Police accost women protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

For years India’s pro-liberalisation, Congress party-led coalition government chafed at civil society groups getting in the way of grand plans to boost growth through the setting up of mega nuclear power parks, opening up the vast mineral-rich tribal lands to foreign investment and selling off public assets.

Now, at the end of its tether, the Interior Ministry has cracked the whip on hundreds of non-governmental organisations engaged in activities that “prejudicially affect the public interest.”

“It is shocking what the government has done – but not surprising given the increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic and repressive measures being directed…against anyone who is seen to challenge or disagree with their positions and decisions,” Lalita Ramdas, anti-nuclear campaigner and board chair of Greenpeace International, told IPS.

Ramdas said NGOs concerned with nuclear power, human rights, environment and ecology – areas where corporate and industrial interests were likely to be questioned – appeared to be particular targets of the government order.

Among the worst affected is the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), a network of more than 700 NGOs that is currently challenging, in the Supreme Court, the government’s restrictions on foreign funding reaching groups that engage in activities that can be described as “political” in nature.

In its court petition INSAF described itself as an organisation that believes that “the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India need to be safeguarded against blatant and rampant violations by the State and private corporations.”

INSAF said it has “actively campaigned against land grabs by corporations, ecological disaster by mining companies, water privatisation, genetically modified foods, hazardous nuclear power (and) anti-people policies of international financial institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.”

INSAF declared in court that it “firmly believes in a secular and peaceful social order and opposes communalism and the targeted attacks on the lives and rights of people including religious minorities, and regularly organises campaigns, workshops, conventions, fact-findings, people’s tribunals, solidarity actions for people’s movements and educational publications.”

“With that kind of a profile we were expecting this crackdown,” Anil Chaudhary, coordinator of INSAF, told IPS. “Still, the government could have waited for the Supreme Court verdict.”

“At this rate,” he said, “organisations working against discrimination of women and (advocating) for their empowerment through participation in local bodies could be termed “political”, as (well as) organisations working for farmers’ rights.

“The same arbitrariness can be applied to green NGOs trying to protect the environment against mindless industrialisation.”

Chaudhary thinks it unfair that NGOs critical of government policies are being singled out. “Instead of selectively freezing the funding of groups under INSAF, the government should order a blanket ban on all foreign funding.”

Among INSAF’s many campaigns is an intiative to bring international financial institutions like the World Bank under legislative scrutiny for their activities in India.

It cannot have escaped the government’s attention that INSAF’s campaigns have run parallel to powerful movements for transparency and clean governance led by social activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the Aam Admi Party (Common Man’s Party) that plans to contest general elections due in 2014.

Kejriwal, whose social activity led to the passage of the 2005 Right to Information Act, has also been closely associated with transparency campaigns led by Anna Hazare, who mounted a Gandhian-style fast against corruption in April 2011 that rallied over 100,000 ordinary people.

Street protests demanding good governance have since been a thorn in the side of the government.  When they peaked in December 2012, following the gang rape of a young woman in a bus in the national capital, police took to beating protestors.

The government, starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has also been frustrated by NGOs’ efforts to stall work on a string of mega nuclear parks along peninsular India’s long coastline, especially at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

In February, the government froze the accounts of two leading Tamil Nadu-based NGOs allegedly associated with the protests at the site of the Kudankulam plant, signalling a new and tough stance against civil society groups fighting the displacement of farmers and fishermen by mega development projects.

The two NGOs, the Tuticorin Diocesan Association and the Tamil Nadu Social Service Society, received four million and eight million dollars respectively over a five-year period that ended in 2011, according to declarations they made to the government.

With strong backing from the Church, the groups continue to operate despite the freeze on their assets.

During the same five-year period a total of about 22,000 NGOs across India received roughly two billion dollars in foreign contributions, going by government records.

Unexpected protests have surfaced from among the Congress party’s partners in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Devi Prasad Tripathi, general secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party and member of parliament, reminded Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that the UPA is “committed to protecting and promoting secular, democratic and progressive forces in the country.”

“Effectively, the government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent,” commented Achin Vanaik, professor of political science at the Delhi University.

The government’s move stands in stark contrast to promises made not two years ago at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, where 159 governments and member organisations honoured the vital role played by the non-profit sector by pledging to foster an “empowering” climate for civil society.

In his most recent report to the United Nations General Assembly, Maina Kiai, special rapporteur on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, noted with grave concern that India has repressed “peaceful protestors advocating economic, social and cultural rights, such as…local residents denouncing the health impact of nuclear power plants.”

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Those responsible for the Bangladesh building collapse that killed more than 1,000 garment workers should be given life in prison, a government-appointed committee has said.

The investigating committee, appointed by Bangladesh’s interior ministry, recommended life in prison for the owner of the five factories based in the building on the outskirts of Dhaka.

The Apr. 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza building, the deadliest garment industry accident in history, highlighted the hazardous working conditions in Bangladesh’s 20 billion dollar garment industry and the lack of safety for millions of workers, who earn as little as 38 dollars a month.

The committee found that the ground on which the Rana Plaza was built was unfit for a multi-storey building and the construction itself was “extremely poor quality”.

“A portion of the building was constructed on land which had been a body of water before and was filled with rubbish.” Khandaker Mainuddin Ahmed, the committee head, told the Association Press news agency on Thursday.

Ahmed said Sohel Rana, owner of Rana Plaza was “the main culprit, and because of him 1,127 people have died.”

The report found that Rana ignored construction codes by converting the originally designed six-storey building meant for a shopping mall and commercial space into an eight-storey factory complex where over 3,000 labourers toiled.

Khandaker said Rana, and the factory owners, four of whom have been arrested, forced employees to go to work on Apr. 24 despite cracks which appeared in the building the day before.

“They threatened the workers that they would be fired and that their salaries would be cut if they refused to go to work.”

The committee also said the owners used generators in upper floors, defying building regulations. Combined with other industrial machinery the weight of the generators triggered the collapse.

New safety reforms

A U.S. delegation is to arrive on Sunday led by Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s under secretary for political affairs. They will meet officials from the Bangladeshi government.

