voice of misery

Of loan waivers and tax waivers

2008-05-25T01:48:00.001-07:00

20 May 2008 - In Maharashtra, where the nation's most distressed farmers have been denied the benefit of the 'farm loan waiver,' the government is said to waive crores in entertainment tax that the Indian Premier League cricket matches would normally attract. Media reports in Mumbai on this score reckon that means a loss of up to Rs.10 crore in revenue. As even the pro-corporate newspapers of the city point out, the direct beneficiaries would be Mumbai's millionaires and billionaires. Film stars and corporate bosses who did not find it difficult to spend crores on buying teams and players. That too, for what the media are fond of calling "the world's richest cricket tournament." Simply put, if it goes through, they'll be getting tax waivers on the hiring of cheerleaders, among other things.

True, this is not the first time that entertainment tax has been waived on cricket matches in Mumbai or elsewhere. The BCCI and its affiliates have always enjoyed political patronage. The difference, which has got even members of the ruling front worked up, is that those raking in the crores in exemptions are for-profit-only groups and individuals. By law, any event, musical or cultural, performance or other, staged for profit must pay entertainment tax. But not the IPL, which will have held 10 matches in Mumbai including the Final.

It's an odd situation. The overwhelming majority of Vidharbha's farmers do not gain from the farm loan waiver - because they are too "big." That is, they hold more than two hectares of land. But the IPL waiver goes to some of India's richest millionaires and billionaires. They aren't too big. And the only reason Vidharbha's farmers have holdings that exceed the loan waiver's two-hectare cut-off is because they are dry-land farmers. Their fields are poor, un-irrigated and less productive.

The IPL waiver reports come within three weeks of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on "Farmer's Packages" in the State. A performance audit the government of Maharashtra chose to present to the Assembly on April 27, the last day of the session. A day on which, as MLAs say, "there isn't enough time to count the pages, let alone read the many documents they push at that time." Clearly, they were not eager on a discussion of the contents.

The very first page of the CAG report tells us why. Despite the State government's Rs.1075-crore "package" for farmers "the suicides, however, continued unabated and the number increased to 1414 during 2006-07." The Prime Minister's visit in mid-2006 and the Centre's Rs.3750-crore package that followed in July also came the year the suicides increased. As we know from earlier reports, including some in this newspaper, they actually went up in the second half of that year.

Erratic spending

Here is the CAG on the official response: "No evaluation of the implementation of the packages, in terms of reduction in agrarian distress, was made." We also learn that tens of crores of rupees aimed at reducing farmer distress were, in fact, never spent. The value of the packages themselves was exaggerated by over Rs.200 crore. Crores were released under some heads with no reference at all to the actual requirement of funds.

Other funds, such as those meant "for increase in production," were released late. Cheques given to some 'beneficiaries' "were dishonoured for want of cash in the bank." The "self-help groups were paid subsidies in excess of admissible norms." Parts of other funds were not released at all. In head after head, funds were underutilised. This is how lackadaisical the governments were with packages worth a total of Rs.4,825 crore. So what's Rs.10 crore for the IPL?

But the CAG report, which is devastating from start to finish, does not stop at that. It has a clear premonition of things to come. On the "interest waiver" that followed the Prime Minister's visit, it says: "While reimbursing banks for interest waived on loans, sanction of fresh loans was not ensured."

That is exactly where most farmers now find themselves again after the "massive farm loan waiver." Fresh credit is very hard to come by. Distress has not come down. There have been over 360 farm suicides since January this year, about 200 of them post-loan waiver. In the official count, there were 153 in January and February. And of these, only 18 were considered "eligible suicides." That is, only 18 families had any hope of being compensated for losing a breadwinner. The figures for March and April will turn out to be much worse.

There was a hope, after Rahul Gandhi's plea in Parliament, that the two-hectare cut-off point would not be imposed on dry-land farmers in places such as Vidharbha and Anantapur. But it was. The very places whose misery had sparked the idea of a loan waiver now stand mostly excluded from it.

There is a very important point the CAG report brings out that tends to get glossed over most of the time. That the farmer's world is not driven by agriculture alone. Farmers, whose incomes have been plummeting, have been hammered by education and health costs. The commercialisation of those sectors has hurt them, as it has countless millions of other Indians, very badly. That is on top of the stick they've taken in agriculture.

"Distress amongst farmers on account of cost of education was not measured." The "allocation of funds (Rs.3 crore at Rs.50 lakh per district) for health was meagre ..." It mentions the government's own survey showing that the health issues were huge and required much larger action.

One of the most important things the CAG points to is the State government evading its own findings. In mid-2006, the government organised what was the biggest door-to-door survey of farm households ever done. It covered over 17 lakh households, that is, all farming households in the six "crisis districts" of Washim, Akola, Yavatmal, Buldhana, Wardha and Amravati. Over a fourth of those families - that is, more than two million people - were found to be in "maximum distress." And more than three quarters of the rest were in what the report called medium distress.

In other words, close to seven million people were in distress in just six districts. That was the finding of the most massive study, powered by over 10,000 field workers. And a report of the State government itself, at that.

Yet, says the CAG, "the selection of beneficiaries ? had no relation to the departmental survey conducted for the assessment of distress. As a result, the prioritisation of relief and rehabilitation works considering the distress level of farmers could not be ensured." Why did the State government ignore its own study? Because the results of that huge survey are, to this day, explosive. Also, de-linking the distress survey from the packages meant you could reward your friends who might never have been in crisis.

Catalogue of failure

One line recurs in different ways through the CAG report: "Authenticity of reported expenditure was doubtful in the absence of proper classification of accounts." Throughout, the report is a catalogue of failure too serious to be written off as "error." On inputs, which farmers were desperate to get at reasonable prices, there was poor assistance. Farmers were hit hard by a poor supply of seed when they needed it most. Seed requirements for several crops, suggests the CAG, were simply not taken seriously. "The estimates were not realistic as these were made based on the amount allocated to this component and not based on actual requirement."

The CAG report captures at the top end, the state of things on the ground. Being a performance audit, it confines itself to that task. It is not a field report. However, the portrait it presents of the government's performance is a sharply accurate one. A picture that sits perfectly with the chaos at the receiving end below.

In the end, this is more than just a report. It is a snapshot, or a series of snapshots, of how governments, particularly the one in Maharashtra, are responding to agrarian distress. The complete apathy, the corruption, the cover-ups, even the contempt for the farmer, that come across. This is a State where all the attention is on the brilliantly-lit, power-guzzling matches of the IPL. It is also a State where many regions face power cuts ranging from 3-16 hours each day. And countless children have completed their examinations without being able to study much. The huge power cuts meant darkness in their homes when they returned from school.

The report is about the packages in this State. But if we extend our thinking a bit, it should lead us to reflect on things much larger. On the crisis in the countryside, on those being marginalised or just driven away. On regions beyond this one and on our attitude towards those who grow our food but can less and less afford to eat it themselves. ⊕

P Sainath
20 May 2008

the hindu

Between rock and a hard place

2008-05-07T03:03:00.000-07:00

19 April 2008 - The bailout of Bear Stearns by the U S Federal Reserve was worth $30 billion. That is roughly twice the 'loan waiver' given to millions of Indian farmers. The latter move has been scorched by the ideologues of the free market and neo-liberalism as 'fiscal insanity' or 'irreversible damage.' The media - even those mildly critical - have been far more muted in their criticism of the 'rescue' of Bear Stearns. That is, one of the biggest global investment banks and securities trading and brokerage firms anywhere on the planet.

Think of it: a tiny Wall Street cabal which gave itself bonuses worth billions of dollars just weeks before the crash gets a bailout of Rs.1,19,520 crores. That's almost double the Rs.60,000 crores given to tens of millions of farmers in dire straits in this country. A country where one farmer kills himself every 30 minutes in despair. The problems of farmers do not even begin to end with that waiver.

On the other hand, a bunch of thugs in tuxedos who did pretty much whatever they wanted, laying a minefield across the world, have got the waiver of a lifetime (or many lifetimes). The lifejacket for the bank does not require the return of their bonuses. So much so that Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings and a staunch free marketer, calls it "Socialism for the rich." In his words "the Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Maseratis." He points out that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to bail out Wall Street as a whole. The theologians of the global market are between a rock and a hard place. Hypocrisy has rammed into reality.

Three of the basic principles the believers of corporate-led globalisation swear by have been so eloquently summed by Professor James Galbraith Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. One: all successes are global. Two: all failures are national. Three: the market is beyond reproach.

For over a decade, we were assured that everything good that ever happened was because we had embraced corporate-led globalisation. All the negative effects visible were the result of our own national inertia and corruption. And of course, the market would heal all wounds. The notion of state meddling in economic matters was blasphemy. Now the nations feeding us this rot - which we recite by rote - are nationalising banks, bailing out brigands and pouring in funds to stop factories from closing down.

Now having to blame 'global factors' for the price rise at home must seem a bit galling. Failures at home? Er, well, you see, let's not go there now. This is election year. So we see Minister after Minister, the latest being Kapil Sibal, tell us that the price rise and food shortages in India are the "result of global factors." Nothing to do with us. No less amusing to see the World Bank and the IMF warn of starvation and riots. It's hard to think of anyone who has contributed more to those phenomena than they have. And now Finance Minister P. Chidambaram calls for an urgent "global consensus on the price spiral." Without this, social unrest would conflagrate into a "global contagion."

To be fair to the Union Agriculture Minister, he alone has not laid the blame at the door of faceless global forces. Sharad Pawar locates the problem closer home. In his view, south Indians are eating too many chapathis, leading to shortages of wheat. (DNA page 1, April 2, 2008). An entertaining view but there's a problem with it. Even while dietary changes do affect consumption patterns, these occur over decades. There is little evidence of an outburst of wheat-centric gluttony in the southern states these past six months. (Unless, of course, with great cunning, the southies are hoarding it up for future chapathi orgies.)

