The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Managing mining
Strict regulation can stop irregularities

THE steep rise in the prices of sand and gravel, which might have unsettled house construction plans of many people, should not be attributed to the curbs on mining imposed first by the Supreme Court in February and then by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in August. The courts have only said environmental clearances must be obtained before undertaking quarrying on areas less than five hectares. To ensure the compliance of its order, the high court has held the deputy commissioners accountable for violations, if any. Media reports wrongly blame price escalation on the court ban order. In fact, the courts are only trying to regulate the reckless exploitation of minerals.

It is the political leadership in Punjab which is primarily responsible for turning a blind eye to illegal mining. The Punjab government formulated its mining policy last year, putting a cap on sand and gravel prices. There were reports of the mining mafia indulging in illegal operations under political patronage and the continuous government indifference lent credence to them. Cartels controlling the business can also push up prices. Auctions of sites are delayed to benefit the existing players. The deputy commissioners of the districts where the illegal extraction of sand and gravel from river-beds was rampant were either helpless because of political connections of the mafia or plane apathetic. The issue of high prices of construction materials figured in the assembly also but nothing came out of it.

It is against the backdrop of this criminal exploitation of the ecologically fragile areas and the loss of revenue to the state exchequer that the courts have stepped in. It is true environmental clearances are often delayed, but that is no excuse to get on with the unauthorised activity. Faster environmental clearances, transparent auctioning of sites to end the monopoly of a few operators and a firm check on illegal mining and quarrying can be helpful provided there is a political will to act.

Protect hapless children
Haryana government must be proactive

EVER since the lid was taken off the murky goings on in the shelter homes in Haryana, the country has stood aghast in shock and horror. One would have expected that the horrific tales emanating from these homes compelled the Haryana administration out of its inertia into a pro-active mode. Yet months after the shocking incidents of sexual abuse of the inmates, some as young as 10 years, came to light, the state authorities have not shed off their complacency borne out of apathy. Instead of going out of the way to ensure the welfare of children, including the missing ones, it has not moved beyond token measures. What else can explain the fact that three months after the expose 20 children are still missing from the Gurgaon shelter home.

If Apna Ghar in Rohtak was akin to a horror house, the sexual exploitation and physical torture of the girls in Suparna Ka Angan, Gurgaon, was no less abominable. The appalling details of sexual abuse and pressure from the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights did impel the state government to take action against those involved. Indeed, the law must take its course and those apprehended for gross violations must receive deterrent punishment. But arrests alone do not provide a solution to the problem of destitute children who are at the mercy of others.

The real test for the Haryana government would be how best it can ensure the well-being of hapless children and women. That depravities of the worst kind could take place in the name of protection not only indicts those running the shelter homes but also the government which often turned a blind eye to the wrong-doings. The administration can cover up for its lapses and redeem itself only by taking corrective steps and providing a mechanism that will facilitate the proper monitoring of shelter homes. On paper, the instructions issued for the inspection of child care institutions seem sound. Only the administration has to find ways to keep a tab on NGO-run shelter homes without jeopardising their efficient running. For, NGOs, many of which are doing a commendable job, are needed as partners in the development process.

Thought for the Day

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

— Joseph Joubert

ARTICLE

Anna’s dream for political party
Doubts being raised about its success
by TV Rajeswar

Anna Hazare and his team, which has now decided to form a political organization to achieve their objectives, initially appeared at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, in April 2011 with the slogan of eradication of corruption.

The original demand for fighting corruption was soon followed by the demand for the Lokpal Bill. The UPA government held discussions with four members of Team Anna, including Anna Hazare himself, on their various demands. The other prominent members of Anna’s team were former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan, his son Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal, heading an NGO called India Against Corruption. There were also Santosh Hegde, former Lok Ayukta of Karnataka, and Kiran Bedi, former IPS officer. The Lokpal Bill subsequently took shape and was passed by the Lok Sabha, which sent it to the Rajya Sabha. The debate in the Upper House on the Lokpal Bill resulted in its being referred to a Select Committee of the Rajya Sabha where it is still pending.

