The removal of Mughal history from textbooks is seen as a political move which downplays the rich diversity of the Indian subcontinent. This artwork stems from this period. Credit: Govardhan. Jahangir Visiting the Ascetic Jadrup. ca. 1616-20, Musee Guimet, Paris

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Apr 20 2023 (IPS)

The removal from school textbooks of chapters covering the Mughal period of Indian history spanning three centuries has raised a storm of protests from academics.

The Mughals, who ruled much of the Indian sub-continent between the 16^th and 19^th centuries, left behind an indelible stamp on science, art, culture, and overall development. Their legacy is visible today mainly in a number of monuments recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb, Lahore Fort, Shalamar Gardens, and the Taj Mahal.

UNESCO’s India representative, Hezekiel Damani, said the organisation advises that the curriculum represents a conscious and systematic selection of knowledge, skills and values that shape the way teaching, learning and assessment processes are organised by addressing questions such as what, why, when and how students should learn.

“Therefore, a quality curriculum must pave the way to the effective implementation of inclusive and equitable quality education,” Damani says. “Subject-specific curriculum development, reform and revision are entirely the decision of member states; they must be conscious of today’s curriculum, and future needs while making any intervention.”

“The issue here is that Mughal rule does not align well with present-day politics — it is no surprise that chapters that refer to that period are being deleted by the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT),” says Ruchika Sharma, who teaches history at the Delhi University.

Sharma says that from an academic point of view, the Mughal period presents a well-researched part of Indian history because of the rich documentation they left behind. “Removing an entire chapter dealing with such an important period of history from class XII textbooks would certainly affect students’ career choices — they will see a mismatch between visible legacy and the curriculum.”

Sharma referred in particular to the chapter titled ‘Kings and Chronicles, the Mughal Courts,’ from the NCERT history book Themes of Indian History-Part II, which describes how the Mughals encouraged peasants to cultivate cash crops such as cotton grown over a “great swathe of territory that spread over central India and the Deccan plateau.”

The Mughal period saw India becoming the world’s biggest exporter of cotton as well as cotton manufactures such as calico and fine muslins that were shipped to the European markets by the Dutch and English East India Companies that were allowed to set up ‘factories’ or fortified trading posts along the Indian coasts.

Other revenue-generating crops included sugarcane and oilseeds such as mustard and lentil that were grown alongside staples like rice, wheat and millets, the deleted chapter said. The section on ‘Irrigation and Technology’ noted that under the Mughals, cultivation rapidly expanded with the help of artificial irrigation systems and the introduction of crops from the new world, such as tomatoes, potatoes and chilli.

Swapna Liddle, historian and author, says that much of India’s built heritage, language, arts, agriculture and land tenure systems are a legacy of the Mughal period. “It is important to study how India was also progressing in the scientific fields during that period,” says Liddle.

The Mughal period saw a flowering of the sciences, especially astronomy, mathematics, medicine, architecture and engineering, that had an impact long after the dynasty ended in 1857. Akbar’s reign (1556—1605), for example, saw the establishment of medical schools and dispensaries, while his successor, Jehangir, patronised the study of mathematics and astronomy.

On April 7, a group of ‘Concerned Historians’ issued a statement saying: “We are appalled by the decision of the NCERT to remove chapters and statements from history textbooks and demand that the deletions from the textbooks be immediately withdrawn.”

“The decision of the NCERT is guided by divisive motives. It is a decision that goes against the constitutional ethos and composite culture of the Indian subcontinent. As such, it must be rescinded at the earliest,” said the statement, which has been endorsed by hundreds of academics.

According to the statement, the textbooks were designed to be inclusive and provide a sense of the rich diversity of the human past both within the subcontinent as well as the wider world. “As such, removing chapters/sections of chapters is highly problematic not only in terms of depriving learners of valuable content but also in terms of the pedagogical values required to equip them to meet present and future challenges.”

The director of the NCERT, Dinesh Kumar Saklani, has stated that the chapters were removed as part of “rationalisation aimed at reducing the burden on schoolchildren following the COVID-19 pandemic.” He claimed that the rationalisation was vetted by experts and denied that there was any political agenda behind the move.

Says Ajay K. Mehra, a political scientist currently attached to the independent think tank, the Observer Research Foundation: “It would have been far better to modify the chapters on the Mughal and Islamic periods than delete them altogether — this way a very large and important period of mediaeval Indian history is going to be lost to impressionable young students and to future generations.”

The changes to the textbooks, says Mehra, are deliberate and part of a larger, declared political agenda to restore the past glory of Hindu dynasties that existed before the arrival of Islam in India. This can be seen in the renaming of roads and cities, he said, citing the renaming of Allahabad city in 2018 to Prayagraj to reflect its importance as a Hindu pilgrimage site at the confluence of the sacred Yamuna and Ganges rivers.

“What is lost here is the fact that Mughal rule saw enormous economic advancement that lasted three centuries because of a compact with Hindu Rajput (princely) feudatories. “Rajput princes not only led Mughal armies but also entered into marital alliances — two of the important Mughal emperors, Jehangir and Shah Jahan, were born of Rajput princesses, for example,” Mehra said.

Makkhan Lal, distinguished fellow at the Vivekananda International Foundation, a think tank considered close to the government, says that there is a case for the Mughal period getting “disproportionate description and allotment of space” in history textbooks and this needed to be rectified.

Lal, who has taught history at the Banaras Hindu University and worked with the NCERT, said the “correction being made now is a step in the right direction and should have been taken earlier.”

Apart from academics, leaders of opposition parties have also denounced the changes to the textbooks. Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the Communist Party of India, said the changes made to class textbooks were regrettable because of India’s diversity.

“The lands of India have always been the churning crucible of civilisational advances through cultural confluences,” Yechury says.

Pinarayi Vijayan, who leads a communist party government in the southern Kerala state, Tweeted: “They resort to rewriting history and masking it with lies. So, we must strongly protest the decision of the BJP government to delete certain sections from NCERT textbooks. Let the truth prevail.”

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Migrant labourers wait in queues in Kashmir in order to travel back to their homes. The second wave of COVID-19 in India has seen masses of people leave cities and towns to return to their rural homes. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Apr 29 2022 (IPS)

Public health specialists say that an ongoing wrangle between the Indian government and the World Health Organization (WHO) over the COVID-19 death toll in this country is symptomatic of a long-ailing public health delivery system.

India has consistently challenged estimates published by leading scientific journals such as the Lancet, which placed the number of excess deaths in the country at four million from 1 Jan 2020 to 31 Dec 2021.

“You can argue till the cows come home but the figures are going to be in the range of four to five million deaths as shown in several studies and any contestation would require robust data rather than bland denials.”

On 16 April an official note from the Press Information Bureau in response to a New York Times article said, “India’s basic objection has not been with the results (whatever they might have been) but rather the methodology adopted for the same.”

India’s concern was that the projected estimates in the article, titled “India Is Stalling the WHO’s Efforts to Make Global COVID Death Toll Public,” for a country of its geographical size and population could not be done in the same way as for smaller countries. “Such one size fit all approach and models which are true for smaller countries like Tunisia may not be applicable to India with a population of 1.3 billion,” the official note said.

But independent public health specialists said that the concern was that India’s spat with the WHO was detracting from the more serious issue of the country’s tottering health delivery system failing to deal with the pandemic.

“Forget about the actual number of people who died of COVID-19 or because of comorbidities like diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease — the fact remains that an unusually large number of people died during the pandemic because the health delivery system was overwhelmed,” said Mira Shiva, founder-member of the international Peoples Health Movement.

“One could say that the pandemic worked like a stress test of how good healthcare services were, and they were found seriously wanting,” said Shiva. ”Unsurprisingly, it was the poor and marginalised groups that took the brunt of it all — many more died of undocumented causes than usual as reflected in the several calculations based on excess deaths.”

Shiva said that, at the best of times, a cause of death is not properly registered in India. “We can only guess from the very large number of bodies seen floating down the main Ganges and Yamuna rivers during the second wave of the pandemic in 2021. There were also widely-circulated images of bodies laid out in rows on the river banks — these were obviously of people whose relatives could not afford to buy the firewood for cremations.”

Says Satya Mohanty, former secretary in the government and currently adjunct professor of economics at Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi: “You can argue till the cows come home but the figures are going to be in the range of four to five million deaths as shown in several studies and any contestation would require robust data rather than bland denials.”

“If the crude death rate on average is one per thousand per month, anything above that average over a period of two years can be safely taken as deaths due to a differentiator – in this case the COVID and post-COVID effects,” says Mohanty. “There cannot be any other reason unless other differentiators were at play and to the best of our information there were no other differentiators.”

Sandhya Mahapatro, assistant professor at the A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies (ANSISS) in Patna, Bihar state, says “while India has made great strides in reducing inequalities in healthcare, large access gaps by socioeconomic status remain. Our studies show that 38 percent of outpatients in Bihar, a state with a population of 128 million, had no access to public healthcare.”

“There is growing concern about the distributive consequences of welfare initiatives on different socioeconomic groups,” Mahapatro added. “The historical disadvantages of healthcare access experienced by women and marginalised groups continue, with factors like caste, class and gender intersecting at various levels to create advantage for some sections and disadvantages for others,” she said.

A paper published by Mahapatro and her colleagues in the peer-reviewed journal Health Policy Open in December 2021 showed that social status clearly determined whether a person could access healthcare or not, despite pledges to ensure equity in healthcare provision and commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Goal 3 — providing quality health services to all at an affordable cost.

“The issue of inequity played out during the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the poor and marginalised disproportionately,” said Mahapatro. “Internal migrants were greatly affected by the lockdowns with a staggering economic burden befalling them. The pre-existing inequality has widened and is expected to further widen as a result of the pandemic.”

Mahapatro said a study conducted at ANSISS during the post lockdown period found a familiar pattern of deprivation in healthcare services as in earlier studies. “The burden of unmet healthcare needs was substantially higher among the poor, women and people of low caste,” Mahapatro said. “Unmet healthcare needs were found to be particularly high among women of lower caste groups.”

“Importantly, our studies show that the pattern of health spending has remain unchanged over the decades and that the household remains the main source of financing healthcare before and during the pandemic,” she added.

A local priest and relative of a family member who died from Covid watching a pyre burn at the Garh Ganga Ghat in Mukteshwar, in Uttar Pradesh on 4 May, 2021. (Mukteshwar, Hapur/ File-Amit Sharma)

“The ongoing economic crisis due to the pandemic and inadequate healthcare capacity would obviously constrain healthcare utilisation by the marginalised sections of society, with internal migrants being the worst impacted as a result of the lockdowns,” Mahapatro said.

A staggering 450 million Indians are internal migrants according to the 2011 census, 37 percent of the total population. A national lockdown imposed with a four-hour notice on 24 March 2020 left most of these domestic migrants with no option but to undertake long treks back home with little money or food.

The national lockdown, considered among the tightest globally, went into three more phases with increasingly relaxed restrictions on economic and human activity until 7 June.

“Almost 80 percent of the migrant workers we surveyed had lost their jobs during the lockdowns,” said Mahapatro. This naturally affected their ability to access healthcare, with huge nutritional implications for them as well as their women and children.”

“If the unmet needs of such large and deprived social groups are not catered to then equity in healthcare and the UN SDGs on health will remain a distant dream,” Mahapatro added.

A woman holding a child begs at an intersection in New Delhi. Credit: Ranjit Devraj/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

If India ranks among the world’s fastest growing economies it is also where inequity is growing the fastest, thanks to endemic features unique to the country such as the caste system.

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,” says Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

According to Ray, the labouring castes and their interests are poorly represented where it matters and they also have little guidance or support from voluntary agencies. “There’s no capable voluntary sector of the type that works to empower the marginalised in other countries in the region. In fact, hundreds of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Greenpeace, have been forced to shut down operations in India in recent years.”

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,”

Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata

“A contrasting situation can be seen in Bangladesh, where powerful NGOs reach down to people at the grassroots and guide them on how to generate and manage surpluses,” says Ray. “It helps immensely that Bangladesh is not burdened by a caste system.”

Last year, Bangladesh posted a per capita income of $2,227 or $280 higher than that of its larger neighbour. “Bangladesh, once regarded as a ‘basket case,’ can now be expected to maintain this lead in the foreseeable future because of investments in the social sectors, especially education and health,” says Ray.

In a global report released in January, the British charity Oxfam describes India as ‘very unequal,’ with the top 10 percent of its 1.4 billion population having cornered 77 percent of the total national wealth. The report, Inequality Kills, estimates that inequality has been rising over the last three decades.

Oxfam calculates that it would take 941 years for a minimum wage worker in rural India to earn what a top paid executive at a leading Indian garment company earns in a year. India’s stark wealth inequality is attributed by Oxfam to “an economic system rigged in favour of the super-rich over the poor and marginalised.”

The report said that during 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused 84 percent of Indian households to suffer a drop in income, the number of billionaires in the country grew from 102 to 142. During the worst months of the pandemic (March 2020 to November 2021), the wealth of India’s billionaires more than doubled, from $313 billion to $719 billion.

“The pandemic proved to be a crunch point which exposed the country’s uncaringly iniquitous system,” says Ray, referring to how a suddenly imposed lockdown left millions of internal migrant workers stranded in the cities with no jobs, food or shelter and with little choice but to trek to their distant homes in the rural hinterland, often hundreds of kilometres away.

It took petitions in the Supreme Court for government to admit that more than half a million people were walking down the highways trying to get home, often braving assaults by police charged with enforcing lockdown rules. Trade unions said the bulk of an estimated 200 million migrant workers in India’s different cities and towns lost their jobs.

In contrast to the callous treatment meted out to internal migrant workers, the government spared no costs in arranging special flights to fetch students and privileged people who found themselves stuck in foreign countries that had also imposed lockdowns to stop the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 virus.

The Supreme Court has had to intervene on behalf of the poor and marginalised on other occasions where inequity has been glaring. For example, the court stepped in to order the distribution to poor and starving people of vast quantities of surplus grain rotting in state-run godowns.

On 7 January the apex court dismissed petitions challenging the government policy of reserving a quota of coveted post-graduate seats in India’s medical colleges for socially backward castes on the plea that it went against the principle of merit. The court did not buy that argument and pointed to India’s iniquitous system, which it said impacts on merit.

“Widespread inequalities in the availability of and access to educational facilities will result in the deprivation of certain classes of people who would be unable to effectively compete in such a system,” said Y. Chandrachud, handing down the judgement. “Special provisions enable such disadvantaged classes to overcome the barriers they face in effectively competing with forward classes and thus ensuring substantive equality.”

“Merit should be socially contextualised and re-conceptualised as an instrument that advances social goods like equality that we, as a society, value,” Chandrachud said, pointing to provisions in India’s constitution to award reserved quotas in jobs and educational opportunities to “remedy the structural disadvantages that certain groups suffer.”

Reserved quotas have, however, barely scratched the problem. Since 1983, the government has implemented a policy of reserving 50 percent of jobs in the coveted civil service for socially under privileged castes, but by 2019 only four individuals from these categories had made it to a list of 89 secretary-level positions.

How may such ingrained inequities be remedied? The Oxfam report called for higher taxes to be imposed on the richest 10 percent of the Indian population to help fund measures to reduce inequality. That’s easier than done because only one percent of Indians declare earnings sufficient to attract taxation.

In 2021 only 50.89 million individuals in a population of 1.4 billion people filed income tax returns, and only half that number paid any worthwhile tax.

Prabhat Patnaik, former professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, agrees that that the solution to gross inequity lies in “taxing the rich and investing the proceeds for the neglected social sectors — it is shame that large numbers of people continue to have no access to health or education.”

The Oxfam report says that 63 million Indians are pushed into poverty each year because of unaffordable healthcare costs. Public spending on healthcare ranks among the lowest in the world — 1.8 percent of GDP in 2021. Although India is a major destination for medical tourism because of its fine specialty hospitals, several of its poorest states have infant mortality rates higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Patnaik pointed to how government policies have consistently favoured the rich since the country embarked on economic liberalisation in the early 1980s. Inheritance tax was abolished in 1985 and in 2017 the government abolished wealth tax, allowing the concentration of wealth in rich families. In September 2019, corporate tax was slashed from 35 percent to 26 percent.

“In contrast to India’s policy of providing tax concessions to the rich the international trend is for the wealthy to ask that they be taxed more,” said Patnaik referring to the open letter from the Patriotic Millionaires group to the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos in January asking to be taxed more to help economic recovery after the pandemic.

“As millionaires, we know that the current tax system is not fair. Most of us can say that while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic — yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes,” reads the letter, which was prompted by the Oxfam report.

Predictably there were no Indians among the list of 102 Patriotic Millionaires and there has been no statement on it from any quarter in India.

India’s minister for environment, forests and climate change, Prakash Javadekar (left), said he would be happy if CoP 14 could achieve consensus on such difficult issues as drought management and land tenure. Courtesy: Ranjit Devraj

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Sep 4 2019 (IPS)

Expectations are high, perhaps too high, as the 14th Conference of the Parties (CoP 14) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), now into the third day of its two-week session, is being held outside the smog-filled Indian capital of New Delhi.

At the inauguration on Monday, India’s minister for environment, forests and climate change, Prakash Javadekar, soon after ceremonies to mark his taking over as president of the Convention for the next two years, said he would be happy if CoP 14 could achieve consensus on such difficult issues as drought management and land tenure.

Other issues on the agenda of CoP14, themed ‘Restore land, Sustain future’ and located in Greater Noida, in northern Uttar Pradesh state, include negotiations over consumption and production flows that have a bearing on agriculture and urbanisation, restoration of ecosystems and dealing with climate change.

According to Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the Convention, CoP14 negotiations would be guided by, its own scientific papers as well as the Special Report on Climate Change and Land of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in August.

The IPCC report covered interlinked, overlapping issues that are at the core of CoP14 deliberations — climate, change, desertification, and degradation, sustainable land management, food security and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

“Sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies,” the IPCC report said. It also identified land use change as the largest driver of biodiversity loss and as having the greatest impact on the environment.

Javadekar said he saw hope in the fact that of the 196 parties to the Convention 122, including some of the most populous like Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, Russia and South Africa have agreed to make the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal of achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN) targets by 2030 as national objectives.

But the difficulty of seeing results on the ground can be gauged from India’s own difficult situation. Nearly 30 percent of India’s 328 million hectares, supporting 1.3 billion people, has become degraded through deforestation, over-cultivation, soil-erosion and wetland depletion, according to a satellite survey conducted in 2016 by the Indian Space Research Organisation.

A study, conducted last year by The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI), an independent think-tank based in New Delhi, estimates India’s losses from land degradation and change in land use to be worth 47 billion dollars in 2014—2015.

The question before CoP14 is how participating countries can slow down loss of land and along with it biodiversity threatening to impact 3.2 billion people across the world. “Three out of every four hectares have been altered from their natural states and the productivity of one every four hectares of land has been declining,” according to UNCCD.

Running in parallel to CoP14 is the 14th session of UNCCD’s committee on science and technology (CST14), a subsidiary body with stated objectives — estimating soil organic carbon lost as a result of land degradation, addressing the ‘land-drought nexus’ through land-based interventions and translating available science into policy options for participating countries.

