Image Courtesy: india today

Sheikh Ashiq, President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) confirmed to the Press Trust of India (PTI) that the running business losses for Kashmir have crossed INR 10,000 crore and all sectors have been severely hit. It has been nearly three months now and yet the people are not doing business because of the prevailing situation. There has been some activity in the recent weeks, but the feedback that we are getting is that the business is dull,” MrAshiq said.

The shutdown in Kashmir, following the abrogation of Article 370, entered its 85^th day on Monday, October 28, has not only left business crippled but has also rendered thousands jobless with main markets and factories continuing to remain shut.

Ashiq said that the figure was a preliminary estimate and the KCCI would come out with a white paper revealing the exact losses and the permanent damage to the economy. Explaining how the internet shutdown has permanently harmed the IT sector, he said that IT firms in the valley working with American and European companies have not been able to provide their services due to the internet blockade, which have led these international clients to switch to other areas.

He also said that around 50,000 to 60,000 carpet weavers have been rendered jobless. These weavers would generally receive orders online by July and August which would be completed and ready-to-be delivered by Christmas and New Year. This year they received no orders.

Apart from the tourism industry, the worst hit is the INR 10,000 crore fruit industry where apple growers became reluctant to do business and came under heavy threat from militants.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Mohammad Shafi, vice-president of Jammu and Kashmir’s largest industrial estate, said that he is planning to sell a part of his ancestral orchard to avoid bankruptcy.Shafi who also owns a rice mill and an animal bone mill said that most of the workers in his factory had left and that his interest payments were mounting.

The growers have been able to export only a third of their around 20 lakh tonnes of apples, hamstrung by militant attacks on non-local people —mostly those involved in the apple trade — that resulted in five deaths.The KCCI President also said that development projects worth INR 2,000 crore had come to a halt because of the workforce leaving the state.

Not only this, the KCCI President said that notwithstanding the business loss, they would have to face other problems like GST and online returns. This, not because they missed deadlines, but due to the clampdown in the Valley. Now, they have no system to cut back on their losses and the government has not taken up any responsibility to help.

Three prominent members of trade bodies, Mubeen Shah, former Chairman of the J&K Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Yasin Khan, President of Kashmir Economic Alliance; and ShakeelQalandar, former President of Federation of Chamber of Industries Kashmir, that had been detained under the draconian Public Safety Act, have still not been released.

Even though the shops and markets do open for some hours during the morning and evening, they are shut for most hours of the day in a way of a silent protest against the government’s clampdown.

While the government claims that the abrogation of the special status will usher in a new era for the state, for now it feels like it has ushered in more dystopia than development.

Related:
We Will Not Survive This Disaster: Kashmiri Entrepreneurs As Lockdown
‘No outsiders in Kashmir’: Militants target non-locals, gun down apple traders and migrant labourers
Kashmir: Apples Caught in a Siege, Growers Willing to ‘Sacrifice’ Harvest
Kashmir will ‘Disobey’: Citizens choose silence as their strongest weapon of resilience
 

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Algebra, alchemy, artichoke, alcohol, and apricot all derive from Arabic words which came to the West during the age of Crusades.

Sculpture of ninth-century Persian scholar Al-Khwarizmi in Khiva, Uzbekistan. Latin discovery of Al-Khwarizmi’s work introduced the numerals 0-9, one of many ways in which Islamic cultures have contributed to Western civilisation. LBM1948/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Even more fundamental are the Indo-Arabic numerals (0-9), which replaced Roman numerals during the same period and revolutionised our capacity to engage in science and trade. This came about through Latin discovery of the ninth-century Persian scholar, Al-Khwarizmi (whose name gives us the word algorithm).

This debt to Islamic civilisation contradicts the claim put forward by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations some 25 years ago, that Islam and the West have always been diametrically opposed. In 2004, historian Richard Bulliet proposed an alternative perspective. He argued civilisation is a continuing conversation and exchange, rather than a uniquely Western phenomenon.

Even so, Australia and the West still struggle to acknowledge the contributions of Islamic cultures (whether Arabic speaking, Persian, Ottoman or others) to civilisation.

In an initial curriculum proposed by the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, only one Islamic text was listed, a collection of often-humorous stories about the Crusades from a 12th-century Syrian aristocrat. But Islamic majority cultures have produced many other texts with a greater claim to shaping civilisation.

Philosophical and literary influences

Many of the scientific ideas and luxury goods from this world came into the West following the peaceful capture of the Spanish city of Toledo from its Moorish rulers in 1085.

Over the course of the next century, scholars, often in collaboration with Arabic-speaking Jews, became aware of the intellectual legacy of Islamic culture preserved in the libraries of Toledo.

Their focus was not on Islam, but the philosophy and science in which many great Islamic thinkers had become engaged. One was Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna), a Persian physician and polymath (a very knowledgable generalist) who combined practical medical learning with a philosophical synthesis of key ideas from both Plato and Aristotle.

Portrait of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) on a silver vase from Museum at BuAli Sina (Avicenna) Mausoleum, Hamadan, Western Ira. Adam Jones/Wikmedia, CC BY-SA

Another was Ibn Rushd (or Averroes), an Andalusian physician and polymath, whose criticisms of the way Ibn Sina interpreted Aristotle would have a major impact on Italian theologist and philosopher Thomas Aquinas in shaping both his philosophical and theological ideas in the 13th century. Thomas was also indebted to a compatriot of Ibn Rushd, the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides, whose Guide to the Perplexed was translated from Arabic into Latin in the 1230s.

While there is debate about the extent to which the Italian writer Dante was exposed to Islamic influences, it is very likely he knew The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder (translated into Castilian, French and Latin), which describes the Prophet’s ascent to heaven. The Divine Comedy, with its account of Dante’s imagined journey from Inferno to Paradise, was following in this tradition.

