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)

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.)

Love’s Triumph over Fear

A card-carrying romantic will always say that in the end love triumphs over fear. And she may be right, but we need to go a bit deeper and ponder – fear of what and love of which kind and to what effect? Till we have done this bit of thinking, we really can’t be just happy about the triumph of love. From selfless love for fellow beings to the businessman’s love for profits there is a whole gamut of this emotion to observe.

To make matters simple we can focus here on three kinds of love – romantic love, the love for wealth, and the love for fellow humans. Love for one’s blood being defined more by biology and genes and its characteristics well known, is not considered here.Literature, history and the newspapers are replete with examples of how romantic love is ready to face all odds and how easily it conquers fear. So we have the story of Abelard and Heloise from 12th century France or that of Heer-Ranjha immortalised by the Indian silver screen.

Many are the instances of romantic love brave in the face of adversities -from jealous uncles to cruel kings. Dante said that this love `quiets our will’ and we tend to agree. Scientists who are intent on pinning down romance to chemicals point out that a neurotransmitter chemical called serotonin is among the most important in the chemistry of love. Interestingly this chemical can make people temporarily insane and insanity, as we know, often breeds fearlessness.

Love for wealth and profits has helped in the creation of huge enterprises and employment on the one hand and international crime-syndicates on the other. The worshippers of wealth do also have to rise above fear – sometimes it is the fear of failure, the tax official or angry union, while for others it is the crime investigator. Their kind of love is sometimes described as avarice but even if it does triumph over fear we can’t say straight away that its end-effects are intrinsically beneficial to society at large.

It depends on the subject who overcomes fear and with what final intent.Which brings us to the love for fellow humans, perhaps the greatest of all kinds of love. This kind of love as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others have shown, triumphs finally and decisively over fear. The power of this love can free nations, save lives, bring peace and empower communities. Every concerned social activist will tell us a story, how such a love everyday confronts adversaries and one step at a time, spreads joy and happiness among underprivileged and suffering people. While there may be battles they lose, this growing community of men and women the world over are the vanguards of a movement, which through the power of love over fear, can truly change the world. These selfless people are the bearers of the legacy of Gandhi of Martin Luther and many others; nay they are the descendants of Prometheus!

Unforgettable quotes

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.-Thoreau

All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.-Thoreau

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."-Confucius

When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.-Thoreau

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?-Thoreau

Let there be Rights

We are at the gates of Hong Kong - the venue of the sixth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - when this goes to print. Ministers and delegates from all WTO member nations will flock to this port city over the next week to try and fashion rules which will guide world trade in the coming years. There will be farmers from Korea, coffee growers from Brazil, industrialists from India and of course there will be the ministers the NGOs and many more. All will descend on that glittering port town to articulate their hopes and fears and possibly come back with a better deal for the constituency they represent. While Indian ministers will pitch for better deals in the negotiations on trade in services, their European counterparts will try hard to continue with the protection given by their countries to farmers. Cautious activists will try and buy time before the opening up of the services sector in developing nations to the winds of global commerce while certain powerful nations will band together pressing the South for better access to their markets for non-agricultural products.

More than ten thousand kilometers from Hong Kong and on a long and chilly night in Montreal, ten days ago, there was excitement of another kind. The labours of that endless night brought about a better deal for the environmental future of the planet. The 11th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came to a close in Montreal this past week with the happy news that countries have agreed to do more (beyond the 2012 commitment period) than they had previously pledged, to try and control the havoc that greenhouse emissions are causing to world climate systems. This was some news for cheer and perhaps all excepting US and Australian negotiators were happy.

In the backdrop of Montreal, Hong Kong does not look promising enough. While more and more countries join the WTO possibly with the hope of a better economic future some simple lessons seem to be passing into collective oblivion. Excepting for conscientious activists rarely do we hear about the pitfalls of a system that is bred on contradictions. The basic premise of gains from trade stands on the assumptions of Ricardian comparative advantage. This in simple terms translates to the cold logic of concentrating in doing what you do best and let the others provide for your other needs. Talking of international trade this means concentrating on export of goods and services in which you have some kind of advantage. The second premise that links trade with development is that of trickle-down, i.e. to say the gains thus accrued will percolate and reach everyone.

Sadly these premises are riddled with practical holes. For example who will guarantee that if I spend the first few years of post-college life cramped in call-centres, working difficult shifts and conversing in a peculiar language over phone, with unknown unseen people thousands of kilometers away, that this will not affect the development of my character as a responsible and balanced citizen? How would we justify the loss of indigenous varieties of crops because of the lure of cash crops for export markets and the strengthening grip of multinational seed companies (hawking genetically modified crops and other poisons) on the farmer? How would we ensure that the export earnings trickling into the bank accounts of businesses in leather, textile and clothing and other industries will be equitably distributed among the labour who toil for these industries? Would the state guarantee that in the race to export and export more and fast we will not turn a blind eye to the pollution caused by tanneries? Such questions in there hundreds bubble up in our minds. And sadly we get few answers.