On Tuesday, as CoP4 launched into substantive business, the participants at the CST and other subsidiary bodies began to voice real apprehensions and demands.

Bhutan representing the Asia Pacific group, highlighted the need for cooperation at all levels to disseminate and translate identified technologies and knowledge into direct benefits for local land users.

Bangladesh pointed out that LDN targets are sometimes linked to transboundary water resources and also called for mobilising additional resources for capacity building.

Colombia, speaking for the Latin America and Caribbean group, appreciated the value of research by the scientific panels, but urged introduction of improved technologies and mitigation strategies to reduce the direct impacts of drought on ecosystems, starting with soil  degradation.

Russia, on behalf of Central and Eastern Europe, mooted the establishment of technical centres in the region to support the generation of scientific evidence to prevent and manage droughts, sustainable use of forests and peatlands and monitoring of sand and dust storms.

Civil society organisations, led by the Cape Town-based Environmental Monitoring Group, were also critical of the UNCCD for putting too much emphasis on LDN and demanded optimisation of land use through practical solutions that would ensure that carbon is retained in the soil.

“Retaining carbon in the soil is of particular value to India and its neighbouring countries, which presently have the world’s greatest rainwater runoffs into the sea,” says Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator, South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), a New Delhi based NGO, working on the water and environment sectors.

“What South Asian countries need to do urgently is to improve the rainwater harvesting so as to recharge groundwater aquifers and local water bodies in a given catchment so that water is available in the post-monsoon period that increasingly see severe droughts,” Thakkar tells IPS. “This is where governments can be supportive.”

Benefits such as preventing soil degradation and consequent landslides that have become a common feature in South India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

A study published in May said half of the area around 16 of India’s 24 major river basins is facing  droughts due to lowered soil moisture levels while at least a third of its 18 river basins has become non-resilient to vegetation droughts.

Responding to the suggestions and demands the Secretariat highlighted  recommendations to ensure mainstreaming of LDN targets in national strategies and action programmes, partnerships on science-policy to increase awareness and understanding of LDN and collaborations to assess finance and capacity development needs.

In all, the delegates, who include 90 ministers and more than 7,000 participants drawn from among government officials, civil society and the scientific community from the 197 parties will thrash out 30  decision texts and draw up action plans to strengthen land-use policies and address emerging threats such as droughts, forest fires, dust storms and forced migration.

“The agenda shows that governments have come to CoP14 ready to find solutions to many difficult, knotty and emerging policy issues,” said Thiaw at the inaugural session. The conference ends with the parties signing a ‘New Delhi Declaration’ outlining actions to meet UNCCD goals for 2018-2030.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is shown here being showered with rose petals after his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was declared winner in the country’s national elections. Source: Narendra Modi Facebook Page

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 25 2019 (IPS)

“We worked for the poor and they voted us back to power,” was the explanation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made to newly-elected legislators on Saturday, May 25, on the spectacular win scored by his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s just concluded general elections.

Modi’s statement appeared refreshingly simple when seen against the plethora of theories and analyses on the second electoral defeat in a row that the BJP delivered to the venerable Indian National Congress party that led India to independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and had become almost synonymous with governance in the years since.

“More than anything else the election was the victory of Modi’s political leadership,” Ajay Mehra, professor of politics and currently senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, tells IPS. “Since the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 the leadership quotient has been missing in Indian politics.”

“Modi was astute enough to understand this vacuum while the Congress party singularly failed to restore the leadership quotient when it had the chance while in power during 2004—2014 under Manmohan Singh, who was more manager than political leader,” Mehra says.

Modi’s main opponent, Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson and great-grandson of former Congress prime ministers did make a bid to fill the leadership vacuum in the run up to the elections but “it was all too little too late,” says Mehra.

According Mehra, Modi never lost an opportunity to project himself as a strong and powerful leader. And the greatest opportunity came in the form of a deadly suicide-bombing attack on an armed forces convoy in Kashmir on Feb. 14, that left 40 troops dead.

Modi, who could never be faulted for his sense of timing, waited until Feb 26, a date close to the general elections, to order Indian air force jets to carry out retaliatory bombing on a militant camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistani territory.

The Balakot bombing added hugely to Modi’s image as a great nationalist leader ready to defend the country against internal and external threats without hesitation, says Mehra.

Throughout the long and arduous election campaign across the country that followed, Modi repeatedly harped on the Balakot bombing to audience tuned to the idea of Pakistan as a long-standing enemy country which armed and financed terrorist groups tasked with the objective of wresting Muslim-majority Kashmir from Indian control.

It appears that the Gandhi and Congress party leaders learned no lessons from the defeat in 2014 when Modi’s one-time occupation of being a tea-stall vendor in a railway station was made fun of and used as proof that he was incapable of running a large and complex country like India.

This time around Modi’s description of himself as a ‘chowkidar’ (or watchman) taking care of the country’s interests was converted by the Congress party into the slogan ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ (the watchman is a thief) in reference to accusation that a deal to buy Rafael fighter jets from France was tainted and rigged to favour crony capitalist interests.

But, like the tea vendor jibes, the chowkidar slogans backfired with the mass of desperately poor Indian voters identifying all the more with Modi than with the half-Italian Gandhi and his sister Priyanka, who lent a hand in the election campaigning and addressed political rallies.

The campaign focused on the Rafael deal also had the effect of turning the electoral battle into one that was not over issues like rising unemployment, deep agrarian distress and declining manufacture into a personality clash between Gandhi and Modi—one in which the callow Congress leader could only lose to his politically astute and seasoned opponent.

A former spokesperson for the BJP during his long political career, Modi understood the value of building a positive image for himself through carefully arranged political interviews to friendly journalists while scrupulously avoiding the glare of India’s unruly media.

In fact, the only press conference Modi ever gave as prime minister came at the end of his present tenure and that too after elections were safely over. And then he sat through it without uttering a single word but deflecting questions towards his trusted lieutenant and party boss, Amit Shah.

However, Modi was visible everywhere on social media, bear-hugging world leaders one day and sitting in a cave in the snow-clad Himalayas meditating in the saffron robes of Hindu monk the next.

While such images drew derision and mockery from India’s English-speaking elite, the aspirational crowds identified even more with one of them who had made good but was yet rooted in traditional, devoutly Hindu roots.

On Saturday, Modi was elected as leader of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of right-leaning political parties that includes the BJP. Though the BJP won a majority of seats on its own, gaining 303 out of 542 sets while the Congress party secured just 52 seats. 

In his address to newly-elected parliamentarians of the NDA, Modi said the ‘pro-incumbency vote’ was the result of the faith that people reposed in him. He vowed to take the whole country along into the future, even his enemies. He’s revised his slogan from 2014 to include the latter part on faith: ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas, sab ka vishwas’ or ‘With everyone, for everyone’s development, with everyone’s faith‘. It was regarded as his assurance that everyone, even his political opponents, could trust him.

Modi also warned the new legislators: “Do not resort to a VIP culture–the people don’t like it.”

According to Rajiv Lochan, political commentator and professor of history at Panjab University, Chandigarh, the Congress party lost mainly because it came to be associated with the worst side of traditional India.

“The Congress believes in castes, it believes in religious groups, it believes that Muslims are one single entity as are Hindus and Sikhs,” says Lochan, referring to the parties ‘vote bank’ calculations to take advantage of horizontal and vertical divisions in Indian society.

“The Congress party also represents the feudal aspect in which people are seen as supplicants. All the Congress policies in this election were designed with the presumption that people are supplicants while the scion who has no energy, no intelligence and no abilities is still the boss directing everyone.

“Think of the stories of tiger hunts by Indian princes in colonial times when a servitor would kill the tiger and insist that it was the prince who had done it,” Lochan tells IPS.

“In contrast,” he adds, “the BJP had a Narendra Modi who was full of infectious energy. He had the ability to energise his audience.”

According to Lochan the BJP also ran a “very modernist campaign that was predicated on promising to empower everyone irrespective of caste, religion and family even increasing its support among Muslims from 9 percent to 12 percent, according to the poll surveys.”

“On the whole, I would say, people voted out the bad of traditional India and voted in the good,” says Lochan.

A man draws water from a solar-powered water ATM in New Delhi’s Savda Ghevra slum settlement. Thanks to these machines, which allow users to withdraw water with a rechargeable card, waterborne diseases have become less frequent here. Credit: Ranjit Devraj/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DEHLI, Aug 28 2018 (IPS)

At New Delhi’s Savda Ghevra slum settlement, waterborne diseases have become less frequent thanks to solar-powered water ATMs that were installed here as a social enterprise venture three years ago.

“The water is cheap, reliable and fresh-tasting,” Saeeda, a mother of three who lives close to an ATM, tells IPS. Each day, Saeeda collects up to 15 litres of water from the ATM, paying 30 paisa per litre for the water with a rechargeable card. It means she pays 4.5 Rupees (about 6 US cents) for 15 litres of pure drinking water. It is convenient and cheap as bottled drinking water costs about 20 Rupees (about 30 US cents).Over the last 25 years India’s ministry of new and renewable energy, a GGGI partner, has developed specialised programmes for both drinking water as well as irrigation systems using solar water pumping systems of which there are now an estimated 15,000 units.

Installed by Piramal Sarvajal, as part of the company’s corporate social responsibility, the decentralised drinking water project for urban slums now provides access to clean water to some 10,000 families in six slum clusters, Amit Mishra, the project’s operations manager, tells IPS.

Mishra says that each water ATM, though locally operated through a franchise system and powered using solar panels, is centrally controlled through cloud technology that integrates 1,100 touch points in 16 states. The result is reduced costs that allow round-the-clock provision of pure drinking water to underserved communities.

Sarvajal Piramal is not the only group that has set up solar-powered water ATMs in New Delhi or other parts of Delhi. Solar-powered water ATMs are part of a plan to use solar power to supply water for India’s vast 1.3 billion people, not only for drinking, but also for agricultural use.

“This is the kind of decentralised, neighbourhood solutions that the Global Green Growth Initiative (GGGI) is interested in,” the Netherlands-based group’s deputy director and water sector lead, Peter Vos, tells IPS. “However, solutions of this type may not be ideal in all situations, since the networks may require a lot of maintenance and can be costly.”

GGGI, says Vos, is interested in promoting policies that allow efficient use of limited water resources sustainably and at reasonable cost. “We do this by embedding ourselves in key ministries concerned with renewable energy, rural development as well as water and sanitation.”

Currently, GGGI has an approved budget of USD 1.37 million dollars for knowledge sharing, transfer of green technologies and capacity building in order to meet global commitments towards implementation of India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. “Facilitating the flow of domestic and international climate finance and investment would be a key contribution to support India’s NDC implementation,” Vos says.

India’s setting up of the International Solar Alliance, an alliance that facilitates cooperation among sun-rich countries, provides GGGI an opportunity to disseminate renewable energy best practices with 18 GGGI member countries and seven partner countries—India and China are partner countries and prospective members.

As a predominantly agricultural country, with the world’s largest irrigated area serviced by some 26 million groundwater pumps mostly run on diesel or electricity, GGGI is keenly interested in India’s plans to switch to the use of solar power for irrigation.

Electric pumps are considered unreliable and diesel is costly. To keep them running, India spends about USD 6 million in annual subsidies that create their own distortions. Farmers tend to waste electricity as well as water thanks to the subsidies, Vos explains.

Under India’s National Solar Mission programme, farmers are now supported with capital cost subsidies for solar pump systems. A credit-linked subsidy scheme invites local institutions across the country to provide loans to reduce the subsidy burden on the government and make the system affordable for farmers.

According to a GGGI study released in 2017, the ‘context-specific delivery models’ used in the solar pump programme have resulted in noteworthy initial successes in terms of economic and social benefits, emission reductions, reduced reliance on subsides, increased agricultural output, development of new businesses, job-creation and improved incomes and livelihoods in rural areas.

India’s models offer replicable strategies to support solar irrigation pumping systems in other countries where GGGI has a presence, says Vos. In fact, the Indian government has plans to export solar pumping systems and expertise to countries interested in greener alternatives for irrigation.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), irrigation is becoming an important part of global agricultural production, consuming about 70 percent of global freshwater resources and reliable irrigation. However, using solar-powered systems can increase crop yields four-fold and can be key to national objectives like achieving food security.

Over the last 25 years India’s ministry of new and renewable energy, a GGGI partner, has developed specialised programmes for both drinking water as well as irrigation systems using solar water pumping systems of which there are now an estimated 15,000 units.

The progress has not been entirely without a hitch and, so far, the solar water-pumping market has remained relatively small primarily due to high up-front capital costs and low awareness among farmers as well as users of drinking water provided through ATMs.

A study of the Savda Ghevra slum showed that it took 18 months before the first ATM could be provided to Piramal Sarvajal. And then only 37 percent of the residents were using the ATMs as a primary or secondary source of potable water.

The study found that the ATMs were more than covering operating costs and generating revenue for Piramal Sarvajal, and could reach a wider population with government or other support, especially in the rural areas. The monies generated by Piramal Sarvajal are used to pay salaries and to maintain the machines.

According to the government’s own figures, presented in parliament in 2017; out of 167.8 million households in rural India only 2.9 million or 16 percent have access to safe drinking water. GGGI with its  considerable experience and expertise around the world is well-placed to step in, says Vos.

Countries do not have to be economically prosperous to move from high birth and death rates to low fertility and mortality rates. In India as the female literacy rate increased from 39 percent to 65 percent, the fertility rate dropped. These women pictured are studying an IT short course. Credit: Ranjita Biswas/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 2 2018 (IPS)

Countries do not have to be economically prosperous to move from a situation of high birth and death rates to low fertility and mortality rates.

Education, social security, environments conducive to economic development and good value systems are what promote this, as evidenced by the recorded experiences of Asian countries as far apart as Japan and India.

According to Dr. Osamu Kusumoto, Secretary-General of the Asian Population Development Association, the economy and demographic transition or DT are indirectly rather than directly correlated.

Demographic transition is the theory that holds that countries move from a situation of high birth and death rates to low fertility and low mortality rates as they industrialise. However, in more recent times, the theory has been hit by contradictions and there are debates over whether industrialisation leads to declining population or whether lower populations lead to industrialisation and higher incomes.“At the same time the spread of healthcare and public health services promote mortality transition or lowered death rates. But, with real prosperity there is potential for fertility to rise again.”

Thus, according to Kusumoto, in high-income oil-producing countries, DT is unlikely to advance unless the countries also implement modern economic systems.

There are also debates around such inter-related DT issues as higher female incomes, old-age security and the demand for human capital with experiences differing across countries and regions.

As a country transitions, the cost of education rises creating relative poverty and promoting fertility transition, or a lowered birth rate, says Kusumoto. “At the same time the spread of healthcare and public health services promote mortality transition or lowered death rates. But with real prosperity there is potential for fertility to rise again.”

Kusumoto cites the example of Japan where, even with high per-capita incomes, people live in relative poverty and find unaffordable the high cost of educating children. “It is possible to say that fertility declines, even when social security systems are in place and old-age pensions are provided for, because people will make the rational choice of avoiding the cost of having children through marriage and childbirth.”

Japan’s birth rate is 1.44 per woman, which has caused the population to decline by one million in the last five years.

What people in Japan fail to realise, adds Kusumoto, is that without children the social security system becomes unsustainable and cannot support them in old age.

Meanwhile India, a developing country that is home to the world’s second-largest population, the total fertility rate has shown a steady decline from 3.6 per woman in 1991 to 2.4 per woman by 2011. Over that 20-year period per capita incomes rose from 1,221 dollars to 3,755 dollars, going by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) figures.

During the same period the female literacy rate increased from 39 percent to 65 percent. Also the composite human development index score of the UNDP, which combines education, health and income, rose from 0.428 in 1990 to 0.609 in 2014.

A closer look at the statistics at the district levels shows curious results such as that in eight Indian states, where there was a drop in the use of modern contraceptive methods, fertility had decreased, according to studies by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai.

Professor Sanjay Kumar Mohanty at the IIPS says that disaggregated analyses at the district level are important since the districts are the focus of planning and programme implementation in India, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “Such analyses may throw light on the unexplained decrease in fertility levels.”

According to an IIPS study published in 2016, while most of India’s 640 districts experience substantial declines over the 1991-2011 period, no clear relationship between initial levels and subsequent changes was discernible.

In the Indian experience, says Mohanty, female education and literacy have been associated with the use of modern contraceptives, higher age at marriage and birth spacing.

According to Kusumoto, in order to achieve the SDGs, what is needed is mortality transition as well as fertility transition. “We need to design a system where young people can have children if they wish to do so.”

Advances in medicine and public health and the availability of healthcare services will inevitably lead to mortality transition, says Kusumoto. “But unless there is also fertility transition, the population will continue to increase beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity.” 

While fertility control was successfully promoted using healthcare-based family planning and services, as in the case of India, from the 1960s onwards Western Europe and more recently East Asia began to see fertility rates falling below mortality rates in a “second demographic transition,” Kusumoto says, adding that research is still lacking on why exactly low fertility occurs. 

A notable example of the unpredictability showed up in the rapid DT in China’s Sichuan province during a study carried out in the 1980s by Toshio Kuroda, a winner of the U.N. Population Award. Kuroda noticed that DT happened despite the province’s low gross national product, making it an exceptional case of the economic DT theory.   

While there is a correlation between the economy and DT there are clear cases where it is not the economy but changes in people’s norms and values that bring about positive transition.

The exceptional changes that took place in the former Soviet countries may be attributed to a shift from communism to a market economy, which people accepted as rational. A World Bank report shows that Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan all had birth rates of 6 children per woman in 1950-55, but this declined by almost half by 2000. It was a decline also experienced by other former Soviet countries that previously had high birth rates. All former Soviet countries also showed increased life expectancy.

In the end, says Kusumoto, what is important is policies that promote “appropriate fertility transition” and are aimed at building a society in which “human dignity is maintained as envisioned in the SDGs.”

Vehicle ownership in India is projected to hit 400 million by 2040 from the 170 million recorded in 2015, which could prompt a five-fold increase in poisonous gases emitted by cars and trucks. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 20 2018 (IPS)

With India’s citizens clamouring for breathable air and efficient energy options, the country’s planners are more receptive than ever to explore sustainable development options, says Frank Rijsberman, Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).

Rijsberman, who was in India to attend the first International Solar Alliance Summit on March 11, told IPS in an interview that the GGGI was prepared to support the Indian government to explore energy alternatives and improve the country’s growth model.

India is not yet a member country of the GGGI but is recognised as a partner, says Rijsberman. He points to the fact that GGGI has had small but successful projects running in India such as a collaboration to get India’s first electric buses running in Bangalore city.

“The electric buses are an example of how local level innovation can yield positive results in energy efficiency,” said Rijsberman. “The success of this project is in line with India’s Intended  Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) commitments to reduce carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency.

GGGI’s recognition of the potential for expanding its activity in India can be seen in the fact that  the organization has been recruiting top managerial talent for its India country office.

Frank Rijsberman. Credit: GGGI

“For us, it is a bit of restart in India trying to position GGGI well at a time when the Indian government clearly wants to have more leadership internationally and project its own cleantech or green growth initiatives,” Rijsberman said.

