SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2007 Edition
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Some of the most engaging stories that Civil Society has done in the past four years have been about people trying to solve their problems and get on with life. The stories have been about setting up social businesses, opening hospitals and schools, going organic on farms, saving water bodies from pollution, reviving traditional water structures, providing finance, delivering justice and something as unlikely as teaching lower middle class girls unarmed combat. Invariably, these efforts have been prompted by governments having failed to either deliver services or help citizens cope with problems. As India turns 60, such examples of self-help are reason for hope. |
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.Arun Maira
THE challenge of ‘inclusive growth’ evokes a picture of four men in a boat. Two men at one end of a boat that is sinking into the water are furiously bailing. At the other end, rising into the air, two men are gloating, one saying to the other: “Thank goodness, the hole is not in our end!” In September 2000, at the UN Millennium Summit, 147 heads of states, rich and poor, signed a declaration to make poverty history.
They established the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that specified the results required in eight areas by 2015. A mid-term review shows that the goals are unlikely to be achieved. One part of the world is poor, yet to ‘develop’. The other is rich, and ‘developed’. The MDG, as they should be, are aimed at the improvement of conditions in the developing world which is affected by poverty,
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..Anupam Mishra
WHILE in office, President APJ Kalam came up with a scheme called PURA or
Providing Urban Facilities in Rural Areas. It was for 7,000 villages. You could
ask why just 7,000. Surely the Rashtrapati needs to think about the entire Rashtra? There was no logical explanation for 7,000, but it was the chosen number
for unstated reasons. The PURA scheme never got going since the villages
were in the states, funding was to come from the Centre and the Planning
Commission had no such allocation. Moreover the President is now gone.
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..Ravi Venkatesan
VILLAGERS angered by a South Korean steel company's plan to build a $11 billion plant in eastern India kidnap two company executives before releasing them unharmed and this latest episode in a saga of continuing delays in land acquisition jeopardizes the future of this investment. In West Bengal, intense opposition continues to the establishment of a car factory to build a $2,500 "people's car" resulting in pitched battles with the police leaving scores injured. Just a few months ago, another violent clash between police and villagers protesting the creation of a special economic zone left 14 dead, putting into doubt the future of SEZs. Harnessing the anger of the rural poor,
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..Kavaljit Singh
PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh’s sermon on inclusive growth at an annual
summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) evoked sharp reactions
from the corporate world and media. Most comments were aimed at
resisting the enforcement of a Ten-Point Social Charter spelt out by the Prime
Minister through regulatory and legislative measures. “The government cannot
legislate CEO salaries,” was industry’s common refrain.
This is nothing but a complete misreading of the Social Charter because it
nowhere hints at curbing excessive remuneration or eschewing conspicuous
consumption through regulatory and legislative measures.
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..Manshi Asher
LOCAL communities dependent on agriculture have in the past year and a half come out in vehement opposition to the acquisition of land for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Examples abound from Nandigram in West Bengal to Raigad in Maharashtra, Jhajjhar in Haryana and Nandagudi in Karnataka. The SEZ policy is the government’s most recent tool to spur economic growth. At present there are 360 formally approved SEZs. These will cover an area of 583 sq km (58,300 hectares). Combined with the in-principle approvals, the total land requirement is expected to be as much as 1,945 sq km (194,500 ha). The Ministry of Commerce points out that this is only 0.065 per cent of India’s total land mass.
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..
Rumjhum Chatterjee
IT is early afternoon and a group of women and girls
gather near the temple of Yamai Devi, the presiding
deity of their village in western Maharashtra, around
45 km from Pune. The women and girls finished their
morning chores early since they didn’t want to miss
Seema’s session.
Seema is a member of the Feedback Ventures team
that is managing the community engagement process
leading to the acquisition of land for developing a multiproduct
SEZ in that area.
Read More...
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..J K Banerjee
DOES the phrase ‘inclusive health care’ sound like jargon? Several slogans like ‘health for all by 2000’, ‘comprehensive healthcare’,‘total healthcare,’ and
some political ones such as ‘primary healthcare,’ have been coined earlier.
Are all these slogans attempts to assuage the ‘middle class guilt ’ of politicians,
bureaucrats and ‘yes minister’ health professionals who draw up health policies?
The health status of the country has changed only marginally in the past 60 years.
Unreliable government statistics try to show the brighter side by quoting
improved health indicators. But nobody does a cost benefit
analysis of the money that has gone down the drain.
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..Darshan Shankar
INDIA’S traditional medicine sector is growing. In 1947, its total national
turnover was said to be less than Rs 50 crores. In 2007, the traditional medicine
sector is estimated to be around Rs 8,000 crores. The sector is growing
at the rate of approximately 20 per cent every year.
