Aam aadmi agenda has many miles to go
Civil Society News New Delhi

The second United Progressive Alliance (UPA-2) government completed a year in office in May with a ceremonial ‘Report to the People’ only to find itself under the cloud of the Bhopal disaster. How could a government so committed to working for the aam aadmi or common man have forgotten the victims of the world’s worst chemical accident?

Now a Group of Ministers (GoM) has made certain face-saving proposals, but it remains to be seen how they are implemented. Bhopal carries a huge burden of pollution. After a full five years in office and now a year into its second term the UPA has acted belatedly to find a solution. Toxic wastes continue to lie at the Union Carbide plant site and have widely contaminated the groundwater. Compensation, paltry as it is,  has not been disbursed and tens of thousands of people live in a twilight zone of apathy and neglect.

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Also read:

Zakia Soman, Nikhil Dey,Dileep Ranjekar, Ravi Chopra, Goutam Ghose, Chandrasekhar Hariharan, Ravi Agarwal, Dr U Jaikumaran, Anand Narayan, Amita Joseph, Dr L Narayana Reddy.
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An interview with Dr MS Swaminathan

Civil Society News New Delhi

He is best known as the Father of India’s Green Revolution but Dr MS Swaminathan has travelled a long way since then. He has worked devotedly on agriculture down the years. As a result, he has seen the rise and fall of Indian farming in all its aspects.

Twenty years ago Dr Swaminathan started an NGO, the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai. It promotes sustainable agriculture and works with farmers who have little land, even those with just a homestead.  Dr Swaminathan is a champion of the small farmer.

At a critical juncture when the National Advisory Council (NAC) will be discussing the Food Security Bill, the big question is whether Indian agriculture can provide affordable food for all? 

The health of India’s agriculture will have a bearing on food production and food security. India’s landscape is fast changing. Urban spaces, SEZs, industry are swallowing agricultural land like never before. There is also the looming threat of climate change.  On the other hand there is the farmer, stuck with high input costs, low prices for crops and unpredictable weather.

As a Rajya Sabha MP and a member of the NAC,  Dr Swaminathan brings to the table his rich experience in farming and boosting food productivity. In his sparse apartment in Delhi, Dr Swaminathan talked to Civil Society about food security and the centrality of the small farmer.  Extracts from the interview:

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Saibal Chatterjee New Delhi

A 33-year-old left bastion is crumbling. If the 2011 electoral script plays out the way All-India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee expects it to, the politically volatile state is just a year away from the end of a not-so-happy era. 

Riding on the back of consecutive wins in the 2008 panchayat elections, the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and the recent battle for the control of Bengal’s 81 civic bodies, the railway minister’s political juggernaut has inched tantalisingly close to Writer’s Buildings.

West Bengal is one Assembly election away from pulling off the sweeping political, social and economic change that large swathes of its people have been clamouring for since Nandigram and Singur exposed huge chinks in the armour of the world’s longest-serving democratically elected communist government.

If Mamata does indeed become the Chief Minister of West Bengal next year, the inevitable question would be: are the Trinamool Congress and its temperamental leader equipped to address the challenges that lie ahead? Says adman and marketing pundit Suhel Seth, “Petulance is good when you are anti-establishment, but it certainly isn’t when you become the establishment.”  

Mamata Banerjee is up against a heap of challenges, many of which are direct fallouts of the uninterrupted leftist hegemony in West engal since 1977. She would, therefore, have to consciously curb her tendency to fly off the handle at times. Her task is cut out.

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Civil Society News New Delhi

Sharafat Ali is an old man who can barely walk. But he came all the way from Ghaziabad to be there at Hazards Centre’s book launch. Ali wanted to tell everyone what his neighbour, the Coca-Cola factory was up to. 

”We have rashes, tumours and tension ever since this cola factory came up in our area Agriculture is ruined, so is our health. There’s no grass. Cows don’t yield milk. Twenty-five cows passed out after drinking water released by that factory,” he said.

Sukhbir Shastri, an elderly activist from Ghaziabad, nodded in agreement. The two are members of Azadi Bachao Andolan, an ongoing agitation against the Coca-Cola factory.

Hazards Centre’s report, ‘How harsh is your soft drink’  has been brought out in collaboration with the People’s Science Institute, Dehradun.  It is a chilling study of soil and water contamination around five PepsiCo and Coca- Cola factories.  They are located in Mehdiganj and Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh), Kaladera and Chopanki (Rajasthan) and one in Panipat, (Haryana). 

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Syed Basharat Srinagar

The Kolahoi  glacier, which is close to the famous tourist resort of Pahalgam, has been steadily receding over several decades because of diminishing snowfall and rising temperatures.  The glacier could vanish in 20 years, warn scientists.

