Dr U Jaikumaran is breathless with excitement over the phone. “The next five days will be hectic and crucial in our war against hunger. We have to transplant rice on 300 acres in just five days.” Dr Jaikumaran, a professor at the Kerala Agriculture University (KAU), has been building a Food Security Army (FSA) – men and women in green uniforms organised into nine regiments and 24 battalions – who are equipped to bring mechanisation to paddy cultivation in Kerala. Now in ‘Operation Ponnamutha 300/5’ 200 soldiers of the FSA are going to achieve what has never been done before. Normally 200 farm labourers would take 30 days to transplant paddy on 300 acres. But the FSA wants to prove the same work can be completed in just five days with mechanisation and planning. The terrain at Ponnamutha in Thrissur district is tough. The approach to the area is difficult. The paddy fields are slushy. But the FSA knows this is a crucial battle. The soldiers go all out and cover the 300 acres in six days – taking one day longer than their own impossible deadline. This too is a record. “Self-esteem is crucial in this mission,” says Dr Jaikumaran. “You can’t solve the food crisis if this force feels alienated. They are fighting a war on the food security front. Hence they are like an army.” Paddy yields have been declining in India. This year rice production dropped by 18 per cent. The reason cited was drought. For the first time in 20 years there was talk of importing rice, a suggestion which sent rice prices soaring in world commodity markets. The Union government backtracked and said there was enough rice in stock for now. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RATAN Mondol, 86, is one of the first environmental refugees from the Sunderbans. Old and bent, Mondal recalls how the rising sea destroyed his life. “Erosion in the Sunderbans began 35 years ago,” he says with the resigned air of one who has seen it all. “My grandfather shifted to Ghoramara island from Midnapore. When the British cleared the forest, he was one of the early settlers.” The Mondols were prosperous farmers in Ghoramara. They owned 100 bighas. But over the years, chunks of it began to be swamped by the sea. “The first major exodus began 15 years ago when all the fertile land in Ghoramara was swallowed by the swirling waters of the Bay of Bengal,” he says. One night, recalls his wife Ujjala, they woke up and found themselves surrounded by the sea. The Mondols lost all their land. They took refuge in nearby Sagar, the largest island here. They watched as Lohachhara and Suparibhanga islands disappeared into the sea after 1982. The Mondols were given one and a half bighas of land where they grow a little paddy. They have a house built under the Indira Awas Yojana and a small pond. But Sagar is rapidly losing land, about 100 bighas
every year. The Mondols don’t know how long they
can live in Sagar for soon it will be taken away by
the sea. For the Mondols, climate change and a rising
sea have meant loss of self-respect and security
and dependence on official largesse. Things are getting
worse. There is no land to resettle new climate
change refugees. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
THE government of Rajasthan’s order suspending social audits in 16 districts of the state has disappointed activists. In early October, CP Joshi, Union Minister for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj facilitated a social audit in his own constituency of Bhilwara. State government officials worked in close coordination with the Mazdoor Kissan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) to undertake the social audit and find out how money disbursed to panchayats for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme had been spent. The audit turned out to be a resounding success. Corruption got uncovered, officials gained experience and awareness spread. People who volunteered got trained. Good practices, like the Vijapura wall on which details of work, materials and people employed were displayed, began to be copied by other panchayats. Buoyed by its success, the government had then said that social audits would be carried out in all the districts of the state. So the order cancelling audits has caused dismay. “Bhilwara created a huge momentum. That will be lost,” said Nikhil Dey of the MKSS. Trouble had started brewing soon after the Bhilwara social audit. Sarpanches and gram sewaks realised that their embezzlement of funds would be uncovered by a transparent social audit. They ganged together and sat on dharna. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
IN a showcase full of pictures there is one of Mrs Sukla Bhattacharjya, 76, in which she has a hint of a smile on her face. That isn’t unusual except when you consider that she’s sitting an arm’s length away, unmoving and perhaps asleep, and that her husband and caregiver, Brig (retd.) SP Bhattacharjya, had to watch almost all day to capture that fleeting moment of wakefulness. Sukla, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1996, hasn’t spoken in four years, is now in the terminal stages of the disease after a 15-year struggle, and it is for these daily moments when her eyes open that her husband waits. Mrs Bhattacharjya is one of 3.5 million Indians with dementia, a disorder marked by a steady decline in memory and mental abilities. This figure is set to more than double in the next 20 years. In fact, low or middle income countries (LAMIC) like India will show a proportionately higher rate of increase of dementia cases over the next 40 years than developed countries. By 2050, almost 59 per cent of the world’s 115.4 million dementia-affected people will be in Asia. New studies also suggest that the rate of prevalence of dementia for people in India over the age of 60 years is now considered to be 5.7 per cent (India’s population of elderly is predicted to be 178 million by 2030), up from the earlier estimate of 3.4 per cent, which is comparable to those in Europe and Australasia. Dementia has the dubious honour of being the leading cause of disability among older people in LAMIC. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