In early June Anna Hazare came out with allegations against the Prime Minister and 14 other Central ministers and demanded an enquiry by a special investigation team consisting of judges. In his speech at Central Park in Mumbai in June, Anna referred to Sonia Gandhi as the Prime Minister’s remote control and that she was dictating decisions to Dr Manmohan Singh.

Anna Hazare’s team led by Arivind Kejriwal started a fast at Jantar Mantar again in July this year and Anna also joined the team. Soon after he announced an indefinite fast unto death unless the government conceded of his demands. However, the UPA government stood firm and ignored his feelers for negotiating with them.

The people who had collected at the Jantar Mantar venue of Anna and his team were somewhat in a holiday mood. The crane-mounted TV teams were transmitting all the happenings. There were one or two persons who tried to imitate Mahatma Gandhi in their dress and leading a “ramdhun” chanting. There was a man in the crowd who had dressed himself like Hanuman with a formidable tail, and there was a woman in Rajasthani skirt doing a dance performance. From all this one can understand the attitude and thinking of the crowd which had assembled at Jantar Mantar.

On the ninth day after Team Anna started its fast, it dawned on Anna Hazare and his team that the government would not budge by sending negotiators, much less consider the demand for appointing a special investigation team to enquire into the allegations against the Prime Minister and 14 ministers. Then, on his own initiative, Anna announced on August 2 afternoon that he had decided to end the indefinite fast programme at 5 pm on August 3. He added that it appeared that their continued fast was a waste of time. Anna announced that he had taken a historic decision to give the country a political alternative. Anna added that the next parliamentary poll was due in 2014 and during the intervening two years he and his team would go to the people throughout the country. Anna said that many people were asking him to give an alternative and it was time that the country was given a political alternative. Anna Hazare added that he would not himself join any party and that people should decide how to achieve an alternative system and who all should be given tickets.

The Union Law Minister, Salman Khurshid, held a closed-door meeting with Anna Hazare on June 23 after it was arranged at a common friend’s house. Salman Khurshid and Anna spent two hours talking about various issues. The minister explained to Anna that his demands for the Lokpal at the Centre and Lok Ayuktas for the states as well as his other demands such as the Grievances Redressed Bill, the Judiciary Accountability Bill, etc, were all taken care of, and these were pending in Parliament and that select committees were examining in detail. Anna Hazare asked Sulman Khurshid that the government should state all this in a letter or a statement. Accordingly, MoS V. Narayanasamy in the PMO issued a statement soon after. Salman Khurshid’s analysis is that Anna Hazare is an honourable man. Anna asked Salman to keep the meeting confidential. Anna’s announcement that Anna Team was disbanded was made by him on his own initiative and he had not apparently consulted even his close aides before making the announcement.

Anna Hazare and his team are now in a stage of deliberation and there is no knowing what would be the next stage of their agitation. It is believed that people like Kejriwal, a prominent member of the Anna team, have a soft corner for the BJP and the RSS. The Anna party, as and when it is announced, would be an anti-Congress and anti-BJP party, or it could well be of non-Congress, non-BJP brand and a potential member of the NDA. It is indeed surprising that Anna Hazare’s grand illusion has collapsed in such a short time. The realisation came that they would have to face the people on solid grounds of politics and could not continue merely by sloganeering. However, Anna is not sure what is going to be the shape of his political outfit after his announcement on August 2 at Jantar Mantar that his movement would consider “a political alternative for the country”.

The opposition movements in the past had witnessed political stalwarts like Jayaprakash Narayan, VP Singh, Charan Singh and NT Rama Rao who rose against the political parties in power and tried to challenge them on moral and idealistic grounds, followed soon after with the formation of political parties.

The JP movement was primarily against the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. In 1977, the Janata Party with Morarji Desai as its chief emerged. However, Indira Gandhi outsmarted Jayaprakash Narayan as well as Morarji Desai and his motley crowd of politicians constituting the Janata Party by announcing general elections in 1979 and came out successful in 1980. Thereby she proved, in a manner of speaking, that the imposition of the Emergency was justified since the people had voted her party and herself back to power.