So far, the successes have not been on the scale of what India is capable of, says Rijsberman. “In other countries we sit with ministries — the ministry of planning and investment in Vietnam and Laos for instance — and help with national green growth strategy or in the next five-year plan.

“Last year, said Rijsberman, “we helped member countries get 500 million dollars’ worth of green and climate finance – we’ve had no such breakthrough in India.”

Still, Rijsberman finds encouraging the “growing concern over deteriorating air quality and other things that is convincing citizens and politicians that the quality of growth really matters — we are looking at what GGGI can do to help the Indian government shift to a model of growth that is cleaner and more sustainable.”

India has experience in increasing the share of renewable energy in its overall energy mix and GGGI is keen to work with the government, particularly the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the International Solar Alliance (ISA), to share India’s expertise, and knowhow with other developing countries facing similar developmental challenges

“India has wonderful experiences that can be shared with countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and in other cases we could help share experiences from other countries that could support India’s green growth initiatives,” Rijsberman said.  

It has not all been smooth sailing though. Last year, Rijsberman said, GGGI had worked with the MNRE to find a combination of financing from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency and other sources to improve India’s small and medium industries. “In the end we could not get the seal of approval from the environment ministry — so it has got a bit stuck.”

An important international finance mechanism, the GCF is  mandated to support developing countries to access international climate finance by developing projects to achieve renewable energy targets.

India country representative for GGGI, Shantanu Gotmare, said the project has not actually been shelved and is still in process. “We haven’t given it up yet,” said Gotmare, a career bureaucrat who has taken a break from government work to lead the GGGI in India.

Gotmare explained that much of GGGI’s work, so far, has been with provincial governments like those of Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab states. “We have developed comprehensive green growth strategies and supported these state governments in adopting integrated analytical approaches to assess green growth challenges and prioritise opportunities in energy, water, agriculture and forestry.

“We supported these three state governments in implementing specific green growth opportunities by formulating detailed project proposals, policy implementation roadmaps, and capacity building initiatives,” Gotmare said.

The plan for the immediate future is to scale up GGGI’s programmatic activities to launch green growth interventions at the national level.

“Our aim is to support the government to deliver on its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) ambition by helping to develop policy frameworks, mobilising domestic and international climate finance and helping to introduce clean technologies and finally to create and share green growth knowledge and best practices,” Gotmare said.

There is an immediate opportunity to finance off-grid energy (OGE) access to millions of households in India that have limited or no access to electricity. GGGI is designing an innovative finance mechanism to support the government’s goal of ‘electricity for all’.

“This is a plan that is expected to simultaneously achieve social, economic and environmental  benefits,” Gotmare said.

According to Gotmare, as India’s citizens demand more power, it is a challenge for the government to make sure that there are energy options that are cleaner than the traditional coal or diesel-fired power plants. “This is precisely where GGGI comes in,” he said.

GGGI’s experience, says Rijsberman, allows it to work closely with the government to rapidly ramp up India’s electrification plans in a clean and sustainable way and use solar solutions to extend electrification services to India’s most marginalised households.

An infant in intensive care at the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi. Indian hospitals prefer traditional DPT vaccines. Credit: Holy Family Hospital.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 8 2014 (IPS)

A spate of sudden infant deaths following vaccination in India has prompted leading paediatricians to call for stronger regulatory mechanisms to evaluate new vaccines for safety and efficacy before their acceptance into the national immunisation programme.

According to data obtained from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, over the last one year 54 babies are recorded to have died soon after receiving the newly introduced “pentavalent” vaccine that is designed to prevent infection by five disease-causing microbes.“If the birth cohort in India of 25 million is vaccinated with pentavalents, 6,250 babies will die each year from adverse effects following immunisation." -- Dr. Jacob Puliyel

Rolled out gradually in different Indian states since December 2012, the pentavalent vaccine is a combination which seeks to confer immunity against Haemophilius influenzae type B and Hepatitis B, in addition to the protection afforded by the traditional trivalent vaccine against Diphtheria, Pertussis and Tetanus (DPT).

“Going by the ministry’s figures, an average of one death has occurred for every 4,000 babies vaccinated with pentavalents,” says Dr. Jacob Puliyel, who heads paediatrics at the St. Stephen’s Hospital here. “If the birth cohort in India of 25 million is vaccinated with pentavalents, 6,250 babies will die each year from adverse effects following immunisation (AEFI).

“The huge cost in terms of lives lost from AEFI on being given the combined pentavalent vaccine is difficult to justify,” Puliyel tells IPS, adding that the time-honoured DPT vaccine had a far better record for safety.

Given that the reporting of AEFI in many Indian states is unreliable, paediatricians believe that many more deaths may have occurred than recorded, and recommend a ban on the use of pentavalent vaccines until there is a thorough investigation of the policy change that allowed their entry into India.

In September 2013 Dr. Yogesh Jain, former assistant professor of paediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and currently expert at India’s Planning Commission on developing universal health, filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court seeking a ban on pentavalent vaccines.

Jain’s lawyers argued at preliminary hearings that the “five-in-one” vaccine is banned in Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan as also in the developing countries Pakistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, following infant deaths.

Puliyel says that pentavalents gained entry into India as the government chose to bypass the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI) that was set up in 2001 to advise on the introduction of new vaccines. “NTAGI instructions for evaluation were not done after the first year.”

In most countries vaccines are introduced into the national programme after an expert committee has studied the burden of the disease, the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and affordability. If these are satisfactory the vaccine may be considered for inclusion in the routine immunisation schedule.

“Of late, the World Health Organisation has been recommending vaccines that are accepted without regard to local cost effectiveness,” says Puliyel. “Organisations like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) have also been pushing new vaccines into India and other developing countries by providing substantial donor grants at the introductory stage.”

Typically, according to Puliyel, once a vaccine gains entry into the Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP), funding is withdrawn and the government finds itself saddled with the full costs of supporting a vaccine of doubtful value and, in some cases, dangerous.

In India, until recently, when a vaccine was proposed to be introduced into the UIP, a subcommittee of the NTAGI would review the available literature and consult experts to make an informed decision. In the interests of transparency the minutes of the meetings and recommendations would be uploaded onto the ministry’s website.

In 2013, an Immunisation Technical Support Unit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was set up to “help” NTAGI in its work, but a new confidentiality clause was inserted to protect the “proprietary” interests of commercial, academic and research institutions.

“In fact, the confidentiality clause is not limited to proprietary matters and NTAGI members are barred from divulging discussions, opinions or decisions for 10 years after leaving the committee that decides on the new vaccine,” Puliyel says.

“Vaccines being introduced in the UIP must be cost effective and look at the disease pattern and load in the country, rather than ape models from other countries,” says Sumbul Warsi, leading city paediatrician and medical director of the well-known Holy Family Hospital.

“The NTAGI must be a totally independent body which is capable of resisting pressures from outside and be transparent,” she tells IPS. “It seems that of late there has been a lot of interference in the process leading up to the introduction of vaccines.”

Puliyel says the government must publish information about a vaccine under consideration for inclusion in vaccination schedules. Stakeholders, including patient groups, health professionals, academic institutions, vaccine companies and organisations like the WHO and GAVI can then register their interest.

Transparent processes would gain the confidence of the public, which is vital in any mass immunisation programme, Puliyel says.

Street protest against the planned Indo-Japan nuclear cooperation deal. Credit: Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 1 2014 (IPS)

Activists opposed to India’s plans to massively increase civilian nuclear power production are aghast that a plan for an Indo-Japanese nuclear cooperation deal is gaining pace even while Japan is struggling to cope with the fallout of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was guest of honour at India’s 64^th Republic Day celebrations on Jan. 26, announced in a press statement before leaving that talks for a nuclear cooperation agreement were continuing “with the view for an early conclusion.”“It would appear that the two countries were only waiting for the anger over the Fukushima disaster to cool down."

At a press conference given jointly with Abe, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said “negotiations towards an agreement for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy have gained momentum in the last few months.”

“It would appear that the two countries were only waiting for the anger over the Fukushima disaster to cool down,” Anil Choudhury, leader of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), which ran a poster campaign and a demonstration protesting against the deal during Abe’s three-day visit, tells IPS.

“CNDP will continue to oppose any Indo-Japan nuclear deal as also will our counterparts in Japan,” Choudhury said. “A simultaneous poster campaign was mounted in Tokyo and letters of protest were sent to both prime ministers by Yukiko Kameya, an elderly evacuee from Fukushima.”

In an open letter to Abe, Laxminarayan Ramdas, a prominent leader of the CNDP wrote: “A country like yours, which was the victim of the first two atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the more recent and tragic accident of your nuclear power plant at Fukushima would, one would have thought, helped you to give up this horrible and dangerous source of energy.

“Please do not do us this favour and sell us a potential Fukushima,” Ramdas, former admiral of the Indian navy, told Abe in the letter.

Abe’s visit was marked by marches at sites where mega nuclear parks are functional or in various stages of completion. At the Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu, which became operational in October 2013, protests led by the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) have been continuing since September 2011.

According to PMANE leader S.P. Udayakumar, the Kudankulam project built with Russian technology is unsafe and threatens the delicate marine ecology of the Palk straits. “A Fukushima-type accident at this mega plant, which is due to generate 9,200 MW when complete, would be truly catastrophic,” he tells IPS.

The 2004 December Asian tsunami flooded nuclear installations at Kudankulam and tremors were recorded in the area in March 2006 and August 2011, but the government continues to insist that the plant is safe, Udayakumar says.

Safety is a major concern expressed by organisations of farmers and fishermen who live close to other major nuclear parks sites like Jaitapur in Maharashtra state, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Fatehabad in Haryana.

“There is very little to inspire confidence as India does not even have a nuclear radiation safety policy in place,” Choudhury said. “The lack of transparency and accountability that exacerbated the Fukushima disaster is far worse in India.”

A Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill, pending in Parliament since 2011, has been criticised by opposition legislators and activists as failing to give the regulator real autonomy and credibility, although India has gone ahead with plans to boost nuclear power capacity to 20,000 MW by 2020 and 63,000 MW by 2032.

“The scale of peoples’ protests at Kudankulam, Jaitapur and at other nuclear sites has been such that the least the government could do is to ensure that there is an independent regulator to take care of the public interest,” says Anup Kumar Saha, a member of parliament representing the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Much of the criticism revolves around the fact the regulator is funded by the very organisations it is supposed to be regulating, compromising its ability to act independently. Matters relating to atomic energy are also controlled directly by the prime minister and not parliament, protecting the nuclear establishment from public scrutiny.

M.V. Ramana, physicist and lecturer at Princeton University, tells IPS that the Indo-Japan deal is a corollary to the historic Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation deal signed in October 2006. Ramana was awarded this year’s Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, given for ‘outstanding accomplishments in promoting the use of physics for the benefit of society in such areas as the environment, arms control, and science policy.’

“The primary motivation for a nuclear agreement between Japan and India is the fact that it is part of the bargain during the U.S.-India deal when the Manmohan Singh government promised to import very expensive reactors from companies like Westinghouse, General Electric and Areva which source key components from Japan,” Ramana says.

“The sad irony is that the deal between India and Japan is being negotiated by democratically elected leaders when their populations are opposed in one way or the other to this agreement,” Ramana adds.

A court-appointed committee in India has called for a ten-year moratorium on field trials of GM crops. Credit: F Delventhal/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2013 (IPS)

Food security activists who secured a moratorium on introducing genetically modified brinjal (aubergine) into India fear that their efforts are being undermined by the release of GM brinjal in neighbouring Bangladesh.

“India and Bangladesh share a long and porous border and it is easy for GM  brinjal varieties to be brought over,” says Suman Sahai, director of Gene Campaign, a Delhi-based research and advocacy group devoted to the conservation of genetic resources and indigenous knowledge.

GM brinjal is spliced with a gene derived from a soil bacterium to confer inbuilt resistance against the fruit and shoot borer pest, and reduce dependence on pesticide spraying. The U.S.-based Monsanto Corp., which owns the patents for GM brinjal, markets the seeds through Mahyco, an Indian subsidiary."India and Bangladesh share a long and porous border and it is easy for GM brinjal varieties to be brought over."

Sahai tells IPS that although Bangladeshi authorities have prescribed strict sequestration of its GM brinjal crops, there is real danger of genetic contamination of Indian brinjal varieties through natural cross-pollination in the long run.

According to an Oct. 31 announcement by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), cultivation of GM brinjal would be carried out under official supervision. Farmers would first be trained to take bio-safety measures, and the produce would be clearly labelled at the markets.

However, such measures are considered inadequate by the Coalition for a GM-Free India which has called on the Indian government to ensure that there is no illegal or unintentional transfer of seeds or of the crop across the common border.

“Since the India-Bangladesh border is porous, we demand a ban on the import or  transfer of crops, fruits, seeds and food of brinjal and related species, genus or family, which have remotest possibility of contamination directly or indirectly through Bt Brinjal,” the coalition members said in an open letter to India’s Minister for Environment and Forests in October.

According to Chitra Devi, a scientist with India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, the structure of the brinjal flower favours rapid cross-pollination. “Contamination with the bacterial genes spliced into GM brinjal would be rapid and  irreversible,” she tells IPS.

Such concerns guided the 2010 Indian moratorium on the cultivation of GM brinjal that was supposed to have become India’s s first GM food crop.

Prospects for cultivating GM food crops in India further receded in July when a technical advisory committee (TEC) appointed by India’s Supreme Court recommended a 10-year moratorium on all field trials of GM food crops.

“Based on the examination of the safety dossiers, it is apparent that there are major gaps in the regulatory system,” the TEC informed the apex court which is continuing to hear arguments for and against the recommended moratorium.

The TEC had also recommended a ban on the “release of GM crops for which India is a centre of origin or diversity,” which rice, brinjal, and mustard.

Earlier in August 2012, the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture had called in a report for a complete ban on GM food crops in the country. Provincial governments in states like Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have also opposed GM food crops.

Devinder Sharma, chair of the independent collective Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security in New Delhi, believes that it is no accident that the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute resorted to GM brinjal technology from Mahyco, the Indian subsidiary of Monsanto.

“Similar strategies have been used in Latin America to achieve a fait accompli by illegally releasing GM crop varieties into the environment,” Sharma tells IPS. “In fact this route was used to foist GM cotton on India and get around opposition by farmers and activists trying to protect biodiversity.”

Leading food security specialists in Bangladesh have also questioned the rush to release GM brinjal. Farida Akhtar, founder of UBINIG, a Bangladeshi NGO which runs one of the biggest community seed banks in the world, says the research on GM brinjal “was not done on the basis of need.”

In an emailed interview with IPS, Akhtar said “neither farmers nor officials have adequate knowledge of biosafety measures around GM brinjal or that there could be potential impacts on health and environment.”

Akhtar said the threat was not only to the Indian sub-continent but to Bangladesh itself with its over 100 varieties of brinjal that now stand to get contaminated through cross-pollination. “UBINIG alone has a collection of 41 different varieities,” she said.

“Subsistence farmers who account for 84 percent of farming households in the country are the custodians of local varieties of brinjal which are now going to be hit by  biological pollution caused by GM brinjal,” Akhtar said. “It is also possible that pests would now begin to selectively attack the natural varieties and finish them off.”

India's parallel economy has widened disparities. Credit: Ranjit Devraj/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

As India grapples with rising prices and a rapidly sinking rupee, attention has turned to the country’s massive parallel economy that siphons wealth away from development programmes and into the pockets of a corrupt ruling elite.

On Monday, a special court declared Lalu Prasad Yadav, one of India’s leading politicians, guilty of diverting millions of dollars meant for the purchase of animal fodder while he was chief minister of the eastern state of Bihar in the 1990s.

He has been sentenced to five years in prison. Because he was given more than two years, he will lose the seat he currently holds in Parliament and will be barred from contesting elections, according to a Supreme Court ruling handed down in July, which the government has sought to overturn through an ordinance.

Last week, however, Rahul Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty who is tipped to be prime minister if the ruling Congress party is returned to power in elections due next year, announced personal opposition to the ordinance, sealing Yadav’s political fate and that of other legislators convicted for corruption.

“If you want to fight corruption in the country, whether it is the Congress or the [main opposition] Bharatiya Janata Party, we cannot continue making these small compromises. Because if we make these small compromises, we compromise everything,” said Gandhi.

Analysts see Gandhi’s opposition to his own party’s policy as a response to rising public anger against corruption. His father Rajiv Gandhi, who served as prime minister from 1984 to 1989, had also been critical of “power brokers” in the Congress party who siphon off development funds.

Ashwini Sharma, who teaches global political economy at Delhi University and is a fellow of global governance at the University of London and visiting professor at the University of Warsaw, says that black or unaccounted-for money is impossible to eradicate because it is the lifeblood of political parties in India.

“Asking political parties to fight corruption is like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop,” Sharma tells IPS.

With black money now an entrenched feature of life in India, Sharma says it has become important to assess the real costs it imposes on the body politic. “We already know that a large parallel economy makes it impossible for economists to make accurate analyses and make policies and programmes that have a chance of working.”

Worse, Sharma said, black money is regularly transferred out of the country through clandestine ‘hawala’ channels, and even if it returns to the country it only goes into lavish lifestyles for a privileged few rather than development activity or projects that can alleviate poverty.

Sharma said the fact that the value of the rupee has slid down by 20 percent over the last four months and is now close to 70 to the dollar is partly the result of increased capital flight via hawala channels, typical in months leading up to an Indian election.

The parallel economy works through an extra-governmental system backed by a phalanx of musclemen, brokers and touts acting in collusion with chartered accountants, policemen and bureaucrats who get a share, said Sharma. “Corruption feeds on itself through the constant generation of black money.”

Having a disposable income in India is determined by whether a significant portion of it is in the form of black money gained through opportunities to participate in the parallel economy.

R. Vaidyanathan, professor of finance and control at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management in the southern city of Bangalore, released a three-year study in 2012 that found Indians paying as much as 70 billion dollars annually in bribes for ordinary governmental services.

Vaidyanathan tells IPS that such bribes work as a form of parallel tax that does not reach government coffers. “This system of ‘bribe tax’ is so well developed that the actual collection is outsourced to private agents.”

According to Vaidyanathan, successive governments have balked at widening the income-tax base beyond three percent of the population because of the existence of the bribe tax system. “Obviously, you cannot ask people to pay two sets of taxes – one for the formal system and the other that feeds the black economy.”

Records released by the finance ministry show that in fiscal year 2011-2012 only 30 million people in this country of 1.2 billion people paid annual income tax, with 90 percent of that number paying less than 7,000 dollars each.

A political manifestation of people’s resistance to corruption is the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) or Ordinary People’s Party led by Arvind Kejriwal, a former income tax official who has vowed to clean up the system and is fighting the next elections with the broom as a polling symbol.

Kejriwal is best known for his efforts to bring transparency into governance that resulted in the passage of the Right to Information Act of 2005. But political parties have been fighting to have the Act amended to ensure that they do not come under its purview.

“It is a travesty that political parties are resisting accountability when they should have been supporting it,” said Sharma. “This shows how entrenched the main political parties have become in the parallel economy.”