Someone is hoarding it up, though, and it is not the general public, south or north. The presence of very large traders including MNCs buying directly from farmers has been on awhile. A process aided by our strangling of the old Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees' Act. We've set the soil for contract farming and corporate agriculture. Meanwhile, the lip service paid to higher Minimum Support Prices (MSP) has proved worse than a sham. In practice, producers are being pushed towards private trade. Fewer procurement centres, delays in purchasing and, still worse, delays in payments are the norm. Then, when procurement is poor, we announce that the farmers are doing so well in the market, they don't want to sell to the state.

The present mess was arrived at with much celebration of the farmer's right to sell as and when he liked, to whom he wished. In effect, millions of farmers, deep in trouble, have been selling their produce at distress rates for several seasons now. The bargaining power of individual farmers on their own is zilch.

Total procurement has been down. When market prices for the farmers' produce have been higher than the MSP, this might be expected. But it has happened even when the MSP has been raised. There have also been cases of traders picking up produce from indebted farmers and then claiming the higher MSP on it themselves. On the whole, though, smaller traders are in trouble. The big boys are here. And so even with enough grain within the country just now, the less well-off cannot access it at affordable rates.

The Centre's pressing the States to act against hoarding is itself an admission of the problem. But there is yet to be a single instance of action against really big hoarders and speculators. These include giant companies operating through a variety of pointmen. The raids now focussed on small traders will yield little.

Meanwhile, the entry and growing entrenchment of giants in retail ensures things will get worse. (Remember this was supposed to provide us with cheap prices? Then look at the gap between wholesale and retail prices.) We have also nurtured the commodities futures market despite its clear links to speculation and price rise. It's odd how every other small trader will brief you at length on this - but you won't see much of that story in the media. In fact, with markets tanking around the world, more speculators have seized on foodgrain as a good bet. Which it is.

Through the reforms period, we have pushed millions of small farmers to shift from foodcrop to cash crops. The acreage under foodcrop has reduced across these years. And we also exported millions of tonnes of grain - as in 2002 and 2003. What's more, we exported at prices cheaper than those we charged poor people in this country for the same grain. The idea was that we had a "huge surplus" of grain and could well afford to export. The truth was that the massive pileup of unsold stock arose from a surplus of hunger rather than of grain. The purchasing power of the poor had collapsed. But the fake "surplus" story came in handy. It allowed the export of grain - heavily subsidised by us - to be consumed by European cattle.

The present mess is no surprise. For years, economists such as Utsa Patnaik have warned strongly that we would arrive at where we are now. As she repeatedly pointed out, the effects of all our actions could be seen in the plummeting net per capita availability of foodgrain. From 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 422 grams by 2005. With the top fifth of Indians doing better than ever before, this meant that those below were eating far less than they did just a few years ago.

The plunging food intake of the poorer sections has come along with the steady scrapping of the public distribution system. On the one hand, the PDS has been sharply whittled down. On the other, millions who need BPL cards are denied them. In Mumbai, just 0.28 per cent of ration cardholders have BPL cards. Now, even those who do have cards find no supplies to buy. And of course, we've spared no efforts to link our agriculture to the volatility of global prices in a world where a handful of corporations control those prices. Their clout within India has grown rapidly. Their control extends further each day from the field and farm gate to the price and sale of the final product.

Meanwhile, each budget takes further the process of "growth" driven by the consumption of the rich. Tax breaks at the top, cuts in state spending, all these too have a major role in making life unbearable below. Yet, even as the edifice crumbles, a few true believers hold out for the Second Coming. "Price rise reflects scarcity," says one editorial, "and at no time is free trade more effective as a welfare enhancer than when it combats scarcity by quickly getting supplies where the demand is." But governments are "denying free trade this role." Well, get set for the global contagion.

listening to grasshoppers

2008-03-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Arundhati roy

Gujarat 2002: Can goofy secularism combat organized hatred?
I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one".* [*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]
*** In a way, my battle is like yours. But while in Turkey there's silence, in India, there is celebration. ***
I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting. "When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail. And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them." Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor. This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well. I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.
*** Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been part of Europe's search for lebensraum. ***
The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant. The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse. In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002.
I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive.

When genocide politics meets free markets, genocide denial becomes a multinational business.

Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes. Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage,

no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital. The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness.

This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf

Is a country poised on the threshold of 'progress' also poised on the threshold of 'genocide'?

in other Indian states. As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India. It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:
"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.
Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million). All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:
Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice....
And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:
We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...hacked, burned, set on fire...we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it.... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death...I don't care if I'm hanged...just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay...I will finish them off...let a few more of them die...at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.
I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial. Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."
Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.
The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might. In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur.

A counterfeit universe tells us that the rich have no choice, the poor do. If they don't, it's their fault.

Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million

Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child? Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population.

(Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him). In America's second Holocaust, almost

When citizens of the sky look down, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources.

30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population). None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

"The question is," says Robert MacNamara—whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank—now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?" Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide? And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children's schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion—meant especially to illustrate that section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide is any act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part". The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system.

They've done Shahrukh no personal harm; Ram Guha says the genocide is an aberration, not fascism.

It's a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture. Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called

Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one. The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America.

The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost

How do you go on a hunger strike when you are starving, pay taxes when you have no income?

10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia. Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of the time. It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress.

'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide. Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way. Advani’s chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched
In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun. It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common—all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.) Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both these projects are encrypted with genocidal potential. The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:
Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.
Then:
In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation.... All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots.... The foreign races in Hindustan...may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen's rights.
And again:
To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews.
Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by. (How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.) By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery. But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim. The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch). Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on... On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb. Hindutva had transcended petty party politics. In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock. Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.

India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details. In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder. Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:
Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword...chopped off his hand, then his legs...then everything else...after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive.
The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place. The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made a great deal of noise, but did nothing. In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the expose would help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask? The Dehumanised: Dalit massacre, Jehanabad, 1997
Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian genocide, you have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu society and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was a time when they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing things that caste Hindus would not do.
Now, with technology, even that labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits. While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation. The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide—a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment). Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India! India!' But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They see thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the People's Car. They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are those people doing on our land? What's our water doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in their trees? If you look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the homelands of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up over each other.
So, in reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them—überzahligen Essern, superfluous eaters. The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off." The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million people starved to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million—more than a third—of the world's undernourished children.) Nandigram 2007: Even the CPI(M) has its own armed militia
With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its own armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty. In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a day after the Memorandum of Understanding between the Tata Group and the government was signed. It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That's because what is on sale is another form of denial—the creation of what Robert Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe, systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique of the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of the Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".

Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire. Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. "I don't know him personally...I have no opinion...," he says. "Personally they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book—as well as in a series of highly publicised interviews—that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has corrected itself after elections. Editors and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister. In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by NGOs.) Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, "I was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all.... I mean just being kicked out of their homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones who are holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?" The trouble is, I could. I can. The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating each other. They're probably not progressive enough. That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a commercial for The Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over pessimism. "There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his famous baritone.
One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash. One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself." The Other India says, "Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you'll have a chance." One India lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India lurks in the scepticism of our minds. One India wants, the Other India hopes... One India leads, the Other India follows. These conversions are on the rise. With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming over to this side. ... And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.
And finally:
Now in our 60th year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to the edge of time's great precipice.... And one India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head is looking down at the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at the sky and saying it's time to fly.
Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.
It tells us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'. They're already ghosts. "Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost natural." The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.' They have watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings. Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India
People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are ogws—overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly. Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India's democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government's control. (At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don't know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well... anything is better than annihilation. The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation. Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.
This government is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.
"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out". Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any means necessary. Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.
This is an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.

Oh! What a lovely waiver

2008-03-12T04:00:00.000-07:00

The UPA government’s waiver is no solution to even the immediate crisis let alone long-term agrarian problems. Nothing in this budget will raise farm incomes.

— Photo: Sandeep Saxena
Karza maafi or voter maafi?: File picture of the relatives of a farmer who committed suicide due to mounting debt last year.

It was around the distress in regions like Vidharbha and Anantapur that the present ‘farm loan waiver’ was conceived. Growing knowledge of that distress, breaking through even the filters of a media unmoved by the crisis in the countryside, made the waiver both thinkable and acceptable. Odd then, that in its present form, it excludes the very regions whose pain brought it into existence.

Millions do indeed get relief from what is a positive step. (Though not quite as ‘unprecedented’ as some believe). Even the colonial raj went in for loan waivers or ‘karza maafi’ more than once. And those waivers addressed private moneylender debt. (There were no nationalised banks in those days.) That’s something the present waiver does not touch — even though usury accounts for the overwhelming share of farm loans. In Vidharbha, money owed to private lenders would account for between two-thirds and three-fourths of all debt. In short, we haven’t begun to resolve the debt crisis of these and millions of other farmers.
Unproductive holdings

The failure to touch moneylender debt is just the first problem. In Vidharbha, the average landholding size is 7.5 acres or 3.03 hectares. Way above the two-hectare cut-off mark for the bank loan waiver. Up to 50 per cent of Vidharbha’s farmers are above this limit. Not because they are big landlords. They tend to have larger holdings as their land is unproductive and unirrigated. Poor adivasis in Yavatmal, for instance, often own over ten acres but get very little from their land. In Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, too, many farmers will be left out by size or other norms. By contrast the farmers of Western Maharashtra, the Union Agriculture Minister’s stronghold, will benefit greatly. Their holdings are smaller, well-irrigated and more productive.

For those with over two hectares, there is the old deal of “one-time settlement” of their bank loans. In this case, if they repay 75 per cent of the loan, they will be given a rebate of 25 per cent. Only very large farmers will gain from this. If the rest, drowning in debt, could pay 75 per cent of their dues, they wouldn’t be committing suicide. They would pay hundred per cent.

