.

Indeed, the Himalayas are one of the finest ranges of mountains with impressive flora and fauna, mineral wealth, tremendous hydropower potential and limestone for cement manufacturing. But, often we forget a hard reality, and that is that these are the youngest range of mountains in the world and are extremely fragile.

‘Planned’ and Not ‘Unplanned Development’ Responsible

Some of the write-ups with platitudinal references have been pointing out the unplanned development in the hilly regions and saying that because of houses being constructed on the debris, they are facing cracks as the mountains are subsiding. This is just one part of the story. But why are mountains subsiding?

The push from the centre and the state governments in the mountains to speed up development, particularly in the post-90s period and primarily whence Uttarakhand got its statehood is one of the major reasons for massive activity in the mountains. Himachal has been facing a similar scenario.

The development models of these two states- particularly the widening of the roads, the char dham yatra (Hindu pilgrimage) and harnessing the hydropower potential in both states, have been steered by the World Bank (WB). The WB which was reluctant in funding big hydropower projects changed its policy in 2005.

Quote from a source highlighting the plight of mountains because of massive interventions, states, “abstention from any support of major dams; from 2005 onwards, the Bank(World Bank) has substantially increased its funding to the big hydro project once again, including Nathpa Jhakri but without any critical evaluation. The project was completed at a cost of Rs 8,187 crore. “ Nathpa Jhakri project is on the Satluj basin. It has another interesting story that will follow in the later part of this write-up.

The World Bank website goes on the state that “The World Bank is also assisting the state governments of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand adopt a river-basin approach in the planning and development of cascaded hydropower systems. The two mountain states that have made hydropower generation a significant development priority had asked for Bank assistance in initiating a River Basin Development Optimisation Study that uses the Satluj and Alaknanda rivers as case studies which have been completed and discussions are ongoing on how to take this work forward.”

Hence, it is not unplanned but ‘planned development’ that has led to such holocausts in the mountains and this has been done by multilateral agencies like the Bank and the state and central governments who have brushed aside the concerns of the people. Take for example- in Himachal Pradesh, a No Objection Certificate (NOC) was essential for constructing a hydropower dam in the panchayat precinct but this was removed by a legislative order led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state assembly.

The current model of planned development has benefited the multilateral agencies, and the hydropower corporations but not the people who have been forced to fall to ruins.

The Joshimath Story

Need not be explained that the state government of Uttarakhand in its push to attain more revenue for running the state, started doling out hydropower projects to big power corporations. Not to discount the fact that since the Mishra committee report came out in 1976, the town was reported to be on sediments and not on pucca (concrete) rocks. The vulnerability was high. But what precipitated the crisis is the construction of the World Bank-supported hydropower project, Tapovan-Vishnugad. The National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Limited is constructing this project with a capacity of nearly 520 Megawatt (MW). It is a large project.

Now, what happens when a hydropower project is constructed? This project has a huge catchment area of more than 3,000 square kilometres. The so-called new technology, “run of the river dam”-where large dams are not required, was pushed forward in the last few decades as a solution for saving the submergence of large parts of land under big dams. But this technology, which is also used in the above project has its own perils. And in fact, speaks volumes of perilous development in the mountains.

Under this technology, a potential difference is created by blocking water on the main river and then diverting that river through a Head Race Tunnel (HRT)into the surge shaft and finally pouring it onto the turbines. In the Vishnugad project, the HRT is 12.1 kilometres long with a dimension of 5.6m diameters. Then there are Adit tunnels to enter the HRT.

Now, what happens in the construction of these tunnels? The technology used in most of these tunnel burrowing is through very heavy blasting, instead of a tunnel boring machine which is considered to be better. Imagine the volume of muck that comes out of such digging of a tunnel. Where is it dumped? All this leads to further vulnerability. During the course of HRT because of massive blasting, the rock layers get disturbed, and because of this, the people living in the mountains lose their natural ecosystem. They lose their water springs, and if the strata are loose, they even lose their houses. This is exactly what happened in Joshimath. Soon, this town with a population of over 20,000 will lose its existence.

There is another interesting part of the construction of Vishnugad. The earlier consortium of an Austrian company, Alpine Mayreder Bau GmbH with Larsen & Toubro (L&T) was terminated in 2014 owing to geological reasons. This contract was then given to another company for constructing the project and this company is known for its notoriety in using more than the required gelatin for blasting. The same company was also in a consortium in the construction of NJPC at
one of the three sites.

And now we know the reality. But this is not just an isolated example. This is the story across the mountain regions.

The Satluj Story

Satluj river as it enters from China into India has been targeted for harnessing its entire potential. The proposed and constructed projects as it enters India are Khab Shaso, Jangi-Thopan, Thopan Powari, Shongthong-Karcham, Karcham Wangtoo, Nathpa Jhakri, Rampur, Luhri, Kol Dam and finally the Bhakra hydropower project. All of these projects are on the Satluj River and a dozen more are on its tributaries.

Similar conditions of working as explained above in the Joshimath region prevail in these projects as well. In Himachal Pradesh, additional leverage was given to the hydropower companies, particularly the private ones. This came in the form of a quality check which was there earlier. The state electricity board is used to monitor the overall quality of the construction of the hydropower projects. The use of material- the use of gelatin in blasting, etc., however, was ended during the BJP rule on the strong push from the Jay Pee industries that constructed the Karcham -Wangtoo hydropower project.

Like Joshimath, people often forget that the Nathpa village, where the dam was constructed has lost its existence. The village was small, perhaps, and because of that, there was not much anger. The entire village started sliding because of the construction activity of the dam and then had to be reallocated to another place. In Himachal, there is a continuous threat of landslides even when it is not raining. The sole reason is the construction activity done whilst constructing the project. So, it is not just during the project construction but even afterwards that the threat looms large.

Construction of Chardham roads and widening of roads

This is another important feature leading to massive cutting of the hills and at places even tunnelling that is leading to huge loss to the mountain ecology. There are around 69 national highways announced in the state. The char dham yatra also is a pointer in this direction. Most of the heavy construction road projects in the state of Himachal Pradesh are supported by the Bank and other multilateral agencies. What the mountain states require is the mobility of the people and not the mobility of the cars.

In none of the cases mentioned above, a geologist is part of the team while constructing these roads. This further enhances the vulnerability of the mountains.

The repeated reference made to the Bank does not mean that some vilification campaign is put up against this agency it is to point out that the planned development models are amply supported by the governments and the multilateral agencies without the participation of the people.

No Means No

This is another movement like the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand. This ‘no means no’ movement is restricted to the tribal district of Kinnaur in Himachal where the natives have taken a strong position against the further construction of hydropower projects and are not allowing any new entry into the hydropower construction.

‘Kiang’, in local dialect means ‘fire’ and is one of the connotations given by the tribals where cross sections of the people from the youth, retired bureaucrats, farmers, and women have woven a network and are not allowing any more hydropower projects in the region.

The current model of development- ‘planned development’, without the participation of the people, has led to massive erosion of nature, trust, wealth, and assets are cheating the common people. But there are movements that beacon a ray of hope that alienation will not lead to the desired results, they must fight back and reclaim their right of planning themselves.

Hence, the flawed understanding “it is unplanned construction” that is leading to such holocausts in the mountains must be corrected with “the planning authorities have failed,” the people have to step in to reclaim their right over planning and conserving nature which they have done for centuries together. ‘Nature and us’ living in dialectical unity and nature, not for profit and capital accumulation must be the war cry.

(The writer is the former deputy mayor of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh.Views are personal.)

Courtesy: newsclick.in

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The post Development as Disaster appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In mid-August, floods hit the southern and western states of Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Several hundred people died. Floodwaters damaged property and roads, and destroyed thousands of hectares of summer crops.