According to Joginder Singh, a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, an arm of the police department, the poor are the worst victims of corruption since they must pay bribes out of their pockets each time they deal with government departments.

“Corruption is what keeps a majority of Indians in poverty despite the fact that they live in a country that is well-endowed with natural and human resources,” says Singh, who identifies himself with anti-corruption initiatives. “It is an open secret that most public projects have a built-in scope for corruption.”

In 2010, the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity estimated money lost to India through illicit outward flows to be around 462 billion dollars with 68 percent of it happening after 1991 when the country embarked on economic reforms.

Sharma says it is vital to assess the current size of the parallel economy in India. “The last study conducted by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy was in 1984 when black money was estimated to be around 20 percent of GDP, but most experts agree that it has now grown to around 50 percent of GDP.”

Eurasian Spoonbill wintering at the Okhla sanctuary in the heart of New Delhi city. Credit: T.K. Roy/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 22 2013 (IPS)

Every winter the Okhla wetlands, a charmed haven in the heart of India’s bustling capital city, play host to Greater Flamingoes, Greylag Geese, Tufted Pochards, Northern Shovelers and other exotic, feathered visitors winging in from colder climes as far away as Siberia.

These avian migrants join hundreds of local water birds to breed in the Okhla Bird Sanctuary and Wildlife Park – a four square kilometres patch of wetland on the Jamuna river. The river is struggling to survive amidst costly real estate and development projects in the state of Delhi on the west bank of the river and Uttar Pradesh state on the east.

Conservationists now warn that unless there is a halt to construction activity on the banks of the Jamuna and to the pumping of raw sewage and effluents into the river, the annual spectacle of colours and shapes winging into the Okhla sanctuary will soon be nothing more than a cherished memory.

According to Tarun Kumar Roy, coordinator of the Asian waterbird census of Wetlands International (WI), some 10,000 birds could be counted at the Okhla sanctuary a decade ago. “That number has now been reduced by half, to around 5,000 birds,” Roy told IPS.

Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit organisation, works to conserve wetlands and their resources for people and for the cause of biodiversity.

Roy, who has been working to get the Okhla sanctuary recognition as a site protected under the 1971 Ramsar Convention, says the dwindling bird numbers have dashed his hopes.

Other experts believe that it is still possible to gain recognition for the Okhla sanctuary as a Ramsar site so that it can benefit from international support through the treaty designed to stop encroachments on wetlands with ecological, economic, cultural, scientific and recreational significance.

“The fact that a good number of transcontinental migratory birds visit the Okhla sanctuary makes it an outstanding candidate for designation as a Ramsar site,” Faizi S. Faizi, who is a member of the expert committee on biodiversity and development at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS.

Faizi says it is helpful that the Okhla sanctuary has been certified as an ‘Important Bird Area’ by Birdlife International for its ornithological importance.

Gopal Krishna, coordinator of Toxics Watch, a major environment group based in the capital, said it is up to the ministry of environment and forests to get the Okhla sanctuary rated as a Ramsar site. “If the ministry has failed in this regard it is only due to pressure from the powerful construction and real estate lobbies,” Krishna told IPS.

“It is hard to believe that the officials of the ministry are unaware of encroachments into a national sanctuary located barely five kilometres away from its offices,” said Krishna.

“How could, for example, a heavily polluting waste-to-energy incinerator come up on the edge of the park without ministry clearance?”

Krishna said the future of the Okhla sanctuary now rests greatly on a series of cases filed by environmentalists and local residents at the National Green Tribunal, a special fast-track court that handles contentious cases relating to environmental issues.

“The most important of these cases relates to the waste-to-energy incinerator that has been functioning since January 2012 within the eco-sensitive zone of the Okhla sanctuary,” said Krishna. “A judicial commission of the tribunal has established that the emissions from the plant are 25 times above the permitted limit.”

In July, the school of environmental sciences at New Delhi’s Jawaharalal Nehru University released the results of a study that found the air around Okhla to be severely polluted with lead, nickel, cadmium and cobalt that could only have come from the incinerator.

“The high chimneys of the Okhla incinerator are a serious threat to migratory birds since they emit a range of toxic gases into their flight path,” said Roy.

On Aug. 14, the tribunal suspended further unauthorised construction in a 10-km wide eco-sensitive zone around the Okhla sanctuary, and ordered a fresh survey of the area by central and provincial authorities with a view to protecting it.

Faizi said the tribunal order has come not a moment too soon. “The Okhla waste-to-energy incinerator is absolutely unacceptable in this critical bird area and must be removed without further delay,” he said.

According to Roy, although the total number of visiting birds has declined, the range of bird species represented at the Okhla sanctuary appears to be increasing. “A total of 330 bird species has been recorded at the Okhla sanctuary, although some species are no longer being sighted.”

Feathered visitors to the Okhla sanctuary that figure on the ‘red-list’ of endangered bird species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature include the Ferruginous Duck, Black-tailed Godwit, River Lapwing, Egyptian Vulture, Oriental Darter, Painted Stork, Black-bellied Tern and Black-headed Ibis.

The tribunal is currently hearing multiple petitions asking for intervention against property developers, builders and a ‘sand mining mafia’ that defy existing rules that can help protect the Okhla sanctuary.

After it was discovered that illegal sand mining had caused the Jamuna to shift its course eastward, a crackdown involving seizures and arrests was carried out by Durga Shakthi Nagpal, administrator of Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Budh Nagar district in which much of the Okhla sanctuary falls.

But on Jul. 28, three months after the crackdown was launched, Nagpal was controversially suspended by her political bosses in what was widely seen as a backlash from the construction industry that uses large quantities of river sand for its cement and concrete mixes.

Faizi said that only a people’s movement could save the sanctuary, which acts as a ‘green lung’ for congested and polluted Delhi that is home to 20 million people. “Recognising the Okhla sanctuary as a Ramsar site would be the best way to generate public interest in protecting one of the world’s truly unique wetlands.”

A tribal widow in India bends over a wood fire making puffed rice. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

As managing director of the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation (NAFED), India’s apex agriculture marketing organisation, Sanjeev Chopra is in the thick of planned legislation to cover 800 million Indians under the world’s biggest food subsidy programme.

The new bill, whose implementation will cost 23 billion dollars annually, has been criticised as a ploy by the ruling Congress party to win votes in an election year.

Chopra, a top official in the ministry of agriculture, spoke with IPS correspondent Ranjit Devraj on the advantages and pitfalls of the Food Security Bill that, when passed in July, will make access to food a fundamental right in this country of 1.2 billion people.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: There are fears that the proposed Food Security Bill will undermine the existing public distribution system (PDS). Do you agree?

A: The Bill will not undermine the PDS. The basic change is that what has so far been a responsibility of the state governments will become that of the Central government. Further, provision of food will become a fundamental and enforceable right. This will, no doubt, increase the demands on the PDS system, and India will now have to invest far more in logistics, and infrastructure.

Q:  Almost daily we are inundated with images in the media of grain rotting in the open, exposed to the elements. What is your opinion on this, given widespread malnutrition and hunger in India, and the fact that the Supreme Court recently stepped in to order the distribution of free grain to starving people?

2. There can be no two views about the fact that rotting grain reflects poorly on India’s procurement and distribution system, as well as our inability to attract investments in this sector. The Planning Commission has attached high priority to creating warehousing infrastructure. The solution is not free distribution because this distorts the market, and makes farming for the marginal and small farmers less remunerative. A better response would be exports, or food assistance to countries where crops have failed on account of drought or excessive rainfall.

Q: Are there remedies to this glaring shortfall in governance?

A: Procurement systems require massive investments in infrastructure. We need  grading machines at principal market yards which can clearly give information about moisture, admixtures, average grain size, colour etc. These may come up in the private sector – which will ensure that manpower and maintenance issues will not be a hassle for the government. NAFED encourages its member organisations to get the grain graded in these machines, which will usher in transparency in procurement.

As for distribution we need to leverage technology. This ranges from ensuring weekly delivery schedules to informing all stakeholders over mobile phones about stock availability. While governments have to address the supply side, civil society, media and panchayats (village councils) have to ensure ‘effective demand’.

There are also structural issues like provision of liberal credit to the PDS dealer, improving his profit margins, and giving him an incentive to report off-take. The PDS dealer has to be treated as an integral part of the PDS system, not as an adversary.

Q: How do you propose to balance the interests of traders, including exporters, and small and marginalised farmers who seem to be at the short end of the stick (as witnessed in the exodus from rural areas to the cities)?

A: Intermediaries exist at all levels because they add ‘value’ – it may be argued that it is not value for money. Information technology can reduce the cost of information and intermediation. In states like Punjab and Haryana, which lead agricultural production, the influence of the intermediaries on the political economy of grain procurement is very strong. Thus there is a real conflict of interest and the government is trying to address it through cooperatives and farmer-producer organisations.

Q:  Once access to food becomes a right, the political economy of production will empower the large and medium farmers, who will depend on fertilisers and farm equipment to meet the state’s requirement of food grain to be procured under PDS. How can this be addressed?

The Small Farmers Agri-Business Consortium – an agency of the ministry of agriculture – is helping farmers (form) farmer-producer organisations to leverage inputs at competitive rates, and market their produce collectively.

Two funds have been specially created for these producer companies – the Equity Fund to provide matching equity and a credit guarantee fund to cover collateral-free loans. These interventions should reduce the dependence of marginal and small farmers on the intermediaries – but this is a process, and will take a few years to pan out.

Q: India has seen a steady migration from the rural to urban areas. Is this healthy?

A: Migration from rural to urban is the natural order of things when economies make the transition from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial one or, in India’s case, a post-industrial society. The growth in services and manufacturing, ipso facto, has to be higher than growth in core agriculture.

However, efforts need to be made to improve the profitability of agricultural production – by reducing the cost of credit, by improved marketing and public investments in infrastructure.

Q: The new Bill will increase the demand for fertilisers, thereby increasing the fertiliser subsidy and making India more dependent on imports. With the rupee sinking in value, what are the long term implications for India?

A: The dependence on fertiliser, especially imported fertiliser, will grow, at least in the short run. The ministry is trying to move towards a nutrient-based subsidy regime – but if the rupee continues to slide, the situation will indeed be very challenging.

Excerpt:

India is home to 25 percent of the World’s Hungry. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

As India’s Parliament prepares to pass a bill to provide heavily subsidised food to 810 million people, there are misgivings over its implementation through a notoriously corrupt public distribution system (PDS).

The National Food Security Bill will be debated and passed at a specially convened session of parliament, ahead of the regular monsoon session that begins mid-July.

"Villages (are) building community grain banks and becoming food secure. All that the government has to do is support and foster local self-help groups and replicate this model." -- Devinder Sharma
Opposition legislators will not stop the bill’s passage, but they are already criticising its high cost – estimated at 23 billion dollars annually – as an attempt to win cheap popularity for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in an election year.

Critics of the bill include members of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party as well as India’s communist parties in the Left Front, with the latter demanding that all of India’s 1.2 billion people be covered under a revamped ‘universal PDS’.

“We want amendments to the bill to ensure that there are no leakages through the creation of bogus categories of people such as those living below the poverty line and those living above it,”  D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), told IPS.

According to Raja, while India certainly needs a food security law, implementing it through the existing PDS will only provide more opportunities for corrupt traders and officials to siphon out money from a dysfunctional system.

Government reports have shown that at least 50 percent of the grain channeled through the PDS – consisting essentially of a network of  50,000 fair price shops – is cornered by traders who then either sell the same grain in the open market at high profits, or export it.

Traders have even been caught selling subsidised grain right back to the government’s procurement agents in connivance with corrupt officials of the state-run Food Corporation of India.

“What is needed is a strengthening of the existing PDS which has become notorious for leakages that have been working to deny poor people access to food, defeating the purpose for which it was created,” Raja said.

That India needs to overhaul its PDS is painfully obvious from the fact that each year its granaries overflow with bumper harvests of wheat and rice, which are allowed to rot in the rain while large numbers of people go hungry.

Over the last decade, the average food grain surplus every year has been around 60 million tonnes. In 2012, the surplus stood at 82.3 million tonnes and this year, with a favourable monsoon underway, a 90 million-tonne surplus is predicted.

The government deals with the surpluses by allowing exports – about 10 million tonnes each of wheat and rice were exported last year – a practice that left-wing politicians and food security experts criticise as unconscionable when thousands of Indians go hungry.

Resolving the paradox of starvation amidst plenty has become a priority, what with India finding itself castigated by the World Food Programme of the United Nations for being home to 25 percent of the world’s hungry.

According to a 2012 report by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has lagged in improving its Global Hunger Index (GHI) rating despite strong economic growth.

In India, 43.5 percent of children under five are underweight, giving it an unenviable GHI ranking of 65 among 79 countries surveyed. From 2005 to 2010, India ranked below Ethiopia, Niger, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

The new bill aims to rectify that situation by distributing some 50 million tonnes of grain to 360 million people, categorised as living below the poverty line, at about 10 percent of prices prevailing in the open market.

According to the World Bank, 32.7 percent of Indians live below the international poverty line of 1.25 dollars per day while another 68.7 percent live on less than two dollars per day.

But India’s Planning Commission places the poverty line far lower than the international level and calculates it at a pitiable 28.65 rupees (about five cents) worth of daily consumption per head in the cities and 22.42 rupees (four cents) in the rural areas.

“People at such a low level of consumption are not just poor they are in need of emergency food aid,” says Devinder Sharma, one of India’s best-known food security experts and leader of the respected Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.

Sharma told IPS that it would be impossible to sustain the massive feeding programme envisaged in the bill for more than a few years. “It really does look as if the new policy is designed with a view to win votes in general elections due in May 2014.”

Sharma blames the phenomenon of hunger in India on colossal mismanagement and consistently poor policies. “How else can you explain the paradox of hunger existing for years alongside exports and rotting grain?”

According to Sharma, the government should be addressing hunger through a community approach that builds capacities to become self-reliant rather than depending on doles and subsidies from the government.

“There are many examples of villages building community grain banks and becoming food secure. All that the government has to do is support and foster local self-help groups and replicate this model,” Sharma said.

India should be focusing its efforts on rejuvenating agriculture through a programme aimed at restoring soil fertility, reviving groundwater levels, and stopping the destruction of rich natural resources through unsustainable farming practices.

Most importantly, farmers need to be assured a monthly income. “Since farmers generate wealth in the form of agricultural commodities they should be adequately compensated rather than driven to suicide in droves.”

Sharma believes that India’s farmers have suffered as a result of agricultural imports under World Trade Organisation rules and free trade agreements. “For example, it is senseless to flood the country with duty-free imported edible oils when Indian farmers are capable of meeting the country’s needs.”

Banana vendors in Chennai, South India. Credit: McKay Savage/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

India’s environmental and food security activists who have so far succeeded in stalling attempts to introduce genetically modified (GM) food crops into this largely farming country now find themselves up against a bill in parliament that could criminalise such opposition.

"If the new bill is passed...it will only be a matter of time before India becomes a GM banana republic." -- Devinder Sharma
The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) bill, introduced into parliament in April, provides for ‘single window clearance’ for projects by  biotechnology and agribusiness companies including those to bring GM food crops into this country, 70 percent of whose 1.1 billion people are involved in agricultural activities.

“Popular opposition to the introduction of GM crops is the result of a campaign launched by civil society groups to create awareness among consumers,” said Devinder Sharma, food security expert and leader of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. “Right now we are opposing a plan to introduce GM bananas from Australia.”

Sharma told IPS that if the BRAI bill becomes law such awareness campaigns will attract stiff penalties. The bill provides for jail terms and fines for “whoever, without any evidence or scientific record misleads the public about the safety of organisms and products…”

Suman Sahai, who leads ‘Gene Campaign’, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of genetic resources and indigenous knowledge, told IPS that “this draconian bill has been introduced in parliament without taking into account evidence constantly streaming in from around the world about the safety risks posed by GM food crops.”

She said that Indian activists are now studying a new report published in the peer-reviewed Organic Systems Journal by Judy Carmen at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, showing evidence that pigs fed on GM corn and soy are likely to develop severe stomach inflammation.

“The new bill is not about regulation, but the promotion of the interests of food giants trying to introduce risky technologies into India, ignoring the rights of farmers and consumers,” Sahai said. “It is alarming because it gives administrators the power to quell opposition to GM technology and criminalise those who speak up against it.”

The past month has seen stiff opposition to plans to introduce GM bananas into India by a group of leading NGOs that includes the Initiative for Health & Equity in Society, Guild of Services, Azadi Bachao Andolan, Save Honey Bees Campaign, Navdanya and Gene Ethics in Australia.

These groups are seeking cancellation of a deal between the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and India’s biotechnology department to grow GM bananas here.

Vandana Shiva, who leads the biodiversity conservation organisation Navdanya, and is among India’s top campaigners against GM crops, told IPS that such food crop experiments pose a “direct threat to India’s biodiversity, seed sovereignty, indigenous knowledge and public health by gradually replacing diverse crop varieties with a few patented monocultures.”

She fears that an attempt is being made to control the cultivation of bananas in India through patents by “powerful men in distant places, who are totally ignorant of the biodiversity in our fields.”

India produces and consumes 30 million tonnes of bananas annually, followed by Uganda which produces 12 million tonnes and consumes the fruit as a staple.

India’s National Research Centre for Banana (NRCB), which has preserved more than 200 varieties of the fruit, is a partner in the GM banana project. Others include the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

With so much official involvement there are fears that GM bananas may eventually find their way into nutrition programmes run by the government. “There is a danger that GM bananas will be introduced into such programmes as the integrated child development scheme and the midday meals for children,” Shiva said.

India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the world’s largest integrated early childhood programme, began in 1975 and now covers 4.8 million expectant and nursing mothers and over 23 million children under the age of six. Bananas are included as part of the meals served in many of the 40,000 feeding centres.

QUT’s Prof. James Dale, who leads the project, has, in interviews given to Australian media, justified the GM experiment by saying that it will “save Indian women from childbirth death due to iron deficiency.”

According to studies conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, more than 50 percent of Indian women and more than 55 percent of  pregnant women in India are anaemic. It is estimated that 25 percent of maternal deaths are due to complications arising out of anemia.

In a Mar. 9, 2012 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dale said, “One of the major reasons around iron is that a large proportion of the Indian population are vegetarians and it’s very difficult in a vegetarian diet to have intake of sufficient iron, particularly for subsistence farming populations.

“India is the largest producer of bananas in the world but they don’t export any; all of them are consumed locally. So it’s a very good target to be able to increase the amount of iron in bananas that can then be distributed to…the poor and subsistence farmers.”

Dale denied in the interview that there were risks to existing Indian banana strains and said because bananas were sterile there is no danger that the genes being introduced will enter and destroy other varieties.

But experts like Shiva have challenged Dale’s claim. She said Australian scientists are using a virus that infects the banana as a promoter and that this could spread through horizontal gene transfer.

“All genetic modification uses genes from bacteria and viruses and various studies have shown that there are serious health risks associated with GM foods,” she stressed, adding that there are safer, cheaper and more natural ways to add iron to diets.