Dante very likely heard lectures from Riccoldo da Monte di Monte Croce, a learned Dominican who spent many years studying Arabic in Baghdad before returning to Florence around 1300 and writing about his travels in the lands of Islam. Dante may have criticised Muslim teaching, but he was aware of its vast influence.

Domenico di Michelino, Dante and the Divine comedy, fresco, 1465. Dante is thought to have been influenced by Islamic cultures. Wikimedia Commons

Islam also gave us the quintessential image of the Enlightenment, the self-taught philosopher. This character had his origins in an Arabic novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, penned by a 12th-century Arab intellectual, Ibn Tufayl. It tells the story of how a feral child abandoned on a desert island comes through reason alone to a vision of reality.

Hayy ibn Yaqzan was published in Oxford, with an Arabic-Latin edition in 1671, and became a catalyst for the contributions of seminal European philosophers including John Locke and Robert Boyle. Translated into English in 1708 as The Improvement of Human Reason, it also influenced novelists, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719. The sources of the Enlightenment are not simply in Greece and Rome.

Civilisation is always being reinvented. The civilisation some call “Western” has been, and still is, continually shaped by a wide range of political, literary and intellectual influences, all worthy of our attention.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Kulda opencast mine operated by Mahanadi Coalfields in Sundargarh district of Odisha

Projects are expected to comply with these safeguards during construction and through the period of operations. In case of mining projects, backfilling and ecological restoration of the land also form part of the safeguards. In effect, the purpose of conditional project approvals is to minimize and mitigate environmental and social harms caused by large projects.

During the first four decades of implementation of India’s post-independence environmental laws, there was little or no emphasis on the status of compliance with conditions by projects. The focus was on the needs of the economy and national development on the one hand, and on the other hand, the social conflicts caused by land displacement. Even though legal clauses related to environmental compliance existed in these laws, projects operated with impunity, causing widespread degradation of the environment.

It is only in the last decade that environmental non-compliance by projects and the inability of existing institutions to enforce laws have come under the scanner. Since 2010, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has produced environmental audit reports and reported on non-compliance. The courts have observed large-scale legal violations in specific sectors such as mining. Non-governmental studies have also recorded high rates of non-compliance.

Unable to brush the problem under the proverbial carpet, the government engaged in a series of hurriedly thought out mechanisms to deal with it. These include:
 

• Self-regulation through the use of pollution monitors or devices to capture and relay information on pollution and other performance indicators directly to pollution control board authorities
• Provisions for penalties, fines, bank guarantees and other financial disincentives based on the ‘polluter pays’ principle
• One-time amnesty schemes to violating projects and grant of short-term or temporary approvals to violators in an effort to bring them into compliance

But these measures have neither improved environmental performance of projects nor stemmed the flow of complaints and legal cases by affected people against polluting projects.

Why should compliance be addressed urgently?

Robust and well-thought-out environmental compliance mechanisms are hardly seen as a necessity for India’s development. In fact, governments have approached the idea of regulating projects as a liability and a drag on economic growth. They have been slow to implement existing regulations and selective enforcement has earned them the reputation of creating a ‘license raj’. This can be seen in the Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to enforce the mandatory emission standards on coal power plants. Even though the standards have existed for several years as part of the consent permits issued under Air and Water Acts, the central government systematically dragged its feet on getting projects to comply with the norms.

Today, the impacts of unregulated projects have made it politically unfeasible for governments to ignore their effects on the economy and on people. The recent conflict due to the operations and proposed expansion of the Sterlite Copper Smelter in Tamil Nadu is a case in point. The project was India’s largest copper production plant but also causing toxic emissions, soil and water pollution.

Despite numerous complaints and legal cases against the project’s pollution, the company was allowed to continue its operations for 20 years. Last year, when the company sought permissions to expand its operations, there were massive local protests for over 100 days; they finally turned violent when the local police shot down 13 protestors. Sterlite also became a political flashpoint with the opposition party making it an important issue in their 2019 election campaign in the state.

There are numerous cases that are being litigated in court for non-compliance with environmental safeguards. These have resulted in huge financial implications for projects and for related economic sectors as a whole. The Goa mining case led to the total state-wide ban on mining since 2012. The National Green Tribunal imposed penalties of over INR 873 crores as fines for environmental violations in the first quarter of 2019 – an amount that is close to the total fines imposed last year.

Poor compliance causes critical environmental blowbacks in the form of severe water shortages, productivity losses and toxic air. While these conditions have been building up in most parts of the country, climate change dynamics add to these local conditions, making their impacts far more acute and complex. For example, areas already affected by large-scale water extraction for industrial purposes, coal washeries and thermal power plants could also face frequent and more lasting droughts.

The visible effects of environmental impacts in eroding the positive gains of development have already caused a shift in mainstream economic thinking that traditionally ignored the economic cost of degraded and damaged habitats. It is accepted that crisis management is hardly possible any more, and that there is a need to plan reforms and strategies for economic and environmental transformation. Environmental compliance systems will form a key part of these reforms.

The case for compliance as a bulwark of environmental regulation has never been more compelling than in the time of climate change. So far, the success or failure of compliance has revolved around the compulsions of domestic politics, but it is now tied to the geopolitics of climate change. After years of wrangling over who should do what to check global warming, nations finally thrashed out the Paris Agreement, which obliges every signatory to put in place, by 2020, a set of measures to meet their respective carbon mitigation targets.

However, without a systemic and robust protocol to ensure compliance, India runs the risk of falling short of its targets. Therefore, it is imperative, not to mention politically expedient, for the political party coming to power after the 2019 general elections to set up, in the first place, a credible and effective mechanism of compliance with domestic regulations before it goes about honouring its Paris commitments.

Who should regulate projects and how

Successive governments have emphasized the quantitative aspects of economic growth. They have focused on increasing the number of projects approved during their tenure and reducing the time needed for impact assessment and granting approvals. These projects have been accompanied by severe impacts as pollution and environmental degradation are viewed as the trade-off for growth. However, with over 16,000 centrally approved large projects operational and several others promised or in the pipeline, the scale of the problem has today expanded exponentially in both industrial and ‘greenfield’ or less industralized areas.