“They’ll talk about labour law reforms,” U.S, ambassador Dan Mozena said.

“They’ll talk about fire safety standards, a minimum standard for every factory, and they’ll talk about minimum structural soundness standards.”

If the proposals are accepted, “it will become the largest ‘better work’ programme in history,” Mozena said.

The Bangladeshi government has already pledged to tighten factory safety inspections and make it easier for workers to form unions and set up a panel to raise wages for the three million garment workers.

Mozena said there were still “some outstanding issues” to be addressed, without elaborating.

Poor wages and repeated fatal accidents have led to a string of protests in the main garment-manufacturing hubs, halting shipments and forcing some retailers to divert orders to other countries.

More than 2,500 people were rescued after the disaster and the committee has urged the government to provide them with free medical treatment.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

The textile industry is suffering from the blackouts. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Raheel Tauseef is feeling quite powerless this summer. Frequent power outages in the industrial city of Faisalabad in the Punjab province of eastern Pakistan, where the 29-year-old and his family run three hosiery factories, are taking a heavy toll on their business.

“The power outage is anywhere between 12 and 16 hours,” Tauseef told IPS. We do get a respite of some four hours, but even that is not at a stretch. Just as the machines get rolling, the power goes off.”

So bad is the situation that the family has had to lay off over a thousand workers in the last two months. “Many factory owners are now keeping workers on a daily wage earning basis and pay them only on the days when there is work,” he said.

Little wonder then that Mian Zahid Aslam, president of the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was sounding frustrated when IPS caught up with him over the phone.

Having sat through three gruelling back-to-back meetings, all he could say was: “We are done with meetings. We want some action now, and quick.” Apparently, all that the various stakeholders could discuss at the meetings was how best to end the energy shortfall and revive the dying industry.

“The fomenting anger of the factory workers will spill out on the streets if something is not done on a war footing,” said Aslam.

Fearing precisely such violence, the provincial government of Punjab has directed the administration to avoid unscheduled power outages which have now reached up to 20 hours a day.

Meanwhile, many industrialists in Punjab have installed huge generators, run either on gas or diesel, to meet their export deadlines. But this is not without its problems either.

“Due to shortage of gas, we get it only for three days,” said Tauseef. In desperation, many factory owners have switched to diesel, but even that has become precious now. “Buying diesel from the stations is almost like begging for it,” he added.
Over 80 per cent of the 3.2 million people in Faisalabad, a city dubbed the Manchester of Pakistan, are linked to the textile industry. It is home to nearly half of Pakistan’s textile factories.

The national trade body All-Pakistan Textile Mills Association reports that the sector accounts for over 50 per cent of Pakistan’s total exports of roughly 25 billion dollars, and employs 38 per cent of the manufacturing sector workforce. That works out to about 3.5 million people.

According to experts, Pakistan is losing between 1.3 per cent and two per cent of its gross domestic product due to the energy crisis and an ineffective law and order apparatus.

And the summer has only made the situation worse. With the mercury soaring well above 40 degrees centigrade across the country, there is a shortfall of 7,000 mega watts of power. Of the total demand for 16,000 mw, the available supply is only 9,000 mw.

Power cuts were a problem all political parties acknowledged in their manifestos for the May 11 elections. The party which finally won – the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) – had, in fact, ranked it second after the economy on its list of important things to address.

Their leader and now the prime minister designate, Nawaz Sharif, promised in his election rallies to end load-shedding in two years if his party was voted to power. He also vowed to make Pakistan one of the top ten economies of the world and talked about expensive schemes like bullet trains and privatising the national airline and the railways.

Not everyone was impressed, though. Haris Gazdar, a leading economist based in Karachi, capital of Sindh province, hoped the new government would “rethink the bullet train business.”

“Our politicians promise us the moon,” said Tauseef. “Energy is indeed a big challenge and I have yet to see a plan of action.”

On its part, the PML-N plans to pump in two billion dollars to generate 10,000 mw of electricity in the next five years. Half of this is expected to come from developing the Thar coalfields in Sindh and setting up coal-fired plants in that southern province.

This meets the approval of Pakistan’s former science and technology minister, Professor Atta ur Rahman. The previous ruling Pakistan People’s Party, he told IPS, had “opted wrongly for oil-based power plants due to the huge kickbacks they received.”

Top priority should be given to converting all the country’s power plants to coal, he believes. “China and India both use coal as the major source of energy,” he said.

And before the environmentalists leap up in protest at his suggestion, he added, “We can employ cheap locally fabricated filtering devices to clean up the emitted soot.”
Rahman is hopeful the new government can “overcome the problems.”

His only caveat: “They must appoint competent and honest professionals and observe merit.”

The water and power ministry too has warned that unless corruption in the National Power Control Centre in Islamabad is curbed, no improvement in performance can be expected.

The PML-N government will have to take some tough decisions if it is going to tackle the energy challenge with any amount of seriousness.

“To overcome the energy crisis, prices will have to be raised and dues recovered,” said Gazdar, who is the director of the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi. “Alternatively, they can allocate more gas for power generation at the expense of other consumers.”

Petroleum minister Sohail Wajahat H. Siddiqui has already indicated a price hike without which, he said, the sector would suffer “irreparable economic and efficiency loss.”

With the government providing as subsidy the gap of Rs 3.02 per unit between the cost of producing electricity (Rs 11.91 per unit) and the price at which it is sold to the consumer (Rs 8.89 per unit), the Pakistani consumer can expect a hike in tariff as soon as the new government takes over the reins of power.

A port of entry into Myanmar (Burma) from Thailand. Credit: Preethi Nallu/IPS

Nangnyi Foung reaches into the dryer, pulls out another pair of pants and places it on the ironing board. “I still have several more loads to go,” she says as the clock strikes nine p.m., marking the start of her 14^th hour on the shift.

She has been on her feet in this laundromat in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai since seven in the morning and had been hoping to call it a day when two more customers walked in.