India is the world’s biggest grower of fruits and vegetables with many varieties naturally rich in iron. “Good sources of dietary iron in India included turmeric, lotus stem, coconut, mango (and) amaranth…there is no need to genetically modify banana, a sacred plant in India,” she said.

Attempts by IPS to contact Dale directly and separately through QUT’s press relations department on the risks from horizontal gene transfer and the possible danger to public health failed to elicit any response.

According to Shiva there is a concerted move by food corporations to control important food crops and staples in their centres of origin. “We have seen GM corn introduced into Mexico and there was a determined attempt to introduce GM brinjal in India.”

In February 2010, the then minister for environment, Jairam Ramesh, ordered a moratorium on the brinjal project and his action was seen as a major blow to the introduction of GM food crops in India.

“If the new bill is passed, we could have a reversed situation and projects like GM bananas will be quickly cleared with the backing of the government – and it will only be a matter of time before India becomes a GM banana republic,” Sharma said.

Police accost women protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 23 2013 (IPS)

For years India’s pro-liberalisation, Congress party-led coalition government chafed at civil society groups getting in the way of grand plans to boost growth through the setting up of mega nuclear power parks, opening up the vast mineral-rich tribal lands to foreign investment and selling off public assets.

Now, at the end of its tether, the Interior Ministry has cracked the whip on hundreds of non-governmental organisations engaged in activities that “prejudicially affect the public interest.”

"...The government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent." -- Achin Vanaik
On Apr. 30 several NGOs were informed that the bank accounts through which they receive foreign funding had been frozen.

“It is shocking what the government has done – but not surprising given the increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic and repressive measures being directed…against anyone who is seen to challenge or disagree with their positions and decisions,” Lalita Ramdas, anti-nuclear campaigner and board chair of Greenpeace International, told IPS.

Ramdas said NGOs concerned with nuclear power, human rights, environment and ecology – areas where corporate and industrial interests were likely to be questioned – appeared to be particular targets of the government order.

Among the worst affected is the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), a network of more than 700 NGOs that is currently challenging, in the Supreme Court, the government’s restrictions on foreign funding reaching groups that engage in activities that can be described as “political” in nature.

In its court petition INSAF described itself as an organisation that believes that “the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India need to be safeguarded against blatant and rampant violations by the State and private corporations.”

INSAF said it has “actively campaigned against land grabs by corporations, ecological disaster by mining companies, water privatisation, genetically modified foods, hazardous nuclear power (and) anti-people policies of international financial institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.”

INSAF declared in court that it “firmly believes in a secular and peaceful social order and opposes communalism and the targeted attacks on the lives and rights of people including religious minorities, and regularly organises campaigns, workshops, conventions, fact-findings, people’s tribunals, solidarity actions for people’s movements and educational publications.”

“With that kind of a profile we were expecting this crackdown,” Anil Chaudhary, coordinator of INSAF, told IPS. “Still, the government could have waited for the Supreme Court verdict.”

“At this rate,” he said, “organisations working against discrimination of women and (advocating) for their empowerment through participation in local bodies could be termed “political”, as (well as) organisations working for farmers’ rights.

“The same arbitrariness can be applied to green NGOs trying to protect the environment against mindless industrialisation.”

Chaudhary thinks it unfair that NGOs critical of government policies are being singled out. “Instead of selectively freezing the funding of groups under INSAF, the government should order a blanket ban on all foreign funding.”

Among INSAF’s many campaigns is an intiative to bring international financial institutions like the World Bank under legislative scrutiny for their activities in India.

It cannot have escaped the government’s attention that INSAF’s campaigns have run parallel to powerful movements for transparency and clean governance led by social activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the Aam Admi Party (Common Man’s Party) that plans to contest general elections due in 2014.

Kejriwal, whose social activity led to the passage of the 2005 Right to Information Act, has also been closely associated with transparency campaigns led by Anna Hazare, who mounted a Gandhian-style fast against corruption in April 2011 that rallied over 100,000 ordinary people.

Street protests demanding good governance have since been a thorn in the side of the government.  When they peaked in December 2012, following the gang rape of a young woman in a bus in the national capital, police took to beating protestors.

The government, starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has also been frustrated by NGOs’ efforts to stall work on a string of mega nuclear parks along peninsular India’s long coastline, especially at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

In February, the government froze the accounts of two leading Tamil Nadu-based NGOs allegedly associated with the protests at the site of the Kudankulam plant, signalling a new and tough stance against civil society groups fighting the displacement of farmers and fishermen by mega development projects.

The two NGOs, the Tuticorin Diocesan Association and the Tamil Nadu Social Service Society, received four million and eight million dollars respectively over a five-year period that ended in 2011, according to declarations they made to the government.

With strong backing from the Church, the groups continue to operate despite the freeze on their assets.

During the same five-year period a total of about 22,000 NGOs across India received roughly two billion dollars in foreign contributions, going by government records.

Unexpected protests have surfaced from among the Congress party’s partners in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Devi Prasad Tripathi, general secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party and member of parliament, reminded Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that the UPA is “committed to protecting and promoting secular, democratic and progressive forces in the country.”

“Effectively, the government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent,” commented Achin Vanaik, professor of political science at the Delhi University.

The government’s move stands in stark contrast to promises made not two years ago at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, where 159 governments and member organisations honoured the vital role played by the non-profit sector by pledging to foster an “empowering” climate for civil society.

In his most recent report to the United Nations General Assembly, Maina Kiai, special rapporteur on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, noted with grave concern that India has repressed “peaceful protestors advocating economic, social and cultural rights, such as…local residents denouncing the health impact of nuclear power plants.”

A woman is attacked by police at an anti-rape protest in New Delhi. Credit: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Harsh police handling of public protests erupting across India over a spate of sensational rapes since December has resulted in renewed demands to reform a force that retains the repressive features of its colonial origins.

Last month a bench of the Supreme Court, angered by police brutality on women protesting against rapes in the capital, New Delhi, and other north Indian states, demanded to know the status of compliance with rulings the apex court had made on police reforms six years ago.

“Even an animal won’t do what the police officers are doing everyday in different parts of the country,” the bench said, referring, among other things, to the beating up by police of a 65-year-old woman who had joined protests against rape in Aligarh, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “How can police officers beat an unarmed lady?”

Justice G.S. Singhvi, leading the bench, singled out the case of a police officer slapping a young woman participating in protests on Apr. 19 outside a Delhi hospital where a five-year-old girl was being treated for serious injuries inflicted on her by her rapist in the Gandhi Nagar area of the capital.

“The police can do little to reduce crimes like rape, but they should be judged by how they react to such crimes,” said Jyotiswaroop Pandey, who retired last year as director-general of police in the northern Uttarakhand state and is currently a member of the police reforms commission.

Pandey told IPS that it was “unacceptable” that police failed to react to complaints of misbehaviour against a bus driver on Dec. 16, 2012.  Hours later, the driver and his crew were arrested for the gang rape and brutalisation of a 23-year-old woman passenger.

The victim and her male companion were flung off the bus and left lying in a busy Delhi street naked and bleeding for almost an hour with no passer-by daring to intervene for fear of getting embroiled in a lengthy police case.

As public protests grew, authorities moved the young woman to a Singapore hospital where she succumbed to her grievous injuries on Dec. 29. In Delhi, police resorted to water cannons, baton charges and mass arrests as protesters surged towards parliament.

Commenting on the rough treatment of protesters, Pandey said the police had “forgotten that their primary focus should have been on maintaining peace and order without resorting to force or behaviour likely to exacerbate tensions when an empathetic attitude could have quietened tempers.”

Even more than the brutal repression on the streets, rights activists are concerned with the way rape victims are treated at police stations, starting with refusals to record complaints.

In December, the victim of a gang rape in Patiala, Punjab state, committed suicide by consuming poison after leaving behind a note charging police with failing to act on her complaint and, instead, intimidating her.

Soon after she was raped by three men, the victim had appeared on television channels describing her ordeal, but that failed to rouse the police. Even after the suicide it took intervention by the Punjab high court before authorities moved to sack three policemen and initiate criminal proceedings against them.

In a press note released on Apr. 23, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a major non-government organisation that is pushing for police reforms, expressed “serious concern at the continuing lack of response to victims of rape.”

CHRI said evidence of this failure could be seen in the way police handled the case of a five-year-old girl who was kidnapped and raped in Delhi last month.

Instead of registering the missing person complaint, police “simply drove the distraught parents away,” the CHRI press note said, adding that policemen even offered a bribe to prevent the family from taking their story to the media.

Even the new rape laws, which threaten police officers who refuse to record a complaint of rape with a two-year jail sentence, seem to have done nothing to change attitudes and behaviours, said CHRI Director Maja Daruwala.

The new law, drawn up after wide consultations with civil society, takes into consideration current thinking on gender issues and existing patriarchal attitudes in society to modify ideas ingrained in the Indian Penal Code that was introduced by the British colonial regime in 1860.

Recent events show that the law, passed by parliament on Mar. 20, is yet to kick in. “Changes in law brought about after the Dec.16 rape have little meaning if the police continue to defeat justice through their…subversive practices,” Daruwala said.

Also, while the changes provide for quicker trials and harsher punishments for rapists, they have been criticised for completely overlooking the burning need to modernise the police force to make it service-oriented rather than repressive, as desired by the Supreme Court.

“If the 2006 directives of the Supreme Court were adopted and implemented they could have transformed the police from a feared and distrusted force into an essential service upholding the law,” says Navaz Kotwal, coordinator of CHRI’s police reforms programme.

On Mar. 6, alerted by reports in the media of the police’s repeated high-handedness in dealing with anti-rape protests, the Supreme Court issued notices to the provinces to report on progress in implementing reforms.

But senior police officers are sceptical. “Even though the apex court has not given up its monitoring, the present bunch of police reforms is already a futile exercise,” says Vikash Narain Rai, former director-general of police in the northern Haryana state.

Rai told IPS that if police reforms are to be successful they need to be accompanied by “judicial reforms, an overhaul of correctional services and real empowerment of society.”

Rai regrets that the emphasis remains on “flexing state muscles through increased retribution and protectionism, essentially by-products of male chauvinism, rather than on sensitising criminal justice functionaries and empowering women.”

Women protesting against a proposed nuclear plant at Mithi Virdi in the Indian state Gujarat. Credit: Krishnakant/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 25 2013 (IPS)

Bhagwat Singh Gohil frets for the future of his bountiful orchards in Mithi Virdi village in western Gujarat state’s coastal district Bhavnagar. “After contending with droughts, rough seas and earthquakes we are staring at the possibility of a man-made disaster in the shape of a nuclear power park.”

Speaking with IPS over telephone from Mithi Virdi, Gohil said he and other villagers are unconvinced by official declarations guaranteeing the safety of the Gujarat Nuclear Power Park (GNPP) which, when complete, is due to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity.

“They could not have chosen a worse site for a mega nuclear power plant – we have a history of earthquakes and fear a Fukushima type disaster in the Gulf of Khambat where the GNPP is coming up,” said Gohil. “Also, Gujarat borders Pakistan, a hostile neighbour. What if this nuclear facility is bombed in a future war?”

On Mar. 5  Gohil and some 5,000 villagers silently walked out of a public hearing  held by the local administration seeking approval for construction for the GNPP which is due to be equipped with six Westinghouse-Toshiba nuclear reactors, each with a 1,000 megawatt capacity.

“We did not want to be party to an illegal public hearing that was seeking endorsement for an environment impact assessment (EIA) report that was flawed and ignored many safety aspects which we are soon going to publish in a parallel document,” Rohit Prajpati, leader of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (Environment Protection Group), a voluntary agency active in Gujarat told IPS.

“To begin with, the EIA was drawn up by Engineers India Limited (EIL), a public sector consultancy that does not have the required accreditation – a fact which is apparent on the government’s own website,” Prajapti said. “An attempt was made to hoodwink the villagers, but they did not buy it.”

According to the terms of reference, EIL was supposed to carry out a detailed risk assessment and provide a disaster management plan, but the final document avoids that responsibility. “We have made written protests about this flawed EIA to the environment ministry,” Prajapati said.

According to V. T. Padmanabhan, independent researcher and member of the Brussels-based European Commission on Radiation Risk, basic safety aspects are being glossed over in the EIAs in the rush to set up a string of nuclear parks along India’s vast coastline.

“The EIA drawn up for the Mithi Virdi project, for instance, ignores the fact that there has been no study conducted on maximum flood levels – and that in an area that is seriously prone to tidal floods,” Padmanabhan told IPS.

On Mar. 6, answering questions in parliament concerning the new nuclear parks, V. Narayanswamy, minister in the prime minister’s office, said coastal nuclear power parks are designed with consideration given to possible earthquakes, tsunamis, storm surges and tidal flooding.

“Safety is a moving target in nuclear power plants and is continuously evolving based on the reviews by utilities and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB)  besides internationally evolving standards,” Narayanaswamy informed parliament.

But, it is not just the villagers and activists who are worried at the haste with which the public sector Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) is going about setting up coastal nuclear power projects – the courts have been lending a sympathetic ear to the protestors.

On Mar. 12, the high court of the southern Andhra Pradesh state halted plans for a 9,000 megawatt nuclear park at Kovvada in coastal Srikakulam district following a petition filed on behalf of local residents and fishermen by J. Rama Rao, a retired naval engineer.

The high court took notice of the petitoners’ plea that the government was going about attempting to acquire land for the 6,000 megawatt nuclear facility even though the project is yet to gain clearance from the AERB.

Kovvada villagers have been on a relay hunger strike since December 2012 against the proposed nuclear power plant. Their petition cited the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear meltdowns to say that in the event of an accident, future generations would be affected by radiation contamination.

But, in spite of the protests and intervention by the court the government appears determined to push ahead with plans to generate 40 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2020, most of it from nuclear parks in various stages of completion along India’s peninsular coastline.

Narayanasamy stated in parliament that electricity will begin to flow from the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) in southern Tamil Nadu by April. The KNPP, which is designed to generate 9,200 megawatts, has been in the making since 1988 when a deal was signed for its construction between India and Russia.

KNPP is yet to have valid Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) clearances. Last November, NPCIL also admitted in the Supreme Court that it had constructed a desalination plant without mandatory environmental clearance, showing how existing rules are being bypassed.

“CRZ clearance is not a technical formality, but an important procedure designed to protect India’s sensitive coastal region,” said Padmanabhan, adding that the haste in setting up coastal nuclear plants contrasts with the bureaucratic red tape that India is known for.

“What we are seeing is a repeat of the Fukushima experience where investigations by a parliamentary committee have shown that although triggered by a tsunami, the meltdown of the rectors was man-made and a result of collusion between the government, the regulators and the utility Tokyo Electric Power Company,” Padmanabhan said.

Poor governance and lack of independent regulatory oversight in the construction of nuclear plants have already been pointed out by the Comptroller and Auditor General, India’s powerful government watchdog.

After one of the six males under trial for the rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old woman was deemed an adolescent and therefore entitled to leniency, juvenile rights activists have found themselves pitted against irate members of the public demanding death sentences for all the perpetrators.

The brutal rape committed on Dec. 16 aboard a bus plying in the Indian capital sparked widespread outrage and calls for summary trial and maximum punishments, including for the adolescent, a member of the attackers who was yet to reach 18 years of age and cannot be tried as an adult under existing Indian law.

The incident prompted calls to reduce the age when an offender may be considered a juvenile delinquent to 16. A petition filed in the Delhi High Court by political leader Subramanian Swamy demanded that the adolescent (who may not be named under the law) be tried as an adult. The demand was turned down.

“What is being missed here is that the accused was one of the more than 80,000 child labourers in the capital and never had a chance to get an education or a decent life since he was ten years old,” says Bhuwan Ribu, a lawyer known for his work with the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) or the ‘Save Childhood Movement’.

According to Ribu, the adolescent was also a victim of trafficking, that the BBA has been fighting alongside its campaigns over child labour. It has been demanding that the government implement existing laws that guarantee the right to education for all Indian children.

“The laws exist only on paper and these include laws passed in 2006 seeking to prevent children from being employed as domestic help and in roadside restaurants,” said Ribu.

Surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) do show a declining trend. While the NSSO estimated that there were nine million child workers in India in 2005, the numbers had declined to about five million by 2010.

Over the last three years the ministry, under its National Child Labour Project (NCLP), says it has rescued and rehabilitated 354,877 child labourers and launched 25,006 prosecutions that resulted in convictions for 3,394 employers.

“Most offenders get away with token fines because they bribe officials to apply laws that carry punishments that are not as tough as those prescribed for violating child labour laws,” said Ribu.

Swami Agnivesh, an activist who leads the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (BMM), or Bonded Labour Liberation Front, says there are practical difficulties in securing convictions for violating child labour laws. “The judicial process is tardy and our focus is on rehabilitating the victims and getting them back to school.”

Agnivesh who has served as chairperson of the United Nations Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery told IPS that the government appeared unable to implement laws that deal with child labour although various studies have shown that it is a factor in perpetuating poverty, illiteracy and unemployment in India.

Agnivesh said that but for international pressure factory owners would have continued to employ children in industries that involve hazardous substances such as glass, matches, fireworks, tobacco, cement and bricks.

“We believe that in spite of the laws more than 12 million children below the age of 14 are still working as domestic help or in stone quarries, mines or in the hospitality business,” Agnivesh said.

“The NSSO figures are gross underestimations and there are no government mechanisms for carrying out inspections on industries that employ children and prosecute influential employers,” he said.

One difficulty in prosecuting erring employers, said Agnivesh, is the difficulty in proving the identities and age of children who are trafficked to cities like Delhi from remote villages.

In the case of the adolescent facing rape charges investigators relied on records provided by the principal of the school where he studied in the district of Badaun, 220 km east of the capital, to establish his age. But that did not stop calls for having him tried as an adult.

In an open letter published in the Hindustan Times newspaper on Jan. 15, Minna Kabir, a child rights worker and wife of Altamas Kabir, India’s chief justice, said “every society is responsible for the well being and care of its children up to the age of 18 years, especially if they are marginalised, helpless and powerless to do anything for themselves.”

According to Kabir, most children come into crime “because we have failed to provide them with even a basic support system.” She listed poverty, faulty peer groups, dysfunctional families, an empty stomach and exploitative adults among the reasons.

Child rights activists are now looking to amendments due to be made in existing child labour laws through the child and adolescent labour bill that is expected to be passed in Parliament during the budget session which opens on Feb. 22.

The bill seeks to prohibit employing anybody below 18 years in hazardous occupations and all employment of children below the age of 14. Children between 14-18 years are to be defined as “adolescents” in the amended law.

With child labour a major obstacle in getting children into education, the amended laws are expected to help implementation of free and compulsory education up to the age of 14, under a 2009 law.

More than 100,000 Indian citizens have signed an e-petition by the BBA and the Global March Against Child Labour supporting the new child labour law as part of a campaign to get India to ratify International Labour Organisation conventions. (End)

Local people protest over the Koodankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K.S.Harikrishnan.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jan 25 2013 (IPS)

When India was admitted to the world’s nuclear power industry nearly five years ago, many believed that this country had found a way to quickly wean itself away from dependence on coal and other fossil fuels that power its economic growth.