Then, of those farmers falling within the two-hectare limit, only a small group have access to bank credit. So the gainers in this crisis-hit region will be a small percentage of the total number of farmers. It doesn’t end there, though. The few who do qualify, gain much less than farmers in, say, Western Maharashtra. The average crop loan in sugarcane territory is Rs. 13,000 per acre. Apart from which farmers there get up to Rs. 18,000 per acre for drip irrigation. In Vidharbha’s cotton regions, they get loans of just Rs. 4,400 per acre. So the scale of the write-off will be far greater for the relatively better off farmers. In political terms, this benefits Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s base. At the same time, it undermines the farm base of the Congress in Vidharbha. Indeed, the average loan for the grape growers (outside of Vidharbha) is Rs. 80,000 per acre.

The cut-off date of March 31, 2007 works against even the small group of Vidharbha farmers who do benefit. Loans in the cotton regions are taken between April and June. In the cane growing regions, they are taken between January and March. This means the Vidharbha farmer has one less year of loans waived than the others.

Since no distinction has been made between dryland farmers and others, anomalies abound. West Bengal and even the non-crisis regions of Kerala have large numbers of farmers below the two-hectare limit. With agriculture in bad shape, don’t grudge them the windfall the waiver brings. But it is odd the same does not happen for farmers in dryland regions who need it most. What’s more, the farmers of Bengal and Kerala have far more access to bank credit than those in Vidharbha do.

The State government itself reckons that Rs. 9,310 crore of the waiver comes to Maharashtra. That is, almost a sixth of the total. Of this, a fraction goes to Vidharbha, the rest being collared by better off farmers. And what of other dryland farmers across the nation? Those in, say, Rayalaseema or Bundelkhand? What do they get?

Is the waiver ‘unprecedented’? Each year, nationalised banks write off thousands of crores of rupees as bad debt. Mostly money owed by small numbers of rich businessmen. And theirs is not a ‘one-time waiver.’ It is a write-off that recurs every year

Between 2000-04, banks wrote off over Rs. 44,000 crores. Mostly, this favoured a tiny number of wealthy people. One ‘beneficiary’ was a Ketan Parekh group company that saw Rs. 60 crore knocked off. (The Indian Express, May 12, 2005). However, those ‘waivers’ are done quietly. In 2004, last year of the NDA, such write-offs went up by 16 per cent. Such ‘waivers’ have not slowed down since 2004.
Staggering giveaway

And all this is apart from the annual Rs. 40,000 crore ‘giveaway’ to the rich, mainly corporate India. That has been the average in the budget every single year for over a decade. Then there are the straight handouts. No one knows how many thousands of crores are lost by handing out spectrum the way it’s being done. But we know it’s a staggering amount. Tot up the ‘tax holidays,’ exemptions and the rest of it and you’re looking at sums that make the ‘unprecedented’ one-time farm loan waiver look like loose change.

But let us look, for instance, at the millions of farmers owning less than one hectare — the largest group. Some 7.2 million of them have accounts in scheduled commercial banks. And the total outstandings against these accounts is Rs. 20,499 crores. (Reserve Bank of India: Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy 2006-07.) As Devidas Tuljapurkar of the All-India Bank Employees Association points out, that’s about the same amount the nationalised banking sector writes off each year as bad debt. Mainly for industry. Those farmers with between one and two hectares hold 5.9 million accounts and owe Rs. 20,758 crores. That is: these 13 million account holders owe less than the Rs. 44,000 crore written off by the banks during just the NDA period for a tiny number of rich people.

The waiver does bring great relief to large numbers of farmers. But it is no solution to even the immediate crisis let alone long-term agrarian problems. Nothing in this budget will raise farm incomes. Which means farmers will be back in debt within two years. Their incomes have long been much lower on average than those in other sectors. And they fall further behind each year. Worse, fresh credit will not come cheap. Pleas for ‘low-interest or no-interest loans’ have been ignored. There is no mention of a price stabilisation fund to shield farmers from the volatility of corporate-rigged global prices. Besides, the idea of a five-year repayment cycle has not been touched. And the highly unjust crop insurance rules that dog regions like Anantapur remain unchanged.

However, there is still a long way to go in the budget session. So these problems can be set right if the government is sincere about helping those worst-hit by the crisis. It could work all these measures into the final document and also adjust the terms for dryland regions.

One funny outcome of the budget is that the media are now talking about farmers. Of course, the ‘analysis’ of what is ‘pro-farmer’ comes from the elite. From CEOs, stockbrokers, business editors, corporate lobbyists and touts in three-piece suits. On budget eve one anchor posed a question to his panel in words to this effect: “Will it be a pro-poor, aam aadmi budget or will Mr. Chidambaram use the opportunity to do something good [for the country] in terms of reforms.”

When the budget rolled out, one anchor said: “And now for the budget bad news. India Inc.’s plea for a cut in corporate tax rates went unheeded.” Isn’t that cute? If a budget is pro-poor, it cannot be good for the country. If it does not give the corporate world more goodies, it is bad. And of course, the elite panellists mostly rued this “gigantic giveaway.”

While gasping at the size of the “write-off” it’s worth asking why the loan waiver comes up now. Why not in 2005, when the demand was already being made? Or in 2006 when the Prime Minister visited Vidharbha and was shaken by the widespread distress. Mr. Pawar has outsmarted his rivals. Had the step been taken then, the credit would have gone entirely to the Congress. No prizes for guessing who opposed it then (when it would have cost much less).

For three years, while the misery and suicides mounted in Vidharbha, there was not even the admission that a loan waiver was possible. Indeed, it was shot down by those now taking out full page ads claiming credit for it. As they complain in Vidharbha, this is not about karza maafi. It is about seeking voter maafi (voters’ forgiveness) in election year.

The Last of the Buccaneer Editors

2008-02-10T00:31:00.000-08:00

"You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."

So read the sign outside Russy Karanjia's office in Blitz. He passed away on February 1, exactly 67 years after he founded one of India's most powerful publications. He was 95. The tabloid died a few years before him. Karanjia the man would have been touched by the obituaries in the press. Karanjia the editor would have rejected most of them as unfit for publication. "Too reverential," he would have grumbled. "Where's the spice?"

He was the last of the buccaneer editors. "Free, Frank & Fearless," roared our masthead. We were not always fearless. We were sometimes too free for our own good. And we were often obnoxiously frank. But Blitz was always readable, thanks to an editor with an unrivalled instinct for what would make news to an incredibly diverse readership, from a jawan on the Chinese border to striking textile workers in Mumbai. A genius who gave some of Indian journalism's greatest names their first break, or a platform to build from. That includes R.K. Laxman. Blitz was also the paper where K.A. Abbas ran his legendary Last Page column unbroken for more than 40 years. Though the English tabloid was the oldest, Blitz also appeared in Hindi, Urdu, and Marathi. Karanjia also founded and ran a morning tabloid called The Daily for some years. His daughter Rita ran the high-circulation Cine Blitz.

Blitz was an anarchist's parliament. And we had two of everything. What we did not have on staff, we had in equally eccentric contributors. We had the world's least successful astrologer. The stars he consulted were mostly those dancing around eyes lit up by liquor. Often staffer wrote fanciful forecasts under his name when he passed out from too much stargazing. Karanjia, who pioneered the political astrology beat, would bully him into making predictions (which Karanjia favoured) on who would sweep the elections. When these bombed, he would chew him out: "What sort of astrologer are you? Can't you get anything right?" The shaken oracle would totter off seeking what we at Blitz called Spiritual solace. After one proonged absence the last page of Blitz ran words to the effect "Jupiter may be in the house of Mars, and Saturn in the house of Venus, but it will be be a while before Pandit Astro rolls into the house of Karanja." He was back that afternoon.

Blitz had its own style. Embedded journalism, never. Embellished journalism, ah well, every now and then. Karanjia was above all a great storyteller. He spoke even better than he wrote - and he was an excellent writer. He had a wicked sense of humor, too. He once sent me - underlined and with exclamation marks - an aphorism from Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye: "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."

Yet Blitz carried more racket-busting reports and giant political scoops than anyone else. Chief Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, and Governors were laid low by a paper that had amazing access to everything. Investigations, stings, exposes, almost anything the press now celebrates, first happened with Karanjia. He was also the first editor who took photographs and visuals seriously. Look at their quality in Blitz at a time when most papers ran blotched images where it was impossible to tell Khrushchev from his wife.

He also stood by us when the powerful complained, though sometimes in outrageous fashion. Once a politician, now big at the Centre, called to complain about a damaging - and true - story on his land fraud, run as a "Blitz Exclusive." I walked into Karanjia's cabin in time to hear him tell the man on the phone: "I was away, you know, that story was run by my hot-headed deputy, I must discipline him." I raged at him: "How could you do that? It was your story, not mine. The man will now hate me forever." He was unruffled. "He hates you, anyway, dear fellow, and you don't love him either. I've known him since he was a lad and must maintain some equation with him. I don't see what you're complaining about."

He was an instinctive gambler on big issues: Which way to go on technology? Who would win the elections? What was the Big Idea to back? What could we get Parliament fighting about? Some of his gambles succeeded beyond belief. Some left us gasping in a quagmire. He never sought scapegoats for failures, though (except with the astrologer), always taking personal responsibility for things going wrong. I should know. It never happened during the 10 years I was his deputy chief.

Karanjia brought the April Fool hoax to the Indian press. His biggest April 1 coup came when The Daily's front page announced the sale of The Indian Express to A.R. Antulay. At a time when the Express was, in fact, running a campaign against him. Amidst a chaos of jangling phone lines, furious denials and total bewilderment in the city, an incensed Ramnath Goenka warned he would sue us. Karanjia loved that threat. And he did not mind taking on both powerful and dangerous people. As he told me of one, "Oh I say, if you call him a crook, do put a question mark to it. That helps with the libel stuff, you know."

There were periods when I fought with him every morning, but he always made me laugh by the end of the day. Like when I stopped the practice of the pin-up girl on the Last Page. A handwritten note from Karanjia to me ran: "Dear Sainath, now that we are emulating the Vatican Gazette, do you have any further ideas to perk up the paper

Like its editor, Blitz was internationalist. Countless Indians followed the wars of liberation in Vietnam, Africa and Latin America, through Blitz. His great hero was Fidel Castro (whose photo remained on his desk till the last day he went to office.) The Americans hated him and denounced him as a Soviet stooge.