The government can neither ignore nor delay tackling this problem. Compliance with environmental and social safeguards is a necessary if not sufficient condition to improve the quality of our economy’s growth. The question, therefore, before the new government, will no longer be ‘if’ projects need to be regulated but of how to regulate and who will regulate. Given below are three sets of policy reforms with the potential to shift the government’s approach to the problem of environmental compliance of projects and achieve better results.

Compliance-based approvals

Agencies implementing environmental laws view the procedures for grant of approvals as linear systems rather than cyclical ones. This problem is best illustrated by the number of flowcharts put out by them explaining these procedures. Compliance comes downstream in these processes and there is little room for feedback. Project performances on compliance almost never influence government decisions on project expansions, extensions or applications for permission by violating companies to set up projects in new areas.

For example, the Kulda opencast mine operated by Mahanadi Coalfields in Sundargarh district of Odisha has violated several conditions of its approvals. Yet, it received approval for expansion and capacity addition twice in two years, for a period of one year each. The validity of environment clearances for mining projects is otherwise 30 years. This decision of the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) set up under the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, 2006, to review such projects was ad hoc, with no precedence and legal basis.

The lack of systemic mechanisms to address non-compliance in recent years has also created huge pressure on the bureaucracy to show legal compliance without affecting the financial status of ongoing operations. For this they have offered one-time amnesty to violating projects under the EIA, Coastal Regulation Zone and biodiversity laws. But these measures only improve the record of compliance on paper and not in reality.  Now with so many projects already operational, it is crucial to place a very high bar on projects being granted approvals.

The basis of regulatory procedures should shift from approvals to compliance. Only those projects that have an established record of high compliance or which can surpass the compliance performance of others in the field, and certainly meet the legal standards, should be granted permits and approvals. The permissible standards for pollution are already pending major reforms. But these changes will prove futile if projects are not held to the highest compliance standards.

Third-party monitoring

The present practice of monitoring a project’s compliance in effect involves two parties: the project proponent and the regulatory authority. This system has so far not been able to address the problem of non-compliance and has instead led to concerns of collusion and corruption. A review of this practice has resulted in recommendations that monitoring should be done by an independent third party. The environment ministry proposed an amendment to the EIA notification in September 2018 to include this recommendation. This is yet to be finalized. The ‘third party’ proposed in this amendment is expert government institutions.

In reality, the genuine ‘third party’ in this context is the communities who experience effects of non-compliance such as loss of livelihoods, poor living conditions and displacement. Although they have the greatest stake in remedying the damages caused by non-compliance, they are nowhere in the picture when project monitoring is done. This is contradictory to the participatory turn in environmental governance in several countries since the 1970s and the constitutional mandate for it in India. Data from our research on cases of environmental non-compliance in four states shows that when communities have been involved in collection of evidence, reporting of violations and official monitoring by regulators, environmental compliance can improve significantly. Their participation also helps regulators understand community priorities for remedial actions. Regulatory bodies in these states are beginning to recognize the benefits of community participation and are more open to including communities in procedures such as site visits conducted by them for monitoring. But practices that foster community participation ­– such as social audits of projects (which provide access to monitoring data and formal spaces for interaction with affected people) – are yet to be systematized in environment regulation.

Integrated regional networks for compliance

India’s environment regulations have largely been implemented with a project-centric approach. Approvals are granted to projects after their impact studies, cost-benefit analysis and environment management plans are assessed by regulatory bodies. These assessments routinely understate the potential impacts of projects, making them seem benign or operations whose impacts can be easily mitigated. Such assessments also generate quicker approvals from regulatory bodies, thus helping to meet the government’s economic growth targets.

For long, activists and experts have demanded cumulative impact studies so that the full range of project impacts can be ascertained prior to the grant of approvals. But such comprehensive studies have been done only in a few cases. Cumulative studies are needed not just at project levels but also for regions that are affected by environmental degradation.

Similarly, a project-based monitoring system is resource intensive and not very effective in terms of the overall outcomes. But if regulators could be reorganized as integrated regional networks, they could use the resources available to them more efficiently to improve environmental standards regionally. Multiple regulatory agencies within the concerned region could pool their expertise and human resources towards coordinated responses. Such a mechanism can bring an inter-displinary approach to compliance monitoring.

The regions identified for such integration could cut across administrative boundaries such as districts or states. It could be at the level of large industrial sites like Special Economic Zones (SEZs) with multiple projects operating within them, metropolitan regions, entire districts or geographical regions already identified as critically polluted, or entire airsheds or river basins.

Although envisaged by law, such a regional approach to environmental governance has only been used in a few cases. It has been used in emergency responses to environmental pollution, such as the moratorium on industrial activity in Vapi, Gujarat, or the ban on mining in Goa. But a regional approach to systematically  improve post-approval compliance of projects has not been envisaged.

This is mainly because compliance with safeguards has rarely been the focus of regulation and institutional reforms to improve environmental compliance have never been on the government agenda. The ministry could develop pilots to understand the optimum scale at which such integrated compliance networks could deliver the most effective results. Given that the scale of the effects of non-compliance is such that they are no longer restricted to project areas, a regional approach is needed to improve the outcomes of regulation.

Conclusion

Environmental compliance is a critical part of environment regulation. While regulatory actions have prioritized economic growth for several decades, the costs of environmental degradation due to industrial and developmental projects are no longer possible to ignore. These issues have become politically and economically salient in recent years. This paper makes three sets of recommendations for how environment regulation can approach the issue of persistent and pervasive non- compliance by projects. These reforms are critical to avoid the costly and harmful disruptions of development.

Courtesy: Counter View

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After withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran last year and resuming sanctions last November, the White House in April announced that its goal was to “drive Iranian exports to zero.” To make this drive happen, the White House stopped allowing (my emphasis) countries like India, China, Japan, Turkey, and South Korea to import Iranian oil: dictating to sovereign countries whom they can trade with.