She is not in a position to turn anyone away: “I need the money. My family needs me to work,” she tells IPS, her voice tinged with desperation as she begins yet another load.

Six do-it-yourself washing machines stand like sentries at the entrance of this storefront-turned-laundromat. A flight of stairs leads to Nangnyi Foung’s living quarters, where she retires late at night only to collapse in exhaustion before waking up and beginning all over again.

Originally from the Shan State in neighbouring Myanmar (formerly Burma), Nangnyi Foung came here saddled with debt.

Fleeing persistent violence in her home country, she took out loans and paid middlemen hefty sums in order to win safe passage to Thailand, where, she had heard, employment opportunities awaited.

Ten years later Nangnyi Foung is still working to pay off her debt, awaking daily to a rigorous fourteen-hour shift of washing and ironing. Her earnings after seven days’ work without a single day off amount to little over six dollars, much of which is remitted back home.

Reaching for the steaming iron Nangnyi Foung tells IPS she saves on living expenses by sleeping in the basement of this facility. If she also had to pay for lodging she would not be able to send money home to her family of four.

Accounting for over 80 percent of Thailand’s 2.5-million-strong migrant labour force, Burmese migrants like Nangnyi Foung provide a lifeline to cash-strapped families back in Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries that is struggling to recover from decades of economic stagnation.

Today, the minimum wage in Myanmar – about 180 dollars a month – buys eight to 10 times fewer daily consumption commodities like rice, salt, sugar and cooking oil than it did twenty years ago. The average Burmese lives on less than a dollar per day.

Though Myanmar is the world’s largest exporter of teak, jade, pearls, rubies and sapphires, and boasts lucrative extractive industries such as mining, timber and power generation, very little of the country’s natural wealth trickles down to the masses: approximately 32 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while unemployment is at 5.4 percent.

According to a 2006 survey of migrant workers from Myanmar, conducted by the Asian Research Centre for Migration, more than two-thirds of the 600 respondents admitted to being unemployed before migrating to Thailand.

Remittances jump hurdles

While migrant workers fill crucial gaps in Thailand’s labour market, and their remittances account for five percent of Myanmar’s gross domestic product (GDP), neither government has attempted to make the flow of money between workers and their families any easier.

Despite the existence of commercial banks or official ‘Xpress Money’ outlets, most migrants prefer to use the informal remittance channel known as the “hundi” system.

These unauthorised transactions involve dealers in Thailand relaying messages to members of their network in Myanmar, who then deliver the necessary amount to the family.

Some migrants rely on friends and loved ones who travel between the neighbouring countries to act as conduits, thereby circumventing costly bank transfers.

“The banks can’t be trusted and they require a work permit, a letter of recommendation from our employer and a passport,” Nangnyi Foung says, documents very few migrants have access to.

Migrants with families in rural areas go through brokers, who deliver cash to the recipient’s doorstep, eliminating the hassle of them having to locate cash points.

According to a new report released Monday by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Asian countries dispatched over 60 million migrants into the world, “who sent almost 260 billion dollars to their families in 2012. This represented 63 percent of global flows to developing countries.”

Yet the continent seems ill equipped to deal with the influx of remittances, which benefit one in 10 Asian households.

“Although the clear majority of the region’s population lives in rural areas, 65 percent of payment locations are in urban areas,” the report found. In most Asian countries, only banks are authorised to deal with foreign currency transactions, making it difficult for poor rural communities to access funds coming in from abroad.

The report stressed the urgent need to provide remittance-receiving families with “more options” to secure and spend this money, especially since nine Asian countries currently receive remittances “exceeding 10 percent of GDP.”

The report has particularly vital policy implications for Southeast Asia, where 13 million migrants are currently living and working abroad. Thailand has become a “net importer” of migrant labour – attracting more than double the number of migrants to work in its expanding economy than it is sending abroad.

Women forfeit rights for employment

Constituting nearly 49 percent of the global population of 214 million migrant workers, women are responsible for the lion’s share of remittances flowing around the world.

Acutely aware of their families’ needs, like food, housing costs, education for children or younger siblings, and healthcare – women often endure extreme conditions in order to remit money back home.

The town of Mae Sot, located along the Thai-Myanmar border, hosts the largest number of women migrant workers in Thailand, who toil over fifteen hours a day in garment factories. In 2012, this sector netted estimated profits of 6.3 billion, while labourers who keep the industry running earned between 66 and 100 dollars per month.

Kyoko Kusakabe, associate professor of gender and development at the Asian Institute of Technology and co-author of ‘Thailand’s Hidden Workforce’, told IPS that most female migrants in Mae Sot “avoid labour strikes and forfeit their rights in favour of (continued employment).”

She says this is part of a culture that forces women to be “responsible” from a very young age, while their male counterparts have few obligations.

According to Kusakabe, this culture is reflected in remittance patterns: when the economy is booming, remittances from men increase, falling again when the economy enters a slump. Remittances from women, on the other hand, remain steady regardless of the overall economic climate, suggesting that women save more, or forego their own needs during times of economic austerity in order to preserve their family’s lifeline.

Her research found that even if women are not paid their salaries, or lose their jobs, they borrow money in order to send home, fearful that their children or parents will starve without financial support.

The Senate voted 99-0 to adopt a resolution that urged President Barack Obama to fully enforce existing economic sanctions against Iran and to “provide diplomatic, military and economic support” to Israel “in its defense of its territory, people and existence”.

Washington, it said, should support Israel “in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force” if Israel “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

The measure also re-affirmed the official policy of the administration of President Barack Obama that it would take whatever action necessary to “prevent” Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Republican-led House of Representatives unanimously approved new sanctions legislation that, if passed into law, would blacklist foreign countries or companies that fail to reduce their oil imports from Iran to virtually nil within 180 days.

The same bill would expand the current blacklisting of companies that do business with Iran’s financial sector to include those engaged in the country’s automotive and mining sectors, as well.

In perhaps its most controversial section, the bill also eliminates President Obama’s ability to waive most sanctions for national-interest or national-security reasons.