At the height of the Sino-Soviet hostility, Karanjia managed exclusive interviews with the leaders of both the USSR and China (including a rare meeting with Zhou en Lai.) He also had one with the Pope in the same period. His early interview with Castro, though, was very Blitz. Landing in the confusion of revolutionary Cuba, Karanjia was mistaken for the Indian envoy, an error he did little to correct. Castro held up his hand and waved to the crowds at meetings. "Oh, I was in the doghouse a bit when it came apart," he told me. But Castro's own sense of humour triumphed and Karanjia returned with one of the most important interviews of his life.

Blitz had some superb small town correspondents who, unlike the astrologer, were pretty good at calling elections. For years, it had lakhs of readers, and more of them writing to the editor than in any other paper. Readers who would raise lakhs of rupees for causes ranging from poor children needing costly surgery to funds for Vietnamese freedom fighters. Karanjia, who knew giants and was once called a "chronicler of revolutions, a biographer of revolutionaries," never lost sight of little people. It was he who taught a generation how to make a big story of little people. He was the only editor of a big publication in India who supported the massive textile strike of the early 1980s for the full 19 months it lasted.

No editor was more accessible. Anyone could walk into Blitz - and they often did. From levitating ascetics to poor municipal cleaners complaining about working in the sewers - all could meet the editor directly. No vast security apparatus. Even policemen turning up to serve him with summons would have tea with him and return pretending he was untraceable.

Karanjia's unfailing look at the funny side of everything rubbed off on the rest of us. Blitz never lost its sense of fun even when threatened or attacked physically. This was an office where crank callers were welcome entertainment and those hurling death threats were baffled by the response they got. As my late colleague Habib Joosab told one caller: "No, you cannot kill us Mondays or Tuesdays. Those are our press days, don't you know we're busy?"

The staff were his extended family. As patriarch, he could yell at us. Those yelling back were generously tolerated. No one was victimized. To know this man was to love him.

In the mid-1990s, long after I had left the job, he had an accident that damaged his memory. At the hospital I was told he was not recognizing anyone. In his room he greeted me with: "Good evening, Sainath. Have you put the paper to bed? You know I hate going late." I hadn't the heart to remind him I had left Blitz ages ago. I assured him all had been done. Here was a man who, when he had forgotten almost everything, remembered he was a journalist and an editor. Nothing could erase that identity.

Discrimination for dummies: V 2008 [19th jan,08]

2008-02-10T00:24:00.000-08:00

A signal achievement of the Indian elite in recent years has been to take caste, give it a fresh coat of paint, and repackage it as a struggle for equality. The agitations in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and other such institutions were fine examples of this. Casteism is no longer in defensive denial the way it once was. ("Oh, caste? That was 50 years ago, now it barely exists.") Today, it asserts that caste is killing the nation - but its victims are the upper castes. And the villains are the lower orders who crowd them out of the seats and jobs long held by those with merit in their genes.

This allows for a happy situation. You can practise casteism of a visceral kind - and feel noble about it. You are, after all, standing up for equal rights, calling for a caste-free society. Truth and justice are on your side. More importantly, so are the media. Remember how the AIIMS agitation was covered?

The idea of 'reverse discrimination' (read: the upper castes are suffering) is catching on. In a curious report on India, The Wall Street Journal, for instance, buys into this big time. It profiles one such upper caste victim of 'reverse discrimination' with sympathy. ("Reversal of Fortunes Isolates India's Brahmins," Dec. 29, 2007.) "In today's India," it says, "high caste privileges are dwindling." The father of the story's protagonist is "more liberal" than his grandfather. After all, "he doesn't expect lower-caste neighbours to take off their sandals in his presence." Gee, that's nice. They can keep their Guccis on.

A lot of this hinges, of course, on what we like to perceive as privilege and what we choose to see as discrimination. Like many others, the WSJ report reduces both to just one thing: quotas in education and jobs. No other form of it exists in this view. But it does in the real world. Dalit students are routinely humiliated and harassed at school. Many drop out because of this. They are seated separately in the classroom and at mid-day meals in countless schools across the country. This does not happen to those of "dwindling privileges."

Students from the upper castes do not get slapped by the teacher for drinking water from the common pitcher. Nor is there much chance of acid being thrown on their faces in the village if they do well in studies. Nor are they segregated in hostels and in the dining rooms of the colleges they go to. Discrimination dogs Dalit students at every turn, every level. As it does Dalits at workplace.

Yet, as Subodh Varma observes (The Times of India, December 12, 2006), their achievements in the face of such odds are impressive. Between 1961 and 2001, when literacy in the population as a whole doubled, it quadrupled among Dalits. Sure, that must be seen in the context of their starting from a very low base. But it happened in the face of everyday adversity for millions. Yet, the impact of this feat in terms of their prosperity is very limited.

The WSJ story says "close to half of Brahmin households earn less than $100 (or Rs.4000) a month." Fair enough. (The table the story runs itself shows that with Dalits that is over 90 per cent of households.) But the journalist seems unaware, for example, of the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Which says that 836 million Indians live on less than Rs.20, or 50 cents, a day. That is, about $15 a month. As many as 88 per cent of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (and many from the Other Backward Classes and Muslims) fall into that group. Of course, there are poor Brahmins and other upper caste people who suffer real poverty. But twisting that to argue 'reverse discrimination,' as this WSJ story does, won't wash. More so when the story admits that, on average, "[Brahmins] are better educated and better paid than the rest of Indian people."

Oddly enough, just two days before this piece, the WSJ ran a very good summary of the Khairlanji atrocity a year after it occurred. That story, from a different reporter, rightly suggests that the economic betterment and success of the Bhotmange family had stoked the jealousy of dominant caste neighbours in that Vidarbha village. But it ascribes that success to India's "prolonged economic boom which has improved the lot of millions of the nation's poorest, including Dalits." Which raises the question: were other, dominant caste groups not gaining from the "boom?" How come? Were Dalits the only "gainers?"

As Varma points out, 36 per cent of rural and 38 per cent of urban Dalits are below the poverty line. That's against 23 per cent of rural and 27 per cent of urban India as a whole. (Official poverty stats are a fraud, but that's another story.) More than a quarter of Dalits, mostly landless, get work for less than six months a year. If half their households earned even $50 a month, that would be a revolution.

Let us face it, though. Most of the Indian media share the WSJ's 'reverse discrimination' views. Take the recent Brahmin super-convention in Pune. Within this explicitly caste-based meeting were further surname-based conclaves that seated people by clan or sub-group. You don't get more caste-focussed than that. None of this, though, was seen as odd by the media. Almost at the same time, there was another high-profile meeting on within the Marathas. That is, the dominant community of Maharashtra. The meeting flatly demanded caste-based quotas for themselves. Again, not seen as unusual.

But Dalit meetings are always measured in caste, even racist, terms. This, although Dalits are not a caste but include people from hundreds of social groups that have suffered untouchability. The annual gathering in memory of Dr. B R Ambedkar on December 6 in Mumbai has been written of with fear. The damage and risks the city has to stoically bear when the noisy mass gathers. The disruption of traffic. The threat to law and order. How a possible exodus looms of the gentle elite of Shivaji Park. (In fear of the hordes about to disturb their polite terrain.) And of course, the sanitation problem (never left unstated for it serves to reinforce the worst of caste prejudice and allows 'us' to view 'them' as unclean).

But back to the real world. How many upper caste men have had their eyes gouged out for marrying outside their caste? Ask young Chandrakant in Sategaon village of Nanded in Maharashtra why he thinks it happened to him last week. How many higher caste bastis have been torched and razed in land or other disputes? How many upper caste folk lose a limb or even their lives for daring to enter a temple?

How many Brahmins or Thakurs get beaten up, even burnt alive, for drawing water from the village well? How many from those whose "privileges are dwindling" have to walk four kilometres to fetch water? How many upper caste groups are forced to live on the outskirts of the village, locked into an eternal form of indigenous apartheid? Now that's discrimination. But it is a kind that the WSJ reporter does not see, can never fathom.

In 2006, National Crime Records Bureau data tell us, atrocities against Dalits increased across a range of offences. Cases under the Protection of Civil Rights Act shot up by almost 40 per cent. Dalits were also hit by more murders, rapes and kidnapping than in 2005. Arson, robbery and dacoity directed against them â€” those went up too.

It's good that the molestation or rape of foreign tourists (particularly in Rajasthan) is causing concern and sparking action. Not so good that Dalit and tribal women suffer the same and much worse on a colossal scale without getting a fraction of the importance the tourists do. The same Rajasthan saw an infamous rape case tossed out because in the judge's view, an upper caste man was most unlikely to have raped a lower caste woman.

In the Kumher massacre which claimed 17 Dalit lives in that State, charges could not be framed for seven years. In a case involving a foreign tourist, a court handed down a guilty verdict in 14 days. For Dalits, 14 years would be lucky. Take contemporary Maharashtra, home to India's richest. The attention given to the Mumbai molestation case - where 14 arrested men remained in jail for five days after being granted bail - stands out in sharp contrast to what has happened in Latur or Nanded. In the Latur rape case, the victim was a poor Muslim, in Nanded the young man who was ghoulishly blinded, a Dalit. The Latur case was close to being covered up but for the determination of the victim's community.

