India’s Dying Beaches

I almost feel as though I am in Pondicherry.  The vicarious excitement and stress of trying to keep up with the sudden barrage of media stories and activities initiated by NDTV’s coverage of “The Death of India’s Beaches” has my adrenelin pumping as I try and support our colleagues at PondyCAN.

On 28 May, 2009, Probir Banerjee, PondyCAN’s President, was interviewed by Prannoy Roy of NDTV, fulfilling a promise Roy made months before to take up the issue of coastal erosion.  Realizing the magnitude of the problem, Roy initiated a state-by-state coverage of the issue in a series called “India’s Dying Beaches.”

Ayudha Puja in Pondicherry

Ayudha puja at Renaissance Workshop

The people of Pondicherry celebrated Ayudha Puja on 8 October 2008, the 9th day of Navaratri (30 September to 9 October this year).  Durga puja is called Ayudha puja in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. Ayudha puja is “worship of the weapons” – which in common terms is translated into implements and tools.

Father and daughter washing a scooter

People clean their houses and wash all the implements and tools of their trade, including their vehicles.

Doorway decorated with palm and banana fronds

People decorate their homes, offices and other places of work as well as their vehicles with palm and banana leaves.  The youngest palm fronds are cut and shaped into decorations. Unfortunately, most people now also use “modern” decorations, including colored crepe paper.

Mark and I were invited to two puja celebrations – one at the carpentry and furniture refinishing workshop of a friend (where we had the best food we have had to date in Pondicherry – the carpenters/cooks were from Bihar) and the other at the Shuddham office.

Snigda Marries Bapoorau

Bapoorau and Snigda in full regalia

On the morning of 3 October 2008, Snigda married Bapoorau at the Sivakami Amman temple, off the Sivaganga tank, of the famous Nataraja temple in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu.

Snigda, pre ceremony

Getting changed at the Sivakami Amman temple

During the ceremony; Bapoorau shows off his well-inked arms

Non-traditional mauling of the bride

By the temple tank

Toe-ringed - it's official now!

Everyday Hero – C.H. Balamohan

C.H. Balamohan

On 30 September 2008, C.H. Balamohan retired as an Assistant in the Education Department of the Government of Puducherry (GOP). After 40 years in government service, Balamohan should have been an officer – a Director or at least a Deputy Director of the department.  However, his promotions were suppressed by the GOP because of Balamohan’s work on behalf of the government employees – he only had 2 promotions in 40 years.

Balamohan is a quiet, unprepossessing person.  He suffers from diabetes, at times bed-ridden and unable to walk.  He wears khadi and carries a cloth sachel.  He gets around town on a scooter. Yet when he sees any kind of injustice, he becomes a changed man.  Put a bullhorn in front of him and he can inspire and rally thousands of people.

In 1979, Balamohan began his fight for the rights of the government employees, forming and acting as President of the Ministerial Staff Association (he was part of the Ministerial cadre in the Education Department).  From there, he went on to help form other government employee associations in the Education Department, Health Department, etc.  At his retirement, he was Honorary President of the Confederation of Pondicherry State Government Employees’ Association, consisting of 100 employee associations.

India Hot

Mark and I landed at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai, India in the early morning of September 25, 2008.  On a hunch, I asked a Korean Airlines representative at baggage claim if there was a shuttle to the Domestic airport for our flight to Chennai, dreading the haggling with taxi drivers at 2am.  Much to my surprise, the representative gave me specific instructions on how to get to the free shuttle:  “make a right after clearing customs.”  “How long has this shuttle been in service?” I ask the people at the counter.  They gave me the “what kind of idiotic question is this” look and huffed:  “over a year.”  Well, blow me down.

Even at 2:00am, the shuttle took 20 minutes, negotiating the crowded tarmac at a slow crawl.  We arrived at the Domestic terminal to find that our flight time had been changed from 4:55am to 5:40am; there were no free seats in the terminal area; and the Cafe Coffee Day lounge did not open until 3:00am.  No matter.  We were happy to be in the terminal as opposed to in the 86 degrees F streets at 2:30am.

It wasn’t until we reached Pondicherry at around 11am that the distress of 90 degree heat and 86 percent humidity hit us.  Since then, brief showers yesterday and the day before yesterday have done nothing to cool things down or reduce the humidity.  It is now 91 degrees, but “feels like 102 degrees” according to Weather.com.  Life exists only under a fan.

