Rose growers in Bangalore, India, rely on sustainable rainwater harvesting techniques. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
Jul 18 2014 (IPS)

Excerpt:

Vembanad lake in Kerala is the lifeline for over a million people. Credit: Samson Alapuzha/IPS.

By Keya Acharya
ALAPPUZHA, (India), Mar 6 2014 (IPS)

Farming, tourism, poor fishing practices along with misdirected policies are muddying the famous backwaters of Kerala, one of India’s best known holiday destinations. Nowhere is this misuse more visible than in and around the 95-km-long Vembanad Lake.

Bearing the brunt are small fishing communities which are caught between dwindling fish catch, worsening water quality and the usurpation of banks – traditionally used as fish-landing points – by tourism operators.The lack of a mix of saline and freshwater, vital to fish breeding, has affected fish species.

“Until about eight to 10 years ago, I would collect this amount in just two-three hours,” says fisherman Ashokan, pointing to a mound of black clams in his canoe-like boat. “Now I work the whole day to procure it,” he tells IPS.

Kerala’s backwaters, a tourist hotspot, are made up of a 1,500-km waterway network of canals, lagoons, lakes and rivers that run parallel to the Arabian Sea and are fed by both saline and fresh water, contributing to a unique ecosystem. Many areas in these wetlands are below sea level, allowing sea water to flow inwards.

Major towns and cities dot the backwaters, such as the historic port city of Alleppey, now called Alappuzha, where the Maharaja of Travancore oversaw the building of canal waterways in the 18th century.

At the heart of this entire ecosystem is the Vembanad wetland area, spread over 36,500 hectares and fed by six large rivers and seawater. It is a lifeline for over 1.6 million people living on the lake’s banks.

More than 150 species of fish are found in Vembanad Lake. The Horadandia atukorali fish is found only around Pathrimanal island in the lake. The ecological significance of Vembanad’s rich biodiversity has made it the country’s largest Ramsar site, meant to accord protection for conservation.

But being a Ramsar site has not brought any protection for Vembanad Lake so far.

The waters of the lake are now divided by the Thanneermukkom barrage, built in 1975 to shut out saltwater ingress into fields in a bid to promote double cropping of paddy in areas surrounding the lake.

The lake’s sea water ingress traditionally helped flush out waste while containing flood waters. The lack of a mix of saline and freshwater, vital to fish breeding, has affected fish species.

“Prawns spawn at the mouth of the estuary and baby shrimps are carried inwards into the lake with tidal sea waters, but they are now trapped, unable to flow inwards because of the barrage,” T.D. Jojo from the Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment (ATREE) tells IPS.

Chemicals from reclaimed farmlands, illegally discharged effluents from tourism houseboats and lakeside industries such as coconut husk retting have contributed to significant pollution in the lake.

The Thanneermukkom barrage, built on the narrowest part of the lake’s width, closes its gates each year from Dec. 15 to Mar. 31, and this has proved to be long enough to hamper fish breeding and also cause decomposition of nutrients in the lake.

As fishing stocks have decreased, fishermen have begun using methods that harm fishlings. Over-fishing is now a problem in Vembanad.

ATREE scientists have been working the last six years to conserve the ecology of the lake. “We now have 13 lake protection groups, trained to check water quality in the lake,” says Dr. Priyadarsanan Dharmarajan, team leader of the ATREE Vembanad conservation project.

Fishers, whose complaints on the lake’s deteriorating health were not taken seriously for years, now feel vindicated by data that shows low salinity and high acidity corresponding exactly to the shutting of the barrage gates.

“We want both saline and freshwater for farming and fishing, so we have asked for the barrage to be opened a little earlier,” says Murlidharan, member of a joint farmer-fishing forum and a fisherman for 30 years.

But the forum has small farmers whose voices are not heard by rich farming interests.

“Our primary concern is paddy. It is not possible to open the Thanneermukkom barrage a little earlier,” district collector N. Padmakumar, Alappuzha’s top administrative official, tells IPS. “The ratio of farmers to fishermen is 10 to one. Whose interest should I protect?”

He is also short of answers on the ecological degradation of Vembanad. “It (degradation) has happened historically. I don’t have a magic wand to make things right. There should be political will on the part of the government to do something.”

The resorts on the lake’s banks blame the houseboats for the pollution, but the houseboat owners deny this. “Houseboats don’t pose a problem for the lake,” says operator Dilip Kumar.

He also tries to sweep aside allegations of declining fish catch. “You can get prawns as big as this (pointing from his fingers down to his elbow) for 80 rupees (1.15 dollars) a kilogram,” he says.

The beauty of the Bay of Naples under a setting sun, the romance of Sorrento and the scenic splendour of the Amalfi coastline pull thousands of visitors to southern Italy. But the region is also home to an ugly truth.

The area between Caserta and Naples in the Campania region has come to be known as Italy’s ‘garbage bin’, thanks to the mafia.

The country produces nearly 100 million tonnes of garbage per year, with over a third of it reportedly cornered by the mafia.

The mafia initially began by charging industries from the north for disposing of their toxic wastes in landfills in Campania, especially the Resit landfill site in Giugliano. A neglected and under-regulated sector, waste disposal was an easy front for the mafia to generate and launder money.“We have been shouting about this for 20 years, but with no response from the government."

“We have been shouting about this for 20 years, but with no response from the government. They did not want to listen,” says Antonio Pergolizzi of the environmental NGO Legambiente which has been researching the issue since 1994.

Legambiente coined the term ‘ecomafie’ or ecomafia for this new face of the mafia.

Italian legislation for solid waste disposal came in 2001, but without adequate provisions to check proper disposal. The law was subsequently amended in 2006 to encompass 152 new types of environmental crimes, including illegal disposal and organised smuggling of waste.

But in 2010, Italy’s measures to clean up Naples were found to be in breach of the European Union (EU) legislation and an inspection team was sent in. By 2012, the EU threatened court action against Italy.

“The eco mafia are now dumping toxics into quarries, on lands, into waters, with no care for aquifers or the environment, and with serious consequences for the community,” Pergolizzi told an international gathering of journalists at Castell dell’Ovo on the seafront in Naples that was attended by this correspondent. The meet was organised by the NGO Greenaccord.

The country’s garbage crisis is now almost institutionalised as industries find it cheaper to pay the mafia to dispose of their waste and send illegal waste to other countries too, says anti-mafia attorney Franco Roberti.

According to him, the mafia are now making alliances with non-waste agencies too.

“They are looking at businesses for financing, giving funds, laundering money. Italy’s clean economy is now getting dirtier,” he says.

Wind farms and other alternative energy businesses are known to have been built with mafia money.

Pergolizzi says the mafia are cornering road-building and other contracts, using building yards as the site for mixing gravel and toxic wastes “all over north and south Italy.”

Real estate on these dumping yards has become a profitable venture for the mafia.

Legambiente estimates that the business of illegally dumping toxic waste on Italian farmland and real estate land is worth over 26 billion dollars a year, writes U.S. journalist Christine Macdonald in E Magazine.

The business of dumping toxic waste has encompassed recycling material, such as plastics, with serious environmental consequences, says Legambiente.

“We now have a whole group of recycling factories available, but there is no raw material for them; the recyclables are all getting diverted elsewhere,” says Pergolizzi.

At the SRI recycling factory in Caserta, a company officer explains how the authorities are now keeping a close watch on transportation of recycling material to the factory, which bales plastics, cardboard and cans separately and sends them on to actual recycling firms.

Naples’ new mayor, Tommaso Sodano, a former judge and new political entrant, says he is now taking a personal interest in recycling and in ways to deal with the garbage crisis.

“My job as a judge is the most important reason for me to have come into politics,” Sodano told journalists. “In both jobs, there have been, and are, obstacles in my way, which I will deal with as part of my work.”

Widespread dumping of toxics by the mafia in the Campania region has been found to be linked to cancers and congenital malformation. In two decades, the number of tumours in men in the region has risen by 47 percent and in women by 40 percent, according to a BBC report.

Earlier this month, tens of thousands of people protested on the streets of Naples, some with placards showing pictures of children who had died of cancer, and demanding an immediate clean-up.

Highlighting Italy’s deep socio-religious connections, Alfonso Cauteruccio, head of Greenaccord, says the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church is important in this matter.

The Vatican’s Cardinal Sepe has suggested to his audience at the meeting that a possible deterrent would be to refuse Holy Communion – the ultimate sacrament for believers – to those who pollute.

Roman Catholic Pope Francis has also waded into the waters, sending a message to the meeting in Naples that journalists and scientists needed to work together.

The first step is to take practical measures, says attorney Roberti. “There is no coordination between the agencies producing evidence. There is lack of funds to fight corruption. We need a re-organisation of our judicial system.”

“The nexus runs deep,” says Antonio Giordano of the Sbarro Institute in Philadelphia, pointing a finger at the health and environment ministries. “The blame is on those in power, those who knew and did nothing in the last 30-40 years.”

Tribal women from Chattisgarh in India record a message. Credit: Purushottam Thakur/IPS.

By Keya Acharya
RAIPUR, India, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

Deep in the forests of central India live the Gond tribals, an almost forgotten lot, neglected as much by the state as by mainstream media. Many cannot read or write. But thanks to a new technology, and the rapid spread of mobile phones through India, they are now picking up their cell phone and making their voice heard.

A tele-news platform called CGNet Swara is helping change their world.

Ask Naresh Bunkar, a 38-year-old tribal in Chhattisgarh state who has used it time and again. “Computer mein chhappa jata hai” (“It gets typed on the computer”), he tells IPS proudly in Hindi, pointing out how CGNet Swara helps news spread through the Internet.

Through it, tribals air their grievances, share news and get administrative work done – all for free.

“I don’t need to pay one paisa for it,” says Bunkar, a field leader of sorts for tribals in the area.“It’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.” - Bill Thies

It was through CGNet Swara that he first reported how a forest ranger had taken a bribe of 99,000 rupees (1,000 dollars) from 33 tribal families while promising them land deeds under India’s Forest Rights Act (2006). The news was circulated, and two months later he called again to say that the official had returned the money and apologised.

In another example of CGNet Swara’s influence, a teacher who had stolen school money, classroom furniture and food grains given by the government for tribal children was suspended after a report on his misdeeds was aired on the network.

Encouraged by such success stories, tribals have swiftly embraced CGNet Swara, which literally means ‘Chhattisgarh’s voice’ through the Internet. Started for the central Indian state, where 32.5 percent of the population is tribal, it is fast spreading to other parts of this vast country to reach out to areas that were beyond the pale of modern communication.

“While Indian states got divided on linguistic lines, the Gonds of central India were forgotten,” Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist, told IPS.

“They don’t have a newspaper in their native Gondi language, but the only new thing I have found on my return here is that most people now have cell phones,” he says.

Choudhary used that cell phone knowledge to set up CGNet Swara in 2010. The system operates in a region beset with Maoist insurgency. Its inhabitants often find themselves caught in the crossfire between the guerrillas and state forces.

A native of Chhattisgarh, he says the ferment in the region stems from years of neglect.

“We are trying to create another ‘development’ paradigm,” says Choudhary. “This communication system could well become the Google of the poor.”

Here’s how it works. When a tribal dials the number +91 80 500 68000, the message goes to a server in Bangalore. The caller disconnects and waits. Within seconds he receives a call and a recorded voice tells him to speak after the beep.

The server has been set up by Bill Thies, a self-confessed geek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working at Microsoft’s Research Laboratory in India’s IT capital Bangalore.

Using a simple desktop and modem, Thies used a freely available software called Asterisk to build 10 lines that automatically call back ‘missed call’ numbers and then record a two-minute message from the caller.

“But,” says Thies, “it’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.”

The ‘secret ingredient’ is the unique media networking system set up by Choudhary, whose community interests aligned with Thies in user-generated technology.

‘Swara’ now has 400 callers daily, dialling Thies’ server in Bangalore to either listen to or record their own news.

Each message goes to the moderator, Choudhary, and through him to about 50 strategically located volunteer sub-editors for cross-checking of facts and local follow-up.

The volunteers are educated Indians, well-versed in their spheres of work and residence, coming from a web-based Yahoo group called CGNet, set up in 2004 by Choudhary and journalist Frederick Noronha of Goa.

For instance, Bunkar’s message on the forest official’s bribe demand was first checked by CGNet’s locally based editorial volunteers for accuracy. It was then sent to the principal chief conservator of forests who found the allegation to be true and suspended the official.

The network – with the website – has even helped people access a popular rural job guarantee scheme.

The state government, however, seems reluctant to acknowledge its potential as a parallel system of governance.

“I personally find it an effective source of feedback and grievance redressal from the grassroots. I do make use of it off and on,” Chhatttisgarh Chief Secretary Sunil Kumar, the state’s top bureacrat,  told IPS, taking care to emphasise the non-official nature of the way he uses it.

Choudhary calls the network a kind of ‘citizen journalism’ wherein there is local news for local residents who are otherwise neglected by the mainstream media.

CGNet Swara now covers all of Chhattisgarh. It’s also popular in the nearby states of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The news system has spread by word of mouth to the tribal belt across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh – an area Choudhary calls the ‘media dark zone’.

Ironically, the region’s ultra-left Maoist radicals, who claim to fight for the marginalised, have issued threats to Choudhary, asking him to close down CGNet Swara.

Choudhary, who divides his time between Delhi and Bhopal, says the Maoists are threatened by the concept of self-empowerment that the news system has brought to its users.

CGNet Swara is evolving into a radio system using a free medium-wave bandwidth, and Choudhary believes users will pay a small amount for subscribing. Running on a UN Democracy Fund and Knight Fellowship finances so far, the system is now looking for financial independence.

A health consultation network called Swasthya Swara is also being set up where traditional healers who make use of herbal medicines will be on air.

“We are extending our Swara system into a mobile-based voice portal,” says Choudhary. “There is no need for a newsroom now. Geography is now history.”

And, for the unempowered tribal population of India, whose numbers run into tens of millions, that’s indeed good news.

Cooking for a midday meal in Bangalore. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, India, Sep 18 2013 (IPS)

In spite of India’s much-publicised national renewable energy policy as part of its international commitments to reduce carbon emissions, its Mid Day Meal (MDM) Scheme, the world’s largest school lunch programme, has no energy conservation or even a fuel policy in its workings.

Approximately 120 million children in 12.65 million schools around the country get a hot, cooked meal at lunch time every day.

The ruling Congress coalition government’s flagship MDM Scheme, and one that it counts as a voter’s favourite in the upcoming national elections in May 2014, has a central government budget of more than two billion dollars, with each state adding its own finances to its allotted amount.“Unless someone tells the schools to use biomass cookstoves, there’s no awareness.” -- Professor Rajendra Prasad of the Centre for Rural Development Technology

The central government in New Delhi also gives foodgrains to each state, mandating 100 grams of uncooked rice per primary school child and 150 grams for higher classes.

Accompaniments of “dal” or lentils, vegetables and yoghurt are standard menu in southern states, whilst northern schools have “chapatis”, the Indian wheat flatbread.

The food, over 24 million killogrammes of it, is currently being cooked mainly through fuel wood cookstoves and some amount of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

Along with the firewood, LPG is used as a supplementing energy source, subsidies on which were removed in 2012, costing the government, and the exchequer, a further 117 million dollars.

There are 577,000 kitchens employing 2.4 million cooks, mostly women and in rural areas, cooking in “smoke filled rooms”, by the government’s own admission.

And yet, in spite of the magnitude and scale of operations, there is almost zero research on the amount of firewood being used daily to fuel the midday meals, and no attention as yet on the impact this is having on deforestation, soil conservation, women and children’s health and a host of related factors, including climate change.

While the Ministry of Human Resource Development in charge of the MDM Scheme has made no public mention of the matter, India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) says it is taking steps to spread the use of biomass-based, smokeless cookstoves in the midday meal scheme.

In 2009, a government initiative to create better technology for cookstoves produced a few improved versions, but the stoves did not end up in the MDM Scheme.

“They’re not used,” says Professor Rajendra Prasad of the Centre for Rural Development Technology at the premier Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, which collaborated with the government on improved technology for cookstoves.

“Unless someone tells the schools to use biomass cookstoves, there’s no awareness,” Prasad tells IPS.

“Unlike the fuel energy sector, there is no lobby to push this; all the attention is given to subsidising conventional fuels,” says Tejaswini Ananthkumar of the Adamya Chethana Trust Bangalore.

Adamya Chethana cooks 200,000 government-aided midday meals for 300 schools in Karnataka state, over 75,000 of them catering to children in Bangalore city alone.

In 2012, the trust converted from diesel generator power to biomass briquettes for gasifier energy used for steam generation for its giant cooking vats. Energy costs have since then come crashing down from 60 paise (approximately one cent) per meal to eight to nine paise per meal in 2013.

Another well-known organisation, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness’s Akshaya Patra scheme cooks using biomass gasification in 12 of the 19 midday meal kitchens it has set up in nine Indian states.

Both Adamya Chethana and Akshaya Patra are now working on methods to reuse, reduce and recycle water, effluents, kitchen waste and energy in its midday meal kitchens, but these two organisations remain a rare species inside the MDM Scheme.

Though midday meal cooking in cities constitutes less than a quarter of all midday meals in India, turning to low-consumption methods in urban kitchens too works out to significant savings in India’s huge petroleum imports (diesel and gas), which leapt to a record 140 billion dollars in 2011 to 2012 due to globally high petroleum prices.

Dr. B. S. Negi, in charge of the government’s cookstove programme in the MNRE in Delhi, thinks everybody needs a little patience.

“We can’t go ahead for the sake of the public without competent approval first,” says Negi, speaking of measures the government is currently taking to standardise and push gasifier cookstoves in the market.

But the dissatisfaction amongst those involved in the midday meal scheme continues.

“Ask the government what is being done about fuels for these stoves,” says Dr. H.S. Mukunda from another premier institute working with the government on gasification, the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science’s Gasification and Propulsion Laboratory.

Mukunda, who is in charge of working with the MNRE for gasifier technologies, says the technology has been available for over a decade now, but lacks political and administrative push. “This field is so disorganised,” he says.