The dictating doesn’t stop there. Last December the United States had Canadian authorities detain and imprison a Chinese executive, the chief financial officer of telecom company Huawei. Meng Wanzhou is currently on trial in Canada, on the allegation that her company violated U.S. sanctions against Iran. Not content with having told China that it cannot trade with Iran, the United States has gotten a third country, Canada, to take a Chinese corporate executive captive in what Trump suggested was leverage for a trade deal: “If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made, which is a very important thing—what’s good for national security—I would certainly intervene, if I thought it was necessary,” he told Reuters in December.

The trade deal with China didn’t come through, and a “trade war” has begun. Meng Wanzhou is still stuck in Canada. And the blockade against Iran is still tightening. Economist Mark Weisbrot assessed some of the damage to the Iranian economy in a recent segment on the Real News Network, noting that when sanctions were imposed in 2012, oil production dropped by 832,000 barrels per day and GDP by 7.7 percent; when they were lifted in 2016 in the nuclear deal, production increased by 972,000 barrels per day and GDP increased by 12 percent that year. In 2018 when sanctions were imposed, oil production fell dramatically again and inflation rose by 51 percent; shortages of dozens of essential medicines, according to a study at the University of California, have followed.

Some basic economics are in order here. A country that does not need to import or export is called an autarky, and in today’s global economy there are no autarkies. All national economies depend on trade: they export, earn foreign currency, and use that to import what they cannot produce. Driving a country’s exports to zero means destroying the country’s economy, and depriving the country’s people of necessities.

Sometimes billed as an alternative to war, sanctions are in fact a weapon of war. Far from precision-guided munitions, sanctions are weapons of starvation, which target the most vulnerable civilians for slow and painful death by deprivation of food and medicine. They are an alternative to war in the sense that unlike the invasion of ground troops or even the dropping of bombs, they pose little risk to the aggressor. This is their appeal to someone like Trump, who revealed the genocidal intent behind the Iran sanctions when he threatened (on Twitter) “the official end of Iran.”

In the 1990s, one focus of the antiwar movement was the impact of the genocidal sanctions against Iraq, which killed 500,000 children (a “price” that Madeleine Albright famously said was “worth it”). Antiwar activists feared that the sanctions were part of a military strategy that would end in even more devastating shooting war. Those fears proved true. Today’s sanctions seem to draw from the same playbook.

International law recognizes that sanctions are a form of warfare, and places the use of the sanctions weapon in the hands of the United Nations Security Council. And so it happened that between the 1990 and 2003 U.S. wars on Iraq, the UN played the shameful role of administering the Iraq sanctions. But today’s unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. circumvent any UN legalities. In the same Real News segment, UN Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures Idriss Jazairy noted that about one-quarter of the world’s population is under some form of unilateral sanctions. Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and others are under various U.S. sanctions regimes. Yemen is fully blockaded by the U.S., UK, and Saudi Arabia; Gaza and the West Bank are completely sealed in by Israel; Qatar is blockaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the list goes on.

U.S. sanctions against Venezuela have already killed 40,000 people between 2017 and 2018, according to a report by Mark Weisbrot and Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. The more intense sanctions imposed in 2019 will kill still more. Venezuela’s electrical grid is damaged, most likely because of sabotage. Maintenance of potable water pumps has become impossible without imported spare parts, leaving millions without water. A Venezuelan professor of economics, Pasqualina Curcio, told a delegation of the End Venezuela Sanctions coalition that sanctions have cost the country $114 billion, “which is nearly equal to one year’s worth of Venezuelan GDP at a typical oil price, or 26 years’ worth of medical imports.”

One of the tactical arguments anti-sanctions campaigners sometimes make is that sanctions “don’t work.” And for their declared purpose of “regime change,” indeed they do not. But when a policy is so widespread, such a first resort, perhaps the declared purpose is not the real purpose. If the purpose is to destroy economies, isolate countries, coerce allies, keep tensions near boiling and maintain a constant threat of war, sanctions are successful. It has been shown time and again that torture “doesn’t work” for obtaining information. But torture is not a technique for obtaining information. It is a technique for breaking a person and, when practiced on a mass scale by an apartheid state or dictatorship, for breaking a society. Sanctions are similar: the point is to break the society, not “regime change.”

Sanctions are Trump’s favorite weapon, but good Democrats are no different. Obama oversaw the destruction of Syria, Clinton laughed about the murder of Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya, and Albright said that 500,000 Iraqi children’s deaths were “worth it.” For the empire, genocide, like aggression, is a normal part of politics. Nuclear planners plan how to commit it. Sanctions officials administer it. And for the most part, human rights organizations take no position on it.

It is possible that at some point sanctions could become self-limiting. If enough countries are sanctioned, they might of course decide to trade with one another. In attempting to isolate so many big countries, the United States could isolate itself, creating a kind of “coalition of the sanctioned.” But from the U.S. perspective, with Brazil, India, and Egypt (the biggest countries in Latin America, South Asia, and the Arab world) all utterly subservient, perhaps this looks like a good moment to try to pressure China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. Trump’s planners can rest assured that it is not them, but millions of innocents in those countries who will pay for their power plays.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Courtesy: Counter Current

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Babita (second from right) has been looking for a job as a tailor for eight months now since the last unit she was employed at shut down post-demonetisation. Every morning, thousands of migrant workers land up at the Noida Hosiery Complex in search of casual jobs.
 
“Look, my chappals have worn thin,” said Singh, 30, pointing to her feet. Giving up is not an option. There is nothing left for her or her family of four in Bulandshahr, their hometown in western UP that they left seven years ago in search of a better life.
 
In March this year, the small garment unit where Singh worked for six years shut down in the wake of demonetisation, the scrapping of 86% of India’s currency, by value, on November 8, 2016. There were thousands like her, pleading for jobs at the gates of around 300 factories in the complex or sitting around in groups, hoping for a job tip from passers-by.
 