In October last year  a study titled, “Climate Change, Glacial Retreat and Livelihoods,” revealed that in the past 30 years the Kolahoi glacier which used to be a little more than 11 sq km has shrunk to 2.63 sq km. The study was conducted over a period of three years by glaciologist Shakil Ramsoo, an assistant professor in the department of geology, University of Kashmir.

Pertinently, Kolahoi’s run-off feeds Jammu and Kashmir’s main river,  the Jhelum,  which rises from a spring at Verinag situated in the south-eastern part of Kashmir. The river flows through Srinagar before entering Pakistan through a deep narrow gorge. The Jhelum is a tributary of the Indus river with a total length of about 480 miles.

Geologists here say glaciers shrink because of various factors including weather conditions.  “If temperature had been the only reason for retreat of glaciers, then many glaciers which are showing advance at several sites in the Himalayan region, particularly Ladakh, should have also shown retreat,” says RK Ganjoo, a professor in the geology department of Jammu University.

Gurcharan Singh, an expert in remote sensing  and a renowned environmentalist here,  believes that  two important glaciers, the Thajwas in Sonamarag and the Kolahoi  are receding fast. “Some 30 years ago, we would see the foot of the Thajwas glacier in Sonamarag but now we have to traverse three to four kilometres from Sonamarag to reach the foot of this glacier,” he says.

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Umesh Anand

The UPA-2 submitted a “Report to the People” on its first year in office. Our cover story this month is a “People’s Report on UPA-2”. It is based on a cross-section of opinions  from all over the country. These are people who you won’t see on TV as talking heads. But they make a significant contribution in what they do and are real enough. We believe their opinions are important and should matter to any government in power.

While the government’s ceremonial report made no mention of Bhopal, it is the accountability of companies, pollution and depletion of resources that worry people the most when they look at the performance of their government.

People want growth with equity and justice and the expectations from the UPA are huge with it being emphasised that the UPA was brought back to office because of the empowering and inclusive policies that it had initiated.

People are in many ways far ahead of their government. They have a modern and globalised view of the rights of the citizen and the consumer. They don’t look kindly upon leaders who barter away these rights in the name of getting investment or who spend too much time on the same page with the corporate sector.

Bhopal is of course a case in point. This magazine has reported on Bhopal from time to time. More than a year ago we did a story headlined: ‘Will someone please clean up the mess in Bhopal?’ We also had occasion to cover the Bhopal victims when they came to Delhi to ask for something as basic as clean drinking water. It amazed us then that they couldn’t get a hearing in Delhi when they were really the victims of the world’s worst chemical disaster. How was it that the UPA government couldn’t see the aam aadmi in the people of Bhopal crying out for justice?

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Civil Society News New Delhi

When is the right time for a start-up to scale up? When should an entrepreneur move out of the garage? The story of Chetan Maini and the iconic Reva, the world’s most successful electric car, has answers to questions like these. He recently gave Mahindra & Mahindra a controlling stake in his company to discover a new bandwidth for his passion for clean and green mobility.

Reva as an idea took germ some 15 years ago. Over time it got built as India’s only wholly original car with technologies that made pollution-free personal transportation in cities a reality.

It came to be known as a car full of attitude and oomph. If you took a Reva out on the street, people would stop to ask about it. You could own a Mercedes, but if you wanted to show that your heart was in the right place you needed a Reva too. It was a small car which didn’t dent, had zero emissions and required little or no servicing. It was also cheap to drive at 50 paise a kilometre.

For all this, the numbers sold were small. National policies didn’t favour electric vehicles. There were no tax incentives. Infrastructure which would provide charging ports and so on was lacking.

People often dismissed the Reva saying that it didn’t have scale. Chetan himself struggled to win policy concessions and sell the Reva in larger numbers. But the real work that was being done was in developing technologies and honing them in different markets.

The Reva was well received in Europe. And so across geographies and climatic conditions, the Reva Electric Car Company was getting feedback that was invaluable for defining consumer preferences and developing technologies.

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Shreyasi Singh Gurgaon

Right off the busy Gurgaon-Sohna road, with its corporate offices, apartment blocks and unending malls, is the agrarian village of Teekli. You pass small shops and clogged, narrow roads and suddenly the landscape changes. Verdant farms and open skies replace urban dust and chaos.

Surprises don’t end there. Right in the middle of one such farm is a small house. Inside, there are over 20 village women, most with heads firmly covered, furiously working away at their computers, oblivious to the summer heat and a noisy generator. They are employees of a rural BPO run by HarVa, a start-up founded in July 2009 to harness the value of rural India. The women are busy fixing classified advertisements in English and mining data for the government of Haryana’s Animal Husbandry Department, an important client for this BPO, wholly staffed with women.

“This isn’t about women’s empowerment. I don’t believe women need to be empowered. In any case, how am I qualified to do that? This is about creating true value for everybody,” stresses Ajay Chaturvedi, who quit his well-paid, high-flying strategy job with Citi Bank to set up HarVa, a “for profit rural enterprise” that delivers what he calls “double bottom lines” –  financial returns and social impact.