The political party which Anna Hazare has announced would take quite sometime to take shape. Anna and his team members want to “consult people” even regarding the finalisation of the name for the party. Likewise, the contents of the manifesto would also be reflecting the views of the people as mentioned by Kejriwal. Political commentators have spoken of the hard realities which Anna and his team members would have to face in giving shape to a political party, enlisting members, contesting elections, collecting funds from various sources for electioneering, etc.

A commentator has stated that Anna Hazare and his friends were living in a fantasy world, and one has to recognise the transient nature of the agitation and the reaction of the people who turned up at Jantar Mantar. The social activist from Maharashtra’s Ralegan Siddhi village will now face the hard realities of political life in this country. When the parliamentary election of 2014 is announced, some people doubt if Anna and his team would still be around, much less generate political waves.

The writer is a former Governor of UP and West Bengal

MIDDLE

‘Mocktails’ from my childhood
by Raji P. Shrivastava

ON many occasions this summer, I found myself recalling these lines from Wilfred Gibson’s poem, “The Ice Cart”:

Perched on my city office-stool,/ I watched with envy, while a cool/ And lucky carter handled ice. . . / And I was wandering in a trice,/ Far from the grey and grimy heat/ Of that intolerable street,/ O'er a sapphire berg and emerald floe,/ Beneath the still, cold ruby glow/ Of everlasting Polar night…

Even as Gibson’s carter is the officer-goers’ object of envy, my mind is transported to the heat and dust of the city of my childhood. Nostalgia mixes with longing as one goes down the lane of remembered sights, sounds and smells. What fun it would be to be a child again, clamouring in clusters around the Golawala as he carted ice, bottles of coloured syrup, moulds and sticks to make perfect crushed-ice golas! On a hot summer day in Ahmedabad, nothing would be greeted with more jubilation than the sound of the ‘bhopu’-horn on the Golawala’s ‘laari’ (Gujarati for ‘cart’).

The Golawala was an expert beverage mixer trained in the school of adversity-fuelled innovation. He plied his trade in the lanes and by-lanes of thickly populated residential societies where children could be found in large numbers, demanding a 'rose gola' or a 'khus gola' and coming back for seconds, siblings in tow.

A huge block of ice covered with a gunny bag was his stock-in-trade. A disreputable looking wooden contraption that worked as an ice shaver was another pre-requisite. The Golawala would break off a piece of ice from his block, shave off smaller particles of ice with the shaver and plop it into a waiting glass. He used a mallet of sorts to push the crushed ice down into the glass. This was followed by a theatrical shake of the preferred colour ‘sherbet’ from the bottle rack along his cart. A squeeze of the atrociously synthetic but heavenly tasting syrupy concentrate (food-grade?) would trickle down into the glass. The spectacular finale: pushing a thin stick into the glass and tipping the ‘gola’ out into the waiting hands of whoever could scream the loudest ....

The taste was divine, the experience was out of this world and the tingle of the ice on my tongue was something I cannot forget in this lifetime. What I do want to blank out, however, is my strict mother yelling, "Wait till you get a sore throat tomorrow." Mothers know exactly how to spoil your fun!

The carter cracked a sudden whip:/ I clutched my stool with startled grip./ Awakening to the grimy heat/ Of that intolerable street.

Like the narrator in the poem, I returned to terra firma with a mental thud. I haven’t seen a Golawala for 20 years. I am told that one can eat ‘golas’ in malls these days. If you ask me that would just be one step away from an overpriced, franchisee restaurant ‘mocktail’ minus the visual joys that have stayed with me and my contemporaries for decades now.

OPED — ENVIRONMENT

Making a case for organic farming
The most effective and low-cost strategy for addressing hunger and malnutrition is through organic farming, which enriches soil. A nutrient-rich soil gives us nutrient-rich food
Dr Vandana Shiva

If we grow food ecologically with internal inputs, more food will stay with the farming house-hold and there will be less malnutrition in rural children. Thinkstockphoto/Getty images

HUNGER and malnutrition is manmade. It is in the design of the industrial chemical model of agriculture. And just as hunger has been created by design, producing healthy and nutritious food for all can be designed through food democracy. That is what the diverse movements for food sovereignty and agro ecology are designing on the ground.