Such waiver authority, which has been routinely included in existing sanctions legislation, has been used by Obama to ensure that countries that have historically enjoyed important trade and financial relations with Tehran continue cooperating with Western-led international efforts to pressure Iran to curb its nuclear programme.

The president’s waiver authority is also considered critical to prospects for a negotiated agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) by which such curbs would be accepted by Tehran in return for easing sanctions.

Both moves come as the Senate Republicans unveiled yet another bill even more far-reaching than that approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee by blacklisting companies that do any trade with Iran and deprive the president of all waiver authority. Under the draft legislation, which so far lacks any Democratic co-sponsors, sanctions could be eased or lifted only by an act of Congress.

Approval of both the Senate resolution and the House bill were hailed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier group of the Israel lobby here.

“The passage of this resolution is an extremely significant and timely state of solidarity with Israel and a restatement of America’s determination to thwart Iran’s nuclear quest – which endangers America, Israeli, and international security,” it said about the Senate action.

The House bill, it noted with approval, would impose a de facto commercial embargo against Iran and would “maximise the effectiveness of American economic and diplomatic efforts as Iran nears a nuclear weapons capability.”

But other observers said the latest Congressional moves marked a dangerous escalation in tensions at a critical moment.

“Congress should abstain from any more reckless threats or sanctions that push us closer to the brink of war with Iran,” Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said of the Senate action.

“Attacking the president’s waiver authority is a cynical attempt to weaken his hand at the negotiating table and sabotage diplomatic efforts,” he added about the House bill. “If the president can’t lift sanctions in exchange for concessions, the Iranians will have little incentive to cooperate.”

The latest Congressional moves came as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its latest quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear programme detailing the installation of more advanced centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium, a buildup of stockpiles of 3.5-percent and 20-percent enriched uranium, and advances in the construction of its heavy-water reactor at Arak.

While a number of senators made much of the latest report, suggesting that Tehran was on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, experts here said that the report offered no major surprises and that Iran’s 20-percent enriched stockpile – which could most easily be further enriched to bomb grade – remained substantially below what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last September defined as Israel’s “red line”.

“The report findings underscore the urgent need to intensify negotiations with Tehran to resolve the political questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and to resolve the outstanding questions regarding the potential military dimensions of the program,” according to an analysis by the Arms Control Association (ACA) here.

“But, at the same time, the findings reinforce earlier assessments that Iran remains years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has repeatedly denied that its nuclear programme is designed to develop a weapon, and, since 2007, the U.S. intelligence community has insisted that the country’s leadership has not yet decided to build one. But the progress Iran has made in building and mastering the technology would shorten the time it would need to construct a bomb if such a decision were made, according to nuclear experts.

On the diplomatic front, meanwhile, progress has been more or less frozen since the latest P5+1 meeting with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan in early April when Tehran rejected a Western offer to ease sanctions on gold and precious-metal trade and some Iranian exports in exchange for suspending 20-percent enrichment and transferring its existing 20-percent stockpile out of the country.

Most observers believe the new talks are unlikely until after Iran’s elections next month and the inauguration of a new president, despite the fact that decisions on nuclear issues are ultimately made by the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Among the favoured candidates approved this week by the Guardian Council is Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who is considered by veteran Iran watchers a hard-liner who has often frustrated his P5+1 interlocutors.

Some had hoped that former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who entered the race at the last minute and has occasionally urged better relations with the West, would offer a major challenge, but his candidacy was rejected by the Council.

Another approved candidate in the race, Hasan Rowhani, served as former president Mohammed Khatami’s chief nuclear negotiator. In that post, he struck a deal to suspend enrichment with the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany). But his lack of prominence makes him an underdog in a race dominated by conservatives closely associated with Khamenei.

Whether the flurry of new threats and sanctions by Congress will affect the election – or the calculations of Khamenei himself – remains to be seen.

Even the strongest supporters of sanctions have conceded that the economic pressure they’ve exerted on the regime to date has not produced the desired result and may even have strengthened regime hardliners who are convinced that Washington’s ultimate aim is “regime change” – a conviction that is likely to be strengthened by a review of Wednesday’s Senate debate.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

An eight-month-old boy with pneumonia is examined by a doctor at Amana Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

PATH, a Seattle-based global health development organisation, is aiming to save two million lives by 2015 by jointly tackling diarrhea and pneumonia, the leading killers of children globally.

Steve Davis, president and CEO of PATH, delivered the message at the ninth annual PATH Breakfast for Global Health held in Seattle on Tuesday.

“Today we placed a bold stake in the ground, with partners around the world, to save two million lives by the end of 2015,” Davis told IPS.

PATH will begin its efforts in India, Cambodia and Ethiopia, where intervention is most urgently needed and PATH has resources. While all three countries have seen their child mortality rates from diarrhea drop, India’s pneumonia death rate remains stagnant, accounting for 24 percent of deaths of children under five, the same as in 2000, according to 2013 World Health Organisation statistics.

“No parent should have to bury a child because of something we can help prevent or treat,” Davis said.

Diarrhea and pneumonia are two diseases that overwhelmingly affect children in African and Asian countries, Davis said, with diarrhea claiming around 760,000 lives a year. And while the number of children dying in Africa before the age of five has decreased, it still vastly outnumbers all other parts of the world, according to the 2013 WHO statistics.

Melinda Gates, philanthropist and founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund health development and vaccines world wide, spoke at the breakfast of the importance of vaccinating children as well as “appropriate” science that meets the needs of communities in the developing countries.

“[The] developing world is littered with pilot programmes,” Gates said.

As he took to the stage, Davis pointed to a tool belt around his suit jacket. A visual aid, the belt allowed Davis to show and carry some of the tools that can prevent the deaths of so many children from diarrheal disease, tools that will be used to achieve PATH’s life-saving goal.

Clean water, soap, zinc tablets for oral rehydration therapy and the rotavirus vaccine, which stops some diarrheal diseases before they start, were all included.

But it’s not just science and vaccines that can improve the lives of communities ravaged by diarrhea. Deeply held cultural traditions and ideas about the disease have to be altered as well.

