BHATARI Devi sits on the pavement at Jantar Mantar in Delhi clutching her baby. Angry slogans fill the air. “Kaagaz tumhara. Jangal hamara,” shout the Adivasis who have blocked the road. It is a protest Bhatari says she just had to attend. It took her three days to get to Delhi from her village, which is 28 km from Kota in Rajasthan. She walked, took a bus and then a train, she explains, her face a picture of desperation. Bhatari has a farm on one acre. This year the rains failed so she couldn’t grow anything. In years gone by, the forest helped her tide over a crisis. “We could always get something to eat – leaves and herbs and so on. Firewood to cook on also,” she says. But the government replaced the forest with a jatropha plantation. Nobody from her village is allowed into the plantation. In any case, jatropha is only good for the oil extracted from its seeds. It yields neither food nor fodder. What really rankles is that people around the forest were not consulted. It was as though her village didn’t exist. “They didn’t even tell us,” she says bitterly.“ Now, from the government’s employment guarantee scheme we get Rs 50 or Rs 60 a day. We are paid a month later. Do you think we can get our forest back under the Forest Rights Act?” she asks hopefully. Also read : Interviews Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A few thousand schools in India have undergone a quiet makeover in the past five years. Their exteriors have been repainted in cheerful colours, toilets improved and classrooms made more airy. Playgrounds have been redeveloped – in one case by using discarded tyres. To make learning less daunting, the walls in these schools are covered with basic lessons in math, geography and general science. Doors are being used as protractors to teach angles. Window grills have taken the shapes of letters of the alphabets. All this has been possible thanks to BaLA or Building as Learning Aid, an inspirational effort by Kabir Vajpeyi and his wife, Preeti, who are both architects and lead an outfit in Delhi called Vinyas. BaLA is based on improving the physical parameters
of the learning environment. If there are
playgrounds and toilets, children tend to go to BaLA is an effort to see the world as a child does. It relies on open spaces, greenery, surfaces on which to doodle and scribble, contraptions to learn from. Kabir’s involvement with education began with the Lok Jumbish programme in Rajasthan. He was among architects chosen to innovate with existing school buildings in rural areas. The challenge was to repair and renovate structures creatively with a budget of Rs 25,000. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
THE world is looking at the work done by the rural surgeons of India as a model in public health care which is both affordable and sustainable and not tied to corporate profits. The annual conference of the Association of Rural Surgeons of India (ARSI) was held at Pipalia Kalan, in Rajasthan’s Pali district, in the first week of November. It was their seventeenth conference and it attracted significant international participation from Africa, Bangladesh as well as Britain and America. “The importance of this year’s meeting is that the world increasingly recognises the Indian model of low-cost facilities with community participation as the way forward in meeting the huge demand for health care in the developing world,” says Dr JK Banerjee, one of the early members of the rural surgeons’ movement in India. Dr Banerjee currently lives in retirement in Dehradun, but he is a legend in his own time. He was invited to Tanzania last year and the African interest in India was in evidence at this November’s Pipalia Kalan meeting where 61 physicians from Nigeria and Tanzania were present. As the world grapples with the cost of privatised health facilities and the pitfalls of insurance, rural surgeons here have shown that it is possible for doctors to stop being driven by money and return to the values of their profession instead. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
CLIMATE change is leaving Ladakhis rather confused. This cold desert perched on the roof of the world is now warmer. There is more rain. Ladakhis are seeing these changes as a mixed blessing. Till some years ago Ladakh received merely 35 mm of rain. No farmer or household counted on rainfall for crops or for drinking water. Ladakhis relied on fresh water from the precipitation which precedes snowfall. Ladakh, a big region with a sparse population, depended only on this rainfall. So all that could be grown here, traditionally, were barley, peas, turnips and potatoes. Only two fruits were grown —apricots and the wild seabuckthorn. But now apples that could never be grown above 9,000 feet are being grown at 12,000 feet. Wheat is being cultivated by farmers. Every year when heavy snowfall blocked road links to Manali and Srinagar, Ladakhis used to pay huge amounts for vegetables like tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and squash. Now local farmers are growing these vegetables right next door. Ladakhi homes cannot withstand rain over 50 mm. Unused to raindrops hammering down, their flat mud-plastered houses collapse and people become homeless. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
Groups in the development sector hope that Unique Identification numbers will smoothen the proccesses through which people can claim their entitlements and access the organised economy. If this really does happen, the project will be truly revolutionary. Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), told Civil Society that groundwork for the project has begun, but much needs to be thought through. The following are extracts from an early interview on how the UID will work and what to expect from it. What exactly is Unique Identification? Will it be on a card or just a number? What details of a person will be encrypted? Are we looking at biometric details? The Unique Identification number provides people with a mechanism to uniquely verify and confirm the identity of a person – to prove that “you are who you say you are.” It will be a unique number linked to your basic demographic and biometric information, with which you will be able to prove your identity easily across public and private agencies in the country. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A government which worries about Maoist violence should perhaps consider with the same urgency going beyond the Maoists. It should address the question of how forest people can be included in the benefits of economic growth in ways that nurture their identities and give them real ownership. Forest areas require investment and development but not without being ecologically sound and sensitive to the Adivasi reality. This should be the challenge before people in government as well as business leaders. We in Civil Society did a cover story called the 'Naxal Reality' several years ago. So, we have covered this ground before. We have also been regularly reporting on forest rights, land acquisition, SEZs and the growing number of conflicts involving industry. But in recent months Maoists have held the nation in thrall. TV shows, newspapers and magazines are full of their exploits. Passionate essays have appeared about the plight of the marginalised and how they have become easy recruits for extremists. The Union government we are told twice over is ready for both action and talks. And yet last month when people from forest communities journeyed all the way to Delhi to demand proper implementation of the Forest Rights Act, there was hardly anyone around to give them a hearing. Adivasis have long lived with this insensitivity of the mainstream. But the passing of the Forest Rights Act in 2006 has given them expectations. The Act gives people rights over land they have traditionally used and also allows them access to forests on which they depend in so many ways. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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MARUTI Suzuki is not just the biggest car manufacturer in India, it is also setting new benchmarks for volunteering efforts by its employees and expects to be able to enlist their families and friends as well. Called e-Parivartan, the ‘e’ standing for employee, Maruti Suzuki’s volunteer programme, and part of its larger corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, was launched last year to create a platform that would enable Maruti employees to engage in social and community work. Two hundred employees have already registered with the initiative. The e-Parivartan programme identified NGOs across the national capital region where Maruti Suzuki employees could go and volunteer on Sunday mornings. The programme offers a bouquet of volunteering options - mentoring, teaching, community development, raising environmental awareness and organising health camps. Since its launch in November last year, the programme has enabled Maruti Suzuki employees to put in over 3,200 hours of active volunteering. Maruti Suzuki says this has been possible because employees took ownership of the programme from the very start. Ranjit Singh, Senior Manager, Corporate Planning, and the primary driver of e-Parivartan, says the push to conceive the programme came from the employees. There were repeated requests, he says, from employees to be involved in social work. So the company’s top management took it on to devise a programme best suited to Maruti Suzuki. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
THE Union Government, especially the Ministry for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj deserve all credit for declaring 2009-2010 the year of the Gram Sabha – the village assembly comprising all adult citizens of the village. There could not have been a better choice in the ministry’s list of priorities. The 73rd amendment to the Constitution aimed at strengthening local self-government and decentralisation in rural areas. To fulfill these objectives, elected panchayats are now in place all over the country barring a few exceptions like Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir. There are indications that in these two states, panchayat elections will take place in the near future. In Jammu and Kashmir, elections for panchayats are likely to be held at the end of this year or early next year. In Jharkhand the state government has been guilty of ignoring its constitutional obligations of holding panchayat elections. But after recent civil society initiatives which asked for early panchayat elections, it appears these elections will be held soon after a new government is sworn in after the Assembly elections. As far as the constitutional obligation of creating panchayats throughout the country is concerned, except a few problems here and there, this duty has been fulfilled within a reasonable time-frame. However, the real test of meaningful rural self-government is to ensure the active participation of the entire village community, to take democracy to every house or hut in every village. It is here that our rural decentralisation and local self-government falters. The reason for this is that we did not pay attention to strengthening the gram sabha. The end result is that in many villages the elected head, known as the pradhan or sarpanch, in collusion with an official usually the panchayat secretary has much more power than is healthy for rural democracy. In villages where there is a weak pradhan, who could be a proxy for powerful persons in the village, other people control him in collusion with the panchayat secretary. In this scenario, certain officials call the shots. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CITIES have forgotten the amazing foods and cuisines they used to once enjoy. To remind them the Millet Network of India (MINI) and Kheti Virasat Mission organised the first ever exhibition of millets at the Press Club in Chandigarh called Bebe di Rasoi (Grandmother’s Kitchen). A bunch of doughty Punjabi women farmers rustled up an awesome range of foods made from millets. The women have rejected chemical farming and opted for biodiverse natural farming. They call their effort, Trinjan. The exhibition and the aroma of food roused plenty of curiosity. A 12-year-old girl peered at the exhibits and asked her mother, “What are millets?” There was no response, so she persisted till her mother decided to find out. This is what Bebe di Rasoi had set out to achieve – get people intrigued about our forgotten foods and food cultures. The Millet Network of India had set itself a challenge, to reach out to city folks for whom the word millet had disappeared from their vocabulary and their dining table. Millets comprise a variety of food grains like Jowar, Bajra, Mandua, Kangni, Sawan, Kodo or Kutki. They might be called by different names in different regions of the country, but they have at one time been integral to our farms, kitchens and even cultural rituals. Over the years, agricultural text books and policies have come to call them coarse grains or ‘mote anaaj’ (fat grains) in Hindi. Such tagging has given millets a cultural stigma. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 
IF you asked fashion gurus about Bhagalpur silk some years ago, they would have shrugged and said it’s just another dying tradition from a seedy town somewhere in the badlands of Bihar. Things have really changed, though. London and Paris, the fashion capitals of the world are admiring Bhagalpur silk. Garments made of Bhagalpur are scorching international ramps, attracting footfalls and buyers. This turnaround is the achievement of a young fashion designer from Bihar, 30-year-old Samant Chauhan, a graduate of Textile Design from Delhi’s National Institute of Fashion Technology, (NIFT). Chauhan realised that Bhagalpur silk was more than just fabric. “Bhagalpur silk is non-violent silk,” he explains. “It is one of the few silks in which the silkworm is not killed. It is wild silk in which the cocoon is kept for ten to fifteen days till the worms start breaking out. The silk is then hand spun. The process is completely eco-friendly without the use of any dyes.” Chauhan says he is inspired by the innate ethos of Bhagalpur silk. He aptly calls it ‘Ahimsa Silk’ or peace silk. It is produced in small production units scattered in a 20 km radius of Bhagalpur. Over the years the town’s handloom industry had lost its sheen with no patrons and little investment in technique and branding. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About Us | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ©2007 Civil Society....................................... .Webmaster Vishwanathan ( vishu4@rediffmail.com ) |
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