Biofuel, mostly from agri-residues in compressed briquette and pellet form for large-scale applications in India, is currently hampered by irregular supply, with manufacturers complaining that lack of government help for collection, storage, transportation and marketing has resulted in exploitative middlemen taking advantage of the situation.

Manjunath Oli of Bangalore-based Alternative Fuels says the lack of government controls on pricing has led to de-husking mills (for biomass from agricultural produce) stamping “any old price they want”.

Ritesh Mehta of Sriri Biofuels based in interior Karnataka state says most biofuel manufacturers now try to stock their agricultural resource when in season, but Oli says the field is so neglected that the technology in the market too is inadequate.

“We are now making our own briquette-making machines,” says Oli.

Negi seems unhurried. “We will now hold consultations with industry to bring down fuel costs, and we are now trying to decentralise pellet-production to make them locally available,” he says.

“Talk to me in 2014, lots will have taken off by then,” Negi tells IPS.

386 teams in Warangal recently competed for the ‘best performance’ trophy in collection and disposal of household wastes. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
WARANGAL, India, Nov 22 2012 (IPS)

In a country notorious for the inability to deal with the waste it generates, municipal officials in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are now resorting to making waste management a competitive sport, in their bid to cajole the entire nation to clean up.

The historic city of Warangal recently hosted 386 teams from 57 municipalities across the northern half of Andhra Pradesh – the largest state in south India and the fourth largest in the country – competing for the ‘best performance’ trophy in collection and disposal of household wastes.

“I found this an opportunity to learn; I too wanted to know how to get it done,” said Warangal city’s municipal commissioner, Vivek Yadav. Warangal’s population of 600,000 produces 300 metric tonnes of household waste daily.

Waste segregation and recycling might be ‘old hat’ in most countries, but in India, where cities are growing exponentially, negligence, administrative mismanagement and lack of infrastructure have resulted in open dumping in over 90 percent of cities and towns countrywide.

The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi estimates that by 2047, waste generation across India’s cities will reach 260 million tonnes per year.

In 2000, in response to a petition filed by Almitra Patel, a Bangalore-based civil engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Supreme Court made it mandatory for the country’s municipalities to take responsibility for the safe disposal of its wastes.

But implementation of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules has been poor.

The idea of handling waste management through sport came to environmental activist Uday Singh after watching an Indian Premier League cricket game.

“We wanted to try and harness the spirit of competition and sportsmanship that India displays in cricket, for public health,” Singh said.

The force for the ‘Clean Cities Championships’, however, was Andhra Pradesh Joint Director of Municipal Administration, Khadar Saheb, the man behind India’s first ‘waste-compliant’ city, Suryapet, in 2003.

Intense pre-competition activity saw routes being mapped, household segregation being explained to citizens and training of staff.

Each team thereafter consisted of a guest municipality’s Sanitary Inspector as team leader and two guest staff accompanied by three officials from the host city.

Pushing trolleys door to door between the hours of seven and eleven every morning, each team was given a score based on how it handled the collection process.

Teams unloaded trolleys full of waste at the collection centre in the town’s water tower premises before continuing on their rounds.

Collection staff varied from municipal tractor-drivers and cleaners to garbage-pickers employed by the municipality.

“The aim was to train all municipal staff so that they go back to their constituencies and spread awareness,” Saheb told IPS.

Plastics went to a storage yard for collection by recycling units, wet wastes went to a dumpsite 15 kilometres outside the city, while scraps from the city’s two main markets went directly for vermicomposting.

The competition caught the attention of a large swathe of the city’s residents.

At the sound of the teams’ whistle each morning, housewives came to the doors of their homes located along the ancient, winding lanes of the old city, once part of the fort belonging to the Kakatiya dynasty that ruled most of present-day Andhra Pradesh from the 12^th to 14^th century.

Sixty-one-year-old Sultana Begum and her tenant, 32-year-old Rani, were unsure of exactly how their segregated wastes were being disposed of, but did not hesitate in proclaming the process a “good thing”, a sentiment echoed by various other households throughout Warangal.

But not everyone was excited about the model.

The exclusion of ‘ragpickers’, India’s garbage-sorters who make a living by reselling plastics retrieved from garbage, posed a serious challenge to dissemination of information and training, though Singh, the ‘hub man’ of the operation, says the ragpickers will get inducted into the recycling system in due course.

Others are disgruntled too. Those who wore protective gloves complained they got damp and were uncomfortable; those who didn’t receive any, due to inadequacies in distribution, were aggrieved at being left out.

At the dry collection centre, the city’s Sanitary Inspector kept a critical eye on the sorting and packing of plastics, labelling the process “too risky”.

But Joint Director Saheb and Commissioner Yadav heard the string of complaints with quiet composure and unwavering determination.

“It’s a brave attempt,” said Supreme Court Solid Waste Committee specialist Patel, who had been invited to the event as a guest of honour.

“This message needs to snowball,” she told IPS.

The prize for best team was awarded to the Khammam municipality, while several others received a slew of consolation prizes. “There are no losers in this game,” Singh stressed.

The competition will now be taken to several other cities in Andhra Pradesh.

(END)

Stall at the COP 11 of the CBD in Hyderabad. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

India’s National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) is actively promoting decentralised grassroots livelihoods as the best way to  conserve biodiversity as mandated by the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing (ABS).

On Tuesday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had announced at the 11^th Conference of Parties (COP 11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) India’s ratification of the Nagoya Protocol, and pledged 50 million dollars for national biodiversity conservation efforts.

At the 2010 meeting of the CBD in Nagoya, Japan, the parties had agreed to halve by 2020 the rate of habitat loss, restore degraded ecosystems and  work to prevent the extinction of threatened species.

But, finding the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to achieve the 20 ‘Aichi Targets’ of the protocol has proved problematic and so far dominated the COP 11 deliberations running in this south Indian city from Oct. 8 to 19, with over 174 countries participating.

“We are discussing the issue of where to garner resources without taking into account local communities, unaware that they have the full answer,”  said the chairman of the NBA, Balakrishna Pisupati.

The NBA has initiated countrywide documentation of biodiversity conservation efforts as a means of better understanding that could lead to  policy-making.

Invited to seek out efforts in this list is the Centre for Forest and Natural Resources Management Studies (CEFNARM) of the forest department of Andhra Pradesh, the southern state playing host to COP 11.

CEFNARM has identified 80 potential sites in the state where biodiversity conservation has encompassed livelihoods that use flora, fauna and traditional knowledge of local communities. Some 25 case studies are now being promoted for replication.

Livelihoods in these case studies entail the sustainable use of bamboo for handicrafts, harvesting of non-timber forest produce such as honey and gum, conservation of medicinal plants, mangroves and community-based ecotourism activities.

CEFNARM’s director-general P. Raghuveer gives credit to non-government organisations for doing ‘significant’ work in the field in Andhra Pradesh.

Mangrove conservation by Kobbari Chettupeta village, near the seacoast in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, is now being helped by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), an organisation which has helped put coastal and marine biodiversity back on the area’s map.

MSSRF came in after 1996 when a severe cyclonic storm destroyed several villages in the area, and a seasoned 60-year-old villager, Mythu Sathya Rao, realised that villages without mangroves suffered the most damage.

Mythu Rao then got his village interested in mangrove conservation. The MSSRF has been helping conservation efforts by providing smokeless cook stoves so that mangrove twigs and branches are not used.

In the interior areas of East Godavari district, protection of the Akuru range of the Kakinada forests by surrounding villages through forest committees set up with the help of the forest department has revived native bamboo groves.

Bamboo, harvested judiciously to allow re-growth, is now providing an excellent source of livelihood for tribal communities in the region.

In 2010, bamboo sales netted nearly 200,000 Indian rupees (approximately 4,000 dollars), divided equally between the forest department and the village committee.

The money was enough to meet the needs of 14 tribal households. Araghati Sanyasi, a widow, used her share of income from bamboo to build a house, educate her three children and pay for the weddings of a daughter and a son.

“These are examples of what The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) actually means,” Pisupati said. India has an ambitious plan under TEEB to value its natural resource wealth with the objective of efficient and sustainable use by 2015.

Other South Asian nations, such as Nepal and Bangladesh, have also shown interest in pursuing TEEB.

Developed by the G8 and developing country ministers to study the economics of biodiversity loss and thereby provide solutions to environmental degradation, TEEB also aims to connect policy makers, conservationists and private business.

Prime Minister Singh told his COP 11 audience that India had unique biodiversity conservation efforts, such as a traditional knowledge digital library which has documented over 34 million pages of local knowledge systems.

The library, said Singh, was a response to biopiracy of Indian systems, most notably the patenting of extracts of the ‘neem’ tree (Azadirachta indica) and also of turmeric as healing agents. Both have been known and used in India’s traditional medicine for centuries.

At a local level, TEEB has been raising angst among non-government organisations and experts who feel that private corporate interests will appropriate biodiversity  for profits, leaving local communities out in the cold.

India is one of eight worldwide centres of intense biodiversity, holding eight percent of the world’s total species and home to three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

Lakshmi and a fellow seaweed diver at COP 11. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 12 2012 (IPS)

Indian civil society organisations see in the 11th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), underway in this south Indian city, a rare opportunity to highlight alleged neglect of biodiversity along the country’s extensive coastal and marine areas.

The Bombay Natural History Society, Kalpavriksh, Greenpeace India, Coastal Protection Campaign, Dakshin Foundation and PondyCAN are among groups accusing ports, power plants, shipyards and aquaculture projects of creating havoc in inter-tidal tracts and threatening artisanal fishing.

No fewer than 15 power plants, six captive ports and six mega shipyards are coming up along a small 150 km stretch on the western coastline in the state of Maharashtra alone, delegates to the Oct. 8-19 international conference were told.

On the eastern coastline of this peninsular country, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, host to COP11, there are 10 new ports and 15 thermal power projects on the anvil.

Additionally, Andhra Pradesh has proposed 70 ‘special economic zones’ in 15 of its 23 districts, including a staggering five million acres in a coastal corridor that will include airports, seaports, ship breaking units, petrochemical complexes and other polluting industries.

“None of India’s environmental impact assessments (EIA), conducted by the ministry of environment and forests, take thermal pollution of sea water into account, while existing policy does not make cumulative assessments  mandatory,” says Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh, a leading non-governmental organisation (NGO).

“Our EIA system itself is essentially flawed,” Kothari, tells IPS.

Whenever marine conservation actually happens it does not take local communities into account, says the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF), another leading NGO that speaks for artisanal fishing communities.

In the southeastern coastal state of Tamil Nadu, near the Gulf of Mannar, an entire community stands threatened because its women have been barred from pursuing their traditional occupation of diving for seaweed.

The area has now been declared a marine national park and comes under the protection of the forest department, leaving communities that depend on the collection of seaweed for their livelihood stranded.

Collecting seaweed has been banned by the department on the grounds that it may be detrimental to corals – though officials have little to say about a major nuclear park coming up in nearby Koodankulam that could raise the temperature of coastal waters.

Seaweed, used in cosmetic and lifestyle health products, grows on dead coral underwater and is sustainably harvested by the nimble fingers of women divers to supplement family incomes.

“We have been collecting seaweed since our forefathers’ time,” Lakshmi, 52, from Ramanathapuram district, told rapt audiences on the sidelines of the COP 11 deliberations.

“We depend on harvesting seaweed for our livelihoods, why should we destroy live coral?” she asks.

The women said they were not consulted when the park’s boundaries were demarcated, and accused forest department officials of undue harassment such as by interfering with or preventing artisanal fishing.

“They (forest department) had to seek our help recently to put out a fire probably started by a carelessly thrown cigarette butt by one of their guards,” Lakshmi said, explaining the community’s local knowledge and experience in natural resource maintenance.

“You cannot preserve an ecosystem by throwing people out,” says V. Vivekanandan of the South Indian Fisheries Federation. “The department needs to use local strength in fisheries management.”

The M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, begun by India’s best-known agricultural scientist and named after him, has spearheaded several initiatives on coastal biodiversity conservation.

Notable among these is one to promote the growth of mangroves that has led to a national consultation called ‘Securing Coastlines and Securing Livelihoods’ earlier this year.

The consultation has recommended a new approach to coastal and marine conservation, taking biodiversity issues into account and linking them integrally to the wellbeing of local communities. However, the consultation still needs to find a place in policymaking.

While laying down the principle of national sovereignty over biological resources, the CBD expected this to translate into community sovereignty with farmers, fishers and pastoralists placed at the centre of preserving biodiversity – not just their knowledge, innovations and practices.

India’s own Biodiversity Act, devised to be in line with the CBD, requires “consultation” with local communities, but there are too many instances of populations being forcibly dislocated from their traditional farming or fishing lands to make way for mega projects.

Chandrika Sharma, executive secretary of ICSF, pointed to the irony of poor coastal people, especially women, being adversely affected by development and conservation policies, while lip service is paid to empowering them in the interests of conserving biodiversity.

“Their activities are affected by government policies banning fishing in protected areas while development projects are allowed to come up,” Sharma said. “Local communities can play an important role in governing resources as they have been around for generations and know the ecosystem best.”

The United Nations 11^th Conference of the Parties  to the Convention on Biological Biodiversity (COP 11 CBD), underway in this southern Indian city, is lost on where to garner the billions of dollars needed to implement the ‘Aichi targets,’ due to be met by 2020.

“Decisions made here will lay the foundation for achieving the Aichi targets,” said India’s minister for environment and president of COP 11,  Jayanthi Natarajan. “Expenditure on biodiversity needs to be looked at as investments that will reap benefits for us and our future generations,” she cajoled delegates at the start of the 11-day (Oct. 8-19) conference.

But the executive secretary of the CBD, Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, admitted to IPS, prior to the opening on Monday, that finding the money to keep biodiversity issues at the centre of development was not going to be easy.

“All CBD nations, however, have agreed that to meet Aichi targets. We need to change existing structures,” Dias told IPS. “There is a need for other sectors, such as health, to be linked to the financing process. I don’t expect only environmental agencies to pay this bill.”

The Aichi targets, now standing at a steep and seemingly impossible gradient,  range from tackling awareness of biodiversity, loss of habitats, alien invasive species, sustainable use of fisheries, ecosystems and agriculture to access and benefit-sharing with indigenous and local communities.

More than 170 countries are represented at the Hyderabad deliberations on the CBD, begun at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and now with  193 parties ratifying.

CBD seeks to address all threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services, including threats to climate change, through scientific assessments, development of tools and transfer of technologies amongst other clauses.

The CBD’s Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety is a subsidiary agreement to protect biological diversity from potential risks posed by living modified organisms resulting from modern biotechnology. To date, 163 nations have ratified the Cartegena Protocol.

But the CBD’s Nagoya Protocol ­– that asked for commitments on access and benefit-sharing amongst local communities, and is principal to achieving the Aichi targets –  has only 17 ratifications against the 50 needed to make the protocol a legal commitment.

Disagreements over how genetic resources and traditional knowledge should be shared led to the 2010 Nagoya Protocol, which CBD members are pledged to incorporate into their national laws that govern biodiversity.

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals separately call for “significant reduction” in biodiversity loss – but even these are likely to be missed.

Dias says new financial mechanisms will look at changing current funding that has destructive trade-offs for biodiversity, make efforts to make business more responsible and engage with the private sector. They will involve state and local governments in all nations.

Pavan Sukhdev, who chairs CBD’s new ‘High Level Panel on Global Assessment of Resources for implementing the Strategic Plan’ till 2020, says at least 70 percent of all finances required are investments rather than expenditure.

An amount of 130 billion dollars in 2013 will stretch to 430 billion dollars as resources needed by 2020 to achieve these targets, but over two-thirds of this will be investments while a third will be recurring maintenance expenditure, according to Sukhdev.

“Achieving one target will invariably have an impact on other targets as well. For instance, financing forest conservation will have a natural impact on the Aichi targets in water,” Sukhdev said.

The ‘Working Group 2’ here at the COP11 has had over 70 interventions from various countries, discussing ways and means to finance biodiversity conservation.

“We have inherited, from COP 10, the need for resource mobilisation as the most imperative of needs,” said Indian official delegate Hem Pande at the meeting. “We have to agree on some targets and commitments, or else we will be faced with collective failure.”

The European Union, while outlining its proactive stance on biodiversity conservation financing, reiterated the imperative to look at new sources of funding, not least from the ‘green economy’ sector.

The green economy, commonly associated with The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), established by the G8 and developing country environment ministers, looks to take natural capital into account.

India is one of the first countries to start a TEEB programme within its environmental policies.

TEEB, however has been controversial among civil society sectors which say corporatisation of natural resources cannot be condoned, especially at the cost of local communities that conserve these resources.

The chairman of India’s National Biodiversity Authority, Balakrishna Pisupati, told IPS that  local communities should be involved in the TEEB process since most have innovative ways of earning livelihoods while conserving biodiversity.

Bundelkhand's ravine wastelands. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
BUNDELKHAND, India, Aug 21 2012 (IPS)

Narrow, cobblestoned lanes separate the rows of mud houses with cool interiors and mud-smoothened patios, some with goats tethered to the wooden posts. This is Tajpura village, deep in this water-stressed, drought-prone region of northern India.

An area of stark beauty marked by deep ravines in central India, Bundelkhand spans the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The ruins of stone fortresses dotting the landscape betray a history of constant warfare just as the remnants of water courses and irrigation systems speak of peaceable and prosperous times gone by.

Bundelkhand suffers from manmade problems, starting with the government’s misplaced land and water policies that have worsened an already stressed climatic situation caused by prolonged droughts and erratic rainfall.

Air dropping of ‘Prosopis juliflora’ seeds as a soil-conservation measure in the 1960s  resulted in the plant becoming an invasive species that killed indigenous shrubs and trees, making the soft soils of the ravines leach water rapidly and turned vast areas into wastelands.

Thoughtless promotion by the government of water-intensive crops like mentha (mint) encouraged richer farmers to dig deep tube wells while neglecting groundwater recharge, resulting in a disastrous lowering of the water table.

Marginalised farmers, unable to afford expensive infrastructure and inputs, suffer as groundwater depletion adds to problems caused by the ancient rainwater storage and distribution systems going defunct.