Kerala was particularly badly affected. Reeling under a rainfall deficit of 27% till August 7, the next day the state received 368% more rainfall than average, triggering widespread floods and displacing close to two million people. By August 13, incessant downpours sliced the seasonal deficit to 3%, a massive 24 percentage points difference. The state was still recovering from last year’s floods, the worst in a century.

In Maharashtra, two weeks of heavy rainfall flooded many western districts of the state such as Pune, Kolhapur, Satara and Sangli, killing 50 and displacing half a million. And all this while the monsoon rain shadow areas of Marathwada and Vidarbha remained drought hit.

Karnataka swung between a monsoon deficit of 13% to an excess of 10% on a week’s heavy rainfall. On August 8, some districts received up to 32 times their normal rainfall. Floodwaters rushed into 12 districts, mostly in the northern and central parts. Monuments in the World Heritage Site Hampi were submerged by the swollen Tungabhadra river.

If this wasn’t enough, there were cloudbursts in the Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Extreme rainfall on August 18 wreaked havoc in Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, washing away dozens of houses in several villages. Heavy rains over the weekend in Himachal Pradesh poured enormous quantities of water in many parts of the state, causing floods and landslides. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Sunday that Himachal Pradesh received the highest-ever rainfall for 24 hours since records began some 70 years back.

The rain in the uplands saw floods spilling over the plains of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, where massive relief work is in progress. The headwaters of the Ganga in Uttarakhand are in spate, with the river crossing the danger mark in Haridwar. The water of the Yamuna has risen alarmingly, triggering a flood warning in the national capital.

A disaster foretold

This kind of sudden and heavy rainfall is not unexpected. Scientists have long warned that extreme weather events brought on by manmade climate change is inevitable, and such weather extremes have arrived in India. The trend of extraordinary precipitation over shorter periods of time has been well documented.

“Although prediction of such extreme weather events is still fraught with uncertainties, a proper assessment of likely future trends would help in setting up infrastructure for disaster preparedness,” said a 2006 study led by B.N. Goswami of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. The study of rainfall data of the southwest monsoon, the study found that there is an increase in the number of extreme monsoon weather events over India over the past half century, although the seasonal mean monsoon rainfall remains stable for the same period.

“There is a 10% increase per decade in the level of heavy rainfall activity since the early 1950s, whereas the number of very heavy events has more than doubled, indicating a large increase in disaster potential,” the study found. “These findings are in tune with model projections and some observations that indicate an increase in heavy rain events and a decrease in weak events under global warming scenarios.”

In 2011, P. Guhathakurta, O.P. Sreejith and P.A. Menon of the India Meteorological Department investigated the occurrence of exceptionally heavy rainfall events and associated flash floods in many areas in recent years. They found that extreme rainfall and flood risk are increasing significantly in the country. The frequency of very heavy rainfall events and risk of floods is likely to increase over India, said a 2008 study led by M. Rajeevan of the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory.

Although for some two decades the scientific evidence has been pointing to more such calamities occurring more frequently, such scenarios were mostly ignored by policymakers. As a result, this year’s cloudbursts have caught the authorities unprepared.

Worsening the disaster

At a time when extreme rainfall is more likely, experts are saying that the resulting floods, loss of property and human displacement and suffering are made worse by wrong-headed development and poor water management.

For instance, the extensive floods in Kolhapur, Sangli and Satara in the upper Krishna river basin in Maharashtra could have been somewhat mitigated had the dam operators in the region acted wisely, alleged the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), a research and advocacy group. Poor management of dams has worsened the floods instead of mitigating them, it said in a report.

“In the same period when these districts were getting high rainfall, the dams in these districts started releasing large quantities of water, which played a major role in creating the flood disaster,” the SANDRP report said. “The dam operators are likely to turn around and say that but the dams were full and we had no option but to release water. The question is: why were the dams full when monsoon is just about halfway through and IMD has predicted much higher rainfall in the remaining part of the monsoon compared to the first half?” the report questioned.

The opening of sluice gates of reservoirs, such as the Bhakra Dam on the Sutlej River in Himachal Pradesh and the Kota Barrage in the Chambal River valley, caused much of the floods in northern India. If India has to mitigate the impacts of extreme rainfall, it has to devise ways to manage its dams.

The first step towards a course correction is to recognise the problem. But the government seems to be in denial. “The climate in various parts of the world is changing, but it would be wrong and unscientific to attribute the current flood situation to climate change,” India’s Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said at a media briefing in Pune.

It’s true that climate scientists are wary of attributing a particular extreme weather event to climate change. However, it is also undeniable that scientific evidence points clearly to an increase in such occurrences due to global warming.

Reckless development

Besides faulty water management, the frenzy of ill thought out development has also worsened the impacts of the intense rainfall. In the western Himalayas, for instance, there has been a massive thrust in building infrastructure that has put enormous pressure on the region’s natural environment. Environmentalists and experts have cautioned against the massive road and tunnel-building projects in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

In 2013, heavy rainfall and unprecedented floods had devastated Uttarakhand. At that time, the federal home ministry had blamed deforestation, building of roads that cut through mountains, construction of hydropower projects, and tourism-related construction on floodplains and mountain slopes for worsening the scale of the disaster.

But the lessons of 2013 have remained unheeded. In fact, the government has embarked on the contentious Char Dham highway project to connect four Hindu shrines in the state, though local residents and environmentalists say that it endangers the fragile mountain ecosystem.

In the south, the floods and landslides in Kerala have again focused attention on the 2011 report by the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel led by Madhav Gadgil. The Gadgil report had warned that cultivation of commercial crops on steep slopes was leading to rapid erosion and increased run-off.

It had also said there was a need to control the massive encroachment and deforestation in the catchment of major rivers such as the Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery. It also spoke against building large dams in the ecologically sensitive area.

The warning and recommendations of the Gadgil report were actively opposed and ignored. The terrible results of that became evident when there was unprecedented rainfall in Kerala last year. Scientists said the impacts of the Kerala deluge was made worse by massive deforestation over the years, unrestrained construction, and most of all, stone quarrying that destabilised hill slopes.

This intense rain in the southern state again this year could just be one in a string of such events occurring in the future elsewhere in the country as well. Unless there is a change in the way development is carried out in India, the damage from extreme weather events will only be magnified.

Courtesy: Counter View

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development and planning, two important pillars of India’s economic growth and development pathway, were given importance in the ‘New Urban Agenda’ adopted at the Habitat III conference in 2016 to help achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 – safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities. India’s urban development journey over the last two decades has coincided with increasing marginalisation, exclusion, conflict, and everyday violence in the cities. This violence has gone unnoticed and unanalysed in the urban planning and policy-making world.The economic reforms of 1991 increased urban inequalities, which have worsened through inequitable urban planning. As an instrument of planning, the Master Plan has also deemed many areas of the city to be illegal and, as a result, the Indian state has engineered the “elite capture” of urban spaces. It has also subverted pro-poor provisions of Master Plans.

The poor thus find spaces in the cities through “occupancy urbanism”, a gradual process of informal land occupation under political patronage, while living in fear of the constant threat of eviction. By being deemed “illegal”, the informal urban living spaces created by the poor themselves are denied the provision of basic services.

Governance is not just about what the state does in implementing plans, but also what the state does not do. A good example relates to the provision of basic services. The denial of essential urban services to the poor – because governments lack the political will, capability, or capacity to meet the needs of low-income communities – has also led to the emergence of non-state providers operating as mafias. These informal sector entrepreneurs and middlemen – often with links to government functionaries and the police – use the vulnerability and unmet needs of the poor to manipulate them.