Dr. Alfred Ochola, PATH’s Technical Advisor for Child Survival and Development in Kenya, spoke about educating Kenyans on how to reduce the risk of diarrhea in their communities through hygiene practices like hand washing.

But Ochola, who lost a brother and sister to a diarrhea outbreak in Kenya as a child, has found that at first, people are reluctant to embrace change.

“A big [challenge] is combatting old beliefs that diarrhea is a curse and not an infection, and that the death of a child is an inevitable part of life. ‘God will give you another one’ is a common saying in Kenya,” Ochola said.

Many people believe a child who has diarrhea is cursed, Ochola said. Vomiting and diarrhea are welcomed because it rids the body of the evil inside it, while it should be taken as a sign that something is seriously wrong.

Poverty is another challenge in combatting the diseases. Although heart disease and diabetes are becoming the new illnesses of poverty, according to Davis, diarrhea and pneumonia still adversely affect children of developing countries in Africa and Asia.

In Africa and Southeast Asia, the percentage of child deaths are higher than the global average and have not significantly decreased in 10 years. Both regions have seen child mortality from diarrhea fall from 13 percent to 11 percent of deaths from 2000 to 2010, but in Africa, the rate of death from pneumonia has actually increased, from 16 percent to 17 percent.

“Too many people lack the financial means to seek care when it’s most needed, like paying for transportation to get to a health facility far from home… We often reach women and their children too late,” Ochola said.

Ochola told the story of Jane Wamalwa, a Kenyan woman who came to understand the reasons behind making a change in long-held practices in treating and preventing diarrhea. Wamalwa lost three children to the disease, and has now become a trusted source of information on good anti-diarrhea practice in her community, Ochola said.

“It has become her calling,” he added.

Nawaz Sharif addressing a public gathering in 2012. Credit: cc by 2.0

While entrenched interests among Pakistan’s powerful security establishment constitute one prominent obstacle to any such optimism, a more significant hindrance could be scepticism among the country’s other two neighbours – Afghanistan and Iran – over Sharif’s own past, including his dealings during his two previous stints as prime minister.

Better relations with India

For the moment, Sharif himself is attempting to stoke this optimism. During his election campaign, Sharif pledged to revive India-Pakistan relations, which soured during Pervez Musharraf’s presidency from 2001 to 2008, and during a post-election phone call Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his wish for a “new course” between the two countries.

Following through on this vow, however, will be very difficult. Pakistan has long used ethnic tensions against India, as against Afghanistan, and changing this policy will require both a new mindset and a new set of convictions.

Sayeed Salahudeen, chief of the Muttahida Jihad Council (MJC) and the Hizb-ul-Mujahedeen, a powerful separatist Kashmiri militia group believed to be based in Pakistan, has already warned Sharif not to abandon the “Kashmir cause” over “friendship with India”. As long as “Kashmir is under India’s occupation”, Sulahudeen continued, “the national security of Pakistan, the safety and security of its borders, and its economic stability is at stake.”

Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri militants has been an essential part of Pakistan’s approach toward India, and any attempt to end this will take time. During his election campaign, Sharif stated that the Kashmiri conflict “needs to be resolved peacefully, to the satisfaction of not only both countries but also of the Kashmiri people.”

Sharif also promised a full investigation into the Kargil conflict, the 1999 incident in which Pakistani soldiers and Kashmiri militants infiltrated Indian side of the Line of Control, setting off a major crisis between the two nuclear powers. Sharif, who was prime minister at the time, has long claimed that Musharraf, as the military commander, had acted on his own, although another Pakistani army general insisted in January that Sharif himself was not as ignorant about the plans as he has said.

The new prime minister has also said he plans to investigate the alleged involvement of Pakistan’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the 2008 Mumbai bombings, another key action that would please India but thoroughly aggravate powerful elements within the Pakistani establishment.

The India-Pakistan conflict is today deeply rooted, and governments in Pakistan, both civilian and military, have for decades viewed India as a strategic rival. Indeed, the potential “threat” from India has consistently been the army’s justification for its massive budget.

While civilian governments have generally opposed increasing military expenditures, the military-intelligence establishment continues to exert considerable influence, particularly in foreign and security policymaking. Sharif’s post-election statement that the prime minister would now be “the army chief’s boss” was an attempt to mitigate this concern, but it remains unclear whether he will be able to effectively follow through.

Sharif appears to hope that expanding economic ties between the two countries will weaken resistance to enhancing relations between the two long-time rivals. India’s economy has grown at a much more rapid pace than Pakistan’s over the past decade, and building stronger commercial ties to its giant western neighbour offers Islamabad perhaps the most direct route to getting its own economy out of the doldrums.

Afghan discomfort

While Sharif has established a certain credibility regarding his desire for better relations with India, the same does not hold true for Afghanistan where the new prime minister does not enjoy much popularity.

This is due not only to his support for warring jihadi factions in 1992, but also because Pakistan under his watch became the first country to recognise the Taliban as the legitimate Afghan government in 1997. In addition, Afghans have yet to forget Sharif’s attempt to impose Sharia law in 1999, the same set of decrees the Taliban brutally imposed in Afghanistan.

In his congratulatory message to Sharif, Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his hope that the two countries would be able to cooperate “to root out terrorism”. However, this was viewed mostly as a formality.

“If Pakistan’s political officials want to show good faith,” an Afghan news website states, “they have to confront terrorist groups inside Pakistan that are organised by ISI.”

Indeed, concern over an uncomfortably close association between Sharif and the Taliban intensified during the candidate’s pre-election gathering in Lahore. If he won, Sharif promised, he would pull Pakistan back from the U.S.-led international “war on terror” coalition. If such a statement were not meant to “blackmail” the United States, an editorial in Afghanistan’s Hasht-e Sobh newspaper stated, it means “he is serious in what he is saying.”

In a separate interview with the Hasht-e Sobh, Mahmoud Karzai – Hamid Karzai’s brother and a possible presidential candidate for Afghanistan’s 2014 election – accused Pakistan of attempting to annex Afghanistan, the prospects for which the country “tasted during Taliban rule”.