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V Ravichandar

In May 2010, Bangalore and subsequently the country was witness to a rare photo-op. The Chief Minister (CM) got himself photographed in a snappy suit outside the Vidhan Soudha. This was a photo shoot in the run up to the upcoming Global Investors Meet (GIM) in June. While the CM’s handlers felt that a western suit would trump a safari suit in attracting global investors, ordinary citizens were understandably bemused by the hype around the event. The city has over three hours of power cuts per day but you had advertisements asking investors to come and enjoy the energy advantage! Clearly someone in the corridors of power had a sense of gallows humour.

Post GIM, there has been talk of over 350 agreements and over Rs 4 lakh crores of investment flowing in. One has a sense of déjà vu. Our past record with these events has been dismal. There are announcements running into thousands of crores that never see the light of day. One can recall two Memorandum of Understanding from the last decade – one was a project inappropriately called NICE and another was an Indo-French deal to do the Bangalore Master plan with GIS, et all. While the former is still a work in progress (it is supposed to be a road to Mysore) the latter is in cold storage given the land use patterns that were recommended.

There is a saying that Quality is not a coat that you can put on in the morning and expect to be branded a Quality conscious person. Similarly if Karnataka (or any other State) has to be an attractive investment destination, it needs to have a round the year appeal based on sound fundamentals – this implies that we get our act together on the governance mechanisms and the hard and soft infrastructure. Without that, one fears that the only appeal might be access to land banks and concessions offered by the State.

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Kanchi Kohli

Some districts in Chhattisgarh have seen dramatic industrial transformation in just 15 years. Forests have turned into mines, agricultural fields into steel plants and national highways into private company roads. There is never a dull moment in Raigarh or Janjgir-Champa, if you are in tune with the times. Between road accidents, occupational deaths, protests, silent resistance…there is so much to keep pace with.  Ironically, for the national news media, these districts don’t exist.

In 2005, industrial expansion in the districts was making smooth headway. People were unaware that a procedure existed for seeking environmental clearance, prescribed by central legislation.  Such procedures certainly applied to industries coming up in Raigarh. At a public hearing for the expansion of the Jindal Steel and Power Limited, some determined individuals and informal networks decided to begin working together.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the law and its machinery remain in favour of  industry seeking approvals at the cost of proper assessments and due procedures. When irregularities are caught, ways are ingenuously found overnight to set things right. There are many examples I can cite but for the moment I will limit myself to one.

In July 2009, Ramesh Agrawal, a dedicated activist from a small group called Jan Chetana wrote to Jairam Ramesh, then newly appointed as Union Environment Minister, drawing his attention  to  a public hearing for a project which was was wound up in just 20 minutes, leaving over 1000 protesters utterly surprised and shocked.

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Susheela Nair Bangalore

Located in the heart of Bangalore, near Cubbon Park, the city’s lung space, ITC Royal Gardenia is a juxtaposition of luxury and eco friendliness. Designed by architect Rajinder Kumar, the hotel’s architecture incorporates the unique charm and flavour of Bangalore, India’s Garden City.

The interiors have been aesthetically crafted by Francesca Basu, a designer based in Britain. Nature is the underlying theme. Drawing inspiration from layers of life forms, Basu has dexterously woven the theme of nature through colours, motifs and textures into the interiors in each floor. She has chosen elements of nature ranging from stones to earth, trees, wood, water, fire, foliage, animal life, flowers, winged species, including birds and butterflies, sky and clouds.

As one enters the windswept lobby through the glass facade, the first thing that strikes one is the perceptible drop in temperature The architecture tries to bring inside a bit of the outdoors, in keeping with the Garden City theme. The nature theme is discernible everywhere, from the high atrium lobby to the rooms and suites in each floor and the restaurants. The white sofas, couches and jharokha-style seating arrangements, done up in shades of green, lend  charm to the Grand Arrival Court or the spacious lobby. The lush greenery is indeed a welcome relief to the  frenzied activity outside the hotel.

The most amazing feature of the lobby, however, are four state-of-the-art vertical gardens, 10,600m tall steel structures each embedded with up to 1,500 plants. The vertical gardens are  drip irrigated. These soaring columns of green stretch right up to the 12th floor. Around 1500 species of philodendrons grow in the vertical gardens and they are a visual delight. A soil-free gravity-defying method has been used to grow plants. The vertical gardens are supported by a vertical wall and divided into two layers. The water drips evenly and provides moisture to every plant along the entire length. It collects at the base and is recycled for use. Plants are graded according to the lighting they require to flourish. Patrick Blanc, the creator of the vertical gardens, and the hotel management have ensured that the lighting system is energy efficient.

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