The inability of the State to provide services, employment, and access to the corridors of power for the poor also leads to a failure to provide justice and protection. This failure introduces and sustains a system of violence, coercion, and extortion in urban areas. Such processes emanating from urban governance are not only forms of structural violence, but also cause non-state actors to threaten or use physical violence. The fact that the means of violence are no longer monopolised by the state and that non-state actors either collude or conflict with the state is interlinked to urban planning and governance processes as well.

Local design issues can also create opportunities for perpetrators of violence, conditions for tensions to escalate to violence, or an environment that invokes fear. Paved streets with streetlights and multiple activities throughout the day can create safe environments. In a culture such as India’s, where machismo is valued, everyday conflicts can escalate into violent confrontations. Geographic concentrations of low-income populations can create ghettos where criminals can find shelter.

Ahmedabad is the brand ambassador for the Gujarat Development Model of high growth accompanied by low human development, entrenched communalised polity, and social exclusion. In Ahmedabad, the focus areas and case-study locales were:
 

1. conflicts linked to land, housing, and basic services in urban informal peripheral localities, which are also religious (Muslim) ghettos (focusing on one such locality populated by more than 25,000 families)
2. conflicts linked to land, housing, and basic services in slum resettlement sites constructed using Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) funds (focusing on three slum resettlement sites on the urban periphery)
3. women’s safety in traversing public spaces and in accessing and using public transport (focusing on two low-income localities).

Land as a driver of structural violence

In Ahmedabad’s Bombay Hotel area, located in the informal urban periphery, a decade went by with the state being completely absent and residents having no political voice in the city due to the combined effects of living in an informal development and their identity as Muslims in a city and state dominated by a right-wing Hindu political party. Informal developments have grown up on agricultural land through informal land transactions and devious behaviour by land developers without development permissions.

Bombay Hotel’s development into a large and dense Muslim neighbourhood has a violent history. Muslims displaced due to state-engineered communal riots in 2002 (Concerned Citizens Tribunal – Gujarat 2002) either purchased a plot/house in the locality or were resettled there by charity organisations. The nuclearisation of Muslim families living in the old city areas also led to the search for affordable homes to purchase, which they found in Bombay Hotel as builders floated low-instalment-based housing schemes.

All the land transactions are on sale agreements made on stamp papers, which are quasi-legal documents that record the monetary exchange but not the transfer of ownership. The legal ownership of the lands thus remains with the original farmers.

In 2013, planning came to this locality through the Town Planning Scheme, which is a land pooling and readjustment mechanism. The mechanism mandates that up to 50 per cent of the original land be vested with the planning authority for uses categorised as ‘public purposes’ such as roads, water, and sanitation infrastructure; education and health facilities; and Socially and Economically Weaker Section (SEWS) (low-income) housing known in the global literature as social housing.

The implementation of two Town Planning Schemes as an urban planning tool would have demolished about 10 per cent (2,200) of the houses in the area. Since the residents do not hold legal land rights, they do not qualify for compensation. This led to tensions, followed by mobilisation and protests.
 

“This lane is supposed to be demolished under [the] TP [Town Planning] Scheme. We don’t know whether we will get a house or not. We have invested all our life savings in the house and have just completed paying our instalments and now this fear lingers above us.” (Resident of Bombay Hotel Area, Ahmedabad)

In recent years, slight shifts in politics in the city and the state saw Ahmedabad’s right-wing Hindu political party attempting to woo voters from among the Muslim community. Demolishing such a large Muslim neighbourhood would have attracted bad press and therefore the demolitions under the Town Planning Scheme were put on hold.

Further, the boundaries of electoral constituencies were changed during the 2010–2012 period, bringing a change in local elected representatives. Centrist party (Indian National Congress) candidates won the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and state assembly elections for this locality, leading to pressure from local leaders and residents on the elected representatives to halt demolitions and extend basic services to the locality. The residents were successful on both counts. Significantly, the conflict over eviction was mitigated when the elected representatives intervened, causing the local government to modify the implementation of its Town Planning Scheme to address people’s concerns.

However, the process is incomplete, and conflict over eviction could arise again as the Town Planning Scheme implementation progresses. In the meantime, municipal services, such as drainage and water supply, are being extended to the locality. This has the potential to alleviate some of the conflicts and violence emerging from the informal provision of services as well as structural violence resulting from deprivation.
Housing as a driver of structural violence

The lack of an affordable housing policy and related schemes led to the development of informal housing. Low-income households prefer to live in locations where they can easily access a livelihood and do not have to incur commuting costs. If the formal housing is expensive in such locations, they tend to live in informal housing. In Ahmedabad, for example, informal housing emerged on lands in central areas of the city close to opportunities for work, such as on the banks of the Sabarmati River that divides Ahmedabad.

The riverfront development project displaced between 12,000 and 15,000 households of which approximately 11,000 were resettled at various JNNURM housing sites. Many were resettled at the Vatwa resettlement sites on the urban periphery, along with evictees from other infrastructure projects. The Vatwa sites comprise 9,200 dwelling units across seven sites that were selected due to their low land prices. We selected three of these sites, Sadbhavnanagar, Kusha Bhau Thakre (KBT) nagar,5 and Vasant Gajendra Gadkar (VGG) Nagar for our research.

Here, we found that urban planning has been used as a tool to displace low-income households from core areas of the city to the underdeveloped periphery, rather than bringing them into the urban mainstream and providing them with a wider set of opportunities. This is a typical case of reproducing and, in many cases, deepening inequalities through the urban planning process and further entrenching structural violence. The constrained mobility and stressed livelihoods faced as a result of relocation have deepened the structural violence in the lives of the majority of residents.

The resettled residents, uprooted from their former homes from which they could walk or cycle to work, are now forced to use motorised transport and pay for their travel to work. Specifically, women’s livelihoods were extremely constrained due to the fear of harassment and violence in commuting longer distances. Many dropped out of the labour market or began to work from their homes. At home, they produce goods on a piece-rate basis, resulting in a decline in their income.

All of these factors together have increased housing and transport costs for the residents and have pushed them below the poverty line. Residents reported spending between one-third and one-quarter of their income on commuting, while also indicating increased housing costs. This deepening of structural violence, through induced poverty, has led to thefts of private and common property.

Robberies and burglaries became widespread at the Vatwa resettlement sites. Petrol from bikes; the tyres of rickshaws, motorbikes, and even bicycles; lids of overhead water tanks; tubing covering electric wires; and water pipes have all been stolen.

Many residents have been robbed, sometimes at knife-point, while moving in and around the sites. Residential burglaries have taken place where cash, jewellery, mobile phones, and other items have been stolen. Residents try not to leave their houses unoccupied for long. Residents described how they felt insecure; women, in particular, did not step out of their homes after dark, which was not the case where they used to live. Communities that used to be close knit have been dispersed across different sites and randomly situated within those sites due to the house allotment process.

A resettlement colony in Ahmedabad

This haphazard approach to resettlement has led to social disruption and resulted in the loss of moral authority that local leaders, elders, and residents in general were able to exercise previously. Overall, internal informal social control is now lacking at the resettlement sites, creating a “mahol” or environment in which crime is committed with impunity and youth, in particular, easily stray towards theft, gambling, and illicit activities such as selling/consuming drugs. This latter situation is exacerbated by the absence of feasible livelihood options.
 

“When there are no jobs, the youngsters get spoilt. They get into wrong activities [sic]. They do not have money for the transport fare … when a person goes hungry then he will steal; he will get into bad businesses.” (Female resident at the Vatwa resettlement site)
“If [a child’s] mother is not at home the whole day and they are hungry then they might steal. If I leave my shop unattended just now and if a child who has not eaten since morning comes by, he might pick up something.… Today he might pick up something costing INR5; tomorrow he will steal something more.” (Female resident at the Vatwa resettlement site)

The built environment at the resettlement sites has also enhanced crime. Some stretches of the main road have few activities. The lack of ‘eyes on the street’ has created opportunities for robberies and the harassment of women. Within the sites, large sections do not have functioning streetlights and, where they are present, those who engage in crime break the lights whenever they are repaired. The common passageways in most buildings do not have functioning lights due to disputes about electricity bill payments.