Such rhetoric refers to an old dispute over the British-drawn boundary that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Pashtun tribal areas, though the region continues to be prone to frequent violence and remains a source of tension between the two countries. Whether Sharif can dispel such suspicions will yet another challenge he faces in improving ties with his neighbours.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Iran, which also accumulated its share of complaints about Islamabad’s behaviour under Sharif in the 1990s, is not expected to play a primary role in Pakistan’s regional policies, barring a major event such as a military crisis or controversy around gas pipelines.

Contrary to some analyses, any Iranian scepticism regarding the new Pakistani government is not related to the Islamabad’s alleged support for Sunni insurgents in Balochistan province, on the Iranian side of the border. In fact, Iran and Pakistan have established a cooperative relationship on this front.

Rather, scepticism stems, again, from Nawaz Sharif’s support of the Taliban during the 1990s, as well as his close associations with Saudi Arabia which, among other support, gave him safe haven during the years he was exiled from Pakistan after his ouster by Musharraf in 1999.

Iran and Afghanistan almost went to war in 1998, after Taliban militants murdered Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e Sharif. Because of Sharif’s support for the Taliban, as well as his close ties to Riyadh, Tehran’s chief rival in a region that has become increasingly polarised along sectarian lines, Iran’s hard-line media has reacted with concern to his return as prime minister.

Among other things, Tehran is concerned about the fate of the cross-border natural-gas pipeline between Iran and Pakistan despite strong U.S. opposition. Pakistan desperately needs Iranian gas to meet its growing energy needs, and outgoing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the final construction phase of the pipeline in March.

Pakistan received 500 million dollars to start building the pipeline in its territory, running through Balochistan into Karachi, and the deal is clearly to Pakistan’s advantage.

However, if a story by one influential Pakistani newspaper is true, that deal could now find itself in jeopardy. The Dawn newspaper has reported on Sharif’s rumoured suggestions to Saudi Arabia that “he may be open to reviewing the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline.”

Women collecting water from a deep tube well in Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Credit: A.S.M. Shafiqur Rahman/IPS

Fahima Begum rises each morning at dawn and walks two kilometres to a small pond, the nearest source of fresh water. On her way she passes the rusty old hand-pumped tube well that used to supply water to her village in Bangladesh’s arid Barind region until the water table here dropped out of reach.

Using a ragtag array of pots, she carries back as much as her frail body will allow, knowing that it will have to last her family all day.

“Finding fresh water here is like finding gold,” chimed in 52-year-old Johra Khatun, who lives in the nearby village of Gopalpur. These villagers say every drop of water they collect is precious, and used sparingly.

They are wise to be so cautious, given that this northwestern region is the most water scarce part of Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people that is bracing for severe water shortages.

Already, global warming has dealt a harsh blow to farming communities. Extremely hot temperatures, inadequate rainfall and prolonged drought have become a matter of routine in the 7,500-square-kilometre Barind region.

Average rainfall has dropped to less than 1,200 millimetres, against the national average annual rainfall of 2,300 mm, putting undue stress on a groundwater table that is accustomed to being replenished by heavy monsoon rains.

According to unpublished data disclosed exclusively to IPS, excessive extraction of groundwater by 8,000 electric irrigation water pumps in the last three decades has also contributed to alarming levels of water scarcity in Barind, which produces 60 percent of the country’s most important crop: rice.

The two rivers that once supported life and livelihoods here – the Jamuna and the Mahananda – have slowed almost to a trickle. Massive dams in India that siphon off huge amounts of water during the dry season have led to heavy siltation of these cross-border rivers. In Bangladesh, extreme silt deposits have resulted in island-like formations across rivers that locals call “chars”.

Sardar Mohammad Shah-Newaz, director of the Institute of Water Modeling, a leading research body operating under the aegis of the ministry of water resources, told IPS, “Our latest studies indicate that… if the water levels of the two rivers drop any lower, the groundwater level will further decline, thus forcing the region into an acute water crisis.”

Rural women walk up to two kilometres to find fresh water in some parts of Bangladesh. Credit: G.M.B. Akash/IPS

Nachole, a sub-district of Chapainawabganj, is one of the worst affected parts of the region, experiencing average annual rainfall of less than 1,000 millimetres in 2011 and 2012.

With a population of roughly 120,000 people, many of whom earn between 38 and 50 dollars a month, Nachole is teetering on the brink of disaster: about one-third of the 17,500 families who live here have no access to safe, clean drinking water.

Walking through the villages of Nachole, one is confronted with the dismal sight of dried out ponds, barren farmland, and withering crops. Though such scenes have become almost mundane, some residents still recall a time when these lands were lush and yielded plenty of food for the region’s 50,000 farmers.

Fifty-five-year-old Laila Banu tells IPS, “When I came here 27 years ago there were plenty of freshwater ponds that served as our main source of drinking and cooking water… as time passed, they all disappeared.”

The government responded by constructing some 5,000 tube wells here, drilling 200 or 230 feet into the earth to reach fresh water, compared to the average 30 to 50-foot-deep wells in the rest of the country.

“About 35 percent of those wells are now out of order,” Sakhawat Hossain, superintendent engineer of the department of public health and engineering (DPHE), told IPS.

“This significantly reduces access to safe drinking water in the area, particularly in the summer months.”

Now, organisations like the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA), responsible for installing hundreds of tube wells in the region, are realising that long-term agricultural productivity cannot be achieved by pumping more water out of the earth but by restoring the delicate ecosystems that act as natural conservation and security systems.

“Our aim is to increase agriculture productivity by promoting biodiversity or encouraging farmers to use alternative crops,” BMDA Project Director Dr. Abul Kasem told IPS.

BMDA Chairman Mohammad Nurul Islam told IPS that in order to “overcome the challenges of…climate change, we strongly encourage farmers to grow crops that require less water, like wheat, maize, pulses, tomatoes, potatoes and other cereals.”

He is optimistic about initiatives like the government’s policy on biodiversity that promotes “crop diversification, which maximises use of farmland and increases farmers’ profit margins.”