The discrimination that pervades Dalit lives follows them after death too. They are denied the use of village graveyards. Dalits burying their dead in any place the upper castes object to could find the bodies of their loved ones torn out of the ground. Every year, more and more instances of all these and other atrocities enter official records. This never happens to the upper castes of "dwindling privileges." The theorists of 'reverse discrimination' are really upholders of perverse practice. ⊕

P Sainath

India 2007: high growth, low development[24/12/2007]

2007-12-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath
Even nations that are far below us in the HDI rankings — and which have nothing like our growth numbers — have done much better than us on many counts.
The good news is that India’s falling to rank 128 in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is not really a decline. Even though it was ranked 126 last year. So say unnamed officials (at least, according to a report in one newspaper). It seems the truth is that we would have been 128 anyway, even last year, “had updated data been used for other countries.” In short, we have not really slipped in rankings, you know, we were this bad all along. In Mumbai argot: “We are like this only.”
To begin with, the rank of 128 puts us in the bottom 50 of the 177 nations that the UNDP Human Development Report looks at. Treat Adivasis and Dalits as a separate nation and you will find that nation in the bottom 25. Or subtract our per capita GDP ranking from the process and watch India as a whole do a slide. Meanwhile, even nations that are far below us in the rankings — and which have nothing like our growth numbers — do much better than us on many counts. So even if our HDI value took a tiny step up from 0.611 last year to 0.619, it means other nations did much better than us. And hence we went down to rank 128 this year.
Each year since 1990, the Human Development Report (HDR) of the UNDP publishes the Human Development Index (HDI). This index “looks beyond GDP to a broader definition of well-being.” The HDI seeks to capture “three dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy at birth). Being educated (measured by adult literacy and enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education). And third: GDP per capita measured in U.S. dollars at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).”
Let us look at where we stand in the rankings of the index. El Salvador, which saw a bloody civil war for over a decade from the 1980s, ranks 25 places ahead of us at 103. Bolivia, often called South America’s poorest nation, is 11 steps above us at 117. Guatemala, nearly half of whose citizens are poor indigenous people, saw the longest civil war in Central America. One that lasted close to four decades and which saw 200,000 people killed or disappear. That too, in a nation of just 12 million. Guatemala ranks 10 places above us at 118.
In Africa, Botswana — ranked below us in the 2006 HDI at 131 — climbed four places above us at 124 this time. It replaced fellow African nation Gabon which quit that slot to move upwards to 119 this year. (Gee, their updated data arrived on time. Must be using a different courier service.) The Occupied Palestinian Territories, with all their woes, slipped six places to 106. Still well ahead of India.
In Asia, countries like Vietnam — victim of the bloodiest conflict since World War II — rose further in the charts, to rank 105 this year. Sri Lanka, of course, is way ahead of us at 99. So are nations like Kazakhstan and Mongolia. They too have risen in the ranks. The former from 79 to 73 and the latter from 116 to 114.
Note that some of these nations rank up to 30 slots above us. Others fall within 30 nations below us. Not one of them has had our nine per cent growth. Few of them have been touted an emerging economic superpower. Nor even as a software superpower. Not even as a blossoming nuclear power. Together, they probably do not have as many billionaires as India does. In short, even nations much poorer than us in Asia, Africa and Latin America have done a lot better than we have.
India rose in the dollar billionaire rankings, though. From rank 8 in 2006 to number 4 in the Forbes list this year, but we slipped from 126 to 128 in human development. In the billionaire stakes, we are ahead of most of the planet and might even close in on two of the three nations ahead of us (Germany and Russia). It will, of course, be some time before we erase the national humiliation of lagging behind the top dog in that race, the United States. (Which, by the way, dropped from 8 to 12 in the HDI rankings this year.) The Cuban example
Cuba has zero standing in the roll call of billionaires. In terms of per capita income, it ranks low in the world. But when it comes to human development, it ranks 51 — that is, 77 places ahead of us. It figures in the HDI’s ‘High Human Development’ group. This is a nation which has faced a huge economic blockade since its birth. U.S. sanctions ensure that almost everything is costlier in Cuba than in many other nations. In per capita terms, it spends four per cent of what the U.S. does on health but achieves better outcomes on most of the vital parameters of that sector. Despite its many disadvantages, it achieves a better HDI rank than Mexico, Russia or China. (All of which have gained more billionaires in recent times.)
But there is hope. Our top 10 billionaires are doing fine. “Their collective wealth has soared 27 per cent since July this year,” The Times of India told us on its front page on October 8. The headline said they’d got “richer by $65.3 billion” in just three months since July. That is, by more than Rs.119 crore an hour. Or not far from Rs.2 crore every minute. Of the 10, the TOI tells us, Mukesh Ambani alone “increased his wealth by roughly Rs.40 lakh every single minute.”
It is doubtful if the wages of agricultural labourers went up by just Rs.40 (just 40, not lakhs) in years, let alone by the minute. But then we rank fourth in super-rich and 128th in human development. Most of our billionaires seem to be from Mumbai, also home to a quarter of India’s $100,000 millionaires. Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra, perhaps our richest State on many counts. One that has seen close to 32,000 farmers commit suicide since 1995. Also a State where rural poverty has gone up even in official reckoning.
Meanwhile, the UNHDR records that almost a third of India’s children, or 30 per cent, are below average weight at birth. In Sierra Leone, ranked at 177, rock bottom of the Human Development Index, it is 23 per cent. In Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso, ranked 175 and 176, children with low birth weight account for 22 and 19 per cent. Even in Ethiopia, ranked 169, the figure is 15 per cent. So we’re down there with the bottom five on that count.
Amongst children under the age of five, 47 per cent in India are underweight. In Ethiopia, that is 38 per cent. And in Sierra Leone, 27 per cent. We are home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. When it comes to child nutrition and literacy, we jostle for space with the nations ranked lowest in HDI in the planet. And mostly we even beat them. ‘Statistical glitch’
This week’s papers report a curious new development. One which might further impact on our ‘rank.’ They report a World Bank study as saying that the Indian and Chinese economies might be smaller in size than we believe. Maybe almost 40 per cent smaller, says The International Herald Tribune (December 9, 2007). “What happened was a large statistical glitch,” says the IHT. But it’s a glitch that matters. “Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank’s poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million.” It turns out the overpaid elite number crunchers have been using obsolete data for a very long time.
The Bank’s own survey lists new purchasing power parities for 100 countries benchmarked for the year 2006. Well, India figured in the study for the first time since 1985 and China for the first time ever. And so? India’s GDP in PPP terms, the TOI notes, was $3.8 trillion in 2005 before the new study. Going by the new data after the revision, it stands at $2.34 trillion. (In nominal dollar terms, roughly $800 billion.) Boy! These updated data are a nuisance. First it turns out we should have been HDI rank 128 last year, too. Now we learn that our economy is a lot smaller than we imagined. As the IHT says, “This is not a mere technicality.” It shrinks the relative size of developing economies by quite a bit. India’s GDP per capita (PPP) falls from $3,779 to $2,341 with the new data. Also, as the TOI sadly notes: “We ain’t a trillion dollar economy yet.”
It is not clear yet how agencies other than the Bank, like the UNDP for instance, were working with PPP. Were they using updated measures or the old data? If the latter (which seems the case), and given India’s entry in the Bank survey is recent, even our awful HDI performance could get worse. The captain has switched on the seat belt sign. Buckle up: we could be landing soon on the updated numbers.

Maharashtra ’s head-in-the-sand syndrome[the hindu-27/11/2007]