The ‘Wanted’ boards outside factories listing vacancies have been increasingly sparse since demonetisation
 
Aimed at making the economy less cash-reliant, demonetisation came as a body blow to the readymade garments sector, 80% of which made up of informal units that operated with cash and casual labour, as IndiaSpend reported in December 2016.
 
About 1.5 million jobs were lost during January-April 2017 in the immediate aftermath of demonetisation, according to this analysis by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a business information company. There have been 35% to 55% job losses in manufacturing and trade since November 2016, according to data collected by the All India Manufacturers’ Organisation (AIMO) as the Indian Express reported on November 8, 2017.
 
There are no clear figures on how many workers have lost their jobs due to the crisis in the unorganised apparel sector. But informal jobs, with little or no social security or benefits, constitute around 92% of all employment in India, as per government data. And the textile industry is the second largest non-farm employer in India.
 
Singh–and thousands of other semi-literate, mostly unskilled workers employed as tailors, packers, helpers and cutters–have been hit hardest by demonetisation. They usually earn around Rs 350 for a day’s work.
 
“I was offered a job with an eight-hour schedule this morning for Rs 6,000 a month,” said Yadesh Kumar, a migrant worker from Etawah in western UP. “I have a family of five, how will I cope?”
 

Many workers, like Yadesh Kumar (in yellow), had opened bank accounts to facilitate cheque payments but now find that there are no jobs to give these accounts any meaning.
 
Many workers opened bank accounts after demonetisation to allow employers to make cashless payments. But with no jobs for the few thousand workers–100,000, the local reckoned–wandering the hosiery complex, there is no money to put in these accounts.
 
Just when it seemed that cashless systems were falling into place by the middle of 2017, the complex Goods and Services Tax (GST) arrived as a second big blow. The tax system demands that companies in a supply chain are linked to one another, but it is too complex for this largely unorganised sector.
 
“Dhandha uth hi nahin paya (the business couldn’t get back on its feet),” said a manager at a export house in Noida. The distress visible on the streets of the factory complex was evident in the wake of demonetisation, when 40% of workers reportedly lost their jobs, but now hopes of recovery are receding.
 
“Business is down by 40% in the Noida-Greater Noida region. My calculation is that about 50-70 units have shut down here in recent months,” said Lalit Thukral, executive member of the Apparel Export Promotion Council and head of the Noida Apparel Export Cluster. “Around 8,000 small garment businesses of the total of 10,000 in the country are gasping for breath now.”
 
This is happening not just in Noida. In Tirupur, the hosiery hub in western Tamil Nadu, too businesses are down by over 40%, the Business Standard reported on November 3, 2017. Surat, the textile centre in Gujarat, is in turmoil. And in Gurugram, at the eastern end of the National Capital Region from Noida, former garment units on prime real estate are being let out.
 
Triple whammy: Competition from Asian rivals, demonetisation and GST
 
Last year when demonetisation hit the apparel sector, it was already stressed by competition from other Asian nations, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The contribution of apparels to exports of especially Bangladesh and Vietnam rose 6.1% and 9.6% respectively in 2015, the Economist Intelligence Unit, a think tank, reported on February 3, 2016. Bangladesh, now only second to China among apparel exporters, is giving Indian businesses a particularly rough time.
 

Nearly 80% of businesses in the apparel sector consist of small scale units that employ casual labour.
 
“We are simply not productive or organised enough to deal with this competition. And then we bring in something like demonetisation and Canadian model of GST into the industry,” said a mid-scale vendor for top western brands. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he shut down one of his two factories with 100 machines and 150 workers last year and is now downsizing further.
 
In the long term, he pointed out, cashless payments and GST could bring good things to the industry–formalisation of a largely unorganised sector, more transparency, less inspector raj and the corruption that goes with it. “But in the immediate future it is going to wipe out an entire generation of businesses,” he said.
 
‘No jobs for men or women, illiterate or educated’
 
The apparel sector, as we said, provides work for men and women with low of no skills from primarily rural areas in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where their last occupation was either agricultural labour and small-scale farming.
 
Some said they had not held down jobs for a year now.
 

Workers like Enashi Devi are being turned away at gates by factory managers who cite GST as the reason for the downturn.
 
“Woh bole rahein hain DST (sic) hai, naukri nahin milegi (they say there are no jobs because of DST–meaning GST). Look at the mobs of people searching for jobs, it makes me dizzy. Whether you are a man or a woman, educated or illiterate like me, there is no hope for any of us. Bura haal hai (things are bad),” said Enashi Devi, who had been doing the rounds of Noida the first day of every week in the hope of landing a job as a helper.
 
Feeder businesses struggle to cope
 
Equally impacted are the jobbers who run the micro businesses feeding the industry. These are complex chains of small but critical enterprises such as dyeing, embroidery, printing and zip-making, all finding it hard to comply with the GST. With earnings between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 a month, they are struggling to make sense of it all.
 
Nayagaon, a shanty that is part village and part city, off the Hosiery Complex, houses Durga Dyers. This two-man operation runs out of a room next to a buffalo stable. Its owner, Anil Bansal, is a “local” dyer–someone who can dye small bits of fabric or yarn, the kind of assignment no big business in dyeing will take on.
 

Small feeder businesses like this dyeing unit running out a one room tenement in Nayagaon, off Noida Hosiery Complex, are finding it hard to deal with the complexities of GST.
 
He earns around Rs 50,000 in the peak season and has just acquired a GST account. But he cannot handle its complexities since he is not computer literate, so he now hires the services of an accountant. “It is tough but we are managing somehow,” he said.
 
Not many can afford an accountant’s fees–anywhere between Rs 5,000-Rs 10,000 on average–on such profit margins as small as Rs 15,000-20,000. They opt instead for cash payments to work around GST. “Capital is getting blocked like this because it is hard to claim returns when the entire supply chain is not GST compliant,” said Thukral.
 