I suppose our discomfort is more acute given the 4 months of cool and even cold weather we had in Vancouver this summer.  That plus the extra pounds we gained from eating extravagantly over the last 6 months.

I hope we adjust quickly or it is going to be a long two months before the weather cools in December.

Information Management System Wiki for Bihar Flood Relief and Rehabilitation

A small group of individuals who work at the Planning Commission (Gunjan Veda, Officer on Special Duty; Harsh Agarwal, Consultant; Priyanka Mukherjee, Consultant; and Ruth Zothanpuii) have put together this information mangement system wiki for Bihar flood relief and rehabilition.

It includes telephone numbers for government officials as well as helplines by district and for medical care, links for statistics, pictures, and news and analysis, as well as a list of organizations working in relief and rehabilitation, with details of their area of operation and contact people and numbers.

One important piece of information is on how NGOs can send relief materials:

Relief material from any part of the country can be booked by various NGOs/Trusts, organisations and Government Agencies comprising National Disaster Management Agency in favour of District Magistrates of Purnea, Saharsa and Katihar. It will be transported free of charge by the Indian Railways. Control Rooms for assisting in relief material transportation are functional at the Railway Board and at all zonal and divisional headquarters of Indian Railways. People interested in sending relief material can contact the General Managers of Zonal Railways and the Divisional Railway Managers

If you are an NGO working in the area and your name is not mentioned in the list of organizations involved in relief and rehabilitation, please send the following information to gunjanveda@gmail.com or g.veda@nic.in

Name of Organisation:

Contact details and web address, if any:

Contact person:

Area of operation: (names of villages/ relief camps/ districts):

Focus areas, if any (e.g. health, women, children):

Collection points:

List of materials/ services being collected:

Specifications for cash donations:

Any other information:

Single-point Resource for Bihar Flood Relief and Rehabilitation

Karmayog, a list-serve and resource based in Mumbai that connects like-minded people working to improve their worlds, has put together the most comprehensive, single-point source of information of all organizations working in rescue, relief and rehabilitation in Bihar: http://www.karmayog.org/biharfloods/

Do check this out if you are looking to help – it is more complete than my previous post.

Bihar Floods – How to Help

The Central Government of India has sanctioned Rs. 1,000 crores (US$ 228 million) to be released from the National Calamity Contingency Fund; the European Union announced that it is sending food aid and other relief materials worth 1 million euro (US$ 1.5 million); Britain has diverted 150,000 pounds (US$ 273,000) of an existing fund to provide clean water, shelter and sanitation to 10,000 families in up to 20 camps; and the US has offered US$100,000 to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (which has yet to account for the funds to be used for survivors of the Tsunami in 2004) for immediate assistance to the flood victims in Bihar.

There are the usual calls to donate money to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund or the Chief Minister’s (of Bihar) Relief Fund.  There are also urgent requests from NGOs for volunteers, food and other relief supplies, and donations.

Those in the US can make tax deductible contributions to Association for India’s Development’s (AID’s) All India Relief Fund or to Goonj, for their Rahat Floods program.

AID is a “volunteer movement committed to promoting sustainable, equitable and just development” in India.  AID will be focusing on the following in Araria, Bihar:

1. Rescue operations.
2. Providing food, medicine and shelter.
3. Fodder for animals.
4. Removal of carcasses.
5. Safe drinking water.
6. Monitoring expenditures by the State.

Goonj has been working extensively in Bihar through its grassroots partners, with a special focus on the annual floods for many years now. Anshu Gupta, the Founder/Director of Goonj has asked for the following:

Material Support Dry ration, Medicines, candles & matchbox, torch & batteries, utensils, tarpaulin, feeding bottles, buckets, ropes, bedsheets, all kind of usable clothing & footwear. ( For the list of collection centers, please log on to www.goonj.info)

Logistical Support

• Transport support to reach the material to effected areas
• Space for collection centers
• Facilities for local pickups
• Transportation of material from different cities to GOONJ processing centers in Delhi, Chennai & Mumbai
  

Needed- large quantities of –

• Rice, Chiwra, biscuits, packed eatables
• Water purifier tablets
• Basic medicines
• Sarees and children’s clothing
• Tarpaulins or thick polythene
• Bedsheets
• Export surplus/cotton cloth for making sanitary napkins
• Mosquito nets
• Stoves, cooking and water storage untensils/buckets
  

Financial support-

Donations in India- Please send cash/cheque/draft in the name of GOONJ and send it to GOONJ.., J-93, Sarita Vihar, New Delhi- 76 (Kindly send your full name & address with the contribution for receipt/accounting purpose. ( All donations to GOONJ in India are tax exempted u/s 80 G of IT act.)