Drought is now a familiar spectre in this region and less than half of its one million hectare arable spread is now cultivable, causing distress to its mainly farming population of 50 million people.

“What you have is very high water consumption in an area suffering from water crisis,” says Anil Singh, coordinator of Parmarth, an organisation working to revive traditional systems of water and cropping among marginalised communities that inhabit the ravines of Bundelkhand.

In Tajpura village,  as though in denial of Bundelkhand’s stark conditions, 36-year-old Mamtadevi, wife of Ajan Singh, serves up a meal of steaming hot chappatis (Indian flat bread) smeared with clarified butter, a cool, green salad and a dish of smoked brinjal, boiled potato, fresh tomato and green chilli.

“That extra taste in the vegetables is because they are grown sustainably and without chemicals,” explains Mamtadevi.

Ajan Singh and Mamtadevi were among the first to adopt Parmarth’s ‘low external input sustainable agriculture’ (LEISA) which is now standing them in good stead as rainfall becomes scantier and average temperatures rises.

LEISA involves such practices as efficient recycling of nitrogen and other plant nutrients, managing pests through natural means, maintaining ideal soil conditions and ensuring that local farmers are aware of the environment and the value of preserving ecosystems.

The soundness of this method shows in the freshness of Ajan Singh’s vegetable crops, in biodiversity conservation through the use of hardy indigenous seeds and avoiding chemicals for maintaining soil health.

Ajan Singh is also able to beat the vagaries of the weather and this year’s drought, caused by failure of the monsoons, holds no great terror for him or for other farmers who follow LEISA.

Bhartendu Prakash, steering committee member of the Organic Farmers Association of India (OFAI) and in-charge of its northern branch based in Bundelkhand, says the region was hit by frost last winter but organic farmlands using LEISA were the least affected.

“I did not know this system previously. I would grow ‘gehu’ (wheat) and manage 200-300 kg on this same plot,” says Ajan Singh.

Parmarth helped the community in contouring the lands for rainwater run-off and storage and constructed a well for irrigation. Its volunteers also taught farmers like Ajan Singh how to make vermicompost and set up pheromone traps to catch insects.

Most farmers though, already had their own methods of making biopesticide – usually a mix of neem leaves and garlic soaked in buffalo buttermilk. “But before the pheromone traps were laid, the spraying had to be done once every three days, now once a week is  enough,” says Mamtadevi.

By 2009, the couple’s vegetables had such a reputation for quality that they sold at the local market 10 km away at higher than prevailing rates, earning them nearly 80,000 Indian rupees (then approximately 1,800 dollars) yearly.

Three years later, Ajan Singh bought another ‘bigha’ (approximately 2.2 acres) of land. He now takes his produce to two markets and also sells milk from five buffaloes that he bought with his earnings.

Fifteen more farmers from Tajpura are now following Ajan Singh’s methods.

Along with this, the women of the community have banded together into self-help groups that maintain a savings and loan account to assist women find simple livelihood alternatives like livestock rearing.

The women also run a grain bank that sells surplus grain in the open market and give grain free to distressed families in times of need.

“We are now trying to link the community to government schemes wherever possible, such as obtaining sprinklers, and getting some benefit from the state-run Bundelkhand Relief Package which does help with drought-proofing,” says Anil Singh who works for Parmarth.

Released in 2009 by the federal government, the package worth 1.5 billion dollars supports rainwater harvesting, proper utilisation of river systems, irrigation canals and water bodies over a three-year period.

But Bundelkhand’s natural farming methods need to get more support as the funding period comes to an end.

“Bundelkhand is too entrenched in northern Indian chemical farming methods,” says OFAI’s Prakash. In contrast, OFAI is deluged with requests for training in organic farming methods from farmers in Punjab and Haryana, the ‘mother zone’ of the so-called ‘green revolution’ that transformed agriculture in India after introduction in the 1960s.

Rajesh Krishnan, campaigner for Greenpeace in India, is optimistic that the government will see the wisdom of promoting organic agriculture as a counter measure to the numerous fallouts of chemical agriculture that fuelled the green revolution.

Krishnan is hopeful for the probable financing of sustainable agriculture in India’s 12^th Five- Year Plan, due to be rolled out in November.

Prakash is confident that sustainable agricultural farming will survive through a growing demand for organically-grown crops.

In a country with a disastrous record for microfinancing, a religious organisation has done well enough to claim this year’s Ashden award for initiatives in providing loans to poor farmers.

The Ashden award – which carries 40,000 British pounds (62,238 dollars) in prize money – is given for sustainable energy initiatives in Britain and the developing world by the Ashden Trust that is run by the Sainsbury family, founders of a supermarket chain and other businesses.

The success of the awardee, the Shri Kshethra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP), is linked to the fact that it also administers the ancient and well-endowed Manjunatha Temple in Dharmasthala town, set in the high Western Ghats of southern Karnataka state.

The temple’s hereditary head priest, Veerendra Heggade, who also heads SKDRDP, is revered by devotees as well as borrowers. “It is this reverence that spurs loanees to pay back their loans,” explains L.H. Manjunath, the project’s executive director.

“We are secular with many Muslims and Christians in our fold, and Manjunatha is a symbol of the poor, not just of Hindus,” Manjunath hastens to add.

SKDRDP’s microfinance operations, begun in 2000, now have a turnover of   800 million dollars. Some 1.8 million families from 5,000 villages in Karnataka are covered through a decentralised system that is run by a staff of about 7,000.

Manjunath, who earlier headed a commercial national bank, said SKDRDP noticed that handing out charity did not bring improvement in people’s lives.  “So we changed our policy in 1990 and began giving out small loans for specific livelihood and development purposes.”

SKDRDP started by forming small, ‘joint liability groups’ of five farmers each.  A rotary system was devised where each member performed a day’s free labour on another member’s lands.

“This galvanised development,” says Manjunath. Farmers were also persuaded to save 20 cents weekly that went into a common fund.

By 1995, the organisation had begun involving women’s self-help groups and today two-thirds of its clientele consists of women.

A 4,500-strong band of rural youth forms part of SKDRDP’s network  spread over 16 districts in Karnataka, that grades loan eligibility, guides  repayment and maintains grassroots contacts with clients.

Heggade stands guarantor for loans taken from national banks, which SKDRDP disburses to clients, keeping a four percent profit margin and his high status comes in handy for negotiating the best interest rates.

Factors such as such as a lending bank’s unmet targets are taken into account and in one case, says Manjunath, a leading national bank lent money at 6.9 percent when the going rate was approximately 12 percent.

SKDRDP lends at between nine and 18 percent interest, but keeps both interest rate and payback timings flexible.

Approximately 20,000 loans have gone towards renewable systems of lighting and fuel needs, benefitting some 82,500 people.

A bank account with a deposit of two months’ repayment amount as taken from clients a buffer against repayment default and this is mandatory before the first cheque is disbursed.

“Building the payback capacity of the borrower is our strong point,” says Manjunath.

SKDRDP’s success contrasts with the record in India of borrowers, mostly marginal farmers in the rural areas, getting caught in debt traps and being driven to suicide in droves.

In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the state government was forced to legislate in the state assembly in October 2010, banning the collection of repayments by goons hired by MFIs, leading to the virtual collapse of the system.

“To my mind, microcredit cannot really alleviate poverty,” says Aloysius Fernandez a pioneer of microfinance in India and former head of MYRADA, a reputed non-government organisation (NGO).

Fernandez, now chief of the financial services of the government’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, says distributing credit to the poor and extracting capital from the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ is the wrong way to go.

“I have seen this work where there are support services, but not otherwise,” Fernandez says emphatically. “The national banking system with its standard measures for loans cannot be applied to poor communities who need customisation.

“If you ask me whether agriculture has improved for people through microcredit, I will say ‘yes’, but I have not seen poverty alleviation as such.”

India is predominantly agricultural and more than 70 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people are dependent on farming for a living.

“The question is whether an NGO should function as a banking institution, or be doing rural upliftment work,” says Somnath Naik of Nagarika Seva Trust that has record of good work in the region.

Manjunath responds to that by saying SKDRDP’s microcredit works successfully because of the ‘hand-holding’ and capacity-building measures that it undertakes.

India’s apex reserve bank has outlined the rural sector’s near exclusion from banking services, and has, as a matter of policy, been encouraging rural agents to come forward to fill this gap in rural development. “We are in tune with this policy,” Manjunath said.

By Keya Acharya
SHIVGANGA, India, May 30 2012 (IPS)

Valli, 50, and Sarasu, 60, have been working with Energy Plantation Projects India (EPPI) since inception in 2007, the income they earn forming an integral part of their household budgets. “We easily manage household work and a salary-paying job,” they tell IPS.

Around 20 women take care of daily maintenance work while another 45 work seasonally. The women come in at daybreak and leave at two pm, earning a decent Indian rupees 150 (approximately three dollars) for half-a-day’s toil.

“We devised the timings to suit the women, as we found them to be sincere workers,” says Sam Venkatesan, director of EPPI. “They are free to go home in the afternoon and also graze their goats on lands we have set aside for the purpose.”

The women, who form over half the company’s entire workforce, are happy to have an assured income in return for planting and tending saplings, making shade-nets and taking care of other nursery essentials.

Grown with seven indigenous biomass-producing plant species, the plantation is “one of the first of its kind in the world,” says Venkatesan, who once worked as an executive with Motorola, the United States-based cell phone giant.

Venkatesan explains that the plantation is biometrically calculated for calorific value, rate of growth and yield per acre to supply its own two megawatt gasification power plant with the assured biomass supply that is essential for a successful gasification system.

Gasification converts organic- or fossil-based carbonaceous material, by controlled heating, into syngas (synthetic gas), and the power derived from burning the gas is considered to be renewable energy.

EPPI’s 300-acre biomass plantation now has trees that stand seven metres tall on degraded lands that have been contoured for watershed conservation with reservoirs constructed to enable drip irrigation.
“The groundwater has risen from 300 feet in 2007, when we started the plantation, to 80 feet now,” says C. Lalrammawia who manages technology at the plantation. “Rainfall has similarly increased from 250 mm annually in 2007 to over 800 mm in 2011.”

According to the National Commission on Agriculture, India has 60 million hectares of degraded non-forest and forest lands available for tree growing, including biomass plantation.

The ‘side effects’ of planting for energy are already visible at EPPI and these include improvement in the microclimate of the region with a regeneration of biodiversity. The reservoirs have becoming watering holes for deer and birds now flock to the once degraded, arid lands.

“We discovered that a small forest of this size, with its two Mw power plant, can power several of the cell phone transmission towers in the area, said Venaktesan. Cell phone transmission towers currently consume two percent of India’s subsidised diesel and so that is a huge saving.”

The plantation costs 400 dollars per acre for all-inclusive maintenance annually and yields 50 tonnes of biomass per acre annually on average.

EPPI has received four million dollars as venture capital to begin its two Mw power plant running on biomass gasification using its own energy plantation. But, there are plans to scale it up to six Mw by tapping leasehold energy forests.

India’s ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) after inspection and approval granted EPPI’s energy plantation 272,000 dollars towards reimbursement of equipment costs for every Mw of power produced.

Deepak Gupta, who inspected the plantation during his tenure as secretary (topmost official) at MNRE, believes small biomass gasification power plants are ideal for providing local power, jobs, natural regeneration and availability of biomass supply to nearby industries.

“A dedicated biomass power plant, able to work on its own 24-hour supply, is the answer to India’s local needs,” Gupta told IPS.

As per Indian government regulations, EPPI can upload power into the national grid. But, the company has opted to distribute power to the local grid to ensure power supply to villages close to where its lands are situated.

“We can’t guarantee electricity to each household because we don’t control the grid, but this will surely ensure local benefit. Social inclusion for us is not just corporate social responsibility, it is our business model,” says Venkatesan.

At a calculated 26.4 tonnes of biomass needed to produce one Mw of power daily, the company envisages a ‘plant load factor’ (PLF), or running capacity, of 80-85 percent, which is better than average.

“We can safely calculate this PLF because we own the plantation and have control over supply,” says Jayanth Ganapathy, who manages the company’s business operations.

EPPI managers say the plantation’s predicted growth rate has included factors like extreme weather or slower climatic change events by increasing the contingency scale of each management need.

“Which means, for instance, that we need more land per megawatt, or we calculate an increased buffer amount for each necessity,” says Venkatesan. “This is our management technique.”

“If I were to accept all factors such as climate change, pests and weather vagaries, I’d have to give up,” said Venkatesan. “But EPPI has shown the world that an energy plantation company is more than possible.”

(END)

Standing on a patch of arid, degraded land, 100 km from southern Bangalore city, Ramapal, member of the ‘gram panchayat’ (local village administration), points to a roughly-dug canal feeding a narrow belt of green cultivation.

Cash-for-work schemes are greening arid areas. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

“We cannot do without the government’s cash-for-work programme,” he tells IPS. “We are happy with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) which gives us an assured income, but we want more work.”

The canal took 29 village individuals 14 days to build, paid for by the government under NREGA, the world’s largest social welfare scheme, with a budgetary allocation of 15.02 billion dollars for the 2011-2013 period.

The government says NREGA has so far provided over 10.1 million jobs to 550 million rural poor households.

NREGA, the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance coalition’s flagship scheme in 2005, helped return the party to power in the 2009 general elections.

Total funding for NREGA since its inception has crossed 29 billion dollars.

Begun in 2005-06, NREGA mandates 100 days of paid, unskilled manual labour to one member of every poor, rural household in a year, the scheme having accompanying legal strictures on transparency, accountability and monitoring.

Any eligible worker not given a job within 15 days of his or her request is entitled to unemployment allowance from the government.

Jobs include soil and water conservation-related measures such as afforestation, irrigation, conservation of ponds and activities related to agricultural productivity. Amendments to NREGA in 2012 have now included dairy and poultry-related activities.

Wages, which began at about two dollars six years ago, have now been increased, with each state adjusting NREGA wages according to respective minimum wages for labour.

In Karnataka state, NREGA now pays a little over three dollars per day, while states like Bihar and Jharkhand pay 2.39 dollars and economically better off states like northern Haryana pays 3.74 dollars.

Yet, in spite of its massive public spending budget, NREGA has come under withering criticism, starting with allegations of corruption in several states.

In northern Uttar Pradesh, massive siphoning of NREGA funds by officials and local administration, including village panchayat heads, has now led to the minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh, calling for an official inquiry.

The largest of the NREGA scams in Uttar Pradesh emerged from the constituency of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the ruling Congress party. Not surprisingly, the Congress party fared badly in provincial elections held in the state, India’s largest, in March 2012.

Critics say NREGA’s massive public expenditure is a drain on India’s economy, besides affecting industry by pulling away its labour force and promoting a ‘welfare ethic’.

But, villagers in Dasarahalli and its surrounding areas are united in holding on to NREGA as a straw of hope to earn an income.

“If NREGA is not there, then we can close the gram panchayat,” states Rajappa, a member from the Thimmanayakanahalli village where no wages have been paid in the last two months.

“It is way too much to expect quick results in NREGA,” says Jojo John of the Foundation for Ecological Security, a major non-government organisation which helps panchayats build capacity to work with NREGA.

“Despite all its faults, NREGA has a very strong ‘rights’ component where the poor can demand work and access development,” stresses John. “We do need NREGA.”

Meanwhile, at Dasarahalli village, Venkateshappa, 55, is expecting good returns on his cabbage, maize and ragi (finger millet), grown with the help of water from a canal dug by the villagers adjoining his 5.5 acre farm.

“We have chosen the bigger landholders because their lands are arable, whilst others own rocky fields – we will take those up later,” says Ramapal.

Venkateshappa says he uses five labourers for three months on his land, giving them food and two dollars as wages per day.

Presently, some 20 farmers get water from the NREGA canal while others are waiting for the next round of construction.

NREGA, however, is on shaky ground with shortfalls in payments, administrative hitches and corruption.

India’s official ‘Economic Survey 2011-12’ shows that while the government’s ‘reach’ for NREGA has expanded, it has been able to provide, on average, just 47 out of the mandated 100 days of employment per family per year.

In spite of that for the 2012-13 fiscal year, the Congress-led government has chosen to cut almost 20 percent of the NREGA budget, even while stipulating increased wage rates, straining the programme.

For India’s large population of poor people – estimated at 55 percent of the 1.2 billion population by the United Nations Human Development Report in 2010 and at 37.2 percent this year by India’s Planning Commission – NREGA remains a beacon of hope.

“This is the best programme yet for development of backward areas, but you need to give it time,” says B.S. Shekharappa, chief executive officer of Chikballapur, under which district Dasarahalli village falls.

By Keya Acharya and - -
BANGALORE, India, Mar 9 2012 (IPS)

Agriculture experts blame the crisis faced by India’s small farmers on a highly inefficient supply chain for perishable farm produce, a situation exploited by traders and middlemen.

A farmer at a co-operative in Bangalore. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

The stagnation coincides with a period in which India’s economy has been growing steadily, with projections of a respectable growth of 7.7 percent expected in 2012 despite the prevailing global downturn.

“It’s obvious there is a major block in the growth of the agricultural sector in India,” says P.G. Chengappa, national professor with the apex Indian Council of Agricultural Research, “mainly because of stagnation in productivity and the lack of market support for perishables.”

The overuse of chemical fertilisers and pesticides – together with the government’s encouragement of water-intensive crops and related soil-salinity – has led to the now well-documented environmental decline in India’s faming lands.

India’s current policy is to help farmers by handing out huge subsidies on fertilisers and agricultural inputs, estimated to be worth 25 billion dollars in 2009-2010.

Small farmers, forming over 60 percent of India’s farming community, have neither the financial clout nor the access to groundwater or irrigation, while having to spend large sums on costly pesticides and fertilisers.

The government subsidies are cornered by industrial farming and benefit the fertiliser and chemical industry leaving smallholders out in the cold. An estimated 70 percent of India’s 1.1 billion people are small farmers.

During 1995-2010, over 250,000 poor farmers in India committed suicide, according to national statistics, mainly attributed to their inability to pay debts incurred on agricultural inputs.

While India’s soils are said to be failing due to continuous use of chemical inputs, small farmers, desperate to improve productivity, increase the doses of expensive fertilisers and pesticides and end up falling further into debt.