We hear much about managing growth, but can myopic politicians be truly trusted to manage expertly. Can we trust those whose vision often extend to the next vote, to manage with a clear conscience? Doesn’t such managing actually often boils down to the creation of consent where consent is essential and forgetting the rest?

A farmer in India cultivating a rare indigenous variety of rice suddenly finds the lure of floriculture (which has a good export market) too hard to resist. In the process he gives up his age-old practice and begins to cultivate gladiolus and rose which is sold in Amsterdam flower markets. Then one day the Dutch find that Thai roses or Turkish gladiolus are better and cheaper or perhaps they lose their interest in the rose. Roses go out of fashion. The farmer is now in dire straits. He may die of hunger if he doesn’t migrate to the city into the clutches of urban poverty. With some more following his footsteps the indigenous variety of rice he grew would soon be lost.

Yet the worshipers of the deity of trade tend to ignore how dependent (and hence vulnerable) we (nations and peoples) become on one another when we begin to produce just for the other’s sake. Even with the changing geographies of a globalised production only the contours of those dependencies change. It is also mistakenly believed that human beings can be easily impressed upon to behave in a certain way. The mantra of trade-investment-competition led economic growth profanely assumes that human beings like robots can be turned into machines for producing goods and services, while consumerism will be the fuel that will keep them determined enough to work the next day. That individuals are not only economic entities but also social animals, culturally concerned, lovers of justice and liberty and so on are things they want to ignore and try to mange.

In the world of sleepy villages and choking cities, where men and women feel strongly for more things than just bank accounts and plasma TVs, the common cause of growth for growth’s sake, cannot survive without generation of consent and coercion. Generation of consent can take many forms, like the Hindu demon-king Mahisasura - can hide behind a myriad guises, from the seducing advertisements at metro stations to the spiel of a seasoned politician sold on progress. We give this the name of covert coercion. But coercion covert or overt soon begins to bite and the more sensitive (the underprivileged and the conscientious) are the first victims. Some fall to the lure of covert coercion, some die of disease or hunger, but still some stand up and protest and demand that their rights be upheld. In democracies this pull of opposites (the machinery of consent versus the souls of the conscientious and the affected) gravitates around a shaky equilibrium but in autocracies and dictatorships the situation is far worse. Obviously in democracies the management of consent has to be done in more refined ways than in a banana republic.

All movements of rights that colour the social fabric of nations big and small are protests against this tendency of coerced homogenisation for `greater ends’. Of course this attack is not only from the system that promotes trade and globalisation but from all entities and institutions and ideas which falsely reduces everything to profits and growth, hearts to greenbacks, minds and emotions to cash machines.

This is the system which hires thousands of women workers in sophisticated chip manufacturing and electronics industries - because this is something women excel in and this is a fast growing sector that adds to growth figures - but refuse to give them a stronger role in a nation’s political life. It’s the same amorphous immensely powerful entity which destroyed the lands of Ogoni people in Nigeria and put environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others to death. It’s the hydra-headed demon at work that killed and maimed thousands in Bhopal because of their least regard for environmental safety or displaced local Sakai people from the forests of Indonesia to clear the forest gardens to feed their paper mills.

Trying to impose a structure where there is none can be dangerous. From Marxism to MTV the macabre dance of structures continue. Many of the problems that dog societies and people and nations around the world flows from this tendency to impose, to homogenise, neutralise and shall we say robotify. But we have to stand up against all such designs and strongly assert our human, cultural, environmental, gender and other rights. This is the least we can do for a better future. So let us clap the gay activists of Kolkata or the small farmers movement in Brazil or the brave soldiers of Narmada Bachao Andolan in India fighting against big dams; let us drop our coins for the Greenpeaces and the Medecins sans Frontières and other innumerable conscientious men and women out to fight for their legitimate rights the world over, out to break free from this gauntlet of homogenisation that seems ever closer each passing day. In this pleasant Calcutta December, with the push and shove of Hong Kong about to unfold before us, I somehow have cold Montreal and the cheery-weepy climate activists on my mind.

(Written by Rajat Chaudhuri and published in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol I/III; Copyright, Southern Initiatives. All rights reserved.)

Tread Softly

`Tread Softly for you tread on our dreams.' We will talk here of what we hold dear. What we believe should happen and hasn't been happening and from here we will raise our voices and galvanise our energies to realise our dreams. For better worlds are possible.