Overseas donation can reach us through Cheque (in the name of GOONJ with your full particulars) or by wire transfer with an information on yasmeengoonj@gmail.com

Rotate it ( valid only for overseas donations ) through Wacovia Bank, New York swift code- 2000193008933, GOONJ, A/C No- 2591101004644
Bank- Canara Bank, H block, market Sarita Vihar, New Delhi- 76
Swift Code- CNRBINBBDFS

Contact- GOONJ

H.O Delhi-J-93, Sarita Vihar, New Delhi- 76 Tel.- 011-26972351, 41401216

E-mail- goonjinfo@gmail.com, anshugoonj24@gmail.com

GOONJ Mumbai- Mr. Rohit Singh Tel.- 9322381600, Email- rohitgoonj1@gmail.com

GOONJ Chennai- Ms. Padma Tel.- 9842665320, Email- padmagoonj@gmail.com

“Do spread the word, talk to your friends & relatives, help us to organise campaigns in the offices, residential areas and schools.”

A team led by Pervin Jehangir, Medha Patkar and Raj Kumar will be heading to Bihar soon and are looking for the following:

Immediate Relief Needs:

• Clothes: In Good condition, for adults and children of all ages, – bed sheets, woolen clothes, umbrellas, rain coats etc.
• Medicines: A list of the requirements is attached
• Financial help: Necessary. Please withhold for a very few days, until we are able to give you the account details of where the money must be sent.
• Volunteers: We would also need to have many young and active volunteers, who have the experience of working in situation of calamity (such as Tsunami,. earth quake etc).

“We will soon be leaving for Bihar with a team. Those who want to volunteer and are willing to work hard, in a situation of challenge and adjusting to whatever conditions are most welcome.”

The medical list includes:

Ciprofloxacin tablets and infusion

Levofloxacin tablets

Chloromyecetin capsules and injections

Ceftriaxone Injections

Chloroquine tablets and injections

Metronidazole Chloroquine tablets, suspension and infusion

Paracetamal tablets and suspension

B Complex tablets and syrup

Phensedyl DM cough syrup

Ranitidine tablets and injection

Antacids tablets and suspension

Cetrizine tablets and syrup

Ibuprofen tablets

Dexamethasone injections

Hydrocortisone injections

Deriphyllin injections

Electrol, Glucose and ORS Powder

You may contact Pervin Jehangir, Medha Patkar and Raj Kumar at the following numbers:  022-22184779, 09820636335, 07290-222464, 09424385139

Bihar: Let Them Eat Rats

“Eating of rats will serve twin purposes — it will save grains from being eaten away by rats and will simultaneously increase our grain stock,” said Vijay Prakash, an official from the state’s welfare department.

This statement, reported by Reuters and carried widely by many news agencies on 18 August 2008, seems even more absurd in the wake of the worst floods Bihar has seen in 50 years. Estimates range from 2 to 2.5 million displaced as remote villages in the poorest state in India were inundated by water when an embankment on the Kosi River burst near the India border in Nepal on 18 August.

Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar’s Caste and Tribal Welfare Minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative. “We are very serious about implementing this project since the food crisis is turning serious day by day,” said Manjhi, who has eaten rats.

And if exhorting Biharis rich and poor to eat rats to mitigate low grain stocks and rising prices was not insult enough, it seems that state and central authorities are partly responsible for the breach in the Kosi River.  According to an editorial in the Hindustan Times on 27 August, under a 1954 treaty with Nepal, India is responsible for the safety and maintenance of the river’s embankments.

The pressure on the embankments of the Kosi River from heavy silt build-up was reported by Indian and Nepali water engineers in 1997, who predicted a major disaster should the embankments collapse.

Officials now report that villagers are eating uncooked rice, flour or cornmeal mixed with polluted water as they have no means of cooking the food.  No mention of rats.

The Poorest in India Paid Over $220 Million in Bribes in 2007

On 28 June 2008, Transparency International India (TII) and the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) released a corruption study for the year 2007 with a focus on “BPL households”.