Curiously, the desperate situation of farmers remains unmitigated by the demand for fruits, vegetables and grains in urban India where increasing incomes have allowed organised food retail chains to mushroom, particularly in south India.

Almost two-thirds of the farmers’ suicides were reported from southern Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states, indicating serious agrarian distress in the peninsular region.

Direct dealings with farmers by these food retail chains are almost negligible, with most chains outsourcing their daily supply of groceries through contractors or middlemen. “Large retail chains keep a supply of green groceries only to attract the customer for convenience shopping,” explains B. Somesha, chief financial officer of Sahaja Organics, one company that serves as a direct marketing chain for its 500-odd farmer-members in Karnataka.

Set up in April 2010, Sahaja Organics leaped from a turnover of 38,732 dollars in 2010-11 to an expected 100,000 dollars in 2011-12.

But this growth still does not allow farmers to cash in on the demand from retail food chains.

“They (retail chains) want a listing (registration) fee of at least 1,000 dollars plus three months’ credit, which is not possible for small operators,” says Somesha. On the other hand, they skim off high 40 percent margins.

Prof. Chengappa says India’s Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) is actually a barrier to direct benefit for small farmers through its myriad bureaucratic clauses that deter retailers from seeking permission to deal directly with farmers.

“The APMC allows so many superfluous middlemen that it has actually institutionalised commercial agents and traders in India’s agricultural system,” complains Chengappa.

There are, however, better run government ventures such as the 12.25 million-dollar turnover Horticultural Producers Co-operative Marketing and Processing Society (HOPCOMS), in Bangalore, which works with 18,000 farmer-members.

HOPCOMS enjoys the loyalty of farmers who say they are happy with the assured payments and higher prices compared with what they are offered by the city’s four major markets.

“We don’t need to pay any commission to the market auction agent,” says 35-year-old Shivananda Attibele, who brings leafy greens to HOPCOMS twice a week from his two-acre plot at Jigani, 43 km outside the city.

The markets have commission agents, permissible under the APMC, who fix the day’s rate for vegetables and grains according to the quantities available for the day and the demand for particular produce.

The system has given rise to exploitation and extortion, with farmers forced to pay commissions to the agent and are often at his mercy because of credit they may have taken from him.

“Farmers take loans from the agents and have no option but to take whatever the agents give them,” says 56–year-old Muniraj, whose father began dealing with HOPCOMS 40 years ago.

Traders forming cartels that prohibit small farmers from selling their produce elsewhere is a countrywide phenomenon in India’s markets.

HOPCOMS managing director, Shanmugappa, agrees that the situation is bad for small farmers who are forced to sell their produce at wholesale auctions in city markets.

“There is a huge middleman lobby that is cornering very large margins,” says Shanmugappa. “That is why I say that the government should control the prices of vegetables at the ‘end-point’, the market, not at the ‘source’ by subsidising fertilisers, water and electricity.”

Shanmugappa says the method of government control of market rates for vegetables and grains is successful in several countries.

Satish Natarajan, a director of Sahaja Organics, believes civil society has been irresponsible about its link with farmers.

“We have absolutely no idea about where our food is coming from, or the plight of the farmers,” says Natarajan. “We need to build community support to ensure a regular income for our farmers.

Calls to amend APMC rules have come in from various states in India, but these have been overshadowed by the controversy over a plan to introduce foreign direct investment in the retail sector, that may finally break the middleman’s stranglehold.

India, along with Brazil, Russia and China (that form BRIC), is slated to be among the world’s top five grocery markets by 2015.

Excerpt:

After pushing for financing adaptation at the just-concluded United Nations climate talks at Durban, India is hitting every button for aid in executing its low-carbon growth plans.

This despite India (and China) refusing to sign new climate agreements at the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s 17th conference of the parties (COP 17) in the South African city.

India, in fact, has a well-drawn out policy and action plan for climate change. Last year it announced reduction of emissions by 20-25 percent by 2020 and its national policies on abatement of climate change will help significantly towards reducing global warming.

In 2008, India brought out a National Action Plan on Climate Change, dealing with initiatives in eight key areas till 2017: solar and energy efficiency; sustainable habitat; sustainable agriculture; water; Himalayan ecosystem; Green India and strategic knowledge on climate change.

India, which has been looking for funds under the UNFCCC’s Green Climate Fund, is now also interested in the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund (CTF).

Started by the World Bank in 2008-09 along with major regional banks, the CTF has a total of 6.1 billion dollars in public finance and had loaned 4.35 billion dollars to 12 countries by March 2010.

Low-carbon growth options in industry, research institutions and governance have been initiated in fields varying from removal of hydro-fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons in manufacturing processes to conservation of biodiversity in the forestry sector.

“There is a lot of involvement by industry in areas such as the carbon market and renewable energy,” says Rita Roy Choudhury, director of environment, climate change and renewable energy at the Delhi-based Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

FICCI has a continuing collaboration with the government on climate change and environmental policies for industry.

“In terms of overall sustainability though, Indian industry is still at ‘awareness level’,” Choudhary commented to IPS over telephone from Delhi.

FICCI had put forward to its government, at COP 17 in Durban, requests for fast transfer of technologies, finance and protection of intellectual property rights.

India’s low-carbon growth strategies are now slated for inclusion in its 12th five-year plan beginning 2012.

A tax on coal consumption at Indian rupees 50 (approximately one dollar) per metric tonne of coal, proposed by the environment ministry in 2010, has overcome resistance from the industrial sector and garnered a reported 555 million dollars in 2011 which is to be used for financing electricity transmission from clean energy projects to poor states.

Another major effort underway is India’s Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission to produce 20,000 megawatts of power with 20 million solar collectors and 20 million lighting systems by 2022.

Though its target looks unattainable, the project is moving ahead with 8.50 Mw, out of a targeted 200 Mw of solar power for 2011, becoming operational by August 2011.

In November 2011, the CTF cleared 775 million dollars for a super-efficient equipment programme initiative that encourages energy efficiency among consumers and industry.

The funds will also help the government’s solar mission by lowering the cost of financing, facilitating technology and hydropower development.

“Our goal is to invest in projects that impact social and economic development with significant co-benefits for climate change,” says Anuradha Thakur, CTF Trust Fund member, in a press release.

In yet another private financial agreement – that belies India’s national climate policy stance against the United States’ refusal to sign up, or continuance of the Kyoto Protocol – the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) approved 150 million dollars in September 2011 towards financing solar energy.

The New Delhi-based firm Applied Solar Technologies will use the money to supplement the diesel used in telecommunication tower generators with solar photovoltaics.

“This project brings OPIC’s financing for renewable energy in India to more than 400 million dollars approved in just the past year,” says OPIC chief Elizabeth Littlefield on the official website of the U.S. embassy in India.

“OPIC is proud to be supporting India’s impressive ambitions to shift to a less carbon-intensive economy.”

India also has an ambitious eco-restoration programme, under its Green India Mission, to develop 20 million hectares of land in the next 10 years, calculated to sequester 43 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

India is also seeking global funding to aid its forestry conservation efforts, mainly through additional steps for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation or REDD +.

Godavari village expects to claim the UNFCCC's REDD plus carbon funds. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya and - -
GODAVARI, Nepal, Nov 21 2011 (IPS)

Nepal’s joint forest management system has taken such deep roots that the country’s prolonged political instability has had little effect on it.

“We’re doing well anyway,” Ganesh Bahadur Silwal, 65, general secretary of the Godavari community forestry group, tells an international audience seated in an arc around him in a concrete hall in the scenic Godavari valley, 14 km southeast of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

Nepal’s joint forest management system now boasts of 20,000 community forest management groups countrywide, and part of that success has been due to vigorous participation by women.

In Godavari village, Silwal explains that there are five women members in their 11- member village forest committee, the number having been decided by the members themselves.

With 120 user-households looking after 147 hectares of once degraded lands handed to them by the government in 1996, the maintenance of these lands has depended a lot on the community’s women, who are responsible for fuel and fodder needs.

“Women do the weeding, cleaning and general maintenance work,” says 50-year-old Ruku Bhujel, member of the committee.

With collaboration from the district forest officer (DFO), an official plan was initially signed, a village committee formed thereafter and the land sectioned off into four blocks.

Each year, one block is taken up for conservation work by the 120 users in the group, while the remaining three are left for natural regeneration.

The Kathmandu-based ICIMOD ( International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development), which has a field training site in Godavari, demonstrating various sustainable farming, forestry and livelihood options, has been supporting the group for technical and other expertise.

“Previously, we stole,” says Rama Chettri, vice-president of the community forestry group. “Now that we find it is our land, we protect it,” she says.

Ram Puri, forest guard of the group, smiles broadly. “Neither animals nor humans are allowed into natural regeneration areas until the trees are big enough to have their branches and leaves cut for selling as income,” he says.

In 2011, the community earned Nepali rupees 50,000 (602 dollars) from the sale of branches and leaves alone.

The forests are now there in plain sight, verdant green around the village in the valley. There is enough fuel wood and fodder for the community and the group is now poised to earn more from various income-earning schemes.

The Godavari valley, known for its magnificent view of the Phulchoki forests of the Himalayas and its lush, fertile valley, is a popular tourist spot in Nepal. The village has in recent decades earned money from tourism-related activities.

But the members of the executive committee, which also feature the wife and daughter-in-law of general secretary Silwal, defend the committee’s attempts at poverty alleviation through tourism.

“We made this hall as a ‘picnic stall’ to rent out to various tourist groups that come from Kathmandu to the valley. We earned 1,205 dollars as rental last year,” says Silwal.

The community group has laid out around 20 water taps in the village, and included one government school and three monasteries in its user group.

“We are not sharing school expenses yet, but we have provided scholarships for members’ children,” says Silwal.

The group, which meets every Saturday, has now decided to form a separate group consisting of, and helping, low-income households.

“We need to wait for another generation to see equal inclusion of all castes and classes into these community forestry groups,” says Samden Sherpa, head of ICIMOD’s Godavari training centre.

A 2009 study by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) noted that “a continuing challenge is to ensure equitable distribution of benefits to women and marginalised groups.”

IFPRI recommended “responsiveness of government and policymakers to a multi-stakeholder collaborative learning process,” noting that since 70 percent of Nepal’s population depended on agriculture community management of forests has been “a critically important intervention.”

The programme has evolved from a protection-oriented, conservation-focused agenda to a much more broad-based strategy for forest use, enterprise development, and livelihood improvement with a third of Nepal’s population directly managing one-fourth of Nepal’s forest area.

In 2008, after a 10-year civil war, Nepal abolished its monarchy and became federal republic. But, this country of 27 million people is yet to decide on how best to make the transition to democracy under a permanent new constitution.

ICIMOD, meanwhile, has been conducting three pilot schemes, with help from the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (NORAD), on REDD +, the UNFCCC’s new plan on reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, together with livelihood options.

Begun in 2009 with 104 community forest groups and covering nearly 28,000 hectares in east, west and central Nepal, ICIMOD’s REDD+ runs the Carbon Trust Fund, one of the world’s first, with capital from NORAD.

The fund pays for carbon sequestered through sustainable community forestry, aiming to generate enough money through future carbon stocks to run itself.

Payment depends on performance criteria combined with socioeconomic benefits, and has a training system for measuring conserved carbon.

“We are already in touch with government authorities to take this initiative into policy practice,” says ICIMOD’s Eak Bahadur Rana, in charge of REDD+.

Excerpt:

Harish Hande believes that involving women in design, manufacture and sales pays dividends in any business, but especially in those making products that women ultimately use.

A vegetable vendor in Bangalore using a solar lamp to light her stall. Credit: SELCO/IPS

Hande’s Bangalore-based Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO), which started up in 1995 by innovating sustainable and affordable solar lighting products for India’s rural poor, has a woman occupying the key slot of vice-president and chief financial officer.

“Why should the business sector look at women only as end-users?” asks Hande, who bagged the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay award, also known as Asia’s Nobel prize.

The citation said the award was for “passionate and pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor, through a social enterprise that brings customised, affordable, and sustainable electricity to India’s vast rural populace, encouraging the poor to become asset creators.”

Hande points to the women professionals in his company as illustration of his belief, something that SELCO’s vice president and chief financial officer, K. Revathi endorses.

“I am given full freedom here to bring changes into conventional financing processes,” says Revathi, a chartered accountant.

Managing SELCO’s finances for over eight years, Revathi saw the company through a downturn in 2004-05, when a spike in photovoltaic costs reduced demand, and back up to a respectable turnover of 2.93 million dollars in 2009-10.

Revathi says her involvement in the financial side of designing products, a key component of SELCO’s success, has been satisfying.

Nearly a fourth of India’s 1.1 billion people have no access to the national power grid and, in spite of efforts to connect all of India’s 23.4 million below-poverty-line individuals, only 6.9 million had connections by 2009.

In many rural electrified areas, grid connections are unreliable, causing difficulties to even those who can afford to pay.

Hande persuaded rural-based banks to provide loans to poor families excluded because of their inability to provide collateral.

With SELCO providing the 15 percent down payment, the banks responded with loans of 300-500 dollars to each family for packages with varied energy needs.

Fewer than 10 percent of borrowers have defaulted on loan repayments among SELCO’s current clientele of over 125,000 families in the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and western Gujarat.

A typical rural family uses around 120 litres of kerosene annually for lighting, so SELCO’s systems save not just kerosene but around 22,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

“To date, SELCO has reached more than half-a-million people by installing solar lights in 120,000 households, microenterprises, and community facilities,” the Magsaysay citation said.

Homes benefit from emission-free lighting, children are able to study at night and domestic tasks become easier, increasing time and opportunities for income generation, especially for women. “It’s a misconception that the poor cannot pay,” Hande told IPS. “What they need is a product that suits them and their paying capacities.”

Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have made the best use of SELCO’s equipment and expertise, especially in small businesses involving solar power and cooking stoves.

At Madanapalle, a small rural town in interior Andhra Pradesh, a women’s SHG called Shree Ganga Bhavani, motivated by SELCO’s experience with women’s groups, set up a micro-solar enterprise capable of charging 30 batteries simultaneously.

The batteries are dispatched in the evening to street vendors, many of them women, who use them to power SELCO solar lights in their stalls.

In Gujarat, Pavanben Jadeja, inspired by SELCO’s collaboration with the well-known organisation SEWA (Self- Employed Women’s Association), became a ‘solar light agent’ for nomadic tribal families in the remote Kutch area.

Pavanben says she regularly collects instalment amounts from her customers and pays SEWA back.

“I can never think of double-digit margins but we are sustainable. We just function on a slower scale,” says Revathi.

Steady whilst others have gone bust, Hande illustrates his case by pointing to the giant investment banking firm Lehmann Brothers, which collapsed in 2008.

“We both started in the same year; they’re gone, we’re still here,” says Hande with a grin.

Less than five percent of SELCO’s raised equity of 3.5 million dollars comprises financial grants, belying talk amongst competitors that SELCO manages its operations through financial grants.

SELCO received 2.5 million dollars as a loan from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation – which does not give grants.

“One million dollars were raised as debt and the grant component of the whole was just 200,000 dollars. We have only 250,000 dollars now remaining of our debt, which we will pay back in two years,” explained Hande to IPS.

SELCO’s business model is already a case study at Harvard University in the United States, and Yale University is about to follow suit.

Studies by the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Academic Forum on food security issues in the three countries suggest that providing food access works best when backed by cash transfers.

A paper on food security brought out by the UNDP’s Brasilia-based International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), under the Forum, shows that despite the great strides in food production made by India people in this country are just not eating enough.

Citing indices of the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and International Food Policy Research Institution, the paper shows that India needs to improve on poverty, hunger, nutrient intake and per capita consumption.

Ramesh Chand, director of New Delhi-based National Centre for Agricultural Economics, who was involved in preparing the paper, said the Indian situation calls for a mix of food distribution and cash transfers.

Chand told IPS that India’s decline in cereal production since 1995 is a cause for concern.

“Either we ensure access to nutrition through livestock foods, production of which has increased, or we address the decline in cereal intake by the poor,” says Chand. “Since the markets can’t support this huge intake, I feel a mix of cash and grains is necessary,” explains Chand.

India’s main tool for access to food, besides a mid-day school meal scheme, is its vast targeted public distribution system (TPDS), the world’s largest food distribution mechanism benefiting 160 million families.

Food subsidies in the 2010 – 2011 annual budget saw 14 billion dollars allocated to meet the difference between the actual cost of foodgrains and sale prices fixed under welfare schemes including the TDPS and also to maintain buffers stocks of wheat and rice.

The TPDS, however, is acknowledged, even by the government, to have huge infrastructural and systemic flaws, with significant numbers of the poor being excluded from its subsidy ambit.

P.V. Satheesh, founder of the Deccan Development Society, a voluntary agency which has successfully shown that indigenous grains are an infallible method of addressing overall food security, suggests introducing locally grown millets into India’s PDS.

Currently, the transportation of rice and wheat to all parts of the country in the PDS is expensive, and deterring the production of nutritious millets. Production of white, polished rice is also environmentally destructive, being water and chemical-intensive agriculture.

“Millets address food, health, fodder and livelihoods by being cultivable almost everywhere,” Satheesh explained to IPS.

Brazil-style cash transfers, suggested by the IBSA Academic Forum, are currently controversial in India, with the new Food Security Bill, tabled to be passed in parliament in the coming weeks, recommending it as one of several measures.

A group of research scholars, including prominent development economist Jean Dreze, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, In July, opposing cash transfers as an alternative to the PDS.

“We urge you to ensure that the National Food Security Act includes the strongest possible safeguards against a hasty transition from food entitlements to cash transfers”, the letter requested the prime minister.

“Cash transfers will be a disaster; Brazil’s position is not the same as that of India,” Satheesh told IPS.

As per FAO’s Hunger Map 2010, undernourishment actually increased in India, from 20 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2007, whereas it dropped from 11 percent to six percent in Brazil during the same period. It has remained consistently very low (under five percent) in South Africa.

Brazil’s food security measures are an integrated mix of its zero hunger strategy of over 20 programmes in strengthening access to food, family agriculture and income generation.