We are repeatedly told we will starve without poisons and chemical fertilisers. However, chemicals undermine food security by destroying the fertility of soil, killing the biodiversity of soil organisms which are the real builders of soil fertility, the pollinators like bees and butterflies without whom plant reproduction and food production is not possible, and friendly insects which control pests.

Industrial production has led to such a severe ecological and social crisis, to ensure the supply of healthy food that we must move towards agro-ecological and sustainable systems of food production that work with nature, not against it.

Not a cure

Industrialisation of agriculture creates hunger and malnutrition yet further industrialisation of food systems is offered as a cure for the crisis. In the Indian context, agriculture, food and nutrition are addressed independent of each other, even though what food is grown and how it is grown determines its nutritional value. It also determines distribution patterns and entitlements. If we grow millets and pulses, we will have more nutrition per capita. If we grow food with chemicals, and we grow monocultures, we will have less nutrition per acre and less nutrition per capita. If we grow food ecologically with internal inputs, more food will stay with the farming house-hold and there will be less malnutrition in rural children. If we grow food chemically, with purchased seeds and costly chemicals, less food will be retained by rural producers, more will go out as commodities, leaving rural areas nutritionally deprived.

Agriculture policy focuses on increasing yields of individual crops – not the output of the food system and its nutritional value. The food security system is based on the public distribution system, which does not address issues of nutrition and quality of food distribution. And nutritional programmes are divorced from both agriculture and food security.

The agrarian crisis, the food crisis and the nutrition and health crisis are intimately connected. They need to be addressed together. The objective of agriculture policy must not be guided by maximizing sales of costly seeds and costly chemicals which rob the soil, the farmers, and the people of nutrition. The objective of food policy cannot be based on promoting industrial processing of food. The objective of nutritional policy cannot be the creation of a malnutrition market. The “chemicalisation” of agriculture and food is a recipe for “denutrification” of our food. They cannot solve the problem of hunger and malnutrition. The solution to malnutrition begins with soil. Hunger and malnutrition begin in the soil, and it is in the soil that solutions to hunger and malnutrition lie.

Industrial agriculture, sold as the Green Revolution and 2nd Green Revolution to the developing countries, is a chemical intensive, capital intensive, fossil fuel intensive system. It must, by its very structure, push farmers into debt, and indebted farmers everywhere are pushed off the land, as their farms are foreclosed and appropriated. In poor countries, farmers trapped in debt for purchasing costly chemicals and non-renewable seeds, sell the food they grow to pay back debt. That is why hunger today is a rural phenomenon. The debt creating negative economy of high cost industrial farming is a hunger producing system, not a hunger reduction system. Wherever chemicals and commercial seeds have spread, farmers are in debt, and lose entitlement to there own produce. They become trapped in poverty and hunger.

Destroying biodiversity

A second level at which industrial chemical agriculture creates hunger is by displacing and destroying the biodiversity which provides nutrition. Thus the Green Revolution displaced pulses, an important source of proteins, as well as oilseeds. It therefore, reduced nutrition per acre, it did not increase it. Monocultures do not produce more food and nutrition. They take up more chemicals and fossil fuels, and hence are profitable for agrichemical companies and oil companies. They produce higher yields of individual commodities, but a lower output of food and nutrition.

The conventional measures of productivity focus on labour as the major input (and direct labour on the farm at that) and externalise many energy and resource inputs. This biased productivity pushes farmers off the land and replaces them with chemicals and machines, which in turn contribute to greenhouse gases and climate change. Further, industrial agriculture focuses on producing a single crop that can be globally traded as a commodity. The focus on “yield” of individual commodities creates what I have called a “monoculture of the mind.” The promotion of so-called high-yielding varieties leads to the displacement of biodiversity. It also destroys the ecological functions of biodiversity.

