Friday, October 19, 2007

The Web of Rights

A few weeks ago a young friend from Delhi spammed my Orkut account with a message urging me to check out their NGO's work on good governance, using Right to Information as a tool. Though the spam irritated me a bit, I was impressed visiting the organisation's website and learning about the work they are doing. The Right to Information Act and the involvement of Indian civil society in putting it to use has been a watershed among movements that have people at their core. While the relationship between right to spam and the right to information are complex, in this case, I thanked my young friend for sending me the information! In fact I invited her to write for this journal which she has done.

Unhindered flow of information say economists is an essential pre-requisite for perfect competition in markets. And perfect competition is best for consumer welfare. Drawing an analogy, if we think of citizens as 'consumers' and democracy and its institutions (elected representation, universal franchise, rule of law) as the framework, then again information becomes vitally important for this framework to deliver the goods. The goods: of course good governance, empowered citizenry, lesser corruption among others.

So the right to information is one of those 'super-rights' that if realised to its fullest can nurture and strengthen other rights of the people. This is why the rulers of the day have been jittery and attempts to dilute the law are afoot, here in India. Thankfully a proactive and vigilant civil society has till now prevented this from happening.

Yet, can this right stand in isolation as a source from which other rights and empowerments flow? We know this is not so. For information without understanding is useless, just as understanding without information can be misdirected. Education and the existence of a vibrant civil society movement guarantees that this marriage of information and understanding take place.

Let's talk about India. Here the right to information legislation is being used by deprived and better off alike in demanding (among various other things) information about progress in government projects, payment of old-age pensions among other things. But in many cases there is a civil society organisation facilitating the process of exercising the right. This is necessary as many of us do not know the exact procedures involved. Moreover a large section of the victims of mis-governance are the deprived. They are victims because their deprivation has made them vulnerable and among these deprivations is often a lack of basic education.

Education nurtures our social consciousness, even the most rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic helps us relate to the world in an extra-animal way that is not only about instincts. The Indian reformer Swami Vivekananda said

'Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.' Without the manifestation of this perfection - what we call here social consciousness, or our consciousness of rights and duties - no super-legislation can guarantee salvation.

While NGOs can play the important role of mediator they can do so much. To instil consciousness about rights, to inculcate the attitude of asking questions and fighting for answers, education has no alternative.

So in this web of rights where the right to information alongwith human rights occupy a central space, education happens to be the gossamer thread that holds it all together. Its that sine qua non which guarantees that the web, is a web of life and empowerment and not a quagmire of blind alleys and endless pits. And this is why the right to education (elementary education to begin with) becomes so important.

Alas! progress on this right is slow and in India we still don't haven't got the necessary amendment to the Constitution that will enshrine this supremely important right. Bogged down in nitty-gritties, procrastinating for reasons best known to ourselves we keep delaying in institutionalising one of the pivotal rights that will bring this web to life. When education and enlightenment reach every corner of our land and people begin to ask questions and demand for change, that will be the greatest of revolutions to have come for a long time. Till then we go on erecting the edifices of our democracy, on thin ground.

(Editorial written by Rajat Chaudhuri, Published in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol II/I. Copyright, Southern Initiatives . All rights reserved)


Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Smoke, Tears and Mirrors of Development


As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler – Henry David Thoreau

The Frenchman has finally disappeared beyond the horizon. Good news for many of us that the last rites of the decommissioned aircraft carrier – Le Clemenceau - of the Fifth Republic was not performed in the scrapyards of India. The poison boat with a thousand tonnes of asbestos and other toxic substances in its hull was at last sent back home. But it took the collective might and tireless efforts of groups like Greenpeace, Ban Asbestos Network and others and finally the Supreme Court of India to deal with this retired warrior from the French Navy.

Why was it so difficult to send the ship back? A decommissioned aircraft carrier, it of course did not threaten us with guns or Exocet missiles! It was difficult because surreptitiously and without heed to internationally agreed rules we have decided to become a prime destination for the waste of the world’s rich. And the rich are very happy to bestow us with this honour and help us in ignoring a rule here, skirting round an agreement (Basel Convention and Basel Ban Amendment) there. We have welcomed dead ships for breaking at our dirty ship-breaking facility at Alang, we have shopped for the world’s dirt and poison like mercury, lead, ash, electronic scrap in the far shores of Europe, Australia and America.