2007-11-27T08:54:00.001-08:00

Vilasrao Deshmukh clearly believes he has been merciful towards those committing the ‘crime’ of suicide. Thanks to his government’s generosity, close to 32,000 farmers who have taken their lives in his State since 1995 have gone scot-free.
“Committing suicide is an offence under the Indian Penal Code. But did we book any farmer for this offence? Have you reported that?” — Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh on farm suicides in Vidharbha.
That is the Chief Minister’s response to media questions on the ongoing farm suicides in Vidharbha. He has gone on record with that statement in an interview. (The Hindustan Times, October 31.) Leave aside for the moment this incorrect reading of the law. Mr. Deshmukh clearly believes he has been merciful towards those committing the ‘crime’ of suicide. Thanks to his government’s generosity, close to 32,000 farmers in his State wh o have taken their lives since 1995 go scot-free. Imagine what would happen should he decide to book them for their ‘crime.’ For the record, on average, one farmer committed suicide every three hours in Maharashtra between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has worsened to one such suicide every two-and-a-quarter hours. Those numbers emerge from official data. This could be the State’s worst tragedy in living memory.
Of course, the question arises: who would he punish if he decides to enforce what he believes is the law? And how would he do so? Would their ashes be disinterred from wherever to face the consequences of their actions? Would the awful majesty of the law be visited upon their survivors to teach them never to stray from the path of righteous conduct? Or — more likely — would his government set up yet another commission to look into the matter?
Under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, attempting suicide is a crime. A suicide effort that succeeds places the victim beyond Mr. Deshmukh’s reach anyway. Beyond anything for that matter. As one of India’s foremost legal minds says: “the odd thing about suicide in India is that failing to commit it is a crime. One who succeeds in it is obviously beyond punishment. But the one who fails in his attempt to commit it could be in trouble. You could then be booked for ‘attempted suicide,’ an offence punishable by fine and even imprisonment.”
Abetment to suicide (Section 306) is also a crime. One that places Mr. Deshmukh’s government in the dock if we persist with this logic of ‘punishment.’ His Ministry has been widely criticised on the farm suicides in this State. Many point to the rash of suicides that occurred soon after the government withdrew the ‘advance bonus’ of Rs.500 per quintal of cotton in 2005. A move that tanked cotton prices and brought disaster to lakhs of farmers in the State.
Worse, his is a government which came to power that very year on a promise of giving cotton farmers a price of Rs.2700 a quintal. At the time, they were getting a mere Rs.2200 a quintal. A sum the government conceded was quite uneconomical. Further, neither the State nor the Central government took any steps at all to counter the distortion of global cotton prices. Prices crashed as both the United States and the European Union piled on subsidies worth billions of dollars to boost their cotton sectors.
To top it all, the Deshmukh government withdrew the ‘advance bonus’ soon after coming to power. That brought the price down to just over Rs.1700 a quintal. And the Centre did not raise import duties on cotton despite desperate pleas for such an action. This allowed the large scale dumping of U.S. cotton on this country, further crushing the farmers here. No, Section 306 is not something Mr. Deshmukh’s government would want to look into too closely.
But to be fair to Mr. Deshmukh, he is neither unique nor alone in this mindset. There is something wrong with a society where suicide data are put together by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The idea is in-built: suicide is a crime. From that flows Mr. Deshmukh’s simple notion of punishment. But he did not author the idea. He simply took it to unknown levels of insensitivity. With this statement, the Chief Minister outdid his previous effort when he made remarks about Vidharbha’s farmers that caused a furore. Remarks that suggested that they were both lazy and less than honest. Of course, he soon rallied to say he had been “quoted out of context.” (The Hindu, September 15, 2007). So maybe he will do so this time, too.
But he has certainly got the law out of context. What does Section 309 of the IPC really say? It states that “whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such an offence shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year or with a fine or with both.”
Fact: even the British Raj seems never to have used Section 309 against Mahatma Gandhi or other fasting leaders. And they had the excuse to do so when faced with, for instance, fasts unto death. This surely had less to do with humane behaviour than the hope that leaders like Gandhi would succeed in their fast unto death and rid the empire of a menace. Still the fact is: they did not resort to Section 309.
Mr. Deshmukh’s words suggest that he is holding himself back with much effort. If governments do start enforcing Section 309, the damage would be huge. For every farm suicide that occurs, there are a fairly large number of attempts that fail. Mostly, the police do not press the issue too hard. Even they see the ill logic of oppressing someone in misery who tries, but fails, to take his or her own life. (Such pressures have in a few cases, triggered a second — successful — attempt at suicide.) Following the ‘punishment’ logic would make life a living hell for those already in despair.
Decriminalising attempted suicide
For decades, social and legal workers and activists have struggled to decriminalise attempted suicide. One of them is Dr. Lakshmi Vijay Kumar, a consultant with the World Health Organisation on suicide research and prevention. As she puts it: “It’s a crazy law. One which only a handful of nations still retain. Most others have withdrawn it years ago. Apart from us, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore seem to still have this kind of law. Sri Lanka too did but withdrew it in 1998. It’s a law that punishes those most in need of help. A move to repeal it went through the Rajya Sabha in 1974. The bill was also introduced in the Lok Sabha but that house was dissolved before it could see it through.” The Section was even struck down by a Supreme Court ruling in 1994. However, it was later reinstated by a full bench.
As we write, the Maharashtra Assembly is in session. In the tiny Assembly session ahead, the question of farm suicides is sure to crop up. Why is Maharashtra, with more dollar billionaires and millionaires than any other State in the country, home to the largest number of farmers’ suicides in India? Why is it that farm suicides in this State trebled between 1995 and 2005? Why did they go up so massively in a State where suicides amongst non-farmers fell marginally in the same period?
All the data on farm suicides carried in The Hindu (Nov.12-15) are from the National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. They are not the data of this newspaper. Nor of Professor K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) who authored the study reported in the paper. They are government data. So if Mr. Deshmukh’s outfit has different numbers for the State Assembly, it could be in danger of committing contempt of the house.
Maybe someone in the house will raise other questions too. Queries that go, as they should, way beyond the suicides. The suicides are, after all, a tragic window to a much larger agrarian crisis. They are a symptom of massive rural distress, not the process. A consequence of misery, not its cause. How many more commissions will the government appoint to tell itself what it wants to hear? When will it address the problems of price, credit and input costs, for instance? When will it, if at all, reflect on the role of cash crops in the crisis? When will it push Delhi to set up a Centre-State price stabilisation fund? When will it dig its head out of the sand?

One farmer’s suicide every 30 minutes[15/11/07]

2007-11-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005.

On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. However, the frequency at which farmers take their lives in any region smaller than the country — say a single State or group of States — has to be lower. Because the number of suicides in any such region would be less than the total for the country as a whole in any year. Yet, the frequency at which farmers are killing themselves in many regions is appalling.
On average, one farmer took his or her life every 53 minutes between 1997 and 2005 in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). In Maharashtra alone, that was one suicide every three hours. It got even worse after 2001. It rose to one farm suicide every 48 minutes in these Big Four States, and one every two and a quarter hours in Maharashtra alone. The Big Four have together seen 89,362 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2005, or 44,102 between 2002 and 2005.
K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), who has studied farmers’ suicides between 1997-2005 based on the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, divides the States into four groups. The worst of these is Group II which includes, besides the Big Four, the State of Goa which shows a high farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — that is, suicides per 1,00,000 farmers. However, Goa’s rate is based on tiny absolute numbers. All Group II States have high general suicide rates (GSR) — suicides per 1,00,000 population — and have seen large numbers of farm suicides.
Of these, Andhra Pradesh shows some decline in 2005. And the government claims the numbers have fallen further in 2006. But there is no NCRB data to support this as yet. In all, if the NCRB data are valid, then Andhra Pradesh saw 16,770 suicides between 1997 and 2005.Decline in Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh was the first State after the 2004 polls to appoint a commission to go into the agrarian crisis. Based on the commission’s advice, it also took some steps towards handling that crisis. It restored compensation for the suicides that had been stopped by the previous regime in 1998. It persuaded creditors to accept a one-time settlement of debt in several cases. This possibly helped see a decline after the terrible years of 2002-04. However, Andhra Pradesh has begun to mimic Maharashtra in one unhappy aspect. The number of “non-genuine” cases — those the government does not accept as distress-linked — keeps mounting each month while the “genuine” suicides decline.
There are other problems too. Several States, notably Maharashtra, have made identification of farmers’ suicides extremely difficult by using indicators that rule out vast numbers from being categorised as such. One problem with such corruption of data is that it will eventually reflect in and distort future NCRB reports as well.
Karnataka too records some decline in 2004 and 2005, after a disastrous five-year period. And the State’s 15 per cent increase in non-farmers committing suicide in the 1997-2005 period is five times higher than the rise in farmers’ suicides (3 per cent). But the damage of those earlier years was huge. Karnataka saw as many as 20,093 farm suicides in the period. Again, it is unclear whether the lower numbers for 2004-05 were largely due to policy measures or whether there have been new and creative accounting techniques.
“Madhya Pradesh appears to have long been a problem State for farmers, though this has not been so far acknowledged,” says Professor Nagaraj. “The increase in farm suicides over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is not so high, at 11 per cent, but the absolute numbers have been very high for a long period. Much higher than in many other States. However, here too, the rise in non-farmer suicides, at 48 per cent, is more than four times the increase in farmers’ suicides.” Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) saw 23,588 farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. However, Madhya Pradesh has mostly escaped the media radar as a farm crisis State. In Group II States, farm suicides as a percentage of total suicides reached 21.9 in 2005 against a national average of 15.5. In short, more than one of every five persons taking his or her life in these States that year was a farmer. Also, one in every four suicides in this group was committed using pesticide.
One State outside the Big Four that has seen high numbers of farmers’ suicides is Kerala. It saw a total of 11,516 in 1997-2005. Worse, many of these occurred in small districts such as Wayanad. Kerala shows a fluctuating but declining trend over the nine-year period. The years 1998 to 2003 were clearly its worst period. More than 70 per cent of its farm suicides occurred in those years. From 2004, the numbers begin to drop. So much so that unlike the Big Four, it shows no increases in farm suicides for the whole period. The post-2003 fall, in fact, makes its overall figure minus 7 per cent.
Kerala created a “Debt Relief Commission” soon after the change in government there in 2005. The Commission held a case by case scrutiny of the debt problem, while the government halted aggressive loan recovery measures by banks and money lenders. On the Commission’s advice, the government also decided to declare the entire Wayanad revenue district distress-affected.Kerala still vulnerable
The improvement is quite fragile and could easily see a downturn. Kerala’s farm suicide rate for the period is very high, and the State remains vulnerable to volatility in the prices of, for instance, coffee, pepper, cardamom or vanilla. A fragility enhanced by the fact that major relief on the debt front requires Central help. Besides, State bureaucracies are extremely hostile to debt relief for farmers. Also, India’s free trade agreements with nations and neighbours that produce the same cash crops as Kerala hurts badly. The State’s balance on the farm suicides front is very delicate. Complacence would be, literally, fatal.
Group I States are those which have very high general suicide rates. That includes Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal, and Tripura. “However, Group I’s share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005, even as that of Group II steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
Group III States (Assam, Orissa, Gujarat, and Haryana) are those which have “moderate general and farm suicide rates,” while Group IV States (Bihar including Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh including Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan) report “low general and farmers’ suicides rates.”
Generally speaking, the Gangetic plain region and eastern India have seen fewer farm suicides. States such as Uttar Pradesh (including Uttaranchal), Bihar (including Jharkhand) and Orissa report very few suicides of this kind. These States are in many respects the opposite of the Group II or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States. These are overwhelmingly food crop regions. They are not intensive input zones, and their costs of cultivation are much lower. Use of chemicals is not anywhere at the levels it is in the Group II States. Government support prices for food crop provide some minimal stability. And there is obviously a better water situation.
States such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat also report few farm suicides but their data have been challenged. Haryana, for instance, reports fewer suicides but its increase over the nine-year period was 211 per cent. This springs not from the recording of huge increases in recent years, but because the base year data appear highly flawed. For 1997, Haryana reports a spectacularly low 45 suicides. Which distorts the figure of increase in farm suicides across the period, pushing it upwards. “It could just have been that the counting operation was really shoddy or that it collapsed or was incomplete when data were sent in 1997,” says Professor Nagaraj. The numbers after the low 1997 figure remain roughly within a 170-210 range each year. Which again is strongly contested by farm unions and activists.
There are peculiar indications in Gujarat. Pesticide suicides — a common tool in farm suicides — are 84 per cent higher here than farm suicides. At the national level, they are just 28 per cent higher. Why is the gap three times bigger for Gujarat? Even for Group II States, pesticide suicides are only 21 per cent higher than farm suicides. Which raises the question whether several deaths in Gujarat ended up being recorded as just “pesticide suicides” without being acknowledged as suicides by farmers.

