December 2008 Edition
From Kerala to Kenya, a local solution
Shree Padre
Kannur
THE sun had just slipped into the Arabian Sea. Yet darkness had not covered us. Here at Pathampara, a sleepy hamlet up in the Western Ghats in Kerala, lights flickered at various levels like stars in the sky. A row of kiosks looked especially bright because they stood together up in front and the street on which they were located had no lights.
Eleven years ago, Pathampara, a 90-minute drive from Kannur, made headlines when it stopped petitioning the government for electricity and instead began generating its own power from a very small facility using the flow of a local stream to run a turbine.
The excitement villagers felt over their achievement is palpable even today. "All that you see from here is our Janakeeya Current, (People's Electricity). We have taken it to the highest peak of this hill," Govindan PK, a farmer, proudly tells us.
Pathampara's achievement has been replicated in the Narmada Valley thanks to the interest shown by Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, (Save the Narmada Agitation). Similar small projects have also been set up in the interiors of Tanzania and Kenya.
In power deficit India, can small hydel projects like Pathampara's meet one kind of demand: that of villages? Can they cut cost and time and provide the impetus for regenerating the rural economy by serving village-based industries?
Pathampara was intended to be an experiment by activists who wanted to demonstrate that eco-friendly power production is possible. But years later it is seen as a serious model for clean, sustainable power from decentralised sources with low investment– provided of course the terrain is right and a reliable water source exists.
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Voices from across India
Rita and Umesh Anand
New Delh
WHAT are the expectations that Indians have of the United States of America? If America has voted for change by choosing Barack Obama as its President, what are the changes in American policy and attitudes that Indians would like to see? When India is not being represented internationally by its government, it is invariably industry that is seen speaking for the country. Business leaders and mandarins of CII and FICCI troop off to present a certain point of view. Quite predictably, these people worry first and last about their bottom lines.
Political parties flog their own agendas. The Left will want to distance itself from America, the Congress will want to get closer, the BJP will hog space on the fence and so on. These positions change depending on who is in power and what the compulsions of government may be.
Academicians do offer an important window on India. But such perceptions move slowly, in a trickle. They don't capture the imagination. The media has a role to play. But the media is often tied to the Indian establishment apart from being cautiously subservient to its advertisers. Witness the uniformity of opinion on any issue ranging from nuclear power to public transport to land rights and GM.
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| Umesh Anand |
EIGHT years of the Bush Administration have unleashed dislike for America. The overwhelming support for Barack Obama is clearly an attempt by Americans to set the record right.
The majority of people in India who responded to our question: "The America we want…" on Pages 6 and 7 found American arrogance repugnant. Two key issues which respondents wanted addressed were America's attitude to environment and human rights. There is also concern over the power that corporations wield over American policy and the lives of ordinary people.
Americans who voted for Obama seem to have done so for much the same reasons. They want a gentler America, more inclusive in its sensibilities and less in the control of corporate interests. They are not entirely happy with the policeman's role that America plays abroad.
It is obvious all of this won't change on the basis of one election. In fact, rescuing corporate America and not demolishing it will be one of the first tasks of the Obama Administration.
But the challenge will be to bring big and small onto the same page. In the context of the market this will mean greater regulation. With accountability and transparency will come the rights of the consumer and the small investor.
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Aunohita Mojumdar
Kabul
JAMILLA is 38 years old and has 12 children. Eighteen years ago, her husband, a daily labourer, fell down while scaffolding a building. He was seriously injured so he couldn't support the family anymore. Jamilla spent all these dark years moving with her family from Kabul to Kunduz to Mazar-e- Sharif, seeking refuge, not just from conflict, but from poverty.
Jamilla earned some money selling boloni, the Afghan version of the stuffed parantha, to women who came to Kabul's only women's park, the Bagh-e- Zanana. It was here that she first heard of SEWA, (Self Employed Women's Association), India's largest union of women who run small businesses in the informal sector.
In the park, SEWA was training 1,000 destitute Afghan women to run businesses that were economically viable and culturally appropriate. Jamilla enrolled for the ecological regeneration course. "It's an opportunity to be independent and support my family better," she says.
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Rita Anand
FOR many years Carterpuri, in Gurgaon, has lived as an ordinary, ramshackle village. A 13- member panchayat did pretty much as it pleased. Walk through its broken roads and stinky drains and you'll see what I mean.
The village got its name 30 years ago after a brief brush with fame. In January1978, Jimmy Carter, US President, visited the village which was then called Daulatpur Nasirabad. His mother Lillian, a volunteer in the US Peace Corps, had worked here as a nurse. Carter's visit was a big success. Even today elderly villagers recount that day with nostalgia. The whole village was spruced up. Daulatpur Nasirabad was renamed Carterpuri in honour of Jimmy Carter. The rest too is history: promises of funding were made, the then state government played spoilsport and Carterpuri lapsed into oblivion.
In 2000, an 80- year -old retired Army Colonel (who is so self-effacing that he doesn't want to be named) noted the sad state of Carterpuri's government- run primary school. He was doing social work and had started an NGO, Friends of Rural India. The Colonel wrote letters to Jimmy Carter. Now the school has an institute on its premises which teaches computers and stitching and has a children's library. There are clean toilets and drinking water. Carter, it appears, got an American multinational to finance it all.
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Riaz Quadir
In the course of the last few weeks my 13- year- old asked some difficult questions on the economic crisis that has been hogging the headlines everywhere. Without muddying that very same innocence, it becomes a monumental task simplifying and sugar-coating the sordid world of adults. How does one tell a child not to trust the media that surrounds, suffocates and confuses us round the clock? How does one muster the courage to show children what those well-dressed bankers really are? How does one tell him that those we call our political leaders are by and large pillagers of society? A hard task for any parent - but it has to be done!
Pondering over such questions it becomes at once evident that what was true for my teenage son happens to be true for a vast majority of the population in general – they have either been somnambulating like the children of Hamlin, swallowing media handouts, hook, line and sinker, or else they have been totally oblivious of the facts. Both politics and finance seem to have been relegated be the arcane, rarified domain of the elite few. The democratic tradition in which the Occident prides itself in its recent history requires the exact opposite: the constant vigilance and public accountability of those who are elected to lead. Hence this letter - in which I reiterate many of my previous musings on the subject – and at the same time try to simplify some of the very simple issues which have been deliberately, complicated to keeps us confused.
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