Overall, the physical environment is intimidating, especially for women. Thus, we see structural violence leading to increased crime. Emanating from it is everyday fear of crime and violence among the residents. Lack of proper policing, due to the overall failure of local security governance at the site, has deepened these fears among residents, which have a strong gender dimension.

Water supply systems as a driver of structural violence

Conflicts related to water are primarily due to the lack of a formal water supply in informal settlements. This is an urban planning issue. However, conflicts have emerged: in Bombay Hotel, these are due to the supply by informal water providers; in the Vatwa resettlement sites, they are due to the local government’s approach to the design and governance of water infrastructure.

In Bombay Hotel, the absence of a municipal water supply has led to the emergence of many different kinds of informal water supply arrangements, such as builders or better-off residents providing water from private bore-wells and residents fetching water from surrounding factories. Some of these arrangements mitigate extreme deprivation and conflicts around water, but many lead to a variety of conflicts:
 

• among residents of a neighbourhood
• between residents of different neighbourhoods
• between residents and water suppliers
• between residents and the local government.

The conflicts often involve verbal and low-intensity physical fights on a daily basis. The informal water suppliers are motivated purely by profit; their approach to supplying water reflects this, with fixed territories of supply to protect profits and coercive practices. They collect monthly charges whether or not they are able to supply adequate water. Residents are unable to oppose this due to a lack of alternative sources and the high-handedness and threats from the suppliers.

In fact, residents cannot even complain about these operators without raising their ire. Multiple types of everyday conflicts emerge from the coercive management of water supply systems by these non-state actors. All conflicts have the potential to result in violence between residents and the water suppliers as well as among the residents themselves.
 

“In one of the societies [a community], a local leader complained to a politician about the poor quality of water being supplied by the bore-well operator. This angered the operator who then stopped supplying water to the residents which in turn led to an argument between the residents and [the] local leader as the former felt that the latter should not have complained to the politician as this had totally cut off their access to water.” (Resident of the Bombay Hotel area)

Municipal officials have been aware of unregulated groundwater extraction, its sale in the area, and the consumption of this contaminated water by residents. These facts point to the local government’s complicity in the situation. In recent years, the local government has started to send water tankers into the locality. However, this method of supply is wholly inadequate, leading to violence at the tankers, frequently among women who usually bear the family responsibility for water collection:
 

“Sometimes, these fights are bad. A few days ago, two women physically attacked each other and pulled each other’s hair. We had to call the police. One woman was sent to the hospital and the police arrested the other woman. Women fight with each other because only one tanker comes here for so many people and we cannot be certain that each of us will get water.” (Woman from Bombay Hotel)

In a couple of rare instances, residents have managed to collectively dig bore-wells to make arrangements for water, freeing them from the water suppliers and associated conflicts. This collective effort is an important bottom-up practice, but it still does not ensure good quality water and does not totally address the issue of deprivation and structural violence. At the Vatwa resettlement sites, water provision was arranged without sufficiently resolving outstanding governance questions. This led to a lack of potable water and inadequate running water due to leaking and blocked water pipes.

The structural violence created by resettlement on the urban periphery through socially disruptive processes has made the possibility of residents managing, maintaining, and sustaining the water supply extremely rare, thereby perpetuating structural violence. Municipal officials sometimes intervene, either out of benevolence or due to political pressure, but this generally results in uneven and inadequate interventions, furthering micro-local inequalities.

Some officials are also unsympathetic towards residents because they consider resettlement to be an act of charity. As a consequence of insulting them in this way, residents have retaliated by vandalising public property at the municipal office, exhibiting counter-violence against the state. Here, despite residents’ protests, the local government has remained unresponsive and has withdrawn the low level support that it was providing to keep the water supply system working.

Residents have almost completely stopped making demands on the government in the face of its increasingly uncompromising stance. But with access to water not resolved, the point of conflict has shifted to conflicts among the marginalised: among residents and between residents and water operators over maintenance and repairs. Furthermore, inequities are also reproduced as women and children regularly bear the brunt of gathering adequate amounts of water for the household.

Public transport as a driver of women’s insecurity

Ahmedabad has good public transport coverage through buses operated by Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Services (AMTS) and the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS). However, there are issues related to frequency, connectivity, and affordability of public transport in Bombay Hotel and the Vatwa resettlement sites. Women were forced to commute using para-transit vehicles such as ‘shuttles’ (three-wheeled auto-rickshaws that operate on a shared basis). Many women perceived the shuttles to be unsafe when sharing them with male passengers or when they had to take them alone because they feared the male driver.
 

“She used to go from here to the BRTS road in a shuttle and then from there to Dani Limda in another shuttle and then walk from there to school. The driver would keep a watch on her and would not take any other passenger when she was in his rickshaw; he would tease her and take her through different routes every day. Out of fear, she stopped going to school.” (Resident of Bombay Hotel regarding her niece’s experience)

In Bombay Hotel and Vatwa, walking to public transport stops was also challenging for women. They often face insecurity and harassment in public spaces. There are multiple drivers of this insecurity, many of which stem from the built environment: poor lighting; uneven roads and the absence of footpaths; and vacant spaces and structures along access roads that can be used by goons for illicit activities such as manufacturing, selling, and/or using alcohol and drugs or gambling.

Multiple causes, including a lack of good employment opportunities, draw many male youths into illicit activities, which then lead them to harass girls and young women. As such, women in Bombay Hotel and Vatwa will only undertake a trip if it is a necessity.

—
*Visiting professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad; **independent scholar based in Ahmedabad, formerly senior research fellow at the Centre for Urban Equity, CEPT University

These are excerpts from the paper “Everyday violence in urban India Is planning the driver or mitigator?” published with the permission of Prof Darshini Mahadevia

Courtesy: Counter View

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Despite a raft of economic woes afflicting the country, ranging from joblessness to farm distress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has swept to power in India, winning 56% of seats.

The study, ‘Do Citizens Enforce Accountability For Public Goods Provision?’, by Oxford University scholar Tanushree Goyal took into account election results across 14 states that hold 90% of India’s population. It linked the performance of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (prime minister’s rural roads project; PMGSY) to the results of state and central elections between 1998 and 2017.

A flagship programme of the earlier Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, PMGSY was launched in 2000. By 2018, the programme had resulted in more than 5,50,000 km of roads being laid across rural India at a cost of Rs 28 million crore ($40 billion).

Even when the programme was successfully implemented in villages, bringing connectivity, progress and better access to public facilities, voters did not vote back the same government, the study showed. For example, between 1998 to 2003, the Congress government in Rajasthan constructed 13,634.43 km of road across the state. Yet, in the 2003 elections, the Congress lost an average vote share of 9.6% and the BJP came to power in Rajasthan. Between 1999-2004, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) governing the then united Andhra Pradesh, constructed 8167.56 km of roads. However, in the 2004 election, the TDP lost its vote share by 7.3% and the Congress came to power.

“My empirical analysis suggests that while the world’s largest rural roads provision programme provided all-weather roads to over 200,000 Indian villages, most of which lacked paved roads and desperately needed all year market access, the electoral effects of roads provision were close to zero over time, space and electoral levels,” Goyal said in her study. “The very few times the results are significantly positive or negative, they are far too feeble and inconsistent, to have an electoral impact for the incumbent or incentivise future policy provision.”