Maharashtra: ‘graveyard of farmers’ [14/11/2007]

2007-11-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath
30,000 farm suicides in a decade; Vidharbha worst place in nation to be a farmer.

Nearly 29,000 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra between 1997 and 2005, official data show. No other State comes close to that total. This means that of the roughly 1.5 lakh farmers who killed themselves across the country in that period, almost every fifth one was from Maharashtra — which saw a 105 per cent increase in farm suicides in those nine years. More than 19,000 of those farmer suicides occurred from 2001 onwards.
These dismal findings emerge from a major study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS). Professor Nagaraj has analysed data recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Ministry of Home Affairs, from 1997 to 2005 (see Table). The study begins with 1997 because that was the year when most States began reporting farm data regularly.
However, Maharashtra is a State that did report farm data in 1995 and 1996, too. If we include those two years, then the number of farm suicides in the 1995-2005 period was almost 32,000. An increase of over 260 per cent between those years. Maharashtra is one of the country’s richest States. Its capital, Mumbai, is home to 25,000 of India’s 100,000 dollar millionaires.
Professor Nagaraj’s study shows that of the almost 1.5 lakh farm suicides in India between 1997 and 2005, over 89,000 occurred in just four States: Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). Importantly, Maharashtra accounts for a third of all farm suicides within these Big Four States. “This State,” says Professor Nagaraj, “could be called the graveyard of farmers.”

In terms of a percentage increase in farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, Andhra Pradesh’s figure is actually higher than that of Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh saw a 127 per cent increase in farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. Then what makes Maharashtra worst amongst the Big Four? In all the other three States, suicides by non-farmers also rose massively in this period. Non-farmer suicides shot up 48 per cent in Andhra Pradesh, 48 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, and 15 per cent in Karnataka. The crisis was more generalised across sections of society.
In Maharashtra, suicides by non-farmers actually saw a decline of 2 per cent in those years. That means the intensity of the crisis was borne almost entirely by the farming community. So farm suicides rose steeply, even as non-farm suicides fell marginally.
The percentage increase in farm suicides for Andhra Pradesh (127 per cent) was higher than in Maharashtra (105 per cent) if we take the 1997-2005 period. However, these are both States where the data go back to 1995. Taking that year as the base, the percentage increase of farm suicides in Maharashtra was 263 per cent over 1995-2005. For Andhra Pradesh, it was 108 per cent over the same period. This translates into a very high annual compound growth rate (ACGR) of 7.6 per cent in farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh for the period 1995-2005. Which implies farm suicides there might double in 10 years if present trends hold. Maharashtra’s ACGR for the same period was 13.7. Which means farmers’ suicides here could double in six years, given the same trends.Door-to-door survey
Unlike for most States, some region-specific data on farm distress do exist in Maharashtra. Thanks to public action and activism, positive court intervention, and media pressure, the State Government was forced to keep some record, however flawed. Also, a paper by the then Divisional Commissioner, Amravati, S.K Goel, clearly recorded the situation in the Vidharbha region. Besides, the Maharashtra Government held the largest-ever door-to-door survey of its kind in the region in 2006. This study covered every farm household in Vidharbha’s six ‘crisis’ districts using 10,000 investigators. It captured a portrait of distress and crisis (The Hindu, Nov. 22, 2006).
It found that of the 17 lakh plus families covered, more than a fourth — that is, more than two million people — were “under maximum distress.” And more than three quarters of the rest were “under medium distress.” In short, almost seven million people were in distress. The major sources of such misery: debt and crop loss or crop failure (which often overlap). The pressure on farmers who cannot afford their daughters’ marriages. And rising health costs.
The paper by Dr. Goel, “Farmers’ Suicides in Maharashtra: An Overview,” placed some of this data on record. While his reading of some of the data does not hold up, his contribution to the study of the subject has been quite vital.

Among other things, the paper reveals that the total number of suicides in the six districts between 2001 and 2006 was extremely high at 15,980. Worse, the number went up from 2,425 in 2005 to 2,832 in 2006 — an increase of 407 in a single year. (And in 2006 both the Prime Minister’s and Chief Minister’s “relief packages” were at work.) The paper also confirms indebtedness as a factor in 93 per cent of farm suicides. The next highest factor being “economic downfall” — at 74 per cent.
However, only the state gets to decide which suicide is a “farmers’ suicide.” The Maharashtra Government’s efforts show much creative accounting. The Nagpur Bench of the Mumbai High Court compelled the government to maintain suicide statistics on its official website from mid-2006. But with a few exceptions, the media never really picked up the damaging data on the website. And the government was free to play with definitions of what was a “genuine” farm suicide.Jugglery
As a result, less than 20 per cent of the 15,980 suicides are by “farmers.” This, in overwhelmingly rural districts! (For instance, 80 per cent of Yavatmal’s population is rural.) And just a fraction of that — 1,290 cases — are accepted by the government as distress suicides worthy of compensation. This is achieved by inspired jugglery, as the accompanying table (I) shows.
The first columns give you total suicides each year. Take 2005 for instance, which saw 2,425 suicides in these districts. The next column is “Farmers’ Suicides.” Just 468 of them. Then an extraordinary column: “Family members’ suicides.” That figure is 559. That is, it holds that family members on the farm committing suicide are not farmers. This helps skim down the figure further. Next comes the total of these two followed by “Investigated cases.” The final column invents a new category unknown elsewhere: “Eligible suicides”. That is, suicides the government deems genuine and due for compensation. And so, for 2005, the suicides column that begins at 2,425 ends with 273. This amputated figure then, for propaganda purposes, becomes the number of “farmers’ suicides.” This way, a ‘decline’ in farm suicides is ‘established.’
The contortions are best seen in the category of “Eligible” suicides. Indeed, there is a whole separate table — not reproduced here — on “Percentage of eligible farmers suicides in six districts.” And of course, “Estimated eligible suicide cases” show a decline. So the number of suicides keeps mounting — but the number of farm suicides keeps falling! If accepted at face value, this jugglery would imply that only farmers are doing well.
Everybody else is sinking in Vidharbha. Read more seriously, the region specific data — viewed against the national and State figures — suggest that Vidharbha is today the worst place in the nation to be a farmer.

Farm suicides worse after 2001[13/11/07]

2007-11-14T09:03:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath
While the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress.

Although National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data confirm an appalling 1.5 lakh farm suicides between 1997 and 2005, the figure is probably much higher. Worse, the farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) — number of suicides per 100,000 farmers — is also likely to be much higher than the disturbing 12.9 thrown up in the 2001 Census.
In the five years from 1997 to 2001, there were 78,737 farm suicides recorded in the country. On average, around 15,747 each year. But in just the next four years 2002-05, there were 70,507. Or a yearly average of 17,627 farm suicides. That is a rise of nearly 1,900 in the yearly averages of the two periods. Simply put, farm suicides have shot up after 2001 with the agrarian crisis biting deeper.
A comprehensive study of official data on farm suicides by K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) pins down these and other figures. The data analysed by Professor Nagaraj are drawn from the various issues of Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, a publication of the NCRB. But Professor Nagaraj also explains some of the reasons why the actual numbers and farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) could be far higher.
In 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the FSR at 12.9 was already higher than the General Suicide Rate (GSR) — suicides per 100,000 population — at 10.6. But even this higher suicide rate among farmers conceals a far worse reality. Firstly, the NCRB data seem to underestimate the number of farm suicides. This is because the criteria adopted for identifying a farm suicide at the State level are quite stringent. For instance, women and tenant farmers tend to get excluded from lists of farmers’ suicides. In those lists, only those with a title to land tend to be counted as farmers. On the other hand, the Census data are based on a very liberal definition of ‘cultivator.’Categories of cultivators
The 2001 Census gives data on two categories of cultivators: Cultivators among ‘main workers’ and those among ‘marginal workers.’ For the first group — cultivators among main workers — farming is the main activity. The second group includes those who practice cultivation only on a sporadic basis. However, both groups get counted as farmers. The net result of this is that while deriving the farm suicide rate from the NCRB and Census data, we are saddled with figures that undercount farm suicides but overcount the number of ‘farmers.’ Hence a value of 12.9 for the FSR is likely to be way below the mark. As Professor Nagaraj points out, “If we took only the cultivators among the main workers as farmers, the FSR increases dramatically to 15.8 which is nearly one and a half times the GSR of 10.6 in 2001.”
Secondly, the FSR is anchored in 2001 because that is the year of the Census. However, it was not one of the worst years in terms of farm suicides. Farm suicides in that year actually fell when compared to the previous year, 2000. But the very next year, in 2002, farmers’ suicides leapt by about 10 per cent. And the number of such deaths peaked in 2004. So while the number of farmers’ suicides shows a rising trend after 2001, the number of farmers may well have declined.
The trend of a decline in cultivators seems to have begun even earlier. The 1991 Census says there were 111 million cultivators among main workers. This fell to 103 million in the 2001 Census. This decline would surely have sharpened after 2001 as the farm crisis deepened. Certainly farming has no new takers.
As Professor Nagaraj’s study shows, the Annual Compound Growth rate (ACGR) for all suicides in India over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. For farm suicides, it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. An ACGR of 3 per cent in farm suicides is more alarming as it applies to a smaller total of farmers each year. This means the farm suicide rate must have shot up after 2001.
Suicides by farmers went up 27 per cent during the 1997-2005 period. But non-farm suicides went up by 18 per cent. Indeed, the general suicide rate declined after 2001 — from 10.6 in 2001 to 10.3 in 2005. Which means the increase in general suicides has not kept pace with the increase in the general population. So by all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture in distress. Which would mean that farm suicides are mounting even as the farm population slowly declines.Huge differentials in numbers
Lastly, whether we take the farm suicide rate as 12.9 or 15.8, it is the figure for the country as a whole. That again hides huge differentials in the numbers and intensity of farm suicides across the country. There are States and regions in the country where the FSR is appallingly high. There are regions where it is mercifully still low.
Professor Nagaraj accordingly divided the States into four groups. Group I: States with very high general suicide rates. Group II: States with high general suicide rates and large numbers of farmers’ suicides. (This is the most important group.) Group 3: States with moderate general and farm suicide rates. And Group 4: States with low general and farm suicide rates (See Table).
What demarcates the Group II States — clearly the worst hit — is also the trend in suicides, which is most dismal there. This key group includes Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) and Goa. (The last with tiny absolute numbers.) The ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to the general suicide rate was highest in this Group (see Table). The overall ratio of this group is 1.7. Which means the farm suicide rate in these States is 70 per cent higher than it is in their whole population.
Of the major States, Maharashtra has the worst figure with a ratio of farmers’ suicide rate to general suicide rate of 2.0. That is, one hundred per cent higher. This is followed by Karnataka with 1.6. Of the smaller States, Kerala (from Group I) has the awful figure of 4.7. But it also shows a decline from 2004. Puducherry shows up as the worst with 15.4. Of course, the last two have smaller absolute numbers.
The trend for Group II is most dismal. The AGCR for farm suicides in these States for the 1997-2005 period was 5.33. Or nearly double the national figure of 2.9. And if this trend holds, farm suicides in this group as a whole would double every 13 years. Among these States, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh would fare even worse.