We are told that all this dirt is needed because the dirt is not dirt after all. It yields `useful’ substances like mercury, asbestos, gold, copper, plastics which are required to supercharge the Indian economy. It is never revealed how toxic some of these substances are, how hazardous are the processes through which these are recovered from the waste. What is never spoken about is what the workers who are involved in handling and extraction get in return, what diseases plague them, what shadows darken their tenuous existence. The discussion if at all is about quantities, about numbers, jobs, the employment that the merchandisers of waste generate. Quality (the quality of life of these workers in this case) as often, is quietly forgotten. The benefits, painted in the colours of mass appeal, elaborated in the language of progress are repeated over and over again till the costs disappear from our minds. At best the costs are explained to be manageable.

Which brings us to another important and literally big story of the day – The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) dam over the Narmada river in India, its promises and the tears of those it displaced. Though not as gigantic as the Three Gorges Dam in China the SSP, a Rs 30,000 crore (US$ 6.6 billion) project when completed has been promised to irrigate 1.8 million hectares. However as activists led by Medha Patkar of Narmada Bachao Andolan has been pointing out, the human and other costs are beyond compare. When the dam height was 110.64 metres the number of families affected by submergence in the state of Madhya Pradesh alone was 8860. The total number of affected families has been estimated to be around 25,000 while resettlement and rehabilitation is plagued by corruption and other ills. When the Narmada Control Authority recently allowed further increase in the height of the dam to 121.92 metres, it resulted in feverish protests and a fast by Medha Patkar and some affected people. The Chief Minister of Gujarat also went on what we could call a counter-fast in support of height increase of the dam and the farmers who will be benefited by the dam.

Here we see the promise of irrigated land coming in direct conflict with the welfare of the displaced people. Of course the court has stepped in asking the government to arrange for rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) but as we have said before, the on-the-ground scenario leaves much to be desired. And also do these state governments have enough land to distribute among those whose lands have been or will be submerged?

And the undesirability of big dams does not end here. To speak of the biggest in the world, the 185 metres high Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze in China, has been criticized for its effects on environment, ecosystems, loss of heritage sites, contradictions between flood control and hydroelectricity production, induced seismicity among other reasons. This dam has also displaced millions while their numbers have been underreported and corruption has eaten into R&R benefits.

One other mammoth project here in India that is supposed to propel us forward on the development path is the Sethusamudram ship channel between India and Sri Lanka. By cutting sailing time of ships this channel has been touted to bring direct economic and other benefits to the country and its people. As per latest reports about 5.16 million cubic metre of the shallow seabed has already been dredged as part of the project. The project goes on inspite of experts having faulted its environmental impact assessment (EIA) exercise among other things.

The juggernaut of `development’ rolls on. The tunnel vision of our leaders and we who support them leads us to believe in the benefits of rummaging through a poison boat, digging a ship channel or building the monstrosity of a dam. The costs are at best managed and very badly at that. Have we ever stopped back and tried to do a disinterested cost benefit exercise of such mammoth projects where all parameters – the social, environmental, economic – are taken into account and a participatory framework is used for decision making, as to the necessity of the project in the first place.

Surely dead men tell no tales, nor does those who are yet to be born. So the burden of unsustainabilty of our developmental model can be quietly passed on to our future even at the conception stage. And as for the present – the people that the dams displace or the workers dying of asbestosis or lung cancer in the ship breaking yard - we have courts to grant them alternative land, we have corrupt officials to underreport their numbers or demand bribes for getting rehabilitated, we have managers and experts to lecture on safety in the workplace and greedy contractors not to implement their suggestions.

But how long can we fool ourselves and go on. Can costs of displacement and disease be so easily measured? How does the economic, the social and the environmental costs relate with each other? Can our best climate modeling still predict where the next cyclone would strike and how exactly global warming will affect climate and weather of a particular region?

When the flesh and blood and tears and smiles of thousands of people and those unborn are at stake the concept of cost begins to lose the sharp and clear ring that commerce or economics tends to impute upon it. The arithmetic of numbers and the complacency of nice theories of that Italian, Vilfredo Pareto and the utilitarians, begin to ring with a strange hollowness. The hall of mirrors, that faceless development embodies; where we sit and vote for progress every election-time, begins to get dark. The glass gets blackened before our eyes. And with this dissolution of meaning we feel as helpless as the primitives, as to what we should do with the great power that science and technology has given us.

Do we go on managing and that too badly, the ills of our love for a glittering future of obscene wealth and power? Or do we start thinking anew, and with passion, for simpler, unsophisticated and more humane solutions to the problems of life and living. As individuals, communities and nations the choices are always open before us.

(Editorial written by Rajat Chaudhuri in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development (SIJSD), Published in SIJSD, Vol I/IV; Copyright, Southern Initiatives. All rights reserved.)