The PMGSY was picked to ascertain the presence or absence of a policy vote in India because roads are a highly visible public good, easy for the voter to observe and evaluate, Goyal explained. “Moreover, there is causal evidence that PMGSY brings the poor better access public services in health, education, and agriculture,” she said.

In the campaigning months that preceded the 2019 general elections, the mention of infrastructure projects has steadily declined in the speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The election campaign leading saw an abundance of everything except debates on policies, former finance minister P Chidambaram noted in a comment in The Indian Express. Prime minister Modi has been accused by the opposition of focussing on the Congress party, its president and his family instead of the vikas (development) that he had promised on coming to power.

In a series of articles titled Modi’s Report Card, Factchecker.in had assessed the BJP government’s flagship projects such as the rural electrification programme, rural jobs scheme and the Swachh Bharat (clean India) mission.

The Oxford study has dire implications for democracy, according to Goyal. “…if voters remain unresponsive to policy provision, electoral incentives for public goods provision or improving service delivery, may diminish over time, leading to abandonment or poorer implementation of these crucial programmes,” she said in a blog post.

Parties pay for ‘cost of ruling’

Goyal used detailed, lowest-level roads data from the PMGSY and aggregated it to national and state- level constituencies to cover approximately 11,000 electoral races–parliamentary and assembly–for almost the entire duration of the roads programme.

The researcher has argued that if accountability is not observed for roads, “it is unlikely that we observe it for other policies”. Given their links to improved general social and economic welfare, roads are widely regarded as a “signal of competence” in the Indian context, as per Goyal.
Harish Ramaswamy, professor of political science, Karnatak University, Dharwad, traced the disconnect between votes and development to illiteracy. “One of the arguments about the Indian democracy is that it thrives because of illiteracy,” he said. “The electoral manifesto is read only by 1-2% of the voters.”

However, in her study Goyal has also explored the possibility of voters enforcing more accountability with higher education and better availability of information. She found that awareness about the scheme and even visible proof of road construction did not influence voters in both national and state elections. Information is not a constraint for this programme but its electoral effects remained null.

Since citizens do not vote on policy performance, incumbency does not bring political parties an advantage in the Indian context. On the contrary, it results in the “incumbency disadvantage” or the “cost of ruling”, according to Goyal.

“Incumbents have a comparative advantage over oppositions because they can use their policies to signal competence more effectively, while opposition cannot do so,” she said. “However if citizens’ do not take performance into account, incumbency does not bring this comparative advantage.”

What this meant for 2019 elections

“This election was not fought on the basis of any policies,” Goyal said. “It doesn’t matter how the government has performed in the last five years and that is why Modi speaks about things like nationalism and air strikes. Look at how BJP’s discourse has changed from 2014 to 2019. Then it was a mix of development and Hindutva but now it has changed only to identity and caste.”

So if development is not electorally rewarding then why should any government invest time and funds in constructing roads?

“Constructing roads may not help but not providing them may do great harm,” said Anupam Manur, economic research fellow at Takshashila, a think tank. If the economy is not doing well it works against political parties.”

‘People vote for various factors, not just roads’

There could also be other reasons why people do not vote for roads, said Sandeep Shastri, national coordinator of Lokniti Network, a think tank, and pro-vice chancellor, Jain University. “In many places, people lose their lands and farms for the construction of the roads and they may also receive inadequate compensation. Moreover, PMGSY is a centrally funded scheme that is implemented by the state government and people may not know who to give credit for the project.”

Shastri also questioned the representativeness of roads as an important parameter to vote for. “[W]e also need to see what constitutes building blocks of development from the people’s prism. Roads is only one factor and people consider multiple factors, like unemployment and price rise while going to vote,” he said.

In her paper, Goyal ruled out the possibility that the presence of both members of parliament and members of legislative assembly might lead to attribution errors. She also ruled out the likelihood of citizens not favouring the incumbent government for roads provision due to corruption concerns. “I find that citizens do not respond to variation in quality of roads: they neither reward good-quality roads nor punish for poor quality,” she wrote in her blog.

On the contrary, Shastri said parties’ development records matter in another way. “Democratic battles are battles of perception. In 2014 Modi’s campaign was strong on the non-performance of Congress. They were voted to power as they could build that perception. For the opposition development becomes a tool to attack the incumbent,” he said.

Votes are cast on ‘emotional plank’

While the research does not dwell on what Indians vote for if not for development, Goyal is of the opinion that it is caste. “But this is not to say that their choices are unwise or uninformed,” she said. “Caste plays a central role in Indian social and political life. While this could have bad outcomes for development and policy, it simply means that the electorate cares about other things.”

There is a need to reimagine caste today, Shastri added: “Caste should not be looked as a primordial identity. It is a modern political identity which is used to seek advantages. People also vote on the basis of caste as their life experiences are the same.”

Votes are cast more on an emotional plank than on caste, Ramaswamy of Karnatak University said. “They do vote on the basis of caste but that is a small percentage. The remaining vote a certain way because they are emotionally moved and that is why the parties are talking about nationalism or Ram Mandir. Every party tries to milk the emotional card to their benefit,” he said.

Voter preference could be viewed as a hierarchy of needs with individual benefits right on top, followed by community benefits and lastly benefits from public goods, said Manur from Takshashila. If the benefits are dispersed, the voter does not see it as a personal gain. “For most voters at the time of voting they are not thinking of the newly-constructed roads but of individual gains. That is why in an election cycle, political parties work towards providing public goods in the initial years and towards the end entice voters with freebies. Free saris, laptops, money go a long way in winning votes,” he said.

(Chacko, a postgraduate in Journalism, is an assistant professor of Journalism at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru, and an IndiaSpend intern.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Today, the US and Europe cling to a moribund form of capitalism and have used various mechanisms to bolster the system in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, financial speculation and increased militarism. Via ‘globalisation’, Western powers have also been on an unrelenting drive to plunder what they regard as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas of the globe.

Agricapital has been moving in on Indian food and agriculture for some time. But India is an agrarian-based country underpinned by smallholder agriculture and decentralised food processing. Foreign capital therefore first needs to displace the current model before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control. And this is precisely what is happening.

Western agribusiness is shaping the ‘development’ agenda in India. Over 300,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GMO) cash crops and economic liberalisation.

Other sectors have not been immune to this bogus notion of development. Millions of people have been displaced to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, land grabs for Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other large-scale projects. And the full military backing of the state has been on hand to forcibly evict people, place them in camps and inflict human rights abuses on them.

To help open the nation to foreign capital, proponents of economic neoliberalism are fond of stating that ‘regulatory blockages’ must be removed. If particular ‘blockages’ stemming from legitimate protest, rights to land and dissent cannot be dealt with by peaceful means, other methods are used. And when increasing mass surveillance or widespread ideological attempts to discredit and smear does not secure compliance or dilute the power of protest, brute force is on hand.

India’s agrarian crisis

India is currently witnessing a headlong rush to facilitate (foreign) agricapital and the running down of the existing system of agriculture. Millions of small-scale and marginal farmers are suffering economic distress as the sector is deliberately made financially non-viable for them.

At the same time, the country’s spurt of GDP growth – the holy grail of ‘development’ – has largely been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population has widened enormously to the point where rural India consumes less calories per head of population than it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, unlike farmers, corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans but have failed to spur job creation.

The plan is to displace the existing system of livelihood-sustaining smallholder agriculture with one dominated from seed to plate by transnational agribusiness and retail concerns. To facilitate this, independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land is to be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and remaining farmers will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

US agribusiness corporations are spearheading the process, the very companies that fuel and thrive on a five-year US taxpayer-funded farm bill subsidy of around $500 billion. Their industrial model in the US is based on the overproduction of certain commodities often sold at prices below the cost of production and dumped on the rest of the world, thereby undermining farmers’ livelihoods and agriculture in other countries.