After all, India already had a home-grown nuclear power industry that was producing about 4,000 megawatts of power from 19 nuclear reactors, defying a United States-led embargo on nuclear equipment imposed after it carried out a nuclear test in 1974.

India’s refusal to sign the 189-nation Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was also a cause for its isolation. It took a special waiver in September 2008 by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of 47 member countries to allow India to engage in nuclear commerce.

With the embargos lifted, India’s planners envisaged a string of ‘nuclear parks’ built along the long peninsular coastline by foreign investors adding 40 gigawatts (Gw) of additional power by 2020.

What the planners overlooked was stiff opposition from farmers and fishers, fearful for their traditional way of life and livelihoods, the possibility of adverse seismic events, and a challenge to the nuclear energy plans in the Supreme Court by leading intellectuals.

“There was little doubt that the plan to build numerous nuclear plants all along the coast would run into problems,” says M.V. Ramana, a scientist currently appointed with the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and with the Programme on Science and Global Security, both at the Princeton University in the U.S.

“Because of intensifying conflicts over natural resources, opposition to new nuclear sites will only get intensified in the future. Water scarcity, for example, is becoming more severe by the year,” Ramana told IPS in an email interview.

“Fisherfolk are already seeing their livelihoods threatened by a number of developments – industrial and power plant effluents being discharged into the sea is an important one,” Ramana said.

Currently there are intense protests at Jaitapur in western Maharashtra state where a 9,900 MW nuclear park is being built by the French power developer Areva SA, and also at Koodankulam in southern Tamil Nadu state where a Russian nuclear power facility is nearing completion.

Ramana said displacement is a major issue. “The treatment meted out to those dispossessed by nuclear facilities already commissioned has been less than satisfactory.”

What should nuclear planners do to address the growing domestic opposition to nuclear energy?

“To start with, the planners should realise that the country has a choice between their ambitious plans and democracy,” says Ramana. “The fact that we have seen intense and prolonged protests at Koodankulam and Jaitapur is a sign that all other options for registering their voice have been closed to the people.”

A bigger issue looming up is the possibility of a Fukushima-style disaster, especially at Jaitapur, a site eminent geologists say is vulnerable to seismic activity.

Vinod Kumar Gaur, one of India’s leading seismologists and a distinguished professor at the prestigious Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, says site investigations around Jaitapur were seriously flawed.

According to Gaur, it is hugely significant that the Jaitapur site is only about 110 km from the Koyna dam which developed serious cracks after it was hit in 1967 by a quake that measured 6.4 on the Richter scale.

It is also significant, Gaur said, that in the year 1524 a major tsunami had hit the western coast 100 km north of Jaitapur. The possibility of a tsunami caused by offshore faulting or a distant earthquake was not discussed in existing studies.

Gaur told IPS that “confirmation or refutation through scientific investigations is critical to determining the seismic safety factor for the Jaitapur plant, and the recent earthquake in Japan has demonstrated that it is relevant to plan for all possibilities when it comes to designing nuclear power plants.

“Equally important,” Gaur said, was for “the results of scientific investigations to be made public so as to allay the fears that people have.”

Ramana said it was time that India’s secretive Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) engaged in an honest and open debate over its nuclear plans with the country at large, in particular the people who live in the vicinity of proposed sites.

“DAE has to let go of scientifically indefensible positions like its claims that its reactors are ‘100 percent’ safe and that the probability of a nuclear accident is one in infinity, i.e., zero. There is always a non-zero, albeit small, possibility of a nuclear accident occurring at any reactor,” Ramana said.

“Setting up a reactor will affect the environment because of the expulsion of radioactive contaminants and hot water. How significant is the impact can be the subject of debate, not its existence.”

He added that “if the locals absolutely refuse to have a nuclear plant in their midst, then the DAE should cancel construction plans.”

The DAE has avoided holding public consultation called by the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) that is leading the resistance in Koodankulam.

“Holding public debates has become even more important after Fukushima,” S.P. Udayakumar, leader of PMANE since 1988, told IPS. “Fukushima has greatly helped our agitation and people understand the dangers better.”

“Given that civil society has repeatedly called for public debate, the prime minister should step in and hold consultations across the country on the relevance and role of a dangerous and expensive energy option,” said Karuna Raina, campaigner against nuclear energy for Greenpeace in India.

The biggest challenge yet to India’s ambitious nuclear plans is a writ petition filed in India’s Supreme Court in October 2011 by eminent citizens asking for the court’s intervention to stay all nuclear construction until safety reviews and cost-benefit analyses are carried out.

In its appeal to the court the group said the nuclear programme goes against the “fundamental right to life” guaranteed by India’s constitution.

While India has drastically reduced the spread of HIV over the past decade, new strains of the virus that cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) are troubling medical scientists in this country.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS, or UNAIDS, in its 2012 report, praises India for doing “particularly well” in halving the number of newly affected adults between 2000 and 2009.

But India – home to 2.4 million people living with HIV, one million of whom are on anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy – will need to pay attention to the proven fact that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type I (HIV-1), the most common and pathogenic strain of the virus, has been undergoing a process of fairly rapid viral evolution.

Of the various genetic families, HIV-1 subtype C is responsible for nearly 99 percent of infections in India and has a significant presence in China, South Africa and Brazil as well.

Now, scientists working at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore have found a family of five new strains of HIV-1 subtype C, two of which appear to be outstripping the standard viral strain.

“The study is the first of its kind to identify that a major family of HIV-1 is undergoing evolutionary modification,” Prof. Ranga Udaya Kumar of the molecular biology and genetics unit at JNCASR told IPS.

Kumar said that although the studies at the Centre do not show the new strains to be “more pathogenic”, there are reasons to believe that they are “more infectious”.

The results of the JNCASR study were first published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Nov. 6 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Biological Chemistry.

“The new viral strains appear to contain a stronger viral promoter,” said Mahesh Bachu, who led the team of researchers at JNCASR. A promoter is a region of DNA that codes for whichever protein the cell is trying to produce. In other words, a virus with a stronger promoter is expected to produce more ‘daughter viruses’ and spread faster in a host population.

“Importantly, in the laboratory experiments the new HIV strains were found to be making more daughter viruses compared to the standard viral strains,” Bachu said.

Retroviruses that cause AIDS reproduce by transcribing their ribonucleic acid (RNA) into DNA using an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. The resultant DNA inserts itself into a host cell’s DNA and is reproduced along with the cell and its daughters.

“In addition to making more daughter viruses, people infected with the new HIV strains seem to contain more virus in their blood,” Bachu told IPS, adding that data for the study was generated from 165 samples gleaned from hospitals in diverse parts of the country.

Collaborators in the study included the YRG Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE) in Chennai; St John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bangalore; the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences, Bangalore; and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi.

The clinical findings have been substantiated by laboratory experiments using viral, immune and molecular strategies, Bachu said. “A similar process of viral evolution has also been observed in South Africa, China and southern Brazil – countries that have the same family of HIV-1.”

Significantly, when Bachu and his team first observed the new strains, during earlier studies conducted from 2000 to 2003, their prevalence was quite low – approximately one to two percent of each of the five variants.

A decade later, the prevalence of three of the five new HIV-1 groups had multiplied, with one group increasing from two percent during the 2000-2003 period to 20-30 percent in 2010-2011.

According to Bachu, it is important that subjects infected with the newer 4-kappaB strains show more plasma virus in their blood than those infected with the existing 3-kappaB HIV strain.

“It is possible that a higher viral load permits an enhanced transmission advantage to 4-kappaB strains of HIV, contributing to successful spread of the new viruses,” Bachu said.

“The findings raise several questions with serious implications for viral fitness, evolution and disease management,” according to Kumar. “The most important of these concerns is the possibility of the new HIV strains altering the landscape of HIV demographics in India.”

Both Kumar and Bachu caution, however, that the JNCASR “data should be considered only as suggestive and not conclusive”.

JNCASR and its collaborators are now conducting observational clinical studies to determine if the new HIV strains are more infectious than the existing one.

“It is for clinical scientists to see if the new strains of HIV are likely to cause rapid disease progression to AIDS,” Dr. Nagalingeswaran Kumarasamy, chief medical officer at YRG Care, told IPS.

Kumarsamy said that, as things currently stand, there is no cause for alarm. “We need to further study the new strains and see, for example, if there is a need to start ARV therapy earlier than usual.”

One day after voting against a United Nations General Assembly draft resolution seeking to abolish the death penalty, India executed Pakistani national Mohammad Ajmal Kasab for the November 2008 terror rampage in Mumbai that left 166 people dead.

Kasab was executed Wednesday morning by hanging – the approved method for carrying out the death penalty in India. He was the sole survivor of a ten-man squad of armed militants who landed in Mumbai harbour on a terror mission after sailing out from the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

While the other nine were killed in firefights with Indian security forces, Kasab was pinned down and disarmed by policemen.

After pictures of him – snapped as he attacked Mumbai’s main railway station – were circulated around the world, he emerged as the face of the massacre, and a test of India’s capital punishment policy.

The country’s Supreme Court had, in 1983, ruled that the death penalty should be imposed only in “the rarest of rare cases.” Kasab was the first person to be executed since 2004.

Speaking to members of the press on Wednesday India’s foreign minister Salman Khurshid said Kasab’s was “certainly a rarest of the rare case”. He described the execution as a “sober, sombre duty that had to be carried out”.

In India, capital crimes, or crimes that merit the death sentence, include murder, gang robbery involving murder, and terrorist activities. Hanging sentences are carried out only after appeals are duly heard in higher courts and clemency denied by the government.

After Kasab’s 2010 death sentence was upheld by India’s Supreme Court, the case went before President Pranab Mukherjee who, following advice from the cabinet as is customary, denied clemency on Nov. 5, clearing the way for Wednesday’s execution.

On Tuesday, India had joined 39 other countries in voting against the General Assembly draft calling for a non-binding moratorium on executions, after insisting that every country had the sovereign right to frame its own legal system.

The draft resolution was adopted by the U.N. Third Committee on social and humanitarian issues with an overwhelming 110 countries voting in favour and 36 abstaining.

“It is unfortunate that India has voted against the moratorium, since this is a country that is capable of promoting progressive and liberal ideas in global forums,” Maja Daruwala, a leading campaigner against the death penalty, told IPS.

Daruwala, executive director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a New Delhi-based international non-governmental organisation, said, “India should be leading the movement for the realisation of a compassionate global society.”

Considering that several older death row cases are still under consideration for grant of clemency, Kasab’s case appears to have been disposed of quickly.

There are, according to the home ministry, 14 mercy petition cases now pending before the government, including that of Mohammed Afzal Guru, condemned for his role in the December 2001 terror attack on India’s parliament building.

Guru’s lawyer, Colin Gonsalves, says Kasab’s relatively quick hanging may have an effect on other pending death row cases in India.

“There should not be any death sentence at all, but Kasab’s was an extreme case,” Gonsalves, founder of the New Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) told IPS.

“Kasab’s case is a significant setback for the move towards complete abolition of the death penalty in India,” Prof. Anup Surendranath at the National Law University of New Delhi wrote in an opinion piece in The Hindu newspaper on Sep. 17.

“A profoundly hurt and grieving society, the guilt of the accused established through damning photographs and videos, wounded nationalism and the possible involvement of state actors across the border all contributed towards making Kasab’s case a strong validation of the need for the death penalty,” he wrote.

Gonsalves said he does not see India agreeing to any U.N. moratorium on the death penalty.

Human rights activists like Gonsalves and Daruwala are also concerned at the arbitrary application of the death penalty in the country – as borne out by an analysis of cases between 1950 and 2006 carried out by Amnesty International (AI) – and also by too many erroneous judgements.

In August, a group of 14 former judges sought the intervention of President Mukherjee to commute death sentences passed on 13 convicts, currently incarcerated in different jails across the country, on the grounds of erroneous judgements.

In their appeal the judges pointed out that the Supreme Court had itself admitted that at least seven of the sentences were awarded ‘per incuriam’ (out of error or ignorance) and did not fall in the “rarest of rare” category.

“Executions of persons wrongly sentenced to death will severely undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system and the authority of the state to carry out such punishments in future,” the appeal to the president said.

A court-appointed committee in India has called for a ten-year moratorium on field trials of GM crops. Credit: F Delventhal/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI , Oct 27 2012 (IPS)

Environmental activists are cautiously optimistic that a call by a court-appointed technical committee for a ten-year moratorium on open field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops will shelve plans to introduce bio-engineered foods in this largely agricultural country.

“We are now waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will accept the recommendations of its own committee at the next hearing on Oct. 29,” said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, a collective of agriculture scientists, economists, biotechnologists, farmers and environmentalists.

The committee – appointed in May to examine questions of safety raised in a petition filed by environmental activist Aruna Rodrigues – pointed to serious gaps in India’s present regulatory framework for GM crops in an interim report released on Oct. 18.

In particular, the committee was asked to look at open field trials of food crops spliced with genes taken from the soil bacterium Bacillus thurigiensis (Bt), an insecticide whose impact on human health is unknown.

Noting that there “have been several cases of ignoring problematic aspects of the data in the safety dossiers”, the committee suggested reexamination “by international experts who have the necessary experience”.

In February 2010, the then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had ordered a moratorium on Bt brinjal (also called aubergine or eggplant), based on a series of public hearings on the issue – though this was not extended to field trials of other Bt food crops.

A parliamentary standing committee on GM crops appeared to reflect the public mood when it recommended in August that GM crop trials be banned and future research conducted only under tight regulation.

“The government should see the writing on the wall. It is now amply clear that this country of 1.2 billion people, 70 percent of whom are dependent on agriculture, is strongly against the introduction of GM crops,” said Sharma.

According to Sharma wide publicity given to a recent study by French scientists led by Gilles-Eric Seralini at the University of Caen, which showed rats fed with GM corn developing tumours, has had an impact on the Indian public as well as scientists and experts.

In fact, the court’s committee has recommended that long-term and inter-generational studies on rodents be added to tests to be performed on all GM crops in India, whether approved or pending approval.

Sharma said the Supreme Court’s decision is bound to have a bearing on resistance in Europe to GM food crops, because of safety concerns. Spain is currently the only country in the European Union that grows a GM food crop and this is limited to GM corn to be used as animal feed.

Kavita Kuruganti, a consultant with the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, a Hyderabad-based organisation working on sustainable agriculture in partnership with non-government organisations, said it is significant that the court’s committee had called for reexamination of all biosafety data for approved and pipeline GM products.

The committee’s report contradicts advice from the prime minister’s scientific advisory council (SAC) on biotechnology and agriculture, which complained in an Oct. 9 release, “A science-informed, evidence-based approach is lacking in the current debate on biotechnologies for agriculture.”

But Kuruganti told IPS that the Supreme Court’s committee consisted entirely of distinguished scientists and that their opinions “cannot be dismissed as unscientific as they (have) rationalised each of their recommendations.”

Arguing in favour of introducing GM food crops in India, the SAC statement claimed:  “Land availability and quality, water, low productivity, drought and salinity, biotic stresses, post-harvest losses are all serious concerns that will endanger our food and nutrition security with potentially serious additional affects as a result of climate change.”

However, the SAC acknowledged, “There is concern about the costs at which seeds (from multinational companies that have patents on GM) are available to our farmers, particularly poor farmers.”

”The experience with non-food GM crops, particularly Bt cotton, has been that ordinary farmers do not benefit because of the high costs of seeds and inputs,” said Ramachandra Pillai, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha (All India Farmers Forum) that has 14 million members and is affiliated with the Marxist Communist Party of India.

Pillai told IPS that his party was not opposed to modern agricultural biotechnology, but wanted public-sector involvement because “right now the main driving force behind GM crops seems to be the profit motive, which may bypass such burning issues as food security, malnutrition, poverty alleviation and unemployment.”

Pillai said it was especially important to have government oversight in the case of GM food crops to dispel fears that the private sector was ignoring concerns around public safety.

The court-appointed committee has called for specifically designated and certified field trial sites, adequate preliminary testing and the creation of an independent panel of scientists to evaluate biosafety data on each GM crop in the pipeline.

Suman Sahai who leads Gene Campaign, a Delhi-based NGO, said the report has brought home the fact that the “existing regulatory system for introducing GM crops into the country was hugely compromised.”

Sahai told IPS that the regulatory authorities had, for example, ignored the interests of organic farmers who stand to be ruined if their crops are contaminated by GM crops, several of which are currently under development in India.

Based on India being a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol that recognises biodiversity as a long-term resource, the committee recommended a complete ban on field trials of crops for which India is a centre of origin or diversity, “as transgenics can contaminate and adversely affect biodiversity.”

“For the first time, there is potential legal backing to recommendations that other inquiries have thrown up, including those made by the parliamentary standing committee,” Kuruganti said.

“There is now a chance for monitoring to become a reality rather than just an existence on paper,” she said. “This will also make the deployment of technology into a credible, confidence-inspiring process – that is, once the Supreme Court accepts the recommendations of its committee and passes suitable orders.”

(END)

Fishermen dock their boats on a thin strip of sand at Kollam, in Kerala state of south India. Credit: Max Martin/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 3 2012 (IPS)

Far-flung South Asian communities, from the high Himalayan slopes to the Indian Ocean coasts, united in the face of extreme and uncertain weather, continue to hold on to the hope that the Rio+20 focus on disaster risk reduction (DRR) will positively influence national policies.

“There is hope in India, the biggest country in the region, that the final statement at the Rio+20 summit titled ‘The Future We Want’ gets translated into national policy before it is too late,” Vinod Chandra Menon, former member of India’s National Disaster Management Authority, told IPS.

Menon, now disaster management consultant to several international bodies, said the current severe drought in South Asia, caused by the failure of this year’s monsoon, should compel policy makers in the region to “walk the Rio+20 talk” and recognise that man-made activities are contributing to climate change.

“For decades there have been warnings that reckless extraction of groundwater was not only lowering the water table drastically but also disturbing the sensitive rain cycle of precipitation, condensation and recharge with serious consequences for rain-fed agriculture,” Menon said.

“It is not far-fetched to say that agricultural distress, marked by the spectacle of farmers committing suicide by the tens of thousands, is the result of an inability to translate climate change knowledge into policy,” Menon said.

According to G. Padmanabhan, emergency analyst and officer-in-charge of the disaster management unit at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New Delhi, the Rio+20 statement’s value lies in the call for “a renewed sense of urgency” and “adequate, timely and predictable resources” to build resilient communities.

“South Asia is exposed to a variety of hydro-meteorological hazards, and is high on the priority list for risk reduction measures, especially in the context of climate change,” Padmanabhan  said, adding that the DDR call has special relevance for South Asia.

The statement favoured integration of DRR with sustainable development policies and planning, strengthening of institutions and better preparedness, warning, response and recovery. It also stressed the importance of integrating DRR with climate change adaptation.

“Rather than merely focusing on mitigation and its physical aspects, Rio+ 20 invited countries to build resilience through a more holistic approach,” Padmanabhan told IPS.

Such an approach is backed by scientific perceptions.

A 2011 report of the UN climate panel — The IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) — noted that climate extremes and even a series of non-extreme events threaten people’s lives and livelihoods, making communities vulnerable and exposed to greater risks.

“A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent and duration of weather and climate extremes, and can result in unprecedented extremes,” noted a 2012 Climate & Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) report summarising SREX with an Asian perspective.