When the benefits of biodiversity are taken into account, biodiverse systems have higher output than monocultures. And organic farming is more beneficial for farmers and the earth than chemical farming.

Depletion of nutrients

Industrial chemical agriculture creates hunger and malnutrition at a third level – by robbing crops of nutrients. Industrially produced food is nutritionally empty mass, loaded with chemicals and toxins. Nutrition in food comes from the nutrients in the soil. Industrial agriculture, based on the NPK mentality of synthetic nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium-based fertilisers, leads to the depletion of vital micro nutrients and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, calcium and iron.

To get the same amount of nutrition people will need to eat much more food. The increase in “yields” of empty mass does not translate into more nutrition. In fact, it is leading to malnutrition.

Vandana Shiva is the author of “Violence of Green Revolution” and Director, Research Foundation for Science Technology & Ecology, New Delhi

Neither a myth nor a panacea
Organic farming can not just feed the world but is easy on the environment too and hence more sustainable
Rajinder Chaudhary

Organic farming is neither coterminous with the non-usage of chemicals nor homogenous. Besides, the non-usage of chemicals, it has many other components. What goes under the rubric of organic farming can vary from farming dependent on external inputs (some times provided by some of the same corporations that supply chemical inputs), practising mono-cropping similar to one practised by conventional farming, looking for a year-round supply of ‘tomatoes’ to those using no external or minimal external inputs other than labour, insisting on mixed cropping and combining animal husbandry etc with farming, respecting nature and producing only seasonal crops to the point of excluding mono-cropping from the definition of organic.

This diversity within the ‘organic’ is often ignored in comparative studies while amongst practising ‘organic’ farmers, one will find wide diversity going up to the point that each one gives a different name to it! This diversity should be acknowledged in all comparative studies. The moment we do this, we will realise that comparing individual crop yields does not make much sense as contrary to the conventional practice, practising organic ‘wheat’ growers are often growing no less than 6-7 crops in the same field at the same time. An organisation in Wardha refuses to treat any farmer producing less than 10 different crops in his/her fields as an organic farmer.

But all this should not be read to mean that comparisons of yields and income are not important or that organic performs poorly on these counts. A conference organised by the FAO in 2007 had some 350 participants from more than 80 countries, including five inter-governmental institutions, 24 research institutions and 31 universities. ‘Recognising the need to increase agriculture productivity by 56 per cent by 2030’, it evaluated the available data to determine whether organic agriculture could offer an alternative system. It concluded that ‘organic agriculture has the potential to secure a global food supply … but with reduced environmental impacts’.

Then there is the case of Cuba, which in the mid-nineties in the post-Soviet phase, devoid of petroleum products, had no choice but to go organic and it is no worse for that. Nutritional status as well as rural employment are reported to have improved.

It is a well-known fact that conventional agriculture is in crisis. Father of Indian Green Revolution M.S. Swaminathan himself calls conventional agriculture ‘exploitative agriculture’. This ‘exploitative agriculture’, according to a Planning Commission report, has ‘damaging impacts on environment, human and animal health, soil and water resources’. … The rural economy is in ruins because of over-dependence of outside inputs in agriculture such as seed, fertilisers, pesticides, growth-promoting chemicals etc.’ Another Planning Commission study reports that according to official reports, ‘it appears that nearly 2/3rd of our agricultural land is degraded or sick to some extent’.

So, one has to certainly look for alternatives. If there are various ‘organic’ alternatives available that claim to work wonders, one must. study and evaluate them seriously rather than brush these aside as ‘misinformation’. We must devote a significant part of resources going into agriculture research into these alternatives too. Way back in 2001 a Planning Commission committee had recommended that ‘all the state governments may be advised to consider experimentation and demonstrations on government farms on 50:50 area basis on organic farming and other forms of farming’. How many mainstream agriculture research institutes in India have implemented this? Without having done this, to claim that non-chemical farming does not work out is ‘misinformation’!

The writer is a Professor, Department of Economics, M. D. University, Rohtak