It is a model designed to facilitate the needs and profits of these corporations which belong to the agritech, agrichemicals, commodity trading, food processing and retail sectors. A model that can only survive thanks to taxpayer handouts and by subsidising the farmer who is squeezed at one end by seed and agrochemical manufacturers and at the other, by powerful retail interests. A model that can only function by externalising its massive health, environmental and social costs. And a model that only leads to the destruction of rural communities and jobs, degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water, water shortages and poor health.

If we look at the US model, it serves the needs of agribusiness corporations and large-scale retailers, not farmers, the public nor the environment. So by bowing to their needs via World Bank directives and the US-Indo Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, what is the future to be for India?

A mainly urbanised country reliant on an industrial agriculture and all it entails, including denutrified food, increasingly monolithic diets, the massive use of agrochemicals and food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a range of chemical additives. A country with spiralling rates of ill health, degraded soil, a collapse in the insect population, contaminated and depleted water supplies and a cartel of seed, chemical and food processing companies with ever-greater control over the global food production and supply chain.

But we don’t need a crystal ball to look into the future. Much of the above is already taking place, not least the destruction of rural communities, the impoverishment of the countryside and continuing urbanisation, which is itself causing problems for India’s crowded cities and eating up valuable agricultural land.

So why would India want to let the foxes guard the hen house? Why mimic the model of intensive, chemical-dependent agriculture of the US and be further incorporated into a corrupt US-dominated global food regime that undermines food security and food sovereignty? After all, numerous high-level reports have concluded that policies need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable (smallholder) agroecological methods of farming and develop decentralised, locally-based food economies.

Yet the trend in India continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture and centralised chains for the benefit of Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and other transnational players.

The plan is to shift hundreds of millions from the countryside into the cities to serve as a cheap army of labour for offshored foreign companies, mirroring what China has become: a US colonial outpost for manufacturing that has boosted corporate profits at the expense of US jobs. In India, rural migrants are to become the new ‘serfs’ of the informal services and construction sectors or to be trained for low-level industrial jobs. Even here, however, India might have missed the boat as jobless ‘growth’ seems to have arrived as the effects of automation and artificial intelligence are eradicating the need for human labour across many sectors.

If we look at the various Western powers, to whom many of India’s top politicians look to in order to ‘modernise’ the country’s food and agriculture, their paths to economic prosperity occurred on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Do India’s politicians think this mindset has disappeared?

Fuelled by capitalism’s compulsion to overproduce and then seek out new markets, the same mentality now lurks behind the neoliberal globalisation agenda: terms and policies like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ embody little more than the tenets of neoliberal fundamentalism wrapped in benign-sounding words. It boils down to one thing: Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and other transnational corporations will decide on what is to be eaten and how it is to be produced and processed.

Alternatives to development

Current policies seek to tie agriculture to an environmentally destructive, moribund system of capitalism. Practical solutions to the agrarian crisis must be based on sustainable agriculture which places the small farmer at the centre of policies: far-sighted and sustained policy initiatives centred on self-sufficiency, localisation, food sovereignty, regenerative agriculture and agroecology.

The scaling up of agroecological approaches should be a lynchpin of genuine rural development. Other measures involve implementing land reforms, correcting rigged trade, delinking from capitalist globalisation (capital controls) and managing foreign trade to suit smallholder farmers’ interests not those of foreign agricapital.

More generally, there is the need to recognise that genuine sustainable agriculture can only be achieved by challenging power relations, especially resisting the industrial model of agriculture being rolled out by powerful agribusiness corporations and the neoliberal policies that serve their interests.

What is required is an ‘alternative to development’ as post-development theorist Arturo Escobar explains:

“Because seven decades after World War II, certain fundamentals have not changed. Global inequality remains severe, both between and within nations. Environmental devastation and human dislocation, driven by political as well as ecological factors, continues to worsen. These are symptoms of the failure of “development,” indicators that the intellectual and political post-development project remains an urgent task.”
Looking at the situation in Latin America, Escobar says development strategies have centred on large-scale interventions, such as the expansion of oil palm plantations, mining, and large port development.

And it is similar in India: commodity monocropping; immiseration in the countryside; the appropriation of biodiversity, the means of subsistence for millions of rural dwellers; unnecessary and inappropriate environment-destroying, people-displacing infrastructure projects; and state-backed violence against the poorest and most marginalised sections of society.

These problems, says Escobar, are not the result of a lack of development but of ‘excessive development’. Escobar looks towards the worldviews of indigenous peoples and the inseparability and interdependence of humans and nature for solutions.

He is not alone. Writers Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta argue that adivasi (India’s indigenous peoples) economics may be the only hope for the future because India’s tribal cultures remain the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation. Their age-old knowledge and value systems promote long-term sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature. Their societies also emphasise equality and sharing rather than hierarchy and competition.

These principles must guide our actions regardless of where we live on the planet because what’s the alternative? A system driven by narcissism, domination, ego, anthropocentrism, speciesism and plunder. A system that is using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have poisoned the rivers and oceans, destroyed natural habitats, driven wildlife species to (the edge of) extinction and have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere to the point that runaway climate change seems more and more likely.

And, as we see all around us, the outcome is endless conflicts over fewer and fewer resources, while nuclear missiles hand over humanity’s head like a sword of Damocles.

Colin Todhunter is an independent journalist. Join him on Twitter

Courtesy: Counter Current

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For those who know and watch Gujarat’s politics, the macchwaras have always voted saffron. But today a small yet vociferous number, approximately 250 in all protested his inauguration of the Bhadbhut Wier that they insist will block the flow of the Narmada river, affect the breeding of Hilsa (exclusive special of fish) here and even endanger the Gulf of Cambay itself.
The boats of the protesting Fishermen with black flags were afloat the river Narmada. Local police have detained 250 protesting fisherfolk while the inauguration of the project is on.

According to the protesting fisherfolk, already pollution from Ankleshwar, Jhagadia, Panoli and Dahej plants have seriously curtailed fish breeding. Now, the proposed Bhadbhut Wier project will devastate the breeding ground completely. This barrage is expected to create a fresh water reservoir downstream of the Sardar Sarovar dam. There is no release of fresh water from the dam and the Narmada river flows in a much narrowed width of 20 metres here.

Today, the fishermen angrily waved black flags at the prime minister. They are certain that this project will seriously damage their livelihood by affecting the migration of fish between the river and the sea. The sharp shifting of the salinity equilibrium will disappear causing the death of the Narmada Estar and destroy livelihood to talking Rs 500 Crores.
Kamlesh bhai Madhubala and MSH Shaikh have said that this project will be challenged soon before rhe National Green Tribunal, Pune to protect the livelihood of 25,000 fisherfolk community of Bharuch district, Gujarat.

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Protest in Bhopal

In a unique protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday bash, scheduled for September 17 at the Narmada dam, 30 of the dam’s oustees shaved their heads in order to tell the Madhya Pradesh government that as far as they were concerned, its governance was “dead”. The birthday bash, seen as brazen by protesters,  will see Modi dedicating the “completed” Narmada dam to the nation.

Part of what they called”chunauti dharna” or challenge protest, which lasted for two hours at Neelam Park, Bhopal, speakers on the occasion said, Modi would celebrate his birthday in the presence of the chief ministers of BJP-ruled states of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, at a time when people living in the Narmada Valley — adivasis, farmers, dalits, workers, fisher people, artisans, women, children and others — would be fatally affected.

The people of valley and their supporters would challenge the unjustified submergence being brought to them without proper rehabilitation, they said, adding, the celebration was being organized by Modi for political gains.
 