“Even without taking climate change into account, disaster risk will continue to increase in many countries as more vulnerable people and assets are exposed to weather extremes. In absolute terms, for example, Asia already has more than 90 percent of the global population exposed to tropical cyclones.”

The Climate Risk Index (CRI) 2012 compiled by the charity Germanwatch termed Bangladesh and Myanmar — along with Honduras — as “most affected” by extreme weather during 1991-2010.

In Bangladesh, 251 events over these 20 years caused an annual average of 7,814 deaths (5.51 per 100,000 inhabitants) and losses of 2,091 million dollars (on purchase level parity, or PPP, a relative value).

More than 80 percent of the deaths occurred in 1991 when 140,000 people died in a cyclone.

In Myanmar (also Burma), 33 events killed, on average, 7,130 people (14.06 per 100,000 inhabitants) a year, causing an annual loss of 659 million dollars (on PPP).

For 2010, Pakistan topped the list due to a severe flood.

The SREX showed a trend of more frequent and intense precipitation days over parts of South Asia. Earlier studies by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have also indicated such a trend.

Climate change and human development

According to SREX, extensive (low-impact/high-frequency) disasters affect human development. For instance, affected areas in Nepal recorded lower primary school enrollment rates and more malnourished children.  

A 2010 study covering 15 districts of Bhutan, India, and Nepal suggested that communities perceive a decrease in annual precipitation and resultant increase in the intensity of dry spells.

The study, undertaken by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), was part of an International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) programme.

The communities also reported an increase in erratic rainfall patterns and heavy showers when it does rain, Dhrupad Choudhury, the programme coordinator, told IPS. They also found winters warmer with reduced snowfall.

The Rio+20 ‘Future’ document talked about such changes in different geographies. As deforestation, forest degradation, glacier retreat and natural disasters hit the mountains, it called for collaborative efforts to achieve conservation, food security and poverty alleviation.

“The text provides rationale for action,” David Molden, director general of ICIMOD, told IPS. “Mountains are home to only 12 percent of the word’s population; but 40 percent indirectly depend on them for water, hydroelectricity, timber, biodiversity and niche products, mineral resources, recreation, and flood control.”

Professor Saleemul Huq at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, added, “The Rio+20 outcome on green economy holds promise for Bangladesh as it will enable the country to develop its own green development pathway.”

The green economy concept values nature and environmental services and promotes technologies that address the root cause of climate change – global warming due to too much fossil fuel burning.

Mizanur Rahman, programme officer of Islamic Relief Worldwide in Dhaka, said Rio+20 favours a top-down, government-oriented approach and it works. “For countries like Bangladesh, strengthening people’s capacity is also very important, but unfortunately it has not been highlighted.”

Speaking over telephone from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala state, T.  Peter, the secretary of the National Fishworkers Forum, which represents the interests of artisanal fishers, told IPS, “Getting money, under green economy or climate adaptation initiatives, is not important – but how it is spent for the safety and wellbeing of marginal people like us is.”

Peter and his colleagues are actively resisting displacement of fishers for conservation, development and DRR initiatives.

In the south Indian technology hub of Bangalore, Prof. J Srinivasan, chairperson of the Divecha Centre for Climate Change at the Indian Institute of Science, echoed the scepticism of the global green lobby. He said when the industrialised West is excused from responsibility, all other efforts naturally become weak.

“The biggest bottleneck,” Huq said, “is the reluctance of global leaders to realise that the current economic growth paradigm is unsustainable and needs to be pointed down a more sustainable pathway.”

*Max Martin contributed to this report.

(END)

Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces.

Pentavalent vaccine doses, a cocktail of five antigens in a single shot, confers immunity against five paediatric diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), with the last one considered particularly problematic by some experts.

Pentavalents, produced by several manufacturers and promoted by the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), has had a history of causing adverse reactions and deaths in India’s neighbouring countries like Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

In 2010, the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), a body of experts selected by the Indian government, recommended limited introduction of pentavalents in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu and evaluation of results over a year before extension to other states.

Pentavalents were launched in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in December 2011, but the results were not encouraging. Kerala recorded four infant deaths following vaccination, with symptoms similar to what were seen in other South Asian countries.

Public health activists in Kerala, a state with 100 percent literacy and human development indices similar to those of advanced Western countries, quickly filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Kerala High Court asking for intervention in having the programme called off and a return to the existing health plan.

But despite infant deaths and two pending PILs (with yet another being heard in the Delhi High Court) against pentavalents, the health ministry announced on Apr. 16 that pentavalents would be introduced in five more states – Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry in October.

In making the decision, the government overlooked the NTAGI, which has not even been convened since August 2010 when the body suggested limited introduction to Kerala and Tamil Nadu as the two states have good adverse event following immunisation systems.

“Going by what we have seen in the neighbouring countries and now in the state of Kerala, pentavalents can, without warning, cause children (to suffer) hypersensitivity reactions and death,” Jacob Puliyel, an eminent paediatrician at St. Stephen’s hospital in New Delhi and member of the NTAGI, told IPS.

Puliyel likened the situation to penicillin sensitivity and said it bordered on criminality to be administering pentavalents without first testing a child for hypersensitivity. “Every child that is being given a dose of pentavalent vaccine is a potential victim of the adverse reaction,” he said.

Puliyel was among the many eminent physicians and public health activists in India who wrote to World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan on Apr. 3 asking the health body to “re-evaluate” its recommendation of pentavalent vaccines on the grounds of safety.

Another signatory, Dr Meera Shiva, an expert on pharmaceutical drugs attached to the voluntary Medico Friends Circle, told IPS that WHO had to delist a number of brands of ‘prequalified’ pentavalent vaccine, “but adverse reactions persist and we have surely not heard the last of them.”

The letter to Chan, written under the aegis of the All-India Drug Action Network, an umbrella of public health activist groups, suggested that the cause of the vaccination- related deaths was likely to be “hypersensitivity reaction as described in the post mortem report on one of the children (who died) in Kerala.”

“Unlike conventional drug treatments meant for the management of existing diseases, in prophylaxis with vaccines, safety is of paramount importance. Vaccines that frequently and unpredictably cause the death of healthy children cannot be recommended,” the letter to Chan said.

Policy analysts specialising in vaccines said they were dismayed at the move to approve pentavalents in as many as seven of India’s states, which account for 340 million of India’s 1.2 billion people.

“Pentavalents are a test case for India’s new policy on vaccines that is in keeping with liberalisation and openly favours pharmaceutical majors at the cost of India’s public sector vaccine units,” said Madhavi Yennapu, a scientist who specialises in vaccines at the central government’s National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies.

Twenty of India’s 23 public sector vaccination units, once the mainstay of the country’s immunisation programme, have been shut down one after another over the last four years on the grounds that the quality of their products was suspect.

Yennapu pointed to the draft National Vaccination Policy, released last year, for clues on why the government has not made any serious attempt to revive the vaccine- manufacturing units by enforcing quality standards, for instance.

The new policy demands that the “risk of manufacturing vaccines by private manufacturers must be cushioned by assistance from (the) government” and suggests that it be made mandatory for the government to support vaccine producers with advance market commitments (AMCs).

Madhavi explained that AMCs provide guaranteed markets for a vaccine even before trials are conducted, with the government committed to paying a supporting minimum price. “Even if the vaccine turns out to be less efficacious than the existing one the government must honour the AMC by buying the new vaccine at the agreed price.

“This means that AMC funds must be deposited with the World Bank ahead of vaccine delivery by countries that GAVI is supposed to be helping with the introduction of new vaccines,” Madhavi told IPS. “Naturally, GAVI would be looking at large countries like India, Brazil and China to provide the AMCs.”

For a country like India, what is important is to “see how many vaccines are needed to prevent how many deaths and at what cost, rather than throw out tried and tested vaccines in favour of a cocktail (pentavalent) which not only has doubtful advantages but has been shown to cause adverse reactions,” Madhavi said.

According to Madhavi, there is no hard scientific evidence to show that India needs the Hib vaccine .”It is clearly piggybacking on other vaccines and the public made to pay for it.”

The existing diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DPT) vaccine costs about 30 cents for all the doses needed to immunise a child, while immunisation with pentavalents will cost more than 10 dollars. “We need to ask ourselves if introducing the new vaccine is really worth all the public money being spent on it,” Madhavi said.

At their summit in the Indian capital on Thursday, leaders of the coalition known as BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – made several noteworthy decisions that experts say hint at the converging of economic and political interests of a disparate regional bloc.

China’s trade minister Chen Deming opposed sanctions against Iran when rising oil prices were hitting BRICS. Credit: World Economic Forum/CC-BY-SA-2.0

Though the leaders chose to defer the long-awaited announcement of a ‘South-South Bank’ to next year’s meet, or beyond, the ‘Delhi Declaration‘ produced at the end of the summit said BRICS finance ministers have been directed to “examine the feasibility and viability of such an initiative, set up a joint working group for further study, and report back to us (heads of state) by the next Summit (in South Africa).”

“Creating such a ‘BRICS Bank’ involves complex issues, such as the medium of transfer of credit,” said Vivan Sharan, associate fellow at the prestigious Observer Research Foundation (ORF), which hosted a BRICS academic forum of experts and scholars from member countries in New Delhi from Mar. 4 – 6.

“But there are no roadblocks ahead and it is an idea whose time has come,” Sharan told IPS. “While the plan now is to supplement rather than supplant the existing global financial structure, there is clearly the ambition to go ahead.”

For now though, according to Sharan, citizens of the bloc, who account for nearly half the world’s population, can be content with the knowledge that by June there will be a BRICS Exchange Alliance in place, allowing trading options using local currency.

“Investors will soon be able to invest in each other’s progress and there will be greater liquidity, better market-determined integration and the possibility of extending credit in local (currencies),” Sharan said. “Two BRICS countries are among the top five in purchasing power parity terms and four are in the top 10.”

BRICS’ frustration with the policies of the wealthy G7 countries – France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States, and Canada – was palpable at the meeting of the new bloc’s trade ministers on Wednesday with Brazil’s Fernando Pimentel leading complaints of the G7’s tardiness in meeting reforms promised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Pimentel’s concerns were reflected in the Declaration, which said: “The build-up of sovereign debt and concerns over medium to long-term fiscal adjustment in advanced countries are creating an uncertain environment for global growth.”

Further, the Declaration charged that “excessive liquidity from the aggressive policy actions taken by central banks to stabilise their domestic economies have been spilling over into emerging market economies, fostering excessive volatility in capital flows and commodity prices.”

But the toughest statements came over the sanctions imposed on Iran and the situation in the Middle East. “We respect the United Nations (Security Council) resolution but at the same time it does not forbid countries to engage in trade in essential commodities and what is required for human good,” said India’s Anand Sharma at a joint press conference of trade ministers.

China’s trade minister Chen Deming declared that his country could not be expected to follow unilateral sanctions against Iran at a time of rising crude prices that were adversely affecting the BRICS countries and the global economy.

BRICS leaders said in the Declaration they were agreed that the “period of transformation taking place in the Middle East and North Africa should not be used as a pretext to delay resolution of lasting conflicts but rather it should serve as an incentive to settle them, in particular the Arab-Israeli conflict.” “This is indeed a bold declaration coming from a group that is seen as disparate and one known to have divergent interests,” said Pushpesh Pant, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies. “Earlier there were flip-flops over issues in the Middle East.”

Pant said it was still left to be seen how BRICS members will be able to carry out any of their articulations. “China has internal problems, Russia looks increasingly European, Brazil cannot shake off its Latin American moorings and India has serious problems in dealing with its neighbours.” “Will membership in BRICS encourage China to support India’s candidature for a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council is a question that looms up,” said Pant. “Another is the sometimes conflicting interests of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (that includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.)”

The Declaration said: “China and Russia reiterate the importance they attach to the status of Brazil, India and South Africa in international affairs and support their aspiration to play a greater role in the U.N.”

According to Sharan the strength of the Delhi Summit lies in the Delhi Action Plan (DAP), released along with the Declaration on Thursday, calling for meetings of BRICS foreign ministers on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, and of its finance ministers around the G20 meetings.

There will also be, according to the DAP, meetings of finance ministers and fiscal authorities around those organised by the World Bank and IMF, including stand-alone meetings.

“All this means is that, in spite of the ifs and buts, we can expect more of the kind of coordination seen at the Security Council during the year 2011 and that there is a better chance for multilateral approaches when it comes to global peace and security,” said Pant.

India’s generic pharmaceutical industry meets 70 percent of domestic demand and exports 11 billion dollars worth of generic drugs annually. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

By allowing a generic manufacturer to produce a patented cancer drug at a fraction of its current cost, India has declared that it is not about to abandon its role as the ‘pharmacy of the world’s poor’.

In a path-breaking move on Mar. 9, India’s patent office invoked compulsory licensing (CL) provisions under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to allow generic drug manufacturer Natco Pharma to produce and sell ‘Nexavar’ in India, a drug developed by the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer to treat liver and kidney cancer.

CL allows generic manufacturers to produce a patented drug or use a patented process when denied by the patentee. It is an important ‘flexibility’ clause in the WTO agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS), but one that countries capable of manufacturing generics are still putting to test.

The issue has aligned non-government organisations (NGOs) and the manufacturers of generic drugs with those governments prepared to take on powerful pharmaceutical multi-national corporations (MNCs) that sell drugs worth more than 800 billion dollars annually.

“India always had CL provisions, even in its original 1970 patent laws. In 2005, when amendments were made to make WTO laws consistent, CLs were retained and this was a major achievement (of the Doha declaration of 2001),” Sachin Chaturvedi, senior fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a think-tank of India’s ministry of external affairs, told IPS.

“More generic drug manufacturers in India are sure to come forward now and seek licenses to cheaply manufacture drugs and make them accessible to the poor,” said Meera Shiva, chairperson of the Health Action International – Asia Pacific, an NGO dealing with public health issues.

Shiva told IPS that the cost of treatment with Nexavar – the trade name for sorafenib tosylate – is expected to drop by nearly 97 percent, from 5,500 dollars for a month’s treatment per person to about 175 dollars, once production of a generic version by Natco Pharma begins.

“This will bring relief to more than a million people suffering from liver and kidney cancer and extend their lives by several years,” said Shiva. “It brings hope in a country where government surveys have shown that 65 percent of the 1.1 billion population fall into debt as result of ‘out-of-pocket’ healthcare spending.”

India’s patent office ruled that “the mandate of the law is not to just supply the drug in the market, but to make it available in a manner such that (a) substantial portion of the public is able to reap the benefits of the invention. If the terms are unreasonable, such as high cost, availability is meaningless.”

Shiva said what is significant is the realisation that avenues exist within the WTO for governments to intervene on behalf of their people and ensure access to medicines in the face of attempts by pharmaceutical MNCs to keep profit margins high.

Indian Move a Victory for IBSA

Volunteers for the humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF) in Brazil and South Africa – countries that have benefited from the Indian generics industry – hailed the Indian move.

“In 2007, the Brazilian government issued a CL for the drug Efavirenz, used to treat AIDS, after declaring it of public interest,” said Felipe de Carvalho, project officer with MSF’s Access Campaign in Brazil.

“Right after the issuance of the CL for Efavirenz, while local production was being developed, Brazil bought generic versions from Indian generic producers,” de Carvalho said. “In 2007 alone, the purchase of cheaper versions of Efavirenz represented savings of 30 million dollars.

“So, if the use of CL in India is expanded and allows for exportation, countries like Brazil can benefit from the resulting generic production, as happened in the case of Efavirenz,” de Carvalho told IPS.

When the Brazilian government issued the CL for Efavirenz, the country became the target of intense denouncement by pharmaceutical companies and developed country governments, de Carvalho said.

“The decision in India is important to reinforce developing countries’ right to use TRIPS flexibilities.”

India’s CL has brought on a storm of protests from pharmaceutical MNCs. In a published statement Ranjit Shahani, who heads the Switzerland-based Novartis in India, warns that the move will “work to the detriment of patients through the negative impact they (CLs) will have on future investment in innovative pharmaceuticals.”

However, Shiva debunked this claim that investments in research and development for drugs come solely from excessive profits generated by the pharmaceutical industry. “The fact is, there is publicly- funded research and often big pharma benefits from that too.”

Catherine Tomlinson, senior researcher at the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said it was “heartening to see India’s ongoing resistance against pressure from developed countries to not use the TRIPS provisions to protect health and we hope it will serve as a positive example for our own government.

“For activists in South Africa, it is distressing that our government continues to bow to pressure not to use CL provisions, despite the country facing numerous health emergencies and many critical medicines remaining unavailable to the majority of the population,” Tomlinson told IPS.

Leena Menghaney, a lawyer who works for MSF’s Access Campaign in New Delhi, said India’s patent laws had many advantages. “CLs can be issued to generic producers if patented drugs are unavailable or unaffordable, or if countries that lack production capacity order drugs from India.

“In fact compulsory licensing, under Indian law, is not reserved for emergencies – this is another myth spread by the MNCs,” Menghaney said.

Between 1970 and 2005, India did not recognise patents for medicines, allowing the growth, in that period, of a large and powerful generic pharmaceutical industry that takes care of 70 percent of domestic demand and also exports 11 billion dollars worth of generic drugs annually.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jan 1 2012 (IPS)

After failing to muster support in parliament for the passage of a watered- down anti-corruption bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must find ways to satisfy opposition parties, allies and civil society that his United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is serious about curbing graft in the New Year.

The bill passed through the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, on Dec. 27 but tripped up in the Rajya Sabha, or upper house, on Thursday after opposition parties and allies tabled no fewer than 187 amendments to the ‘Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill’ to monitor government dealings for graft and other irregularities.

That left Singh’s Congress party-led UPA government and opposition parties accusing each other of scuttling the bill. “The bill is not defeated. It can be taken up in the next session of parliament. Hard work lies ahead,” union home minister P. Chidambaram said at a press briefing on Friday.

While Chidambaram pleaded that the government needed time to study the demanded amendments, the leader of main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party Arun Jaitley accused the government of “running away” from a vote on the bill to avoid its certain defeat.

With the bill pending until the next parliament session in February, opposition parties and civil society plan to step up public agitations aimed at forcing the government to make amendments that would give the ombudsman legislation more teeth.

Over the past year the government has been under pressure to pass an effective Lokpal Bill by an anti- corruption campaign led by Anna Hazare, 73, who has vowed to continue Gandhian-style agitations against graft, now reckoned to have reached unprecedented heights.

A ‘fast-unto-death’ by Hazare in August rattled the government and forced it to pledge passage of the Lokpal which has been introduced in parliament nine times since 1968, only to be thwarted repeatedly by powerful vested interests.

Hazare’s movement caught the public imagination because it was launched in the background of massive scams like the one which landed former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja in jail for the sale of mobile phone permits in rigged bidding that government auditors say cost the government 31 billion dollars in revenue.

Also in jail are Suresh Kalmadi and other top officials who organised the 2010 Commonwealth Games. They are alleged to have siphoned away large sums of money by awarding contracts to cronies.

Their arrests came only as a result of intense media campaigns that unearthed incriminating evidence that the government could not ignore.