If larger strategic investments are made in R&D to establish the safety, quality
and efficacy of traditional knowledge products, therapeutic procedures and
services, the sector can grow exponentially because then the country’s exports
will also boom.
Today R&D investments in traditional medicine are neither substantial nor
strategic.
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..Rajiv Mehrotra
THE mandate for public service broadcasting in India is today enshrined in
the Prasar Bharati Corporation. Few will argue that it has essentially failed
to deliver. There is continuing confusion and ambiguity about its role and
hence inevitably the structures that will make it truly effective and successful.
For public broadcasting in India to develop its constituency, we have waited
for far too long for Prasar Bharati to rise to its potential and its obligations. Yet
there seems possibility again. A Committee of Ministers is reportedly engaged
in evolving a strategy to re-vision and restructure Prasar Bharati. A draft
Broadcasting Bill is stirring debate and consternation especially amongst the
commercial channels. While their concerns about the government’s heavyhanded
attempts at content regulation are widely shared,
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..Mihir Bhatt
SO far it has been argued that the exclusion of poor and marginalised women, Dalits, minorities, tribals, and informal labour takes place in India because of competing claims over limited resources. There just isn’t enough for everybody so some people are left out. But the tsunami recovery process in coastal South India shows that even when there are almost unlimited resources we still find persistent exclusion, deliberate and by default. A comprehensive joint evaluation of the entire humanitarian response to the tsunami, under the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, found that “India is the only country where .....
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..Riaz Quadir
DESPITE all the efforts of Patrick Delanoe, the Mayor of Paris, to bring summer
to his city, the Paris Plage remained deserted this year. Plage is the Mayor’s gift to the deprived. “If the poor of Paris cannot go to the
beach in summer, the beach will come to Paris,” he had promised with typical
French grandiosity - and created a new tradition: a beach along the Seine every
August.
The sand and the water were there this month but no beautiful bikini-clad
Parisians. Summer had made an accidental stopover here in April. And then
ashamed at her mistake, hasn’t shown up in May, June, July or August.
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..Jug Suraiya
RETURNING to India after a trip abroad, I always
tell myself that there's no place like home,
thank God. For if foreign were like home, where
the hell would I go when I wanted to get away from
home for a spell?
While here, we're too close to notice it. It's like trying
to read this with the paper stuck an inch from
your face, the print a fuzzy blur. But when we return
from foreign parts, we get a different perspective,
and can read the message only too loud and clear.
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..Dunu Roy
IN 1981, Bombay’s Municipality was planning to evict pavement dwellers
from downtown areas of the city when Olga Tellis, a journalist, filed one of
the first public interest petitions. In 1986 the Supreme Court gave a landmark
judgement. It said that under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, the
Right to Life included the Right to Livelihood and hence pavement dwellers
could not be arbitrarily evicted.
At that moment urban planning seemed to have taken a radical turn-- from
the exclusionary process of removing the poor to the more inclusive process of
providing basic services and livelihoods.
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..Milindo Chakrabarti
IN the last two months, newspapers here have been consistently publishing
incidents where animals have gone on rampage killing people and destroying
crops. Elephants and tigers have not escaped unhurt. People have retaliated.
On 18th June, a Royal Bengal tiger was found dead near Dolong Railway
Bridge between Ghokshadanga and Falakata railway station in Cooch Behar district
of West Bengal.
Five days later wild elephants trampled to death two brothers aged five and
seven in their home and destroyed 10 bamboo houses after straying into a village
in Bangladesh. The herd of elephants also uprooted trees and damaged
crops one night at Panihata village in Tangail, 100 km north of Dhaka.
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..Harivansh
IN the last two months, newspapers here have been consistently publishing incidents where animals have gone on rampage killing people and destroying crops. Elephants and tigers have not escaped unhurt. People have retaliated. On 18th June, a Royal Bengal tiger was found dead near Dolong Railway Bridge between Ghokshadanga and Falakata railway station in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. Five days later wild elephants trampled to death two brothers aged five and seven in their home and destroyed 10 bamboo houses after straying into a village in Bangladesh. The herd of elephants also uprooted trees and damaged crops one night at Panihata village in Tangail, 100 km north of Dhaka.
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..Ratish Nanda
IN India we pride ourselves for
being an ancient culture. We are
delighted when Delhi, because
of its rich heritage, is referred to as
the‘Rome of the East’. Yet our
monuments are rarely visited, historic
buildings periodically
knocked down, conservation areas
receive no incentives and public
participation is limited to supporting
meaningless endeavours such
as the Taj Mahal’s inclusion in the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ list!
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