Protest in Delhi

People had come from all over the valley, and, following the dharna, it was decided to hold mass protest at Barda (near Anjad, District Badwani), where many religious places are in the submergence area, something not acknowledged in government reports.
Led by the anti-dam Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) the Chetavani rally saw an intensive dialogue with a senior Narmada official, Rajneesh Vaish, principal secretary, Narmada Valley Development Authority. Vaish told the protesters that all the oustees’ issues have “already been debated and decided upon by various courts.”

When NBA leader Medha Patkar said that the rehabilitation sites were far from complete, Vaish claimed, water supply had already been provided to all the sites. However, oustees from Nisarpur and Awalda told him true. An oustee, Rameshwar Bhilala, said, the Barwani district collector was not providing true picture of the sites.
 

Protest in Mumbai

Vaish claimed, Madhya Pradesh would receive receive irrigation and drinking water from the Sardar Sarovar reservoir and there was no legal barrier for this, adding, he would ensure that the demand of getting reservoir waters to every resettlement sites were met. He admitted, some of the outstanding works would soon be completed, and tenders were in the process of being issued.

Meanwhile, reports from Nisarpur village said, the Shivling of Shiva Temple at the banks Narmada tributary, Uri-Baghni, was forcibly uprooted amidst opposition of the people. People of the village were being shifted to rehabilitation sites which were not yet equipped with adequate water, proper house plots, roads and basic amenities.

In a parallel development, a group of prominent citizens protested in front of the Ministry of Water Resources and submitted memorandum to the Secretary in New Delhi. Those were in the delegation included Hannan Mollah (former Member of Parliament, CPM); Richa Singh (National Alliance of People’s Movements), Krishna Prasad (All-India Kisan Sabha), Vimal Bhai (Matu Jansangathan), and others.

Madhya Pradesh protesters dialogue in Bhopal

In their representation, they said, the Government of India’s response to the oustees’ problems was “apathetic, shameless and completely undemocratic.” They added, “In Gujarat, canals are incomplete, and the government has reduced the planned irrigation command area from 18 lakh hectares to mere 12 lakh hectares last year.”

“Even then they are only able to irrigate mere 3 lakh hectares”, they said, adding, “Meanwhile, The length of Narmada canal was reduced consistently and silently. From earlier planned 90,389 km, it has been reduced to approximately 71000 km, of which still they need to construct 42,000 km of canal network.”

They wondered, “By closing gates of the Sardar Sarovar dam, and submerging people of the Narmada valley, whom are they providing water without canals? Modi’s Narmada mahotsav has been planned only to highlight the  government’s lies. It is merely a campaign for votebank politics.”

In a simultaneous development, Maharashtra tribals protested in Mumbai, asking chief minister Devendra Fadnavis not to participate in Modi’s birthday bash at the Narmada dam on September 17, submitting a memorandum, which said the state’s oustees’ rehabilitation issues had still not been settled.

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-B R Ambedkar[1]

 

Image: India Today

In the wake of a horrific tragedy in Gorakhpur that devoured 71 children within just five days for the lack of oxygen in the local BRD hospital, highlighting the grave reality of India’s healthcare system, prime minister Modi proudly unfurled the tricolor on the 71^st independence day and delivered his self-congratulatory speech from the ramparts of the red fort.

Notwithstanding his characteristic half truths and pure lies thrown on the face of 125 crores countrymen with an élan becoming of a hero from Bollywood, it was portentous that after 70 years of so called freedom the Indian people have to meekly endure such deception from their prime representative about development, a euphemism for gratification of the rich at the cost of a vast majority of poor.

Development without swaraj, for which people had primarily battled against the British and became martyrs, was meaningless. Swaraj meant freedom, self-rule that subsumed access to education, healthcare, livelihood security, democratic and cultural rights, so that the people could enjoy Swaraj in reality. Seventy years of systematic deprivation of all those covered under the boasts of development has amounted to no less than roguery of the ruling classes.  

The Fragility of Freedom
The ultranationalists at the helm who claim millions of years’ antiquity to their claims of ‘Indian’ (read Hindu) nationhood may not care for the fact that India itself was a gift of the British rule and hence there is no question of any nation in that name existing before. The idea of the nation emerged during the freedom struggle in which none of these worthies or their forefathers took part. This incipient emotion itself was due to political and administrative unification of the Indian subcontinent made possible and sustainable by the modern means of communication and transportation under the British rule. These changes effectively destroyed the static balance of socio-economic life of localised formations called village communities in India, setting into motion a process of nation-making. This process, as our founding fathers warned, was to be carried on by the independent India by pursuing the policies for achieving ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ and not for any jingoist Pakistan bashing or singing of anthems or songs. It is paradoxical that those who make such claims have effectively terminated this process for their political agenda to make this country a hindu rashtra.

As a matter of fact, there is little in Indian history to speak of the capacity of the ruling elites in India. Their conduct was always characterised by extreme self-centeredness and myopic self interests. They often betrayed people for their selfish gains and gave this country a long history of subjugation by the outside invaders. Cheating people has been part and parcel of their class/caste character. It is therefore many people were skeptical about their capacity to manage India after transfer of power. Winston Churchill, that rank colonialist but contrary to his projection not an India hater, had very perceptibly commented about them during the debate on the Indian Independence Bill in British Parliament:

 If Independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air and water would be taxed in India.

There is a controversy over Churchill had ever said these words, but whosoever did it very aptly describes what happened during the last 70 years of Indian independence. 

The second is from our own C Rajagopalachari, who is counted among the founding fathers. He said:
We all ought to know that Swaraj will not at once or, I think, even for a long time to come, be better government or greater happiness for the people. Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of wealth, and inefficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as soon as freedom is given to us. Men will look regretfully back to the old regime of comparative justice, and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest administration…. Hope lies only in universal education by which right conduct, fear of god, and love, will be developed among the citizens from childhood. It is only if we succeed in this that Swaraj will mean happiness. Otherwise it will mean the grinding injustices and tyranny of wealth.

Even Gandhi, the progenitor of the idea, was himself worried that Swaraj had the danger of becoming a mobocracy.

Nothing Has Changed
The independence came ill-omened, bloodied with partition. The Congress Party, despite its transformation into a mass movement by the master strategist Gandhi, had remained the representative of the bourgeoisie at its core. Mouthing pro-people socialist slogans, it systematically structured the state and drove its policy that would further the interests of capital. Even before the formal transfer of power these intrigues began playing out. The constitution of the constituent assembly with the members indirectly elected by the provincial assemblies, elected in the March 1946 elections, which were based on barely 28 per cent franchise was symbolic of the concurrent duplicitous regime that would come into being.

The Constitution which incorporated the Government of India Act, 1935, the last colonial Constitution, ensured that essentially there shall be essential continuity from the previous regime. The same institutional structure of governance, the same laws, the same palaces, the same processes and police with the same draconian laws, only with native elite replacing the white rulers and thereby western liberal ethos with the brahmanic cunning, ensured the sameness of oppressive regime, intensified with their characteristic sly.

Post-1947, the five year plans emulating the soviet system and thereby reinforcing the socialist rhetoric of the new regime was actually stuffed with the content taken from the Bombay Plan which was the vision of the Indian big bourgeoisie. It was publicly rejected but surreptitiously adopted. The Land Reforms were implemented ostensibly to meet the aspirations of millions of landless but calibrated to create a class of rich farmers from among the populous shudra castes as an alley of the Congress in rural India. The Green Revolution, the capitalist strategy for agricultural development, was implemented in the name of quenching mass hunger. Its huge gains fed this class to replace the erstwhile upper caste landlords, spin off as petty businessmen and later as politicians with their regional parties. While this rural rich from among the middle castes thus got hitched to the dwija caste-band through capitalist ties, the dalits were denuded of their traditional jajmani relations and reduced to be the farm labourers in contradiction with the rich farmers. This class contradiction would precipitate through the familiar fault-lines of caste into new genre of atrocities. Kilvenmeni to Khairlanji to Kharda to Una are the direct byproducts of independent India. As political competition as well as crises of living intensified, the state began showing off its draconian fangs to repress people. As though it was not enough it brought social Darwinist ideology of neoliberalism and began pushing people off the margins. The new regime wearing a republican mask did everything with impunity that the colonial regime would not dare to do.