IT was in 2002 that Perry Gottesfeld, a public health professional, started Occupational Knowledge (OK) International in San Francisco in the US. His outfit helps developing countries curb illnesses caused by exposure to hazardous materials and environments in places of work. To fulfill its mission, OK International assists NGOs in checking industrial pollution and preventing workers from falling ill. Accordingly, Gottesfeld put out a request for proposals - offering technical assistance and a grant of $1,000. “We got 60 responses from all over Asia and Africa,” he says outside the conference room in Delhi’s Qutub Hotel, “ but what caught our interest was one from a small NGO in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, the Jeevan Rekha Parishad (JRP). They had seen a proliferation of stone-crushers where the national highway was being built, leading to huge dust problems, but had no expertise to deal with it.” OK International and the Public Health Foundation, New Delhi, organised a Silica Hazard in Construction and Mining Conference in Delhi on 11 and 12 December. The meeting, which was sponsored by the Central Pollution Control Board and the National Human Rights Commission, brought together public health experts, urban planners, medical research agencies and government officials. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WITH the attention of the world on Copenhagen, we thought it would be a good idea to speak to some of the people who have already begun to experience the impact of global warming. In India you will find them on the coasts and in the mountains and chances are that you will soon find them surfacing in slums in cities. Their stories put together by our correspondents appear over three news pages in this issue as a reminder of the escalating problems resulting from carbon emissions. For anyone who chooses to look beyond the carbon dance of competing
interests at Copenhagen, it would be quite clear that the problems The answer to the rich nations is to confront them with their callous record. Urgency and resolve are needed, not the flirtatious engagements that that provide a mere $ 100 billion or $ 200 billion. When the future of the planet is threatened what is needed is honest action and moral commitment. Money is needed, but just throwing money at the developing world so that industrialised nations can continue to pollute won’t make the problem go away. India should have been the natural leader of a new urgency because the burdens that we are going to have to shoulder will go far beyond alternative technologies and reduction of our emissions. We will have to bear economic and social costs that are not part of the current reckonings. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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THERE were some 30 people around the table. Many of them were heads of construction companies doing at least $ 20 million of business each. They shared a single commitment: to change the way in which we impact energy, water and waste management in the country. The first national executive meeting of the CII India Green Business Council was being held in the recesses of the Lonavala hills in Maharashtra on a winter weekend. For the businessmen present here was an opportunity not only to reduce the pressure on the planet’s resources, but also to run their companies more profitably. Like someone said, “If Copenhagen simply concentrated on governance of the construction industry, the world would drop a chunky 25 per cent of its energy use every year.” Helping industry leaders come to terms with new realities were planners, researchers and some very senior bureaucrats. There was news that was quietly being shared on the future that is set to unfold in India in the coming months. “Every government building to be built will be only a green building,” said the Director-General of Central Public Works Department (CPWD), B K Chugh. The minimum rating would have to be three stars by energy efficiency standards. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