Instead of relying on income from a single yield every season, as is the case with crops like rice, farmers with an array of crops can secure an income up to three times a year, he added. This amounts to roughly 300 dollars more every year for smallholders.

Farmers like Rafiq Hasan, who owns just two hectares of land in the Naogaon district, are starting to reap the benefits of this method, though he admits there are “more risks involved,” particularly with crops like potatoes that require cold storage facilities to preserve the surplus.

Ranjan Kumar Das, a small farmer in Chapainawabganj who now plants chickpeas and maize alongside his rice, says he has noticed enhanced soil fertility as a result of crop rotation.

The national biodiversity policy also called for the construction of canals that crisscross this vast landscape, alongside of which trees have been planted in the hopes that their complex root systems will improve the soil’s water retention capacity and ward off desertification.

Although the eight qualified candidates offer somewhat of a choice given their different approaches to the economy and foreign policy, the disqualification of Rafsanjani has once again raised the spectre that the conservative establishment intends to manipulate the electoral process in such a way that only a conservative candidate will win when voters cast their ballots Jun. 14.

Rafsanjan’s candidacy, which received solid support from former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, had created hope among a section of the Iranian population — unhappy with the policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that a real contest over the direction of the country was possible.

In his first statement after declaring his candidacy, Rafsanjani had made clear that returning the country towards “moderation” and away from the “extremism” that had taken hold in both domestic and foreign policy was his objective.

His stature and name recognition had immediately catapulted him as the most formidable candidate against the conservative establishment.

The possibility that the Guardian Council would disqualify a man who is the appointed chair of the Expediency Council and an elected member of the Clerical Council of Experts was deemed unfathomable to many.

In the words of conservative MP Ali Mottahari, who had pleaded with Rafsanjani to register as a candidate, “if Hashemi is disqualified, the foundations of the revolution and the whole system of the Islamic Republic will be questioned.”

Rafsanjani’s unexpected disqualification poses a challenge for his supporters, who include centrists, reformists and even some middle-of-the-road conservatives such as Mottahari: who, if anyone, will they now support in the election?

The slate of approved candidates includes two individuals — former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani and former first vice president Mohammadreza Aref — who hold mostly similar views to Rafsanjani.

In fact, both had said that they would withdraw if Rafsanjani’s candidacy was approved. But neither is as well known as the former president and they will now have to compete against each other in attracting likeminded voters.

Rowhani has chosen to run as an independent, while Aref is running as a reformist. While Rafsanjani’s candidacy had energised and unified the reformists and centrists, the campaign of these two lesser known candidates may be cause for disunity and/or voter apathy.

A third candidate, Mohammad Gharazi — who may also have centrist tendencies — is even less known throughout the country.

He served first as the minister of petroleum and then post, telegraph, and telephone in the cabinet of then-prime minister Mir Hossein Mussavi — now under house arrest after his 2009 presidential bid — and then in Rafsanjani’s cabinet when he served as president.

But since 1997, Ghazari has not held public office. Furthermore, no one really knows his views or why he was qualified when several other ministers with more recent experience were not.

Reformist supporters, already distraught over the previous contested election and continued incarceration of candidates they voted for in 2009, may see Rafsanjani’s disqualification as yet another sign that their vote will not count.

Apathy or abstention in protest among supporters is now a real issue for the centrists and reformists. This challenge may — and only may — be overcome if one of the candidates agrees to withdraw in favour of the other and the popular former reformist president Khatami throws his support behind the unified candidate in the same way he did with the candidacy of Rafsanjani.

But even this may not be enough. The reality is that the low name recognition of both candidates limits the impact of such political manoeuvring and coalition-building by the reformists, especially if the conservative-controlled security establishment makes campaigning and the spread of information difficult. Already Aftab News, a website affiliated with Rowhani, has been blocked.

This leaves the competition among the other five candidates who come from the conservative bloc. One, former presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezaee, is also running as an independent and is both the most likely to last until Election Day and the least likely to garner many votes.

It is the competition among the other four conservative candidates — Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Parliamentary Speaker Gholamali Haddad Adel, and current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili — that will in all likelihood determine the fate of the election.

If Rafsanjani had been qualified, there would have been an urge for unity among these candidates since, without such unity, the former president could have received the 50 percent plus one necessary to win in the first round.

Now, however, the same forces that had prevented the conservative candidates from rallying behind one candidate remain in play.

Polls published by various Iranian news agencies, although not very reliable, uniformly suggest that Qalibaf is the most popular conservative candidate because of his management of the Tehran megapolis and the vast improvement in the delivery of services he has overseen there.

But Qalibaf’s relative popularity has not yet been sufficient to convince other candidates to unite behind him. This may eventually happen after televised presidential debates if he does well in them and if Velayati and Haddad Adel drop out in his favour since, from the beginning, the three of them had agreed that eventually the most popular should stand on Election Day.

But there is no guarantee that this will happen. Velayati in particular has ambitions of his own and has implied that Leader Ali Khameni’s preference should be given at least as much weight as polls, giving rise to speculation that he is the Leader’s preferred candidate despite clear signs that he has not been able to create much excitement even among conservative voters.

Convincing the hard-line candidate Jalili to drop out in favour of Qalibaf will be even harder.

In fact, from now until Election Day there will probably be as much pressure on Qalibaf to drop out in favour of Jalili as the other way around in the hope that a unified conservative candidate can win in the first round, avoiding the risk of either Rowhani or Aref making it to the second round where the top two candidates will have to compete on Jun. 21.

Jalili is the least experienced — and well known — of all the conservative candidates and, in a campaign in which economy is the number one issue by far, there are real concerns regarding whether he is experienced enough to manage Iran’s deep economic problems.

But his late entry in the presidential race, minutes after Rafsanjani entered it, has also given rise to speculation that he, instead of Velayati, may be the Leader’s preferred choice.

What is not a subject of speculation is the fact that Jalili takes the hardest line of all the candidates.

His campaign slogan of “hope, justice, and resistance” suggests that he is the most likely to continue current policies, although perhaps with less bombast and populist flair than the current president.