To add to the crisis, the sector is furious with the government decision to slash the duty drawback on exportable garments from 7.5% to 2% from October 1, 2017. This drawback is a relief given to businesses by way of refund of custom and excise duties on inputs used in manufacture of exported goods and it allowed the garment industry to stay competitive.
 
Thukral predicted the closure of another 20% units in Noida if the industry does not rally around to take orders for the next season.
 
“Iske baad toh bas ek hi kaam rah gaya hai–haath mein katori leke bheek mangna (there is only one alternative left after this, to beg),” said Singh, the job seeker we met at the start of this story, as she gave up her search for the day.
 
(Nair is a consulting editor with IndiaSpend.)
 

The post Demonetisation, A Year On: In Delhi Textile Hub, Businesses Unravel, Jobs Scarce appeared first on SabrangIndia.

वाराणसी में 8 से 15 नवंबर के बीच लाखों-करोड़ों रुपये के रेशम के धागे खरीदे गए। इससे रेशम की कीमत प्रति किलो कई हजार रुपये तक बढ़ गई। नोटबंदी शुरू होते ही रेशम उत्पादकों और कारोबारियों ने कारोबार के लिहाज से व्यावहारिक कदम उठाया। अपने पास मौजूद नोटों को उन्होंने रेशम खरीदने में इस्तेमाल किया।

वाराणसी की गलियों में घूमते हुए आपका सामना वहां पसरे सन्नाटे से होगा। नोटबंदी के बाद यहां के बुनकरों का यह सीजन ठहर सा गया है और बाजार एक अजीब तरह की जकड़बंदी से घिर चुका है।
वाराणसी हिंदुओं और बौद्धों का आध्यात्मिक और धार्मिक केंद्र है। साथ ही यह एक विशाल और पेचीदा कारोबारी और उत्पादन केंद्र है, जिसमें तमाम छोटे-बड़े बाजार और अपने दम पर खड़ा मशहूर रेशम बुनाई उद्योग समाया है। वाराणसी की यह दोनों पहचान अहम है।

बनारस का कारोबार का अहम हिस्सा यानी – कारोबारी और उत्पादन, दोनों पक्ष, भारी नकदी प्रवाह पर टिका है। दोनों जगह उधारी लेने-देने के लिए सालों से चली आ रही एक जटिल व्यवस्था चली आ रही है। इसके तहत कर्ज के लेन-देन के लिए कागज पर लिखे नोट्स का आदान-प्रदान होता है। यह सिस्टम यहां दशकों से चल आ रहा है। लेकिन बगैर सोचे-समझे नोटबंदी का फैसला लागू होने के बाद अब वहां कारोबार पूरी तरह ठप पड़ा है।

31 दिसंबर या फिर कैश-क्रेडिट के नए सिस्टम के आने तक इंतजार करने से पहले वाराणसी में छोटे-बड़े कारोबारी से लेकर 10-15 लाख बुनकरों और उद्योगपतियों के बीच 8 और 15 नवंबर के बीच जबरदस्त हलचल दिखी।

वाराणसी में 8 से 15 नवंबर के बीच पूरे देश में जिस तरह बढ़ी हुई कीमतों पर सोने की बिक्री हुई उस तरह वाराणसी में काफी महंगे दामों में रेशम बिका। रेशम की कीमत प्रति किलो चार रुपये से लेकर 5000 रुपये तक बढ़ गई। एक बड़े रेशम उत्पादक ने नाम न छापने की शर्त पर इस लेखिका से कहा – पैसों का रेशम बन गया।

एक दूसरे मध्य वर्गीय उस्ताद बुनकर ने अपने 40 लाख रुपये के पुराने नोटों से शुद्ध वाराणसी धागे की खरीदारी कर ली (गौरतलब है कि पीएम मोदी की ओर से 8 नवंबर को 500 और 1000 के पुराने नोटों को बंद करने का ऐलान कर दिया गया था)। ऐसा इस विश्वास से किया गया कि रेशम कहीं जाने वाला नहीं है और बाद में इसका इस्तेमाल साड़ी बुनाई कारोबार में हो जाएगा। कई कारोबारियों ने इस लेखिका को बताया कि रेशम खरीदने के लिए गुजरात के सूरत से भी पैसों का लेन-देन हुआ है।

रेशम की साड़ियों का पर्याय वाराणसी लाखों उस्ताद बुनकरों का घर है। हालांकि पावरलूम की बुनाई हथकरघों से बुनाई की शुद्धता पर हावी हो गई है लेकिन हो बनारसी साड़ियों की अहमियत कम नहीं हुई है। अब भी वहां साड़ियों की कीमत 1,00,000 रुपये तक जा सकती है। प्योर सिल्क से बुनाई , इसकी बारीकियों और इसके आनंद को कोई पारखी ही समझ सकता है।

वाराणसी में साड़ी निर्माण उद्योग से 10 -15 लाख लोग गहरे जुड़े हैं। इनमें से सिर्फ आधे ही मुसलमान हैं। हालांकि बुनकर कहने से मन में किसी उस्ताद मुस्लिम कारीगर की छवि उभरती है। लेकिन साड़ी निर्माण और कारोबार का कम से कम आधा लाभ गैर मुस्लिमों को हिस्से जाता है। रेशम के धागे की खरीद से लेकर बुनाई और बुनी हुई साड़ियो का पूरा कारोबार कैश पर नहीं बल्कि उधारी पर पैसों के लेन-देन (क्रेडिट फ्लो) पर टिका है। बल्कि यूं कहिये  क्रेडिट फ्लो पर यह कुछ ज्यादा ही टिका है।