One significant strategy has been Brazil’s Food Acquisition Programme (PAA), a system of public procurement and distribution under which food was bought from 138,000 farmers in 2009, and donated to 13 million people. Its budget in 2009 was 300 million dollars.

But Brazil’s proven strongpoint has been its Bolsa Familia (PBF) programme of conditional cash transfers launched in 2003, using over eight billion dollars to reach 12 million households in 2010.

PBF gives monthly cash payments to pre-defined poor families provided they fulfill education and health stipulations, basically related to pre- and postnatal care, school attendance and immunization.

The IBSA paper suggests India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee, ensuring work for pay for rural households, as a feature worth emulating.

In South Africa, as per its General Household Survey 2009, 20 percent of households have inadequate or severely inadequate access to food.

“The largest expenditure is on social welfare programmes, grants and cash transfers which assist in providing people money with which to buy food,” said Josee Koch, contributor to a 2011 policy document by the Wahenga Institute on public support for food security in India, Brazil and South Africa.

“The social grants are critical,” Koch says. “If you look at an analysis of what poor households spend on food, it’s between 50 to 70 percent of income that goes towards food. With rising food prices, there is little chance that this proportion will drop.”

There is debate in South Africa over the sustainability of grants, with concerns raised over the large number of recipients against the size of the workforce whose taxes must support them.

In contrast, Brazil’s Interministerial Chamber on Food and National Security and the National Council of Food and Nutritional Security, both at high political levels, have been significantly effective in a co-ordinated effort at all the related indices to food security.

India, says the IBSA paper, can in turn offer its experience in consolidating a rights-based approach to food security.

Indian civil society’s Right to Food Campaign has used the courts to guarantee basic entitlements.

*With reporting by Terna Gyuse in Cape Town

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, May 12 2011 (IPS)

Moves to enact a new law on animal welfare in India have upset public health advocates, who fear it will interfere with efforts to control rabies-carrying stray dogs.

Stray Dogs in Cochin, Kerala, India Credit: SingChan/Creative Commons Licence

What public health advocates worry about is that in AWBI’s desire to be kind to animals, its animal birth control and vaccination programme will be unable to keep up with the increasing number of strays on the roads, causing problems in health, safety and unnecessary expenditure of public money.

“The most dangerous aspects of the draft animal welfare act are its interference with the control of rabies caused by the incredible increase in the number of stray dogs,” said environmental activist and solid waste expert Almitra Patel in a letter to Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who has jurisdiction over AWBI.

Rabies is a fatal disease usually transmitted when the toxic saliva of infected animals, such as dogs, penetrates human skin, mainly through bites.

India contributes nearly 60 percent of all deaths from rabies worldwide. A 2003 report by the Bangalore-based Association for Prevention and Control of Rabies in India (APCRI), sponsored by the World Health Organisation (WHO), found 20,565 deaths from rabies in 2003, with over 96 percent transmitted by dogs, mostly strays.

Though the mortality figures from rabies have come down, the viral disease clearly remains a problem in India, which also has an estimated 17.4 million dog bite cases per year, causing the country to lose 38 million work-days.

The public health system spends nearly two billion rupees (45 million dollars) every year for human anti-rabies vaccines to treat bite cases.

Most of the deaths from rabies and bite cases are from poorer sections of Indian society, where garbage heaps and scavenging dogs abound.

There is no known census of the population of stray dogs in India, though the 2003 report by APCRI, a group of professional scientists and experts, estimates that there were 22 million stray dogs in India in 2000.

Socio-religious and cultural beliefs about benevolence to animals has made control of stray dogs an emotionally divisive issue in India.

The new law will annul the current Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960, and respond to calls in Parliament for stronger legislation to control the use of, and cruelty towards, animals.

“We are a balancing agency, trying to incorporate various interests,” says Dr. Anjani Kumar, director of animal welfare at the Ministry of Environment.

An emotional and financial resurgence of animal-rights organisations, coupled with society’s willingness to feed strays, has muddied the issue of control of stray dogs, their connection to public health and the huge costs to the treasury.

In 2001, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act was amended to include Animal Birth Control (ABC) rules, which outline a programme of sterilising female strays and vaccinating each dog on the road, to be conducted by local municipal authorities.

In the 741-square-kilometre town limits of Bangalore, capital of the south-western Indian state of Karnataka, the joint director of animal welfare, Dr. Pervez Piran, oversees the operation of 20 centres for sterilisation and vaccination of stray dogs, outsourced to eight animal welfare organisations.

Each dog costs municipal coffers 600 rupees (15 dollars), with 50 million rupees (11.5 million dollars) spent on the ABC programme in the city last year alone.

But in spite of over 31 million dollars being spent on ABC in the last eleven years in Bangalore, and Piran’s work in sterilisations, he says it will take another three years to ‘stabilise’ Bangalore’s stray dog population, currently estimated unofficially at around 300,000.

“I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” says Piran wryly. “The city, its population and its garbage are increasing rapidly, allowing stray populations living off garbage to increase exponentially.

“I have been struggling for years with solid waste management,” says Patel. “Every municipality needs to enforce non-feeding of strays by citizens.”

Stray Dog Free Bangalore (SDFB), a group of working professionals, including veterinarians, who have banded together to remove strays from the streets because of their public health and safety implications, has now petitioned the Supreme Court to remove strays from public places in India.

“It is ironic that the new act does not take responsibility for or custody of stray dogs,” says Diana Bharucha, founder of SDFB. “Countries like the USA or UK, European and even Asian nations like Singapore and Malaysia have animal and rabies control systems, and treat their animals with as much compassion as we in India.”

A study by the World Society for the Protection of Animals covering 31 European and Eurasian countries in 2006 found that more than half of the countries caught strays as a method of control, with 35 percent euthanising the sick or those not ‘re-homed’ after the holding period of 60 days.

Ten percent, or three countries, did not permit killing of healthy strays, but needed the authorities to hold and take care of such dogs.

After more than a decade, the ABC programme has been unable to stem or control stray dog populations in India, with charges of corruption, malfeasance and incompetence leveled at municipalities and outsourced animal rights organisations.

Dr. MK Sudarshan, dean of the Bangalore-based Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) and principal researcher on the 2003 APCRI-WHO Rabies Survey, welcomes the proposed Animal Welfare Act and the powers it gives to the Animal Welfare Board.

“Let the Animal Welfare Board take over the responsibility of the ABC and ensure the safety and health of the public,” says Sudarshan. “We can now hold the Board responsible if they don’t do a good job.”

The draft Act is due to be discussed for enactment in Parliament later this year.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, Apr 15 2011 (IPS)

They were the face of India’s “brain drain” – the best and the brightest government-educated scholars who eventually left for foreign shores. Now, they have opted to give back as a gesture of thanks for the top-notch education they received.

They are alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country’s premier academic institute which the Times Higher Education Supplement has ranked the world’s third best technology institution, after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley.

Set up by the government for post-war and post-independence industrial development, IIT started in Kharagpur in West Bengal in 1950. It now has 15 campuses all over India, its graduates considered among the country’s academic and professional elite, many of them successful industrialists, entrepreneurs, businessmen and achievers.

Their education was heavily subsidised by the government, and they were at one point criticised for taking taxpayers’ money only to leave the country, mainly for the United States.

“An awareness has now started that you must give back to society,” said Collur Dhananjay, an electronics alumnus of the IIT in Kharagpur and secretary of the Bangalore chapter of the IIT Alumni Association of Kharagpur.

“This present generation of ‘IIT-ians’ are now seeing real wealth and want to do more,” Dhananjay added.

Dhananjay is the point man collecting alumni funds for a project called “Light for Education” that aims to provide solar lamps to tribal children in rural villages.

Dhananjay said he was motivated by another IIT graduate, Harish Hande, who spoke at a forum of IIT alumni.

“I told the alumni that we have had an education subsidised by the people, including the poor. It is high time we played a role that was required of us after graduating,” said Hande, whose work in spreading rural electrification has won him and his company, Selco-India, several distinguished awards, including the Ashden, popularly known as the ‘Green Oscar’.

“It is not only of giving back to society,” Hande told his alumni audience, “but about being part of it and contributing as a partner, not just a giver.”

Dhananjay took Hande’s idea on rural education through electrification to another senior IIT alumnus, Arjun Menda, whose corporate real estate firm, RMZ, funds education through the Menda Foundation.

“The Foundation will match all grants that the Alumni Association garners for the ‘Light for Education’ programme,” Menda said.

The project began with the distribution of solar lamps for studying to impoverished tribal children in the high school level in rural villages in Karnataka.

Tribal communities in India remain among the poorest and most backward of Indian society. Despite several initiatives by the government, a World Bank 2010 report found that 56 percent of rural households still do not have access to electricity.

Under the “Light for Education” programme, each student is given a LED lamp powered by a pocket- sized battery that could be charged every school day at a centralised solar panel erected in the school.

The charged battery provides three hours of light for studying at home and saves the student at least 100 rupees (approximately 2.25 dollars) every month in kerosene cost for lamps, an expense that the poorest families find hard to meet.

Elsewhere in India, IIT alumni are doing their bit. In Bombay, Kharagpur-alumnus Puneet Kumar now co-ordinates a ‘pan-IIT’ company called Ekalavya Creations. The company was set up by well-known alumni from IIT Kharagpur, among them B.K. Syngal who is known as the ‘father’ of the Internet in India, and Arjun Malhotra, the co-founder of HCL, India’s leading technology company.

Ekalavya has begun by travelling around the country, looking at IIT graduates working for development in the social sector. The group now plans to take these case studies to the next pan-IIT meet to motivate alumni.

But despite these efforts, the general consensus from alumni themselves is that IIT-ians are doing too little to help solve country’s vast poverty and rural backwardness.

“In all my years in the IAS (Indian Administrative Service), I have not had any IIT alumni coming to me for help in collaborating on any work in the public sector,” said Bangalore-based IAS officer Rajeev Chawla, an alumnus from IIT-Kanpur.

Chawla is recognised as the civil servant who successfully designed and implemented the e-governance project ‘Bhoomi’ that computerised land records in Karnataka over 2002 and 2003.

His work has served as a development model for other Indian states and international agencies.

“Even those in the public sector are not achieving as per the capabilities and training they have had in their alma maters,” Chawla said.

IIT Kharagpur Associate Professor Joy Sen said the bureaucracy within the governance system, rather than the IIT alumni, is more at fault, but agrees that mindsets in the faculty need to change to incorporate relevance to the environment and development.

Chawla blames Indian society, rather than the inadequacies of IIT faculty. “The rush for power, prestige and money is a social malaise that has included IIT graduates,” he said.

The younger generation of alumni, however, are circumspect about criticism.

“We are technical guys, so this ‘social front’ has come late to us,” said Bombay-based Kharagpur alumnus Kumar of the IIT Class of 2002.

“This is a start,” said Dhananjay, speaking of the “Light for Education” programme. Ravi Chopra, a ‘senior’ from the Class of 1965 of IIT-Bombay working in watershed development in rural areas exhorted the alumni to “take a leap”.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

Several incinerator facilities that were supposed to turn waste into energy have proven to be white elephants that are now adding to the country’s pollution woes, instead of alleviating them.

“Massive waste-to-energy plant subsidies are ruining the waste management field in India,” said Almitra Patel, a civil engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. “Companies are now using these subsidies to set up plants that fail.”

Solid waste experts are alarmed these facilities – which failed to work in the 1980s and 1990s – continue to exist.

Waste-to-energy (WTE) plants, are releasing toxic fumes because wastes are not being burned properly. Waste incineration technology – controversial in western countries – is even more toxic in India due to mixed, un-segregated wastes, which emit a medley of poisonous gases such as dioxins and furans when burned.

At Timarpur in New Delhi, a WTE incineration plant imported from the Danish firm Volund Milijotecknick in 2003 – which subsequently failed – has been resurrected, and another WTE incinerator is being built in Okhla.

Activists are protesting violations of environmental procedures at the Timarpur plant, which is surrounded by a community of about 500,000.

In February 2011, the Asian Development Bank withdrew funding to the plant under its Asia Pacific Carbon Fund, but the Timarpur Okhla Waste Management Company claims it will be able to reduce carbon emissions by 262,791 tonnes per year for the next ten years, and has filed for carbon credits.

WTE “works only on paper”, said Mumbai-based Ragini Jain, who works on dry waste policy, explaining how Indian waste will not combust sufficiently to produce adequate electricity. Indian waste is mainly biodegradable compostable waste with high moisture content. When it arrives at the WTEs it is also mixed with non-biodegradable plastics, aluminium and similar substances – the wastes are not separated.

India set up solid waste management rules in 2000, making urban towns responsible for waste segregation and disposal, and recommending composting as the most suitable form of waste disposal after segregation.

The Solid Waste Rules of 2000 were set up after Patel petitioned the supreme court in 1996, claiming that the government was neglecting the responsibility of proper waste management. The court later appointed Patel head of a national committee on solid waste.

In 2005, Patel again filed a public interest lawsuit before the supreme court, petitioning the court to put a stay on government subsidies for all proposed and future WTE projects until the current plants had been adequately reviewed for feasibility.

The court ordered a stay on government subsidies for further WTEs, allowing only five of these projects to proceed for research and development purposes.

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy however says there is no court ban on promoting further WTE projects.

India now has a reported 33 WTE projects in the works, of which several have the makings of financial corruption and administrative malfeasance, say NGO activists and waste management experts in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai.

Shanta Ram Maley, who specialises in solid waste management, pointed to the lack of understanding in India of technologies for dealing with municipal wastes, citing current failures in WTE technology in places like Hyderabad and Vijayawada in southern India, and Chandigarh and Jaipur in northern India.

Chandigarh, touted as having India’s most well administered municipality, is now “throwing good compost into a landfill [thereby wasting both compostable material and landfill space]”, says Maley.

Following a ban on plastics and a new recycling system for non-biodegradable wastes, the local WTE plant in Chandigarh is now deprived of non-biodegradables needed for refuse-derived pelletisation, and left with incombustible biodegradable waste.

“There is no accountability for operations from these companies, and no responsibility for their monitoring taken by the Ministry,” Maley says.

There is some ambiguity over where responsibility lies. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy passes the buck on approval of technologies to another department, the Central Pollution Control Board.

Under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, WTE technology is one of the ways the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has chosen to promote renewable energy.

Small-scale municipal WTE plants are working well. In Pune, Additional Municipal Commissioner Suresh Jagtap said a successful system of segregation has been set up for their twelve micro WTE units.

“Most of these work well only in small-scale systems where wastes can be segregated according to its nature,” says Maley. What Indian municipal wastes need, Maley suggested, is an integrated system of management that incorporates both composting and small-scale combustion technologies.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, Feb 14 2011 (IPS)

Hundreds of patients are now streaming into stem cell therapy clinics all over India, despite the controversy surrounding stem cell research and even though, doctors say, no one has yet been cured by this technology.

With a 2 percent share of the 56-billion dollar world market, India enjoys one of the highest growth rates in stem cell treatment and is widely perceived to be a centre of stem cell work.

But scientists across the board say successful treatments are a long way away and ethical questions, apart from health and scientific ones, have yet to be fully addressed.

“It’s a rather uncritical explanation that we’re already there,” says Dr. Jyotsna Dhawan, Dean of the Bangalore-based Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. “There is a big gap between reality and potential in the field worldwide.”

One reason for the fuss surrounding stem cell therapy is its potential to address a plethora of medical conditions. Stem cells are cells capable of renewing themselves through cell division, with research now focused on those taken from human embryos and umbilical cord blood.

In India, 22 public and seven private research institutions are authorised to conduct stem cell research.

The only stem cell therapy treatment tried and tested so far is bone marrow transplantation, allowed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Nevertheless, several hospitals and clinics across major cities in India have treatments for neurological, cardiological and reproductive areas of medicine, the largest number being in central nervous system diseases and in soft tissue repair.

In 2007, India brought out a set of guidelines on conducting stem cell research, but the guidelines are not legally binding and have no power to curb clinical implementation of stem cell therapy.

Only 15 clinical trials have been officially registered so far. Dhawan said several of these went well, such as stem cell research using corneal epithelium conducted by the LV Prasad Institute in Hyderabad.

But unregistered work and treatment are being conducted in various places in India.

The most prominent of these is in the New Delhi-based Nutech Mediworld clinic set up by Dr. Geeta Shroff which treats patients, many of them from abroad, through human embryonic stem cells.

Shroff’s brochure says she has not had a single patient showing any adverse side effects.

“I would have forgiven (stem cell therapy clinics) if their objective was to treat a patient,” says Dr. Pushpa Bhargav, senior scientist and former director of the Hyderabad-based Centre for Molecular Biology.

“But the patients are being used for money. How many in India have been cured? None that I know of.”

The low cost of operations and easy availability of target participants has made India a prime destination for clinical trials. India and China became centres for stem cell work after the U.S. voted down legislation on stem cell research in 2006.

But while clinical trials are under way, questions have been raised whether these are done using the proper procedures.

Dr. Vasantha Muthuswamy, former ICMR deputy director general and founder-secretary of the Asia Pacific Ethics Review Committee, posed some questions: What steps are being taken to ensure cells are not contaminated? Are patients’ scores being recorded? Do theory and methodology of treatment “make sense”?

Another critic is Dr. Maneesha Inamdar of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, one of only two scientists in India to have developed new lines from stem cells now being used in Indian and foreign laboratories. Inamdar bluntly termed as “dangerous” the commercial application of non-authorised therapy.

Several stem cell clinics contacted were wary of speaking to the media, revealing their awareness of the controversy surrounding their practice.

A staff member who answered a telephone call to a well-known stem cell treatment clinic in New Delhi refused to identify himself and said the number of cases treated in the clinic was proof enough of its efficacy.

ICMR director general Dr. V.M. Katoch told IPS he was “very concerned” that such cases were only “hearsay”.

Nevertheless, Katoch says control is now “building up”, with an ICMR clinical trial registry now online and awareness on setting up ethics committees improving “by the month.”

He says India’s guidelines have been unable to keep up with practice in the field due to the absence of a single agency responsible for stem cell matters.

That may change soon, with guidelines having taken the form of a bill pending before Parliament. The guidelines have also been amended to include clinical conduct and penalties for offenders.