As such, Jalili stands apart from the other seven candidates who will campaign on the need for both change and competent leadership.

Jalili jumped into the race at the last minute as a hard-line counter to Rafsanjani’s call for moderation. Ironically, with the latter’s disqualification, he now stands alone as the candidate whom others will try to mobilise voters against.

A farmer walks past the solar panels used to pump water in the Soan Valley. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Staring out at his golden wheat field with satisfaction, 50-year old Alamgir Akbar says with a sigh of relief: “We’ve had a good crop this season.”

The farmer has waited a long time to utter those words. A resident of a small rural community on the outskirts of the Ucchali village in the Soan Valley, a 737-square-metre expanse of farmland in the Khushab district of Pakistan’s Punjab province, he has spent five years battling the impacts of a prolonged drought.

With just 12,000 acres of irrigated farmland and only saltwater lakes dotting the landscape, the Valley, which borders the hills of Punjab’s famous Salt Range, is not ideal for practicing agriculture.

Residents traditionally relied on rainwater to recharge their roughly 3,000 community wells, but half a decade of drought in the 1990s brought farming to a standstill and pitched the region’s 150,000 residents into the vortex of poverty.

Farmers here operate smallholdings of no more than five hectares, cultivating crops like cauliflower on flat land as well as terraces and selling the produce in Punjab’s big cities like Lahore, Faisalabad, Sargodha and Gujrat.

Before the drought hit, a farmer could typically earn a net profit of 600 to 800 dollars in a 75-day cropping period, but lost a considerable amount of this income on hiring trucks to transport goods to urban markets.

As the rains became increasingly infrequent, farmers were forced to bore tube wells, some as deep as 200 or 300 feet. This new system required investments in turbines to pump out the water, which in turn generated huge energy costs, as the 26-horsepower machines guzzled gallon after gallon of diesel.

Unable to afford the necessary investments, farmers turned to relatives for loans and sold their animals or other assets to continue farming.

When villagers began to chop down trees for fuel it sparked a process of deforestation, which then “accelerated the rate of soil erosion” and increased the risk of prolonged drought, Gulbaz Afaqi, director of the Soan Valley Development Programme (SVDP), told IPS.

Yields dropped, and farmers like Akbar began to despair.

Bringing back water

Driving down the mud track to Ucchali, the tranquil and almost picture-perfect pastoral scene is marred by solar panels.

But what outsiders see as an eyesore, villagers see as an angel of mercy. Owned and operated collectively by 12 families, these three-kilowatt panels are helping to pump water – and new life – into the farmers’ fields.

The landscape is once again alive with patches of cauliflower, coriander, chillies and potatoes as a pilot project spearheaded by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) begins to bear fruit.

Working with 112 partner organisations in more than 90,000 settlements spread across 120 districts in Pakistan, the fund aims to help this country of 170 million meet the targets defined in the Millennium Development Goals before the 2015 deadline.

Armed with donations from the government, international agencies and corporate entities, the PPAF embarked on a nationwide programme of drought mitigation and disaster management in 2003, which quickly identified the Soan Valley as “one of the areas that needed our attention,” PPAF spokesperson Zaffar Pervez Sabri told IPS.

Determined to avoid the worst-case scenario of locals being forced to sell their livestock or migrate from the Valley, the PPAF developed a “water balance model” to manage and conserve remaining resources and address the impacts of climate change, according to Sabri.

To date, the fund has enabled the construction of 124 irrigation pipes feeding over 8,000 acres of farmland; 60 rainwater harvesting ponds, each about the size of an acre; five delay action dams that collect surface water and are ideal for the Valley’s pitted landscape; 40 check dams, which help to prevent erosion; and 12 natural resource management schemes, benefitting over 100,000 people.

Villagers themselves raised the money for the solar panels that pump the water, giving community members a sense of ownership over the project. “We collected 6,000 dollars from the village, and the fund provided the other 6,000,” Afaqi said. By eliminating the need for diesel pumps, the panels have enabled farm communities to save over 2,000 dollars annually.

Villagers also replaced traditional open channel irrigation networks with the more efficient pipe irrigation system to avoid “huge losses and water evaporation in unpaved water courses,” said Afaqi, adding, “The PVC pipes facilitate even distribution of water into the field.”

Mohammad Ismail, an engineer working with the SVDP, told IPS that pipe irrigation is especially useful on slopes where surface water would otherwise run off.

A 50-percent increase in crop yields after this transition nudged farmers into accepting other, more comprehensive changes in their lives, such as new crops and cropping patterns.

Following the SVDP’s advice, farmers gave up cultivating cauliflower, a water-intensive crop that needs to be watered 16 times in 75 days, in favour of potatoes, “which need to be irrigated only eight times,” a local farmer named Sher Khan told IPS.

Potatoes have become a major cash crop in the area, with 46 percent of irrigated land dedicated solely to their production.

In addition, farmers grow chillies in the summer, wheat in the winter and practice year-round horticulture with nectarines and peaches.

The water scheme has made farming viable once more – with just a single acre of land, according to Afaqi, the average farmer can earn a monthly profit of 1,200 dollars on potatoes, 1,500 dollars on coriander and between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars on wheat.

“With an initial investment of about 1.3 million dollars, combined with technical assistance from the PPAF and hard work by the farming communities, we have created a new economy that generates over six million dollars annually,” said Afaqi.

The programme has also spawned interest in local water conservation efforts, including bi-monthly monitoring of ground water resources at 40 different locations, he added.

Reports from quarterly inspections suggest the groundwater table is improving. Regular monitoring also serves as a kind of early-warning system, by alerting farmers about decreasing water tables ahead of cropping cycles.

For farmers like Akbar, the project has literally helped him and his large extended family – spread between 12 homes in Ucchali – achieve their modest dreams.

“All our children go to school,” he says, pride written all over his face as he conducts a brief tour of his humble brick home. The small, attached toilet at the back symbolises huge progress: “It means we no longer have to go out into the fields to relieve ourselves,” he said with a smile.