Quality of Survival
Contrary to doomsayers’ prophesies, and Ambedkar’s stern warning delivered on November 26, 1949 that if the political democracy created by the Constitution was not supplemented soonest by social and economic democracy, the victims of this lack would blast off the edifice of political democracy, Indian democracy has neither perished nor flourished but limped along past its 70 years. Should we be elated at this survival? If the import in Ambedkar’s warning is understood, we should not.

Today, the Indian elite and the middle classes that try emulating them are euphoric about the GDP growth and ‘development’ of India not caring to know it comes at the cost of misery of the millions of poor. While the present ruling dispensation as part of its ideological project wants to regain its imagined leadership of the world with missiles and bullet trains, it cuts outlays on basic healthcare and education of people.

India continues to languish at the bottom of the comity of nations on every parameter that constitutes real development of the country. India holds the dubious distinction of land of largest population that defecates in open, largest population that lives in slums, largest malnourished children, largest anemic mothers, largest children out of school, largest illiterates, and the list could go on.
 

In education, India ranks 92 which is way behind the ranks of other developing countries such as Phillipines (76), Malaysia (51), Sri Lanka (59) and many more.[2] Her achievement on a range of health indicators ranks her at 143 in a list of 188 countries, far behind countries like Sri Lanka (79), China (92), even war-torn Syria (117) and Iraq (128).[3] The country that boasts of being sixth largest economy in nominal terms, third largest in PPP terms; possesses fourth largest number of dollar billionaires and is the fastest growing economy, ranks below much poorer nations such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Ghana and even Liberia when it comes to healthcare for its masses. New research by medical journal Lancet, on the basis of data from the Global Burden of Disease report, 2015, ranked India at 154 out of 195 countries in terms of access to healthcare.[4] Modi may day-dream of India being a superpower, but she is nowhere near the top 10 countries when it comes to economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom and social capital. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index 2015, India ranks 99 among 142 countries that have been assessed in these sectors.[5]
 

And we are not speaking of the dalits, adivasis and minorities, who together constitute nearly half of India’s population, but live in unspeakable misery and destitution. Just on the eve of Modi’s address to the nation, Bezwada Wilson, who spearheads Safai Kamgar Andolan for liberating manual scavengers who empty 9.6 million dry latrines in the country as per the Supreme Court, has reported 27 deaths in sewer lines and septic tanks, 9 in Delhi alone, over the previous one month. As Modi spoke of his developmental spoils, somewhere a dalit was being lynched and a couple of dalit women raped!

(A version of this article has also been published in the Economic and Political weekly and is being re published here with the permission of the author) 

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Narmada Nyay Yatra exposes multiple scams and widespread corrupt practices across Madhya Pradesh Narmada Nyay Yatra resurveyed the entire Valley and was shocked to see the false promises made by Shivraj Singh Chauhan during the Narmada Sewa Yatra. Shivraj’s plantation drive was recorded on Guinness Book of World Records for enormous spends and media highlight, but environmentalists found the idea ridiculous as it was carried out without any scientific planning of the types of plants that would preserve biodiversity. The Narmada Nyay Yatra found most saplings in Pichhodi, Avalda and Bhavti settlements weren’t even alive. Similarly the alcohol ban on Narmada banks as announced failed to be implemented on ground. Whereas the alcohol ban of the villages Pichhodi and Bhavti which was achieved by the women’s struggle still remains successful. Similarly Shivraj’s false claim of banning sand mining on Narmada banks proved fake as protestors themselves found an abandoned sand mafia truck during the rally whose driver had run away seeing the people. Shivraj had spent close to Rs. 1600 crores in the name of Narmada Sewa Yatra earlier this year. The Narmada Nyay Yatra covered 60 villages in a span of 3 days and continued on its fourth day. In Manawar, the village Jalkheda is facing serious submergence issues due to the Man Dam Project on a tributary Man of river Narmada. These families are facing the challenge of flooding from both Narmada and Man rivers. But the state-administration has no idea about these. They have not surveyed the villages and do not even know how many people will be affected by submergence. So the question of rehabilitation is far from implementation. It was also revealed by the Yatra that Dharampuri is not the only town to be affected by the closing of the gates of SP, but even the Maheshwar town including its historic Maheshwar Fort will also be submerged. It was also found out in Kothra and Bada Barda villages that Dalits, fisherpeople, Kewat community and labour colonies were either acquired half-heartedly or were removed from the list of submergence areas or were considered ‘islands’. But the submergence of the year 2013 proves that houses which were submerged during time of dam height of 122 meters, they will surely be affected by the 139 mt. high dam. Similar corrupt practices were exposed in the mismatch of oustee lists. Meanwhile, the M.P. Revenue Department is claiming that their survey is different from Narmada Valley Development Authority survey. They have announced that only 8821 families are in the submergence area. Similarly they have rejected 8000 families who are in the submergence area but because their names are not on NVDA list, they will be considered ineligible. Instead of giving such families 60×90 land plots, the government is giving them only 20×90 or 30×60 plots. Many oustees are forced to shift into tin sheds. Poor people are being coerced into signing false affidavits and given only half of 1/3 of what they deserve in a bid to increase the number of people who the state can claim are already ‘rehabilitated’. The movement is against all these unjust and criminal practices of the state and will fight until justice is achieved.

Narmada Struggle Support Group, Madurai demonstrates in solidarity with Medha Patkar and the people of the Narmada Valley.  D. Gabriele, 28 August 2017 At Bypass Raod, opp. Guru Theater in Madurai, hundreds of participants from 18 organisations came together from 9 AM to 1 PM to protest against the ‘emergency situation’ in the Narmada Valley. Women participated in considerable numbers. The MDMK and the Humanist Party extended support, as well as people from peasant struggles and struggles to save democracy (like anti Methane and anti Hydrocarbon struggles). The emphasis was on implementing the Supreme Court orders in Narmada struggle and Right to Life and Livelihood and ‘Land for Land’ and stopping arbitrary violence on people. Three lawyers dressed up as Supreme Court Judges were sitting on a bench on top of a truck, which gave a good appeal to expand the independence of the judiciary.

Solidarity Event in Ambedkar University, New Delhi engages young students with the realities of 21^st century India.

Titled ‘Damming the Narmada: Development or Dispossession?’, a cultural-political event was organized by School of Liberal Studies and School of Development Studies of Ambedkar University, New Delhi on 1 September 2017 from 2 PM to 6 PM. Preeti Sampat introduced the event with clippings from the documentary ‘Narmada Diary’ directed by Anand Patwardhan in 1995. A photo exhibition ‘SOS: From the archives of NBA’ was curated by Ishita Sharma and Shiv Ahuja along with the launch of a zine (publication). Powerful performance by Nikita Maheshwari riveted the crowd as she created a sense of doom around the creation of big dams. Swati and Akshara collaborated with the audience and everyone sang along from the lines of the iconic Bhagwan Manjhi song ‘Gaon Chodab Bahi’. The event was concluded with a vibrant interaction between students of the university and Madhuresh Kumar from NAPM.

Courtesy: www.narmadaandolan.org

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