“We are now moving towards a far more regulated regime capable of taking on offenders, while building up development in the field,” Katoch told IPS.

For patients with degenerative diseases, none of this matters. One such patient is 34-year-old Chandana Sen who is suffering from ankylosing spondylitis, a condition where the spinal joints get fused.

Her father, retired Air Marshall D.K. Sen, said Chandana “is willing to be a human guinea pig in stem cell treatment.”

The Sens are just typical of those now flocking to stem cell therapy clinics, too desperate to care about the controversy.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
GUWAHATI, INDIA, Jan 12 2011 (IPS)

A concerted effort to formally document the magnitude and directions of climate trends in the Eastern Himalayas and thereby decide regional adaptation strategies is critical to ensure the region’s water security, according to water experts.

In Nepal, the Imja glacier is retreating almost 70 metres per year. In Bhutan, where glacial melt is the least perceptible currently, 25 of 677 glaciers are categorised potentially dangerous, with an ‘alarming’ glacial retreat rate of 20-30 metres per year, says G. Karma Chhopel of Bhutan’s National Environment Commission.

It is more important to gather statistics on the effects of climate change than to get preoccupied with China building dams in the region, says Professor Jayanta Bandyopadhyay of the Centre for Development and Environment Policy at the Kolkata branch of the Indian Institute of Management.

“Building more dams when waters are anyway threatened due to climate change is accelerating the issue of water loss. It’s a bit like ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’,” Himanshu Thakkar, of the New Delhi-based South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told IPS.

Sharing of water is an important issue, says Thakkar. “India needs to leverage its huge trade dealings with China to form a water-sharing accord.”

Bandyopadhayay says a conflict-resolution system is a ‘good idea’, “But we still don’t know the nature of changes in the region. What will the treaty be based on?” he asks. “I must again stress on the need for developing indigenous climate models for the region. Adaptation strategies will be very difficult without this,” Bandyopadhyay told IPS. “The whole issue of Asian Development depends on this.”

The Eastern Himalayan mountains – stretching 1,500 miles across Nepal, Bhutan, northern Myanmar, south-eastern Tibet and northeast India – and referred to as the ‘water towers of Asia’ are also known as the Third Pole due to their having the largest glaciated area outside of the two poles.

The region is home to three massive river basins, the Indus in the west, Ganges in the centre and the Brahmaputra in the east, featuring major rivers including the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Xingjian, Chao Phraya, Irrawaddy, Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Tarim, flowing through central, south and south-eastern Asia.

The mountains directly impact water resources in Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Nepal – and supply more than 1.3 billion people.

China’s dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong basin have caused concerns of shrinking waters in lower riparian Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

In Nov. 2010, China’s damming of the Yarlung Tsangpo, or the upper- Brahmaputra, at Zangmu, some 300 kilometres from Lhasa raised concerns in India.

Bandyopadhyay says China’s share of water from the Yarlung Tsangpo is only about twenty percent of the amount of water that flows through to India.

“The apprehension is political perception, that’s all,” says Bandyopadhyay. “The Chinese share is minimal – sensitive only in the lean, winter months when the discharges in the regional river basins dry up.”

Bandyopadhyay says that addressing climate change in the eastern Himalayas – the source of the river basins – should be an urgent issue of concern instead.

“We now have an urgent need for strengthening Himalaya-specific water sciences. There are 1.3 billion people living in this region; this itself should push the Government of India to initiate action,” Bandyopadhyay told a gathering of scientists and students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati recently.

The eastern Himalayan region is particularly hampered by a lack of statistics on climate patterns, glacial melt and climatic variations for the entire Himalayan region. Bandyopadhyay says eastern Himalayan models for even baseline information for temperature and rainfall patterns are lacking.

Shresth Tayal, glaciologist from the New Delhi-based The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) says studies by ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) based in Nepal, showed warming in high altitude areas was far higher than in the lower reaches.

The East Rathong glacier in Sikkim, one of India’s north-eastern States, has shrunk from approximately 7.125 square kilometres in 1966 to 0.46 square kilometres in 2009 – a massive loss of 93.54 percent in 43 years, according to a TERI GPS survey.

R. Krishnan, head of Climate and Global Modelling at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, in the southwestern State of Maharashtra, says the Institute now has state-of-the-art equipment to build regional models. “We are ready to share data and collaborate in inter-disciplinary research,” Krishnan says.

In Guwahati, scientists, international agencies and experts from South Asia’s eastern nations agreed that regional co-operation was an urgent necessity.

In its efforts to bring together Himalayan nations to act on the impacts of climate change in the region, Bhutan has initiated a series of high-level consultations between Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Bhutan and will be holding a Ministerial summit, ‘Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas’ in Oct. 2011 to prepare a joint accord.

Bandyopadhyay suggests a major eastern Himalayan adaptation strategy could include payment for ecosystem services, which would entail judicious use and conservation.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
CANCÚN, Mexico, Dec 9 2010 (IPS)

An entire body of leaders, spearheaded by U.N. Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon, is now looking at REDD+ as a panacea to global warming with multiple benefits thrown in.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

REDD+ stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It essentially supports developing countries financially and technically to either prevent deforestation or regenerate forests, and is currently not a part of either the Kyoto Protocol or the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

It is, however, being both pushed and deliberated on at the meetings underway currently in Cancún.

“The overall message of REDD+ is that it is progressing well,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. “The personal leadership of heads of state of national governments like Guyana, Brazil and Indonesia has helped. So the main effort is by national governments.”

REDD+ has garnered around $4.5 billion in funds so far through bilateral agreements. Most of the funding currently is from Norway, which is funding both reforestation and avoided deforestation programmes in Guyana and Indonesia.

In May 2010, Norway signed a $1 billion deal with Indonesia, which Dr. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the head of Indonesia’s government REDD+ Unit, said was a partnership that is the best way to approach the climate change problem and which he hoped would become a worldwide model.

Kuntoro, however, added that the process of REDD+ needed careful consideration in its implementation.

“From an economy that was based on cutting trees, we are now introducing a new way of managing things without cutting. It needs a whole new paradigm of government change,” said Kuntoro.

Kuntoro’s leadership in the reconstruction of Aceh after the devastating tsunami of December 2005, with 93 percent of funds actually seeing direct results on the ground, has been lauded by the international community.

Norway’s PM Stoltenberg also highlighted the political risk involved in staking money on REDD+.

“It’s hard to win elections by raising taxes,” quipped Stoltenberg, “which is why we too are dependent on the success of Indonesia’s efforts. The concept is simple: we pay per tonne of carbon reduced, measured after a year.”

“Besides,” he continued, “as a political investor, transformation is essential.”

Billionaire-philanthropist George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundation which has given over $50 million so far to REDD+ efforts, says “REDD+ is a method that can be done, and can be done cheaper than any other method.”

International forestry organisations and prominent individuals like Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Wangari Maathai and U.N .Messenger of Peace Dr. Jane Goodall are in strong favour of promoting REDD+.

In a video message to the group at Cancún, Maathai said she saw REDD+ as an excellent livelihood option, apart from its conservation and climate change benefits, while Goodall said conserving and re-generating forests would help save the world’s rich biodiversity.

But in spite of the high-profile support for REDD+, one of its first executors, Guyanan President Bharrat Jagdeo, highlighted in blunt terms the difficulties in getting the international financial institutions “up to speed” on the matter.

“What I have a problem with is I have x tonnes of carbon saved, Norway is paying, but I can’t get the money,” said Jagdeo. The World Bank, in this instance, has mired the Norwegian aid in bureaucracy so deep that Jagdeo feels political will be lost in using this new tool.

“Developing countries run the risk of the same situation as before: if there is no corresponding flow of finance, political capital will be lost,” he said.

Developing nations have been complaining throughout the talks at Cancún that climate financing, either promised or in general, is unforthcoming.

None of the $30 billion promised till 2012 by industrialised nations at Copenhagen last December for adaptation and mitigation in poorer countries has been remitted so far. A further $100 billion was promised for the same along with technology transfer by 2020.

With official funding through the U.N. framework remaining a serious problem anyway, REDD+’s propagation seems to hold out promise through the market, as in the case of the U.S. state of California.

Unlike its national government, California has a law to reduce emissions by 2020 to 1990 levels, with a slew of features like ‘cap and trade’, energy efficiency, clean cars and low-carbon operations. It now uses this to implement its REDD+ market strategy, while it waits to pass its draft REDD+ law.

The vice president of the Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation, Steve Kline, says the system works only because it is both climate-effective and cost-effective.

“So we have renewables, low-carbon operations and together we have offsets with local California companies. But we had to convince our customers first,” explained Kline.

Significant progress has been made so far at the Cancún talks to formulate a REDD+ strategy with components for local community rights, and gender considerations.

But while the drafts on REDD+ are almost ready at the Cancún deliberations, organisations like CARE International urge caution in finalising all REDD+ drafts.

“The critical issue in a REDD mechanism is to have strong safeguards to prevent it from harming the livelihoods and violating the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities,” says Raja Jarrah, CARE’s REDD Advisor.

“The real test will be how the words unfold into implementation on the ground,” says Jarrah.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
CANCÚN, Mexico, Dec 4 2010 (IPS)

Forest rights advocates and indigenous community organisations from India are adding their voices to what promises to become the newest division in the climate talks here: the inclusion of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation + in developing countries, or REDD+, as an agreement.

A cloud forest in Costa Rica. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

The resulting carbon sequestration is aimed to reduce overall emissions, while the move itself will enable sustainable forestry and halt degradation.

But the clause is not going down well with forest rights and tribal groups in India over the draft REDD+’s use of agri- business plantations and ambiguity over the land categories to be used for the programme, the latter of which clashes with land rights given to tribal communities under India’s recent Forest Rights Act.

India’s government is staunchly supporting REDD+. In December 2008, it submitted a document to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) called “REDD, Sustainable Management of Forest, and Afforestation and Reforestation”.

The government now proposes to use REDD+ as part of its ‘Green India Mission’ to restore 20 million hectares of land into forests in the next 10 years, costing approximately $10 billion, and calculated to sequester 43 million tonnes of carbon annually.

Under its climate change policies, a national REDD+ coordinating agency and a national forest carbon accounting programme are being institutionalised.

Well-known forest and tribal rights expert Madhu Sarin criticises the government’s grouping all categories of land, whether coconut plantations, or forest, private, community or industrial plantations, into its fold for the programme.

She questions whether existing livelihoods, biodiversity, and displacement of forest-dependent communities have been taken into account by the programme.

“Without clarifying who will own the carbon, who will have the right to decide whether to participate in carbon markets or not, and with barely any mention of community forest rights, the Green India Mission seems designed for garnering REDD+ funds for undertaking plantations on community lands in the name of increasing forest cover,” Sarin charged in her blog on the India Environmental Portal, a news website run by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, with sponsorship from the Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF).

“According to MoEF’s own data, till 1999, 31.21 million hectares of forest plantations had already been undertaken. If all the plantations had survived why would Rs 46,000 crores (US 10b) be required for another 10 mha today?” Sarin continued.

A joint statement of protest against India’s support of REDD+ has now been issued by an umbrella group of Indian organisations, including the National Forum of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers and tribal rights groups from 13 states.

The letter highlights the “dangers” under India’s strategy under REDD+ of denying people’s land rights and forest livelihoods under the Forest Rights Act, excluding community participation, and allowing land grabs by private commercial interests.

But India’s Environment Ministry believes it has addressed community issues under REDD+, saying “local communities will be at the heart of implementation, with the Gram Sabha [village government body] as the overarching institution overseeing Mission implementation at the village level”, according to its brochure brought out just days before COP 16 began at Cancún.

The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) also sees REDD+ as one of the best options available to reduce carbon emissions.

While agreeing that the scientific community has so far focused mainly on forest carbon monitoring, reporting and verification without paying adequate attention to social impacts, CIFOR says many REDD+ programmes identify improving livelihoods as an important co-benefit.

CIFOR recently published “A Guide to Learning About Livelihood Impacts of REDD+ Projects” and is collaborating with the government of Mexico to stage Forest Day 4 on Dec. 5, alongside the UNFCCC talks at the Cancún centre.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, India, Nov 29 2010 (IPS)

India’s first-ever major scientific assessment of its climate change scenario by the 2030s, released in November, has the report’s scientists rooting for the government to take concrete action.

Scientists involved in the work are now saying the job of taking action against the projections and warnings made so far is in government hands.

“It is the job of scientists to forewarn and inform,” says Dr N H Ravindranath, one of the authors of this new report brought out by India’s environment ministry and also a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th assessment report in 2007. Ravindranath is from the premier Indian Institute of Science, based here in Bangalore.

The Indian report was issued in the run-up to the series of United Nations meetings around climate change to be held in Cancun, Mexico, from Nov. 29-Dec.10, 2010.

The report was prepared for the environment ministry by the Indian National Network for Climate Change Assessment (INCCA), which comprises 120 national research and scientific institutions and more than 220 scientists.

Using a Hadley Centre Regional Climate Model version 3 (HAD RM 3), it brought out scenarios in agriculture, water, natural ecosystems and biodiversity in the north, south, west and on India’s coasts, bordering over three-quarters of this South Asian country’s landmass.

The report, thus called a ‘4×4’ assessment, forecasts an overall temperature warming of 1.7 degrees to 2 degrees Centigrade for India, sea-level rise at 1.33 millimetres per year and likely to rise further, with cyclonic intensity increasing even while their frequency declines.

Interestingly, fish yields of certain species such as sardines and mackerel are slated to rise in warming temperatures, it adds.

But fishermen on India’s east coast say the forecast of increased yields of some fish, such as mackerel, sounds unlikely.

“The west coast might have more mackerel, the eastern coastline faces severe marine pollution,” says Arjilli Dasu, executive secretary of the Vishakhapatnam-based District Fishermen’s Youth Welfare Association. ” The eastern coast has no ecological conservation measures, such as mangrove regeneration, in place. We expect, at the current conditions, that the sea will ingress at least 10 to 15 metres into the villages by 2020 itself.”

Dasu’s organisation works with fishing communities along a 100-km stretch of the coastline in Andhra Pradesh on India’s eastern seafront.

The warmer atmosphere will also be good for irrigated rice, as it tends to increase with carbon dioxide fertilisation, says the report.

However, rainfed agriculture, which provides livelihood for the majority of India’s farmers, will suffer, and there will be more stress on livestock and on milk productivity.

Water yield is projected to increase in the Himalayan region, but will be variable in the Western Ghats and along the coastline, it adds.

The Keystone Foundation, which works with tribal communities, biodiversity and livelihood in the Western Ghats, notes the report’s findings on rainfall and rainfed agriculture. ” We apprehend an accentuated erraticity in the Western Ghats’ plantation (tea) sector, in small agriculture and also high flooding”, says foundation director Pratim Roy.

“For instance”, says Roy, ” this year there was very poor productivity in any seasonable crop, be it in agriculture, beekeeping or others, because flowering and the rains have both come together, instead of in its usual periodicity. So an entire food basket collapsed this year.”

“As you now see, the report underlines a very high impact in highland areas,” Roy told IPS on the telephone from Ootacamund, hill capital of the Western Ghats.

The Western Ghats, a beautiful hill-region running parallel to the west coast in peninsular India and traversing six states, will be impacted greatly by a rise in temperature by as much as 4.5 degrees Centigrade. It is recognised as a global biodiversity hotspot.

Having some of the finest examples of moist deciduous and tropical forests, 18 of the 54 forest grids in this area are projected to change by the 2030s, impacting the lives and livelihoods of a sizeable population in the area.

“A lot of effort has gone into the findings, ” says Prof Ravindranath. “The ministry should initiate a plan of clear action for the forest sections under their control.”

Dr Subodh Sharma from the environment ministry, chief coordinator of the INCCA report, says action for any assessment “lies in the policy-makers’ see”.

Sharma says the report will provide a solid base for future actions by various government departments. “I am thinking on how to take this report forward, but it will certainly provide an information base for all,” adds Sharma.

“Assessments made at such short timelines are useful, as they can be used to develop adaptation strategies for a foreseeable future”, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh says in the report’s preface.

India has not had any regional scientific climate- assessment in the next 20 years. All major policies have so far been driven by global assessments projected for the 2050s.

INCCA’s first report, published in May 2010, was on greenhouse gas emissions. That was also the first report by a developing country on updated data. Its next report, due in May 2011, will be on India’s carbon aerosol (black carbon) programme.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, India, Oct 7 2010 (IPS)

It is a sector that happens to be India’s second largest employer and its annual revenues are expected to grow three- fold within a decade if it gets all the support it needs. But major players in India’s textile and apparels industry say it remains low in the government’s list of priorities, rendering the sector incapable of realising its full potential.

That includes having a greater share of the global textile and garments market, they say.

“We are not doing as well as we should be doing,” says Premal Udani, chairman of the government-supported Apparel Export Promotion Council of India (AEPC). “We have actually had an eight percent decline in exports this quarter.”

AEPC is based in Gurgaon, Haryana but has 8,800 manufacturers as members across India. According to Udani, the government is fully aware of the textile and apparel industry’s contribution to the economy, including its ability to employ a significant share of India’s multimillion-strong labour force, but has not given it enough support.

He concedes that the government extends the industry some support such as the usual market development assistance (MDA) grants and measures to regulate the export of cotton yarn and hold garment fairs abroad. “But,” says Udani, “there are no ‘real’ subsidies offered by the Indian government of the type that, say, China offers to its industry.”

China, he says, has devalued its currency to help its garment export sector and has exempted it from a 12 percent value-added tax. By comparison, Udani says that “since liberalisation, there have been no effective subsidies by the government of India” to the country’s textile and apparels sector.

The sector can grow from being a 70-billion U.S. dollar industry that it is today to a 220-billion dollar one by 2020, says the Haryana-based consultant firm Technopak.

India’s current textiles and apparels exports now make up about 4.5 percent of the global trade, or 23.5 billion dollars. Experts say this could reach 80 billion dollars in 10 years, or eight percent of the world market.

Almost all of India’s exports in this sector are “high- end” – high-fashion garments outsourced by major international fashion labels like Tommy Hilfiger, Lecoanet Hemant, H&M, and Esprit.