The study estimated that Rs. 8,830 million, in all, was paid as bribe by BPL households in the last one year, in availing 11 public services. It is estimated that the poorest households of our country paid Rs. 2,148 million to police as bribe.
From highlights of “TII-CMS India Corruption Study 2007“

India has a lot of categories for her people, particularly those in the bottom strata of society. These categories are set up, presumably, to provide certain benefits to the marginalized population. (The controversial reservations system in higher education and government jobs is one example.) There is a National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) that is in place “to safeguard the interest of Backward Classes”. This is the most fungible of the categories, (unlike “Scheduled Castes” (SCs) and “Scheduled Tribes” (STs)) and the NCBC has published guidelines on how to be included in “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs) as well as a central list, by state, of the names of the castes, sub-castes, synonyms, and communities that currently make up OBCs.

Cutting across all these classifications is the category “Below Poverty Line” or BPL (most likely composed of OBCs, SCs and STs). The highlights of the TII-CMS study does not define BPL, but in the 1970’s the government of India (GOI) determined that you were poor if your total income fell below the cost of providing 2,400 calories of food per day per rural citizen and 2,100 calories per day per urban citizen. (Dilip D’Souza, writing in India Together, explores what this means in A thin Indian line.) In December 2005, this translated into Rs. 368 (US$ 8.56) per person per month for rural households and Rs. 559 (US$ 13.00) for urban households. That is less than Rs. 13 (US$ 0.29) and Rs. 19 (US$ 0.43) per day, far less than the US$ 1.00 a day used by the World Bank to measure extreme poverty. Mohan Guruswamy and Ronald Joseph Abraham, of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, call the official poverty line (currently 26% of the population) the “starvation line” in their report Redefining Poverty: A New Poverty Line for a New India because this amount is just enough to consume calories, without taking into account nutrition, or any other basic needs, such as drinking water, shelter, sanitation, clothing, and access to education and health care.

These are the people who had to pay an estimated Rs. 8,830 million (over US$ 220 million) in bribes last year to get access to basic and “need-based” services, including the very services specifically set up to alleviate their poverty, such as the Public Distribution System and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). (Corruption in the NREGS has been highlighted by the recent murders of two social activists conducting social audits of its implementation in the state of Jharkhand.)

The services and the amount paid in bribes for access to these services, are outlined below, in the order of amount paid. This number is not higher because many people could not pay bribes or did not have “contacts” or influence to get access to services. About a third of the BPL households did not have a “BPL Card” or “ration” card.

Police – Rs. 2,148 million (US$ 53.7 million).

Housing – Rs. 1,566 million (US$ 39.15 million).

Land Records/Registration – Rs. 1.234 million (US$ 30.85 million).

Electricity – Rs. 1,040 million (US$ 26 million).

Hospital – Rs. 870 million (US$ 21.75 million).

Banking – Rs. 831.7 million (US$ 20.8 million).

Public Distribution System – Rs. 458 million (US$ 11.45 million).  The Public Distribution System is a social security measure to distribute subsidized food grains and fuel to BPL households through “ration” shops.

Water supply – Rs. 240 million (US$ 6 million).

Forest – Rs. 240 million (US$ 6 million).  Forest services are primarily used by Scheduled Tribes who live in and around designated National Forests. (When a forest is declared a protected habitat, STs who live in the forest are removed and charged a fee to enter the forest in order to maintain their forest-based livelihood or to gather fuelwood.)

Education (up to Standard XII) – Rs. 120 million (US$ 3 million).

NREGS – Rs. 70 million (US$ 1.75 million). The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme guarantees one able-bodied member of a family 100 days of work at the prevailing agricultural rate or, if fixed by the Government, a minimum rate of Rs. 60 per day.  BPL households have had to pay bribes to register, get a “job card”, get selected, and get paid!

These numbers do not take into account the travel costs and lost wages of visiting an office more than three times and dealing with the absence or non-availability of staff, lengthy procedures and multiple form-filling.

The TII-CMS study recommends a four-pronged drive to reduce corruption:

1. Simplification of procedures.
2. Streamlining of information flows with the help of IT tools and e-governance initiatives.
3. Reorientation of front-end staff to the sensitivities of dealing with the BPL households.
4. Additional civil society activism.

I’m not holding my breath.  Besides a couple of headline grabbing, simplistic summaries of this report, I haven’t read any reports of outrage.  It’s business as usual.