IT is Vasanthi Srinivasan’s mission to make management courses more sensitive to Indian social realities. As associate professor at IIM Bangalore, she has been teaching a course on Business, Governance and Society. It will soon be called Responsible Business. In Delhi recently at the invitation of the Business and Community Foundation (BCF), she spoke to Civil Society on how management teaching needs to change to produce better managers. You have been trying to make management courses more socially relevant. The more I taught leadership development, I found that that a lot of questions young leaders in organisations were asking us were of ethical dimensions. They related to making trade-offs between profitability and conscience. We also realised that people in the course who had spent time in industry were asking the most critical questions. They were also the ones who were finding it most difficult to do anything which would follow their call of conscience. They had jobs to hold on to, EMIs to be paid and so on and so forth. It was then that I started looking at ethics and justice as a part of leadership development. One has to think of rights and justice in the Indian context. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
IT was a bitterly cold night in January 1977 when villagers of Henvalghati in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand huddled for a crucial meeting. News had just reached that the police staged a march in the nearby market of Jajal. More importantly, the police was on its way to the Himalayan forest of Advani where villagers had been struggling since days to protect trees from being axed. What should they do now? It was one thing to confront the contractor and his workers, quite another to face a police force armed with rifles and the power to arrest people. After some hesitation, the villagers decided bravely that they will not abandon their trees. After all they had tied sacred threads on those trees. The villagers vowed to continue to protect them. People from several villagers had been coming to Advani forest to collect fuel, fodder, vegetables, fruits and herbs. This forest, like many others in the Himalayas, played an important role in soil and water conservation and in protecting villages from landslides and floods.This forest formed part of the catchment of the Henval river, which is a tributary of the Ganga river. When officials thoughtlessly auctioned 640 sal and chir pine trees of this forest, villagers realised that this can destroy the forest, especially since contractors were known to cut trees much in excess of the auctioned numbers. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
INDIA’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, released a controversial report on 9 November, 2009, saying it would “challenge the conventional wisdom” about melting ice in the mountains. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner.” But the minister denied any such risk existed: “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” he retorted. The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not “historically alarming”. While the IPCC report’s deadline for glaciers is clearly wrong considering the current state of glaciers and their melting, the MoEF paper’s conclusion is also unwarranted, considering the reality of increasing global and even higher Himalayan temperatures. However, the conclusions of the (not peer reviewed) discussion paper from the MoEF, titled Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacier Studies, Glacier Retreat and Climate Change, authored by VK Raina, former Deputy Director General of Geological Survey of India (GSI) is based on very thin evidence. First, the study is based on GSI observations of just 20 glaciers out of the total of 9,575 glaciers within the Indian Himalayan territory and none from the over 46,000 glaciers in the Tibet and Hindukush Himalayan region. Secondly, the study provides no data as to what has been the trend of snowfall over these regions, since snowfall is as much a factor that decides if glaciers advance or retreat as temperature and how climate change affects snowfall. The discussion paper in fact notes: “Studies have revealed that the major factor for the negative regimen of glaciers in the Himalayas is the relatively less snow precipitation during the winter than enhanced glacier melting in summer… Hardly any information is available regarding winter precipitation / accumulation.” ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
TURN the corner from Vikas Marg, a chaotic road stuffed with shrieking cars and you will find yourself in Bharati Artists Colony in east Delhi. The Bhoomika Creative Dance Studio is located here in a warm red-brick building. Bhoomika’s troupe of ten dancers is rehearsing a performance called Rangavali. An eightminute production, Rangavali brings alive the characteristics of each colour of the Indian Flag. There are three female dancers outfitted in saffron, green and white. A male dancer in white and blue represents the ‘charkha’. Their moves are languid, graceful and set beautifully to a musical composition that instils deep pride in the national flag. Practice sessions like these are held every day at the studio but there is an added zing these days. Bhoomika recently launched a performance circuit for schools in the national capital region (NCR). On offer are live stage performances for students during school hours on campus. Bhoomika has prepared a unique repertoire of dance-theatre specially designed for children and young adults. The troupe hopes the performance circuit will stimulate young minds, dulled with computer games and silly reality shows. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About Us | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ©2007 Civil Society....................................... .Webmaster Vishwanathan ( vishu4@rediffmail.com ) |
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