“The fact is that no government or political party has ever been serious about curbing corruption because of the vast amounts of black money (unaccounted cash) it generates which is then used to fund political activity or buy influence in an entrenched parallel system,” said Vineet Narain, one of India’s foremost anti- corruption campaigners.

“What we have seen is that every time the Lokpal bill is introduced in parliament political parties come together to somehow scuttle it,” Narain told IPS. “This last occasion was no different and there is no guarantee that the government will pass the bill in the budget session of parliament either.

“The only difference is that public anger against corruption has never been so high and this is thanks to the sheer scale of graft and the media glare,” Narain said. “But the powers that be are not going to give up a lucrative system without a fight.”

Narain, who is best known for securing several important rulings against corruption through public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, said a point has been reached where “the political class indulges in corruption as a matter of right and is ready to defend and legitimise rent-seeking.”

Narain’s view is not farfetched. In March, India’s chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu released a working paper suggesting that existing law be changed so that the paying of bribes to get work done through the government is not penalised.

Basu’s idea is that under existing law both bribe giving as well as bribe taking are illegal and so there is convergence of interests in keeping the transaction secret. If the giver is not penalised he may, Basu holds, safely blow the whistle on the recipient.

One of the main criticisms of the proposed ombudsman’s office is that it would not have had direct oversight over the lower echelons of the bureaucracy that are responsible for the routine bribery and petty corruption characteristic of Indian business and governance.

Many believe that corruption in India is widespread because the middle classes are willing to pay ‘speed money’ for government services that may range from getting a passport or driving licence to jumping the queue for allotment of housing or securing admission for a child in a school.

“The government needs to seriously look at the supply side of corruption and its patronisation by ordinary citizens as well as large private corporations,” says Anupama Jha, executive director of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI)’s India chapter.

According to a TI survey released on Dec. 22, “Daily Lives and Corruption: Public Opinion in South Asia”, one in three public service seekers pays bribes in India.

“The fact is that the Lokpal was introduced in parliament yet again only because of pressure to act against corruption by civil society, the media and the courts,” she told IPS. “Once again, they went through the motions of passing legislation and then scuttled it – though it is obvious that people are sick of the sleaze.”

Jha also believes that the system is far too entrenched for easy remedy. “You need firstly to address the way black money is generated through bribery and then passed on to political parties or leaders through a complex system in which the secret banking system in Switzerland and other tax havens are involved.

“The lack of seriousness on the part of the government can be seen from the fact that it has ignored offers by the Swiss government to pass on taxes accruing against large deposits made by Indian nationals,” Jha said.

During Thursday’s debates on the Lokpal bill in parliament eminent lawyer and legislator Ram Jethmalani criticised the government for protecting Indians holding accounts in Swiss banks by signing a weak double- taxation avoidance protocol in August.

Global Financial Integrity, the Washington-based watchdog, in its latest estimates published in December estimates that illicit money flow out of India in the 2000-2009 period was worth at least 104 billion dollars.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 24 2011 (IPS)

If India’s powerful central government that rules over the destinies of 1.2 billion people quails before a slight 74-year-old man, it is because he is armed with a weapon that has rarely failed in this country – extreme renunciation through a fast-unto-death.

Doctors continuously monitor the health of Anna Hazare, sitting on a protest fast-unto-death. Credit: Anjan Mitra/IPS

On Tuesday, with a team of doctors announcing rapid deterioration in Hazare’s condition after eight days of fasting, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally offered to negotiate changes to the contentious Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill that awaits passage in Parliament.

That was Hazare’s moment. He waved away the doctors, led by Delhi’s best-known cardiologist, Naresh Trehan, and told the 10,000-strong crowd gathered around him that he was ready to give up his life to fight corruption that he blames for continuing poverty in a resource-rich country.

“His condition is critical. His pulse rate is high as also the ketone (body chemicals that can damage the kidneys) levels in his blood. He needs to be hospitalised,” said Trehan, speaking from the dais at the Ramlila Grounds, the venue of the fast.

Hazare, frail and clad in white, responded to Trehan’s warnings by announcing to the anxiously waiting crowds: “I have already given my heart to the country, what are my kidneys?

“Nothing will happen to me, for I draw energy from all of you. Anyway, I am sure that there will be many among you who can spare me a kidney.”

To roars of approval from the legions of his supporters, Hazare said his inner voice told him not to be afraid of death and refuse intravenous drips or medication of any type.

“This is one of those timeless moments in the life of a people,” commented Abhijit Pathak, a professor of sociology at the capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who had come to the Ramlila Grounds to soak it all in personally, rather than watch on television.

“What Anna Hazare is enacting has been played out countless times and reinforces an archetype that is embedded in the collective consciousness of Indians. It reinforces their myths, epics and the great stories of sacrifice, suffering and emancipation,” Pathak told IPS.

Pathak said the original aim of Hazare’s fast, to compel Parliament to accept an ombudsman capable of monitoring the judiciary and the prime minister’s office, had now receded in significance.

“What is important is the spectacle of a man, revered for his honesty and reputation for public service, about to sacrifice his life for a just and popular cause,” said Pathak. “The fact that his life is now in real danger, as attested to by specialist doctors, only adds to the powerful symbolism.”

“Who cares about the commas and hyphens on the Lokpal Bill? The government should first ensure that Anna Hazare’s life is safe. If he dies there will be chaos,” said Ram Jethmalani, an eminent lawyer and legislator who has served as minister in several cabinets.

Jethmalani said the Hazare phenomenon was being fed by the public perception that the government, despite a series of scams involving billions of dollars, was not serious about curbing corruption in high places.

“Anna Hazare has captured the imagination of the Indian public in a way that no one has since the days of Mahatma Gandhi and that is why there is hope now for the Lokpal Bill, pending passage in Parliament for 40 years,” said Vineet Narain, a leading civil society campaigner against corruption.

“Like Gandhi, Hazare is succeeding in his objectives where others failed because of a disregard for his own comfort and safety. Only Hazare had the moral stature and courage to sit on a life-threatening fast,” said Narain, known for securing important Supreme Court rulings against corruption.

What is also common to both Gandhi and Hazare is that they believed that fasting works best as a tool for ‘satyagraha’ (protest with a desire for truth).

Doctors say that the danger to Hazare’s kidneys is real, especially since he has refused medical support.

“As the body is deprived of carbohydrates it begins to burn proteins and fats which release nitrogen compounds and ketones respectively and these can damage the liver and kidney,” said Dr. K.K. Aggarwal, a leading city physician and public health activist.

Several of India’s prominent politicians have suffered permanent damage to their kidneys as a result of fasting for public causes, one of them being former prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

“Extreme fasting is a part of yogic practices and is believed to draw upon hidden reserves of spiritual energy, but these should never be attempted by novices,” Aggarwal told IPS.

Gandhi who sat on several fasts to promote non-violence and communal harmony in pre-independent India, thought the practice helped exert control over mind, body and spirit.

Fasting as a spiritually cleansing exercise is not limited to Hinduism or India. The Islamic world observes Ramadan as a month of fasting through the day, and many Christians observe Lent with varying levels of abstinence.

“India’s case is different in that fasting is used to move an intransigent ruler or government. Also, Anna Hazare is tapping into the huge symbolic value of renouncing food in a country that sets great store by abstinence of all types, starting with vegetarianism,” said Pathak.

Pathak pointed out that contemporary India is beset by a million mutinies, including armed Maoist insurgency that has gripped several central and eastern states.

“But where all of these rebellions have failed or dragged on for years, Anna Hazare has almost overnight captured the imagination of large numbers through ascetic appeal and he is now calling the shots on the Lokpal Bill,” Pathak said.

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By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 10 2011 (IPS)

While ‘data exclusivity’ clauses will not feature in the India-European Union free trade agreement (FTA), the threat posed by the impending deal to the world’s supply of cheap generic drugs is far from over.

India’s commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma assured Michel Sidibe, chief of the United Nations joint programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) at a meeting this week that India would reject attempts by pharmaceutical giants to include data exclusivity clauses in the FTA.

“The government of India reaffirms its full commitment to ensure that quality generic medicines, including antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, are seamlessly available, and to make them available to all countries,” Sharma said.

Sidibe was told that India will resort to flexibilities allowed under World Trade Organisation (WTO)’s Trade Related Aspect of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement to ensure that people living with HIV have access to life-saving medicines.

Data exclusivity clauses are designed to stop clinical test or trial data submitted to regulatory authorities to prove the safety and efficacy of a drug from being used by the manufacturers of “copy cat” generic drugs.

“No data exclusivity and no TRIPs Plus are the stated positions that India takes on all such occasions,” Sachin Chaturvedi, senior fellow at the Research and Information System (RIS) for the Developing Countries, a New Delhi-based autonomous, state-funded, think-tank set up to promote South-South cooperation, told IPS.

After his meeting with Sharma, Sidibe said in a statement that the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – could “forge an alliance with other high-income countries to ensure that no single person in the world dies for inability to afford life-saving medicines or healthcare.”

Brazil, which has a growing generic drugs industry, has also not accepted data exclusivity in bilateral deals.

Chaturvedi said that in the present climate of FTAs it makes sense for the BRICS countries to collaborate and produce affordable drugs, especially against infectious diseases in the developing world.

India’s generics industry is a world leader producing more than 85 percent of the first-line antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat people living with HIV, pushing down the cost of the least expensive first- generation treatment regimen to less than 86 dollars per patient per year.

“Millions of people will die if India cannot produce generic ARV drugs, and Africa will be the most affected,” the UNAIDS chief said.

“Data exclusivity would have blocked the production and sale of affordable generic medicines by giving big pharma a backdoor means to get a monopoly on drugs ineligible for a patent under Indian law,” Leena Menghaney, a lawyer with the non- government organisation Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) told IPS.

“We understand that the EU will no longer push for data exclusivity,” Menghaney said. “Over the last few months there has been an amazing global mobilisation against the harmful policies in the proposed EU-India trade deal,” she added.

The World Health Organisation, UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have also lent weight to those concerns.

However, Menghaney said, the EU continues to push several other policies in the Indo-EU FTA trade deal that will make it harder for affordable generic medicines to be produced and exported.

She pointed to “IP enforcement” provisions that would allow the seizure of legitimate generic drugs and incriminate those handling such medicines, including MSF.

Worries include “investment” provisions that would allow EU companies operating in India to sue the government if their profitability is threatened by legislation.

For example, enforcement of bigger pictorial warning on cigarette packets or banning a carcinogenic chemical could attract compensation claims worth millions of dollars.

“This could happen under investor-state arbitration proceedings on the grounds that such measures damage investments and profits,” Menghaney explained.

Menghaney said the MSF, together with the other groups that are fighting EU’s policies, will continue to oppose efforts to stop the flow of affordable generic medicines that MSF relies on to treat patients in more than 60 countries.

Menghaney believes that the best way forward is for the BRICS countries to pool their strengths and markets to beat the challenges thrown up by the Western intellectual property systems, which work by blocking access to medicines and research data.

Increasing numbers of people are taking to more efficacious and tolerable first-line treatment. Also, as patients develop drug resistance and require costly, patent-protected second and third-line ARVs, costs are bound to escalate several fold.

An estimated 15 million people are eligible for ARV treatment in low and middle-income countries, and about 6.6 million people have access to HIV treatment. India alone provides free ARV treatment to more than 420,000 people living with HIV.

Pharmaceutical companies argue that generation of test data is costly and that it is unfair to allow the manufacturers of generics to ride on data submitted for registration purposes.

On the other hand, it has been pointed out that that repeating scientific tests on human beings, purely for commercial reasons, violates ethical norms.

In 1970, India eliminated patents on drug products and used its large domestic market to develop a powerful generic drug industry that gave it the reputation of being a “pharmacy to the world”.

“But, in 2005, India implemented changes required by the WTO’s TRIPS agreement and it is only after that India began providing patent protection,” Chaturvedi said. “What is needed now is a firm developing countries position on drug access.”

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By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jul 6 2011 (IPS)

Confident in the large market it offers to the world’s nuclear suppliers, India has decided to shrug off new restrictions by a 46-nation cartel on the transfer of uranium enrichment and reprocessing technologies that potentially have military applications.

India, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the grounds that it is discriminatory, pulled off a diplomatic coup in 2008 by securing a special waiver from the 46-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Except for the five officially recognised atomic weapons states, all countries are required to place their nuclear sites under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

Following a plenary in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the NSG announced on Jun. 24 that it would “strengthen its guidelines on the transfer of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technologies,” diluting the clean waiver granted to India and exempting it from full-scope international safeguards.

Nuclear energy experts in India told IPS that the NSG’s move may be prompted by commercial concerns and an attempt to squeeze India into buying nuclear equipment in a market rapidly narrowing down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

“Even before Fukushima, India and China were the only countries with major plans to expand nuclear power generation. And now, with China switching to renewable energy, India is the only major buyer left,” says Praful Bidwai, a member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation.

“In spite of the many failures of the French supplier Areva, which have resulted in the recent sacking of its CEO, Anne Lauvergeon, India is going ahead with a deal to buy six of its European Pressurised Reactors for the world’s biggest ever nuclear power plant at Jaitapur in Maharashtra,” Bidwai said. “But for the India deal Areva may have to shut shop.”

According to Rajiv Nayan, international partner at the Fissile Materials Working Group and senior research associate at the state-funded Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi, the NSG’s strictures could jeopardise the Areva deal.

“It is for the NSG to carry India along in the interest of better international nuclear governance and management,” Nayan told IPS.

Given the present climate for nuclear energy, countries like France, Russia and the United States, which have already signed major nuclear commerce deals with India, are unlikely to back off, Nayan said.

India has ambitious plans to raise its nuclear power generation from the current 4.7 gigawatts to over 20 Gw by 2020. Besides Areva, Russia’s Rosatom and General Electric from the U.S. are among corporations negotiating for deals worth more than 100 billion dollars.

In an apparent warning to the NSG, India’s foreign secretary Nirupama Rao told television interviewers on Sunday that there are “leverages” that could be applies to countries unwilling to enter into nuclear commerce with India.

Rao said the U.S., Russia and France had, since the NSG announced its new policy, made known that they would stand by their commitments to India.

French ambassador to India Jerome Bonnafont confirmed in a Jul. 1 press statement that “this NSG decision in no way undermines the parameters of our bilateral cooperation,” and that France remained “committed to the full implementation of our cooperation agreement on the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy signed on Sep. 30, 2008.

“Coming after the decision of exemption from the full-scope safeguards clause, adopted in favour of India in September 2008, it (NSG decision) does not undermine the principles of this exemption,” the statement said.

After three decades of isolation, India resumed nuclear commerce with the rest of the world after concluding a civilian nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2008 that allowed it to continue with an indigenously developed nuclear weapons programme.

Nayan said the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation deal and the NSG waiver came in spite of strong domestic pressure both in India and the U.S. from peace groups and those supporting nuclear disarmament.

Within the NSG, countries such as Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland had unsuccessfully argued that India be excluded from trade in ENR technologies.

Nayan said, however, that the NSG never actually gave India any explicit assurance on transfer of ENR technologies.

Also, he said, Indian parliament had passed a stiff nuclear liability bill in August 2010 that discouraged international nuclear equipment suppliers – though several bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements have been signed.

As a self-declared nuclear weapons state that is not signatory to the NPT, it would have been difficult, in any case, for India to source nuclear technology or equipment from any country that is a signatory to the treaty.

India provides no guarantees that it will not replicate facilities and technologies for its strategic programme and, in fact, the Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement allows facilities that are declared to be military in nature to avoid international scrutiny and safeguards.

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By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 21 2011 (IPS)

By striking down a law that makes the death penalty mandatory for drug-related offences, the Bombay High Court has raised hopes among rights activists that other countries in the region will follow suit.

“While we believe the death penalty for drugs – as a mandatory or discretionary sanction – has no place in any country’s legal system, we believe this is a major step in the right direction,” said Patrick Gallahue, analyst with the London-based Harm Reduction International (HRI).

Gallahue told IPS, in an e-mail discussion, that some of India’s neighbours prescribe a mandatory sentence of death for certain types of drug offences and they argue that it is normal for the region.

“The removal of the death penalty as a mandatory punishment for drug-related crimes by India means that there is less cover for other countries in the region to defend national policies that go against international law,” Gallahue said.

The Jun. 16 ruling of the court declared relevant sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, (NDPSA), that imposes a mandatory death sentence for a subsequent conviction for drug trafficking, “unconstitutional”.

The Court however, refrained from striking down the law, preferring to read it down instead. Consequently, the sentencing court will have the option and not obligation, to impose capital punishment on a person convicted a second time for possessing drugs in large quantities.

One beneficiary of the ruling is Ghulam Mohammed Malik, a Kashmiri man sentenced to death by a special NDPSA court in Mumbai in February 2008 for a repeat offence of smuggling charas (cannabis resin).

Malik was sentenced to death with no consideration given to mitigating factors because of the mandatory nature of the punishment provided under the NDPSA.

In general, Indian courts stick by the principle that the death penalty should awarded only in the “rarest of rare” case. Hangings, the sole approved mode of execution in India, are rarely carried out.

The court verdict toning down the NDPSA came in response to a petition filed by the Indian Harm Reduction Network (IHRN), a consortium of non-government organisations (NGOs) working for humane drug policies.

IHRN assailed the law as “arbitrary, excessive and disproportionate” to the crime of dealing in drugs.

Tripti Tandon, who heads advocacy at the Lawyers’ Collective, a part of the network, told IPS that the death penalty is reserved for “very serious offences that involve the taking of life and this did not apply to possessing or dealing in drugs.”

Tandon said she was aware of widespread concern that India is considered a major transit point for drugs from the “Golden Crescent” to its northwest and from the “Golden Triangle” to its northeast. “But the fact is trafficking in this country rarely involves violent crime,” she said.

“Officially, India sees drug trafficking as an economic offence that is dealt with by the department of revenue.” Tandon also pointed out that Indian society has traditionally been tolerant of a certain level of the use of such substances as cannabis and opium, which, in their unrefined state, are not as harmful or addictive as refined derivatives such as heroin.

“The Bombay High Court ruling is a recognition of the principles of harm reduction and human rights in relation to drugs,” Tandon said. “Laws that take away judicial discretion where the capital punishment is involved are unacceptable, because there may be mitigating circumstances and individual situations.”

Tandon said she hoped that the Indian ruling will set a positive precedent in a region notorious for its draconian drug laws.

Some 32 countries currently impose capital punishment for offences involving narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances. Of these, 12 continue to prescribe mandatory death sentences for drug crimes.

In Iran and China drug offenders constitute the vast majority of those executed. In May last year, the Court of Appeal in Singapore upheld the mandatory death sentence imposed upon a young Malaysian for possession of heroin.

According to Gallahue less than five percent of the world’s countries impose and carry out the death penalty for drug-related offences. “That is a very small minority of states and those that still impose a mandatory death sentence for drugs are an extreme fringe for both capital punishment and drug policies.

“Finally, there is not – nor has there ever been – any credible evidence that the death penalty for drugs serves as a deterrent,” said Gallahue. “Capital punishment is a wildly inappropriate response to drugs.”

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