The bulk of Indian garment exports goes to Europe, although the sector also has clients based in Asia and the United States.

“Fifty percent of our workforce are women,” says Udani, noting yet another plus offered by the garments and apparels industry. “Think of the livelihood, empowerment opportunities and development potential that the industry can offer if the government steps in to train and encourage them. This is the right industry for India.”

The right kind of government support for the industry would also bring on other social benefits, says Sashi Sekhar, director of the 99.8 million dollar-turnover Texport Industries heree.

At present, 90 percent of all manufacturing units are based in metro cities in India, but these need to be relocated to interior areas where the bulk of the female textile workforce lives, he adds. “This will also stem the huge rural-urban migration that is now taking place all over India,” he says.

And yet textile and apparel manufacturers in the country speak of poor government support, inadequate supply and high cost of electricity and other utilities, lack of government incentives to produce high-technology ancillary machinery, and other woes that bedevil the industry.

In Karnataka, one of India’s biggest producers of cotton, once-flourishing spinning mills have shut down in the last two decades, dogged by high costs of production and obsolete technologies.

“The garment industry has regressed 20 years in Karnataka,” says Vijay Kumar Tandle, chairman of Bellary Garments Export Cluster that is based in Karnataka’s central district, Bellary. “When you want to go international, you need cutting-edge technology.”

Bellary was the country’s largest supplier of ‘half pants’ in the 1940s, and continues to be India’s major hub for denim jeans in the domestic market. But pleas for government help from textile and garments manufacturers wanting to try exports have apparently gone unheeded.

Laments Tandle, referring to the government: “There is no vision even when there is so much potential to increase production, exports, and develop rural livelihoods.”

For sure, the likes of Tandle and Udani can only look with envy at the information technology sector, which seems to be the government’s current fair-haired industry, considering all the favourable policies that have headed its way.

But Udani points out that the IT sector involves just a few companies that have huge employee turnovers, are mostly closeted together in Bangalore and other metro cities, and employ just one percent of India’s skilled labour.

He theorises that while the garments industry has a huge labour force, the companies themselves are small in size, scattered in metro cities all over the country, and are too loosely knit to be able to present a powerful lobby or pressure group that could push for the sector’s interests.

Tandle adds, “We need policies that are linked to a ‘decentralised’ network of establishments in the districts, with high-tech parks that enable these units to operate at collective costs, thus helping keep costs down.”

In the meantime, the global textile and apparel trade is estimated to reach one trillion dollars by 2020, almost double the current figure of 510 billion dollars. That growth is expected to involve increased outsourcing by Western countries to low-cost producers in Asia.

India is among those nations, but faces increasingly stiff competition from China, as well as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and even Cambodia.

Tandle predicts: “In ten years or thereabouts, we will become history, if we are not careful.”

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, Aug 26 2010 (IPS)

It was supposed to help right old wrongs as well as protect India’s forests, but four years after it took effect, a landmark law recognising the forest rights of scheduled tribes remains the subject of acrimonious debates among the country’s government officials, environmentalists, and rights advocates.

Wildlifers worry the Forest Rights Act will threaten India's last critical habitats, which include Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

One result was the setting up of a committee that would to look at sustainable forest management and protection, as well as the settlement of forest dwellers’ rights.

Yet in August 2010, India’s Tribal Affairs Minister, Kanti Lal Bhuria, was apparently agitated enough to write to Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, complaining that the committee was “going beyond its purview to tell how the Forest Rights Act should be implemented” and was meant only to “study” the situation in the states it visits.

Headed by former planning commission member N C Saxena, the committee has since replied that it has been working “well within its mandate” and suggested that Bhuria needed clarity in his understanding of its role.

Better known by its acronym FRA, the act had attracted criticism even during its drafting stage. While lawmakers were discussing the bill from 2005 to 2006, some 107 organisations and individuals submitted objections and suggestions to the Joint Parliamentary Committee.

In the end, the committee included non-tribal but “traditional forest dwellers” into the FRA’s purview, removed a ceiling limit of 2.5 hectares of land per family, and made the ‘gram sabha’ or local village administration an authority in the determination of rights.

The act, which was finally passed in 2006, also noted that critical wildlife habitats had to be inviolate while communities within these were to be re- settled.

Some environmentalists and rights groups see FRA as the correction of historic injustice against tribal communities evicted from forest lands. But it has also roused protests from organisations that say it threatens wildlife conservation even further by usurping forest lands or by having communities within them.

The controversy over giving forest lands to communities has also led to at least six petitions seeking FRA’s annulment being filed before the Supreme Court and state high courts.

Belinda Wright of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) echoes some activists in saying that while forest dwellers have “rights that are inalienable”, the act may be flawed in its incorporation of local village administrations to decide issues. In fact, she says, it contradicts the clause that protected areas be kept inviolate.

“What is or is not a critical wildlife habitat is… a policy decision that must be based on scientific criteria and in the interests of the nation,” says Wright. “Unfortunately, section 2(c) of the FRA requires the free informed consent of the ‘gram sabhas’… that is not just hard to obtain, but completely irrelevant as far as determining an area as critical wildlife habitat.”

‘Sanctuary Asia’ magazine editor Bittu Sahgal has also described the FRA as an example of “democracy’s lowest hour” in India.

Focusing his ire on the giving individual land rights to tribal groups, he says, “Land rights were always their (tribal communities) their due! But community rights, not individual rights.”

Argues Sahgal: “Deforestation and conflict with nature is now firmly written into the fate of millions whose lands are ripe for the picking by rapacious mining, timber, and commercial lobbies whose lawyers have already figured out how to bypass weak protective clauses.”

Such views, however, clash with those from other activists like Ashish Kothari, convenor of the Pune-based green group Kalpavriksh.

Kothari, who is also a member of the committee resulting from the environment and tribal affairs ministries dialogue, first refutes Wright’s contention that ‘gram sabhas’ are “final authorities”.

“The entire system of identification of rights is a process and ‘gram sabhas’ are involved in this process in terms of consultations,” he says.

“These village sabhas are also rich sources of traditional biodiversity knowledge, they know as much about biodiversity and conservation,” he adds. “This is not just the domain of ‘outside’ wildlife experts. In my mind, this lack of involving local communities has been one of the primary reasons for conflict between people and wildlife so far.”

As for Saghal’s comments, Kothari remarks, “Where I agree with Bittu is that states have so far focused only on individual rights. We are now asking for community rights.”

But he dares Saghal to show proof of the dispensation of individual rights. Kothari says as well, “Ask the wildlife experts to tell us why they have allowed the denotification of wildlife lands under the Forest Conservation Act.”

In the Jun. 26, 2010 issue of the ‘Economic and Political Weekly of India’, Kalpavriksh members Manju Menon and Kanchi Koli write that from 1998 to 2010, the National Board for Wildlife, working under the Forest Conservation Act, had allowed the diversion of 7,949 hectares of protected area lands.

Of these, 4,453 hectares were declassified as “protected”, 2,102 cleared for mining, 625 for projects such as transmission lines and wind turbines, 237 for dams, 170 for roads, and 90 for “constructions”. A mere 271 hectares were earmarked for community rehabilitation.

Menon and Koli also note that during the period, the board’s standing committee did not reject a single mining project.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
NEW DELHI, Aug 3 2010 (IPS)

Their ongoing negotiations remain shrouded in secrecy, but there are already reports that India and the European Union (EU) will have a free-trade agreement ready by the end of August, and that they will be putting signatures to it before the end of 2010.

Yet it is a potential development that is causing more nervous chatter than joyous jitters here in India, where drug manufacturers in particular have raised concerns over India’s trade interests and intellectual property rights (IPR) issues.

India’s 7.5-billion-dollar drug industry is among the world’s top five bulk medicine producers. It is also among the world’s 20 top pharmaceutical exporters, with its export business growing at 17.8 percent per year.

A large segment of its reasonably priced generic drugs, including life-saving HIV anti-retrovirals and anti-cancer drugs, are exported to other developing nations in Asia and Africa. But now Indian drug exporters are worried that any potential growth for their business overseas is bound to disappear should India capitulate to several EU stipulations in the trade talks.

The talks have drawn concern since they began in 2007, especially since they integrate bits from other controversial bilateral negotiations between industrialised nations.

These include the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA), the World Customs Organisation’s Standards to be Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement (SECURE), and the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Task Force (IMPACT).

ACTA, IMPACT, and SECURE have all drawn consistent protests from developing countries for being formulated in secrecy and without their consent.

More importantly, countries like India and Brazil say that ACTA’s definition of counterfeit drugs is ambiguous enough to include generic drugs, while SECURE’s IPR enforcement allows Interpol to decide by itself, or by a third party, what is counterfeit and seize it in transit.

As a result, they say, the definition of generic drugs has become restricted, in turn allowing their seizure in transit through EU countries. Essentially, such acts override previous laws under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that allowed patented drugs classified as ‘essential’ or crucial to health to be manufactured in developing countries. On its website, the EU says that “nothing in the proposed agreement would limit India’s freedom to produce and export life-saving drugs in accordance with the TRIPS agreement….” Officials at India’s Department of Commerce, responsible for dealing with the EU and WTO issues, for their part were tightlipped when queried on the matter by IPS. In June, however, India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma, in response to MP Maneka Gandhi’s query in Parliament on IPR and access to medicines in the India-EU talks, said, “Final positions have not emerged and therefore no agreement has been reached in any sector including IPRs.”

Still, Gopal Krishnan, adviser to the Mumbai-based Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association (IDMA), notes, “What is being agreed on needs to be seen. None of us in the field have seen the document.”

The concerns may not be unfounded. In 2009, the Mumbai-based Indian Drug Manufacturers Association (IDMA), with over 600 small, medium, and large Indian pharmaceutical companies as members, asked India’s Ministry of Commerce to exclude the EU’s clauses on IPR since these were already included in TRIPS.

An issue dropped in the World Intellectual Property Organisation (IPO), the EU’s terms of ‘patent linkage’, whereby one patent is applicable worldwide, had apparently reappeared in the terms of the India-EU agreement.

In the meantime, cases of “fake medicines” have prompted global trade regulators to formulate anti-counterfeit measures.

In 2009-2010, for example, several consignments of fake anti-malarial medicines from China to Nigeria, labelled ‘made in India’, caused India take the issue up with China. The latter country is reported to have ‘apologised’ to Nigeria.

K M Gopakumar of Third World Network in New Delhi, says, however, that “the talks are extending the counterfeit concept to all IPR.” He asserts that the anti-fake mechanisms have become more a means of market control by richer nations.

Gopakumar adds, “If India ‘gives in’ to concerns we have raised inside the FTA talks, what consequences will this have for ACTA?”

Yet India has not been taking things sitting down. In May, it filed a case against the EU in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) dispute settlement court regarding repeated seizures, on patent infringement grounds, of generic drugs transiting through the Netherlands.

India says the seizures are illegal under TRIPS. Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, China, Japan, and Turkey have since joined in the case’s consultations.

Prominent Mumbai-based IPR lawyer Gopakumar Nair feels India’s case at the WTO needs to be settled first before an agreement on the FTA with the EU can be inked.

He also points out that in the early 2000s, the Substantive Patent Law Treaty within TRIPS, which gave sweeping powers on the patent system to WIPO and thus disempowered developing countries from formulating their own systems, was dropped due to opposition from the likes of India and Brazil.

“The key issue now,” says Nair, who was once IDMA president, “is that industrialised nations are bypassing the dropping of this Substantive Patent Law Treaty, and the EU- FTA provides an opportunity for this.”

In June 2010, another international group of lawyers, academics and health organisations signed the Berkeley Declaration that called on all developing nations to approach intellectual property enforcement and anti- counterfeiting initiatives with caution.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, India, May 4 2010 (IPS)

The central Indian remote jungles of Chhattisgarh and the urban technology- savvy node of Bangalore are now linked by a mobile phone-based information system, a first in the world, called CGnet Swara.

Two tribal women receive training in a unique cellular phone-based information system called CG Net Swara. Credit: S.Choudhary/IPS

Anyone can call the designated Bangalore number – 080 6693 2500 – listen to news on the line, as well as record his or her own report, or comment.

Once a news item is recorded, it shows up as a link on the website, which is moderated. The moderator then opens up the link, checks the content, edits and okays it, and puts it out.

As ‘moderator’, Choudhary goes through each report for editing and content checking, and publishes the material thereafter.

“This is an audio system where you can record your own report or comment – that’s the difference that this offers,” says Thies.

Choudhary, who grew up in Chhattisgarh state and now lives in Delhi, says the idea spawned from a citizen journalism website, CGnet, which he started to serve as a voice for the tribal communities, India’s original, and most ancient, inhabitants, living predominantly in this region. CGnet has approximately 1,500 members who are part of its discussion forum.

Chhattisgarh has a controversial history of “dealing” with its guerrilla-like anti-establishment movement called ‘naxalism’ or termed more recently as ‘Maoists’.

The Naxal movement, rampant in the southern forested belt of Chhattisgarh, is an armed and violent guerrilla conflict born from long years of socioeconomic inequality, alienation and displacement of tribals from their lands.

In its turn, the state authorities had aided and abetted an even more violent vigilante movement, called Salwa Judum, started in 2005, to quash the Naxals.

Tribal rights groups say at least 700 villages and a population of 350,000 were brutally emptied from two districts alone in 2005-2006.

The most recent controversial government operation, Operation Greenhunt, used a slew of armed government paramilitary forces to quell this movement.

The tribal residents’ overall neglect is also reflected in the lack of a single radio news bulletin in their local language, Gondi, though their population has grown to four million.

Displaced and alienated from the rest of the country, tribals have thus taken to CGnet Swara as ducks to water.

With innate talent in public speaking and presentation, ordinary citizens of the area file remarkably clear reports and narratives on news from the region, says Choudhary.

Take this example of how this ‘media phone’ is working. In the deep jungles of the Chhattisgarh, Prakash Korram – a tribal activist, native to the area and working with the non-governmental Ekta Parishad – is arrested by the police. The NGO says the arrest is arbitrary. Ekta Parishad co-ordinator Agnoo Sahoo calls up the Bangalore CGnet Swara mobile number and reports the incident. The police deny the charge. Sahoo repeats the report.

After the report is ‘out’ on the web, the police receive several phone calls from various parts of India and the world protesting Prakash Korram’s arrest.

Faced with public pressure, the police release Korram on bail.

“This has now become ‘appropriate technology’ for the region,” says Choudhary, explaining why, in spite of an expensive (10-20 Indian rupees or 22-44 U.S. cents) long-distance mobile phone call, the number of calls to the Bangalore number has risen exponentially in the last two months.

Choudhary runs the system with nine volunteers who train local tribals in voice modulation and narrative skills.

“We hope that CGnet Swara creates a community of communication between tribals themselves and between them and the mainstream world,” says Choudhary.

In north Chhatisgarh at Jashpur, Mamta Kajur of Adivasi Mahila Mahasangh, a tribal women’s empowerment group, says CGnet has been of tremendous help to both her and the surrounding villages.

Trained by CGnet Swara in February 2010, Mamta says the system has helped mobilise a rally on awareness of local issues, where a gathering of 5,000 people participated, at Kunkuri village in Jashpur .

Local mainstream media, in a continuation of the atmosphere of repression and fear in the region, either pay no attention to the condition of the tribals, or tow the government line, say Choudhary and Kajur. “People are very interested,” says Mamta. “They didn’t even know what was happening 50 kilometres away. Now they have access even to national news.”

Both Thies and Choudhary are now working on scaling up the system to reach as many as possible, and to integrate the system into a national cellphone network.

But longevity remains challenged by the political nature of the area CGnet Swara serves, where police and administrative officials have the powers to shut down any operation perceived as “helping” the Naxal movement.

“I foresee problems ahead,” says Choudhary. “Everything is susceptible to government,” says Thies.

But both reiterate, in separate interviews with IPS, that the matter will not end there.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
LAKE VICTORIA, Kenya, Apr 16 2010 (IPS)

The International Centre for Plant Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), based at Mbita, on the Kenyan shores of the world’s second-largest freshwater body, is advocating “push-pull cultivation” as the answer to feeding future generations in Africa.

Agnes Mbuvi amidst the napier grass in her harvested maize plot. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

Push-pull cultivation intersperses the desmodium plant with maize in a plot, and plants napier grass as a border on all sides.

The desmodium repels, or pushes, the stem borer – a major pest – from the maize, and controls the dominant weed, striga; the napier grass attracts, or pulls, the borer towards it.

Approximately 25,375,000 hectares in sub-Saharan Africa are under maize cultivation, of which 6,122,000 ha are affected by the parasitic striga weed which strangles the maize plant.

East Africa loses US$7 billion worth of maize worth of maize due to striga and around $5-6 billion from the cereal parasite stem-borer insect, according to ICIPE.

The chemical-free system against them was developed by ICIPE scientists in collaboration with Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute and various national partners, with funding from Kilimo Trust (East Africa), Gatsby Foundation (UK) and Biovision (Switzerland).

While farmers may opt to use fertiliser on a push-pull field, desmodium both retains moisture in the soil and fixes its nitrogen content at the rate of 110 kilogrammes per hectare per year.

The plant remains in the field after the maize is harvested, and is simply trimmed back to allow new maize to be planted.

“This is the answer to Africa’s food security,” says Dr. Zeyaur Khan, principal scientist developing the push-pull project at ICIPE. “This will provide the magic number of $2 and over in Africa.”

Khan says farmers in Africa will stop migrating to cities in search of incomes if they can earn more than $2 a day in their fields.

Khan says the production of maize by farmers using the method has gone up from less than one tonne per hectare previously to 3.5 tonnes per ha, an increase that ensures year-long food for smallholder family.

Both desmodium and napier are fodder grasses that also help cattle and milk production, besides giving extra income through the sale of its seeds.

At Ebukanga village near Mbita, 45 year old Agnes Mbuvi says her production of maize on her 50 by 40 metre plot has gone up from half a bag (45 kilos) to a remarkable 6 bags (540 kilos) of maize per harvest.

“I have enough milk throughout the year, enough food, the soil is easy. I am happy,” she says.

Mbuvi, a widow, also adds that the extra income from the sale of surplus maize and milk has helped her educate her children.