कारोबारी केंद्र
बनारस बढ़ते कारोबार और बाजार का केंद्र है। यह शहर पूर्वी उत्तर प्रदेश यानी पूर्वांचल, पश्चिम और मध्य बिहार और उत्तरी मध्य प्रदेश का कारोबारी केंद्र है। इन राज्यों के लगभग 48 जिलों में यहां से माल जाता है। यहां की थोक मंडियों से इन जिलों के बाजारों में सामान की निरंतर सप्लाई होती है। हर जरूरी चीज- यानी घी से लेकर तेल और सूजी से लेकर मैदा (मिठाइयों के लिए इस्तेमाल होता है) तक की सप्लाई यहां से होती है। यहां की कई मंडियां शादी का सामान बेचती हैं। खुदरा विक्रेता ये सारा सामान यहां की थोक मंडियों से खरीदते हैं।

लेकिन 8 नवंबर के बाद यहां के थोक और खुदरा बाजार में कारोबारी गतिविधियां लगभग ठप है। दुकानों के शटर गिरे हुए हैं। पैसों का लेनदेन रुक गया है। बचत खाते से सप्ताह में 24000 और थोक बाजार से 50000 रुपये साप्ताहिक निकासी की हदबंदी की वजह से कारोबारी न तो सामान बेच पा रहे हैं और न ही खरीद पा रहे हैं। इस लेखिका को नाम न छापने की शर्त पर एक व्यापारी ने कहा कि इतनी बुरी स्थिति है कि बड़े-बड़े कारोबार करने वाले रिक्शा चला रहे हैं।

अध्येता और राजनीतिक कार्यकर्ता अखिलेंद्र प्रताप सिंह ने सबरंगइंडिया से कहा ‘’चाहे वह हथकरघा से बुनाई का कारोबार हो या पावरलूम से। पूरा का पूरा कारोबार कैश पर टिका है। नोटबंदी की वजह से स्थानीय अर्थव्यवस्था बिल्कुल रुक गई है। न सिर्फ यह ठहर गई है बल्कि बर्बाद हो गई है। नोटबंदी का कोई फायदा नहीं हुआ है। वाराणसी में अर्थव्यवस्था नकदी पर चलती है। यहां कागज के एक टुकड़े जिसे हुंडी कहते हैं, पर पूरा कारोबार चलता है। हुंडी एक तरह की गारंटी होती है कि आपको जितने पैसे (उधारी या नकदी के तौर पर) देने का वादा किया गया है उसे पूरा किया जाएगा। यह बरसों पुरानी  कारोबारी परंपरा है और अब इसने एक मजबूत व्यवस्था का रुप ले लिया है। वाराणसी के सिल्क उद्योग की यह उत्पादन व्यवस्था नोटबंदी के एक क्रूर ठोकर में ही ध्वस्त हो गई है।‘’

अखिलेंद्र कहते हैं- सोचिए अगर किसी राज्य या देश में उत्पादन की पूरी व्यवस्था और कारोबार ही ध्वस्त हो जाए तो अर्थव्यवस्था का क्या हाल होगा। बगैर सोचे-समझे नोटबंदी के फैसले ने इस उत्पादन और कारोबारी व्यवस्था पर निर्भर लाखों लोगों को बुरी तरह प्रभावित किया है। बनारस में सिल्क के कारोबार और उत्पादन से जुड़े बुनकर, छोटे उत्पादक और कारोबारी नोटबंदी के इस फैसले से पूरी तरह बर्बाद हो गए हैं। मेरी रिपोर्ट कहती हैं कि 70 फीसदी स्थानीय अर्थव्यवस्था पूरी तरह ध्वस्त हो गई है। बुनाई और कालीन उद्योग के एक बड़े केंद्र भदोही में 60 फीसदी काम बंद हो गया है। परेशान होकर लोग अपने गांवों की ओर लौट रहे हैं। नकदी नहीं तो काम नहीं।

बनारस के साड़ी उत्पादक केंद्र की अर्थव्यवस्था
बनारस के साड़ी उद्योग में नकदी और उधारी के प्रवाह का मॉडल अनोखा है। यह अपने आप में अनोखा बिजनेस मॉडल है। यह मॉडल नकदी प्रवाह के चारो ओर घूमता है और इसके केंद्र में है बुनकर।
वाराणसी साड़ी के एक छोटे उत्पादक और लेखक अतीक अहमद सबरंगइंडिया के साथ घंटे भर के इंटरव्यू में इस पूरी व्यवस्था को समझाते हैं। वह कहते हैं- बड़े शहरों के थोक विक्रेता बुनकरों, छोटे निर्माताओं और उस्ताद बुनकरों की ओर से तैयार साड़ियां खरीदते हैं। यह पूरा कारोबार सौ फीसदी उधार पर चलता है।

कैसे काम करती ही यह व्यवस्था
कम से कम 10 से 15 लाख लोग बनारसी साड़ियों के कारोबार से जुड़े हैं। इनमें से आधे मुस्लिम और आधे गैर मुस्लिम हैं। बुनकरों या छोटे साड़ी उत्पादकों, निर्माताओं को हमेशा पोस्ट डेटेड बियरर चेक से पेमेंट किया जाता है।

अतीक बताते हैं- पोस्ट डेटेड बियरर चेक एक क्रेडिट या प्रॉमिसरी नोट की तरह तीन तरह से इस्तेमाल किए जाते हैं। यह बुनकर या उत्पादक की माली हालत की मजबूती पर निर्भर होता है।
अतीक समझाते हैं-  इन तीनों में से किसी भी एक परिस्थिति में एक बियरर चेक कम से कम तीन-चार हाथों से होकर गुजरता है। बैंक में भुनाए जाने से पहले कई बार यह छह हाथों से होकर गुजरता है। बियरर चेक प्रॉमिसरी नोट और क्रेडिट नोट दोनों तरह से इस्तेमाल होता है। 