Not far away, 50 year-old Elfas Ameyo, a part-time plumber, says his even smaller “push-pull” plot now gives him 2 bags (180 kg)  of maize, instead of the one ‘debe’ (16 kg tin) he would get previously.

“School education helps in changing the minds of people,” he says, explaining why his neighbor has not yet adopted the system in spite of seeing Ameyo’s huge increase in yield.

“We don’t need much money, we need appropriate technology,” says Khan, who is critical of multinational seed and fertiliser agencies and international donors supporting the giving of seed and chemical fertilizers to farmers in Africa.

ICIPE is now testing the efficacy of the push-pull method in rice cultivation, and against the cotton bollworm, both features that bode good news for millions of Asia’s small farmers.

In the context of climate change, ICIPE is encouraging farmers to plant cotton as a second crop in addition to a food crop.

The roots of the cotton plant also produce chemical flavinoids and isoflavinoids, similar to the desmodium root, that help kill the striga weed.

The napier grass however, has developed a disease, called ‘napier stunt’ that harms its growth and slowly kills the plant. Research is now on at ICIPE with an indigenous species of napier that is resistant to stunt.

“Ten years ago, this disease was not found in napier,” says Khan. “We now find it is a phytoplasm bacterium, passed on through an insect, the leaf-hopper, to the napier grass, and came from grass. This is the danger for the future,” says Khan.

Meanwhile, however, the push-pull system of agriculture also offers a system of mitigation to climate change by its moisture-retention and ability to survive droughts.

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
KOTAGIRI, NILGIRI MOUNTAINS, India, Mar 15 2010 (IPS)

Seemingly unstoppable development has made a mockery of the protected status of this southern Indian region, which houses vast biodiversity and some of the finest examples of moist deciduous and tropical forests.

In the last decade alone, the urban sprawl has reached these mountains, which have seen forests give way to more and more human settlements, as well as to a wide range of commercial activities.

But a newly resurrected people’s movement may yet reverse that trend. Just recently, it successfully lobbied India’s environment minister to set up a separate, legally empowered authority for protecting the ancient forests here.

And so members of the Save Western Ghats Movement who had assembled here in Kotagiri for their annual meeting heard Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh tell them, “The Western Ghats Ecological Authority will start by demarcating ecologically sensitive regions in the hill areas within 90 days and will either stop further economic activity or regulate it according to the sensitivity of the region.”

On Mar. 4 too, the Ministry of Environment and Forests constituted the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. It also announced that eminent scientist and former Indian Institute of Science professor Madhav Gadgil would be heading the 14-member panel.

Covering 150,000 square kilometres, the Western Ghats traverse 1,600 km through the six states of Gujarat, Goa, Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. The Ghats, also known as Sahyadri in Maharashtra, has 5,000 species of flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird species, and 179 amphibian species. At least 325 of these are globally threatened species, such as the Asian elephant and the tiger.

Its complex network of 22 rivers provides nearly 40 percent of India’s water-catchment systems.

In 1986, as part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Man and Biosphere programme, 5,520 sq km of the Western Ghats was conferred special protected status as the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.

UNESCO is also due shortly to confer World Heritage status to the Western Ghats.

For all these, the Western Ghats has not escaped the pressure of an ever-increasing population and the interest of business groups, which have built everything from homes to roads, to power plants across the region. Mountain ranges have also been dug up by various mining companies, sealing the Ghats’ growing reputation as among the Indian regions that are being summarily destroyed by development.

Keystone Foundation, a prominent local non-government group that is part of the Save Western Ghats Movement, says that the original natural cover in the ghats declined by 40 percent between 1920 and 1990, resulting in a four-fold increase in forest fragmentation and an 83 percent reduction in forest patches.

Delhi-based environmental lawyer Ritwick Dutta, who is acknowledged as the movement’s legal face, describes the destruction in the mountains here as “eco-disaster due to governance failure of an unparalleled nature”.

He points to India’s system of environmental clearances for projects, which the Delhi High Court itself says has resulted in an “unhealthy” rate of approval of projects. Says Dutta, referring to the ghats: “There is an urgency here to declare the area an ecologically sensitive zone.”

It was that urgency that precipitated the resurrection last year of the Save Western Ghats Movement, which first rose to prominence in the 1980s. At the height of its popularity, it had involved over 20 local and regional people’s movements that got together to march the length of the Western Ghats between November 1987 and February 1988.

The march was an awareness campaign and protest in one, aimed at the rash of dam and power-station construction in the protected region.

Movements under this banner influenced government policy in the felling of trees in Karnataka. In 1984, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was even prompted to halt a dam project in Silent Valley in Kerala and instead declare the area a national park.

While the movement today is smaller than its previous version, it is once more gaining momentum and putting pressure on the government.

At the very least, the movement expects the new expert panel to monitor and regulate all human activity – including commercial concerns – in the Western Ghats. But it has also said that it wants the Indian government to ensure that the Ghats forms part of the programme under the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

Moreover, it wants the respective state governments of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, and Goa to pay special attention to implementing the conservation clauses under the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, stop all mining activities in areas under their ambit, and work out alternatives to large thermal and hydropower projects.

The environment and forests ministry, for its part, says that it will be furnished with a report by the Western Ghats Ecology Panel within six months from the date of the body’s constitution. A comprehensive consultation process involving the local people and governments of all the concerned states will take place after that, the ministry also says. Ramesh told IPS as well that the new ecological authority will be a “statutory authority” that will have full powers to stop, or regulate, all “economic activity” in the ghats.

In the meantime, he has put a moratorium on further mining activity in Goa, after activists Claude Alvares and Carmen Miranda, who are among the movement’s most well-known members, presented a picture of devastation there due to mining.

Ramesh had told the movement’s members at its gathering here: “My ministry is not on a different wavelength than you. We are partners.”

He said that the government has been aware of the need for conservation of the Western Ghats in the last two decades, instituting its protected area status, and designating funds for its development.

A carbon sequestration quantification study done has shown that the Western Ghats captures about one percent of India’s total greenhouse gas emissions, the minister also said, noting the still-intact quality of these forests.

“The challenge for us in the ghats,” said Ramesh, “is to find an economic growth pattern that is also ecologically sustainable.”

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
BANGALORE, India, Jan 25 2010 (IPS)

“It is a fact that global warming is happening. If the Arctic Sea ice is melting, how can the Himalayan glaciers not be melting?” glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain asked indignantly.

Amid the brouhaha over last week’s retraction by a United Nations body of its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, global warming sceptics quickly seized on the error, noting the rash of media reports on the issue, which they believed bolstered their position.

But Hasnain, who found himself at the centre of the Himalayan meltdown controversy, said it is “ridiculous” to assume that the glaciers are not melting.

The scientist was reported as having given the year 2035 for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers due to global warming in a 1999 interview with a British publication, ‘New Scientist’. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) picked up the date from the ensuing article and reported it eight years later in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, only to retract it last week.

In the IPCC report, the United Nations body said the phenomenon of climate change would melt most Himalayan glaciers by 2035, which was taken from the ‘New Scientist’ article published in 1999, according to the British broadsheet ‘Sunday Times’ in its Jan. 17 issue. The article was based on a telephone interview with Hasnain by the journal’s writer, Fred Pearce.

IPCC, which assesses valuable information on climate change, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore.

Hasnain, who denied ever having given the 2035 time frame to the writer, said Pearce has gone on record in the same ‘Sunday Times’ article, saying a 1999 report prepared by the scientist “does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glacier will melt.”

Hasnain, a senior fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), said the date cited in the ‘New Scientist’ article was a “journalistic assumption interpolated by the interviewer over which I had no control.”

Hasnain gave IPS a synthesis of recent scientific studies on the Himalayan glaciers. Titled ‘Synthesis of Recent Studies on Himalayan Glaciers,’ his report sums up scientific research done in the last decade, proving that the Himalayan glaciers are receding.

Glaciers in eastern and central Himalayas are especially sensitive to present atmospheric warming due to their summer snow-accumulation system, said the glaciologist’s report, citing a 1984 study by Yasunari Ageta and K. Higuchi.

An increase in summer air temperature not only enhances ice melt but also significantly reduces the accumulation by altering snowfall according to rainfall. In contrast, ‘winter-accumulation type’ glaciers receive their main accumulation at lower temperatures and are thus less sensitive to air temperature increase, said Hasnain’s report further.

The Himalayas, located between the Indian subcontinent and the Tibetan Plateu, comprise the world’s highest mountain range, including Mount Everest. It is home to more than 15,000 glaciers.

A 2009 study on glacial melt by a team of scientists led by A. Shukla, using optical satellite sensor data, found that the Samundratapu glacier in Lahaul-Spiti, Himachal Pradesh in northern India, had deglaciated by 13.7 square kilometres in the last 41 years, with the snout retreating by about 588 metres. The scientists concluded that all changes appeared to be linked to climate warming.

The issue of climate change has been on the forefront of vigorous discussions worldwide and the focus of earnest efforts by the international community to deal with its impact, including rapid glacier melting that has been known to trigger a wave of natural disasters.

Late last year, a flurry of emails sent out by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain, claiming some statistical data had been rigged to prove climate change, caused a public uproar. The scientists at the heart of the controversy said their emails were hacked and taken out of context.

Hasnain said vested interests are trying to denigrate scientists who are “diligently doing their best to research the issue.”

Collecting and collating scientific evidence on glacial retreat in the Himalayas has been both physically near impossible and technically difficult. According to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the Himalayan region.

China is the only country in the region that has been conducting long-term mass balance studies of some glaciers. It will expand this study to more Himalayan glaciers in future, said ICIMOD.

In November 2009, accompanying a group of international journalists to Khardung La, India’s highest pass, to observe the state of receding glaciers, Hasnain showed scientific evidence of glacial retreat at Chota Sigri in Himachal Pradesh, Drang Drung in Zanskar region of Ladakh, and in East Rathong in the eastern Himalaya.

Chota Sigri showed a sharp decline in the annual mass balance, with the glacier moving at 40 m per year in the higher reaches and at 25 m each year in the lower reaches.

“It is definitely shrinking,” Hasnain told the group of European, American and South Asian journalists.

Along with Dr. Veerabhadra Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Hasnain also presented scientific evidence of how black carbon aerosols, contributing to the ‘atmospheric brown cloud’ phenomenon, was depositing itself on the Himalayan snows and causing temperature rise to accelerate even further than “normal” global warming.

In India, the Ministry of Environment and Forests appears to feel vindicated over its charge, made mid-2009, that the IPCC view had been “alarmist.” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who is also the director of TERI, had described the Ministry’s report as based on ‘voodoo science’.

The embarrassing debacle over the projected date of disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers has clouded discussions on the poor state of these ice masses, especially the smaller ones.

In Ladakh, in India’s northernmost state of Jammu and Kashmir, retired rural development civil engineer Chewang Norphel quietly refutes claims that there is insufficient scientific data to prove that India’s glaciers are receding.

“I am the scientific data,” said Norphel. “I have seen, for instance, the size of the Khardung La glacier since I was a child: it was solid ice then,” he told the international journalists’ group in November 2009.

Norphel, known popularly as India’s ‘glacier man’, has been building high- altitude water-conservation channels that freeze over as ‘artificial glaciers’ to beat the lack of water from the receding Himalayan glaciers. The Khardung La glacier is one example of Ladakh’s melting glaciers, barely recognisable now as a glacier. Over 70 percent of Ladakh district’s water supply is sourced in springtime from the melting snows off glaciers and is the sole source of water for irrigation for its remote mountain communities.

But in recent years, rising temperatures believed to have been spawned by climate change have resulted in decreasing snowfall in the upper-reach ‘accumulation’ zones of these glaciers, leading to reduced waters in the springtime.

A survey of 20 villages and 211 individuals over 65 years of age in Ladakh district, done by the French non-government organisation GERES (Groupe Energies Renouvelables, Environnement et Solidarités) showed over 90 percent of them saying that winters were now warmer.

Metereological data analysed from 1973 onwards by GERES shows a rise of 1 degree Celsius in the winter months in Ladakh, coupled with a sharp decline in snowfall and an equally sharp increase in mean summer temperatures in July, August and September.

The changing temperatures have already begun impacting the region’s biodiversity and its communities, said the international conservation organisation Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

“The breeding of the bar-headed goose and the Black-necked crane has not been on schedule in recent years,” said Nisa Khatoon, project officer of WWF at Leh.

She added that migration routes of communities on the Tsokar lake at Leh, which weave the world-famous Pashmina shawls, “have become more frequented as these pastoral communities migrate due to degrading pastures.”

Excerpt:

By Keya Acharya
NEW DELHI, Jan 21 2010 (IPS)

The Indian government’s grant of the final environmental clearance to a Korean giant firm, allowing it to acquire 3,000 acres of ‘forest lands’ in the eastern state of Orissa, has prompted a fresh spate of protests from more than 4,000 families that will be affected by a proposed mining project.

Pohang Steel Company (POSCO) has been trying to set up operations in Orissa since 2005, which have been stalled since then due to a rash of sometimes violent protest movements, prominent among them being Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS or Committee for Resistance against POSCO), against the company’s land acquisitions for the project.

The PPSS held its latest protest on Jan. 13 after the steelmaker obtained the much awaited clearance early this month. The group is composed of local indigenous or tribal folk whose combined population is estimated at 22,000.

In June 2005 the state government and POSCO signed a Memorandum of Understanding allowing the company to set up a steel plant .

POSCO, which has the largest foreign direct investment in India so far, at 51,000 crores (11 billion U.S. dollars), plans to build a 12-million-tonne steel plant with a ‘captive’ port in Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa, an integrated township with water supply infrastructure from two important barrages. The project is expected to generate some 45,000 jobs.

India’s government policy on mining, cautious till 1997, was amended in 2006 to allow full direct investment by foreign companies. It was seen as a means to ‘developing’ the country.

Since then, international firms like De Beers and Broken Hill Properties, both with controversial human rights and environmental company practice records in countries like South Africa and Papua New Guinea respectively, have acquired huge prospecting rights in Orissa as well as Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

Alongside China’s demand for iron and steel, fuelled by its furious pace of development , iron ore production in India jumped from 59 metric tonnes in 1993-94 to 154 million tonnes (mt) in 2005-06, bauxite from 5 mt to 12 mt in the same period, while coal-production increased from 267 mt to 437 mt.

Yet, this huge spiraling production has contributed a mere 2.5 percent to the country’s gross domestic product in the last 10 years and yielded much smaller revenues for the government than it should have, given its panoramic increase, according to the Centre for Science and Environment, a well respected New Delhi-based organisation that is campaigning against exploitative mining.

The Orissa state government’s no-holds-barred entry to POSCO gives the company 600 mt of iron ore at half its market price, enabling it to make significantly handsome profits. This was based on a study conducted by environmental researcher and social activist Manshi Asher of the National Centre for Advocacy Studies (NCAS), based in Pune district in Maharashtra, located on the western coast of India.

The government, which also gives the company tax-free status and incentives, will supply iron ore to POSCO at a discount of 2,000 rupees (approximately 44 U.S. dollars) per tonne, and allow it to export high-quality ore even while it imports low-alumina content ore.

Brazil and China had earlier turned down POSCO’s proposed deals due to the company’s refusal to buy iron ore at market prices. The company is now facing protests in Uruguay over land acquisition for a carbon sequestration project.

In Orissa, the company will also receive approximately 150,000 million litres of water, affecting water supply to the nearest city of Cuttack and irrigation to four districts. It will likewise get an unspecified number of ‘captive’ coal mines and over 6,000 acres of land (comprising the newly cleared forest areas for the Korean firm), excluding an unspecified acreage for establishing transportation, water and ‘any other project-related infrastructure facilities’, as per its agreement, according to Asher.

Official statistics indicate that merely 438 acres of the land involved is private, displacing 471 families. Government records, however, do not reflect that most of the approximately 3,000 acres of land belonging to the forest department have been under cultivation for generations, or used by communities for fodder and non-timbre forest produce.

Repeated calls by IPS to K.C. Sahu, who is in charge of mining operations in POSCO’s Indian arm at Bhubaneshwar, drew no response.

There are also environmental concerns over deforestation, destruction of coastal and estuarine ecosystems including the destruction of a natural drainage system by the construction of a captive port.

The Garhirmatha turtle sanctuary in Orissa, home to hundreds of nesting Olive Ridley turtles every year, faces significant risk by the construction of POSCO’s captive port.

The PPSS is also worried about the port affecting the livelihoods of nearly 30,000 fisherfolk.

“There are mangroves where the port is planned, and salt mounds that serve to stop seawater flowing in,” says Prashant Paikare, spokesperson of PPSS. ” What about natural disasters because of their destruction ?” he asks.

In 1999, a devastating cyclone killed thousands and displaced as many on this coastline, destroying 275,000 homes.

Concerns about health also hound the project. According to the NCAS study, the local tribal population also faces serious health problems, especially among mine workers in the region. Many others, having lost their lands and forests, appear to have migrated, with their whereabouts unknown.

“We will offer mass resistance,” warns Paikare. “We still don’t believe the rehabilitation package that the government has said POSCO must fulfill will take care of all the issues involved.”

POSCO has yet to announce the components of the package, but locals news reports said the company was willing to offer land to those who would be displaced by its project. No other details were given, however.

Soon after the PPSS’s Jan. 13 protest, the government of Orissa announced it was convening a rehabilitation and periphery development advisory committee. Steel and mines state secretary A.M.R. Dalwai said he would now focus on the rehabilitation package.

The Indian government’s environmental approval to POSCO comes with 15 riders, including compulsory afforestation; that lands remain with the government and that no damage be caused to flora and fauna. It also specifies that the project cannot be undertaken without the consent of the tribal community living in the area.

The proposed mining site in Keonjhar district, which will supply POSCO its iron ore, is already reeling under the negative effects of large-scale mining activity.

Protected against land alienation under India’s constitution because of its being a tribal area, Keonjhar still faces constitutional violations by even state-run organisations like the Orissa Mining Corporation, taken to court for land illegalities.

“We cannot have development which is only about extraction,” says activist Rosemary Vishwanath, believing it impoverishes the affected communities and destroys their culture.

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