बनारस का बट्टावाला
बट्टा का शाब्दिक अर्थ है छूट।  अतीक कहते हैं, जिन तीन परिस्थितियों की हमने बात की है। उनमें सबसे आखिरी है बट्टा वाला। जब भी कोई चेक बट्टावाला के पास जाता है तो इसे उसके पास ले जाने वाले बुनकर को एक छोटा हिस्सा (फीसदी में) में काट कर कैश दे दिया जाता है। यह कटौती (फीसदी में) चेक में दस्तख्त करने वाले शख्स या पक्ष की वित्तीय स्थिति पर निर्भर करती है । अगर उसकी उधारी चुकाने की क्षमता अच्छी होती है तो दो फीसदी बट्टा लेकर कैश दे दिया जाता है। जिसकी साख नहीं है उसका चेक ले जाने वालों को चार फीसदी बट्टे पर कैश मिलता है। इसलिए छोटे बुनकरों को कई बार चार-पांच फीसदी बट्टा देना पड़ता है।
 
कौन हैं ये बट्टे वाले
बनारस में चौक पर हर दिन दोपहर तीन बजे से सात बजे तक तमाम बट्टे वाले मौजूद रहते हैं। वहां लगभग 2 से 4 हजार बट्टे वाले बैठे होते हैं जो पोस्ट डेटेड बियरर चेक का कारोबार करते हैं। धंधे का सबसे व्यस्त समय दोपहर तीन बजे से शाम सात बजे तक होता है। दरअसल ये बट्टेवाले पार्ट टाइम उधारी देने वाले होते हैं। ये बड़े फाइनेंसरों के मुखौटे होते हैं जो जरूरत पड़ने पर पार्टी को पैसे उधारी पर देते हैं।

अतीक बताते हैं कि इस धंधे में सबसे ऊपर बट्टावाला ही होता है। उसकी चलती है। खास कर यह चलती ईद या दीवाली के त्योहारी सीजन में और बढ़ जाती है। जब छोटे उत्पादकों को पोस्ट डेटेड चेक पर तुरंत पैसे चाहिए होते हैं ताकि परिवार वालों लिए त्योहार के कपड़े और दूसरे साजो-सामान लिए जा सकें।

8 नवंबर की रात और नोटबंदी
 आठ नवंबर की रात नोटबंदी के फैसले के बाद उधारी पर चलने वाली बनारस की साड़ी मंडी के पूरे काराबोर को लकवा मार गया। मोदी के नोटबंदी के फैसले ने पूरे क्रेडिट फ्लो को ठप कर दिया। हालांकि अभी यह पूरी तरह पता नहीं चल सका है कि नोटबंदी के इस फैसले का आखिरकार इस पेचीदा लेकिन व्यावहारिक कारोबारी व्यवस्था पर क्या दूरगामी असर होगा। साड़ी उत्पादकों पर इसका क्या असर होगा। दुकानदार कैसे प्रभावित होंगे। उधारी के प्रवाह की क्या स्थिति होगी। बनारस के उस उद्योग में 8 नवंबर के बाद अब कोई भी पोस्ट डेटेड चेक नहीं ले रहा है क्योंकि किसी को पता नहीं है कि 31 दिसंबर के बाद बैंक से पैसे निकालने की सीमा क्या होगी।

नोटबंदी के बाद सरकार लगातार उलझी हुई दिख रही है और हर दिन पहले के आदेश को रद्द कर दूसरा आदेश जारी कर रही है। करंट अकाउंट से सरकार ने निकासी की सीमा 50000 तय की है जबकि साड़ी कारोबार में लगे सामान्य कारोबारी को भी हर दिन बैंक से पांच लाख रुपये निकालने पड़ सकते हैं। अब वे कहां से पैसे लाएंगे। लोगों में रोष और गुस्सा है और वे बड़ी बेसब्री से इस बात का इंतजार कर रहे हैं कि 31 दिसंबर के बाद सरकार नकद निकालने के क्या नियम बनाती है।   

साड़ी बुनाई कारोबार पूरे पूर्वी उत्तर प्रदेश की रीढ़ की हड्डी है। यहां तक कि लोग कृषि से ज्यादा इस पर निर्भर हैं। बनारस की 38 लाख की आबादी में से 10-15 लाख साड़ी उत्पादन के कारोबार से जुड़े हैं। 
 
बैकग्राउंड
नोटबंदी का क्रूर फैसला बनारस के साड़ी के बुनकरों, उत्पादकों, दुकानदारों और छोटे-बड़े कारोबारियों पर कहर बन कर बरपा है। पिछले तीन साल में इस बार पहली बार बुनकरों और उत्पादकों को इस शादी सीजन में जबरदस्त कमाई की उम्मीद थी। गुजरात के सूरत के वर्चस्व वाले नकली सिल्क साड़ी के कारोबार ने बनारस के साड़ी उद्योग का काफी कारोबार हड़प लिया है। नरेंद्र मोदी के बनारस से चुनाव जीतने के बावजूद बनारस के साड़ी उद्योग का भला नहीं हुआ है। सूरत में कृत्रिम रेशम के धागे से साड़ी बुनी जाती है। यह कम कीमत पर उपलब्ध है। सूरत की नकली सिल्क की साड़ी ने बनारस के बुनकर उद्योग को खासी चोट पहुंचाई है। इससे असली बनारसी साड़ियों की कीमत कम रखने का दबाव पैदा हुआ है।

केंद्रीय कपड़ा मंत्रालय (अब वस्त्र) के आंकड़ों के मुताबिक देश के 38.47 लाख वयस्क बुनकरों और सहायक कामगारों में 77 फीसदी महिला और 23 फीसदी पुरुष बुनकर हैं। दस फीसदी बुनकर अनुसूचित जाति के हैं। 18 फीसदी अनुसूचित जनजाति के हैं। ओबीसी समुदाय के बुनकर 45 और अन्य जातियों के 27 फीसदी के हैं। (यह स्पष्ट नहीं है कि मंत्रालय के इस आंकड़े के मुताबिक अन्य जातियों के बुनकरों का आशय बेहद उच्च कारीगरी करने वाले मुस्लिम बुनकरों से है या नहीं)।

The post नोटबंदी की मार से बनारसी साड़ी कारोबार का अनोखा उधारी सिस्टम ठप appeared first on SabrangIndia.