Farm suicides rising, most intense in 4 States

2007-11-12T08:27:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath
In 2005, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64 per cent of all farm suicides in the country.

Of the 1.5 lakh Indian farmers who took their own lives between 1997 and 2005, nearly two-thirds did so in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). “What’s worse,” says K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), “the trend for this group of States looks quite dismal. All four have, over the nine-year period, shown an ascending trend in farmers’ suicides.̶ 1; This emerges from the painstaking study on farmers’ suicides in India between 1997 and 2005 that Professor Nagaraj has just concluded. The study draws on data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
“They began keeping farm data only from 1995,” says Professor Nagaraj. “But significant States did not start reporting their data till about two years later. So the study begins with the year 1997. And 2005 is the last year for which such data were available nationally.” He has also drawn on the 2001 Census in order to calculate the suicide rate for farmers (FSR). That is, suicides per 100,000 farmers.Dramatic increase
The number of Indians committing suicide each year rose from around 96,000 in 1997 to roughly 1.14 lakh in 2005. In the same period, the number of farmers taking their own lives each year shot up dramatically. From under 14,000 in 1997 to over 17,000 in 2005. While the rise in farm suicides has been on for over a decade, there have been sharp spurts in some years. For instance, 2004 saw well over 18,200 farm suicides across India. Almost two-thirds of these were in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States.
The year 1998, too, saw a huge increase over the previous year. Farm suicides crossed the 16,000 mark, beating the preceding year by nearly 2,400 such deaths. Farm suicides as a proportion of total suicides rose from 14.2 in 1997 to 15.0 in 2005.
Professor Nagaraj also points to the Annual Compound Growth Rate (ACGR) “for suicides nationally, for suicides amongst farmers, and those committed using pesticides.”
The ACGR for all suicides in India over a nine-year period is 2.18 per cent. This is not very much higher than the population growth rate. But for farm suicides it is much higher, at nearly 3 (or 2.91) per cent. Powerfully, the ACGR for suicides committed by consuming pesticide was 2.5 per cent. Close to the figure for farmers.
Such suicides are often linked to the farm crisis, with pesticide being the handiest tool available to the farmer. “There are clear, disturbing patterns and trends in both farmers’ suicides and pesticide suicides,” says Professor Nagaraj.Not the full picture
Alarming though that is, it still does not capture the full picture. The data on suicides are complex, and sometimes misleading. And not just because of the flawed manner in which they are put together, or because of who puts them together. There are other problems, too. Farmers’ suicides as a percentage of total farmers is hard to calculate on a yearly basis. A clear national ‘farm suicide rate’ can be derived only for 2001. That is because we have the Census to tell us how many farmers there were in the country that year. For other years, that figure would be a conjecture, however plausible.
But even in 2001, when the farm suicides were not yet at their worst, the farm suicide rate (FSR) at 12.9 was much higher than the general suicide rate (GSR) at 10.6 for that year. But the GSR slowed down after that to 10.3 by 2005 even as the total number of suicides went up. It means that the increase in the number of general suicides did not keep pace with the growth in general population. But the FSR seems to have risen more steeply after 2001. By all accounts, while the number of farm suicides kept increasing, the number of farmers has fallen since 2001, with countless thousands abandoning agriculture.
In 2005, the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States accounted for 43.9 per cent of all suicides and 64.0 per cent of all farm suicides in the country. By contrast, a group of States with the highest general suicide rates — including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, and Puducherry — accounted for 20.5 per cent of farm suicides in India. “Their share of both total suicides and of farmers’ suicides declined between 1997 and 2005 even as that of the Big Four steadily rose,” points out Professor Nagaraj.
To the extent the media have covered the farm crisis, their focus has been on farm suicides in four States — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. Very broadly speaking, that appears to have been right. All have very high rates of farmers’ suicides. Madhya Pradesh though, is a major State showing such trends which has received scant attention. (Among smaller regions and States, Goa, and Puducherry show extremely high farm suicide rates but on tiny absolute numbers.)
It is important that the figure of 1.5 lakh farm suicides is a bottom line estimate. It is by no means accurate or exhaustive. There are inherent and serious inaccuracies in the NCRB data as they are based on ground data that exclude large groups of people. As Professor Nagaraj puts it: “There is likely to be a serious underestimation of suicides, particularly of farmers’ suicides, in these reports. The most important problem is the way a farmer is defined at the ground level: as someone who has a title to land. This is likely, for instance, to leave out tenant farmers and, particularly, women farmers.”
The quality of reporting also varies from State to State. For instance, Haryana shows a very low ratio of farm suicides to general suicides. This conflicts with other assessments of the problem in that State. Data from Punjab have also been highly contested by groups monitoring the farm crisis there.
However, even in this flawed data, the trends are clear and alarming. But what has driven the huge increase in farm suicides, particularly in the Big Four or ‘Suicide SEZ’ States? “Overall,” says Professor Nagaraj, “there exists since the mid-90s, an acute agrarian crisis. That’s across the country. In the Big Four and some other States, specific factors compound the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialised agriculture. Cash crops dominate. (And to a lesser extent, coarse cereals.) Water stress has been a common feature — and problems with land and water have worsened as state investment in agriculture disappears. Cultivation costs have shot up in these high input zones, with some inputs seeing cost hikes of several hundred per cent. The lack of regulation of these and other aspects of agriculture have sharpened those problems. Meanwhile, prices have crashed, as in the case of cotton, due to massive U.S.-EU subsidies to their growers. Or due to price rigging with the tightening grip of large corporations over the trade in agricultural commodities.”Debt trap
“From the mid-‘90s onwards,” points out Professor Nagaraj, “prices and farm incomes crashed. As costs rose — even as bank credit dried up — so did indebtedness. Even as subsidies for corporate farmers in the West rose, we cut our few, very minimal life supports and subsidies to our own farmers. The collapse of investment in agriculture also meant it was and is most difficult to get out of this trap.”

Nearly 1.5 lakh farm suicides from 1997 to 2005[front page-hindu-12/11/2007]

2007-11-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath
Nearly 1,50,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in nine years from 1997 to 2005, official data show. While the suicides occurred in many States, nearly two-thirds of such deaths were concentrated in five States where just a third of the country’s population lives. This means that farm suicides occurred in these (mainly cash crop) regions with appalling intensity.
The five States are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh (including Chattisgarh) and Kerala. Of these, only Kerala showed no sustained increase in the number of yearly farm suicides over this period. That was mainly because of a decline after 2003, which was that State’s worst year. Maharashtra, for which data exists from 1995, is by far the worst-hit. Farm suicides there more than trebled from 1083 in 1995 to 3926 in 2005.
Suicides as a whole rose nationally in the 1997-2005 period. But the rate of increase in farm suicides was far higher than the rate of increase in suicides by non-farmers. In Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the percentage increase in farm suicides were more than double the increase in non-farm suicides in this period.
While suicides by non-farmers went up by 23 per cent in the Big Four States, farm suicides went up by 52 per cent. Indeed, these States might be termed the “Suicide SEZ” or “Special Elimination Zone” for farmers this past decade. In 1997, these States accounted for 53 per cent, or just over half of all farm suicides in the country. By 2005, it was 64 per cent.
That is, in less than a decade, their share of farm suicides, already disproportionately high, leapt to nearly two-thirds.
These and other grim findings emerge from a comprehensive study of official data on farm suicides by Professor K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS).
The data analysed by him were drawn from various issues of Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India.
This is a publication of the National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. The period covered by the study is from 1997-2005.

Indexing inhumanity, Indian style

2007-10-28T01:17:00.002-07:00

It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action when the Sensex fell by several hundred points. But no Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index.

It all happened around the same time. The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index — behind Ethiopia. Both stories did make it to the front page (in one daily at least). But, of course, the GHI ranking was mostly buried inside or not carried at all that day. The joy over the stunning rise of the media’s most loved index held on for a bit the next day. The same day, India clocked in as the leading nation in the number of women dying in childbirth. In this list, the second, third and fourth worst countries put together just about matched India’s 1.17 lakh deaths of women in childbirth. This story appeared in single column just beneath the Sensex surge.

Next came the fall of several hundred points in the Sensex. That is, barely a couple of days later. It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action. Fingers were in every dyke. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram lost no time in reassuring worried investors via the media. Other top officials were all over television, doing the same. “FM soothes the Market’s nerves” ran the ticker. The barrage — both media and official — kept up through the day. The panels of experts convened to celebrate the 19K summit were reconvened to explain why they’d tripped off the cliff. They then droned on about the merits of P-Notes, regulation and the future. What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.

No Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index. That’s out of 118 countries. The daily, DNA, though, did capture the essence of the story with its report: “Ethiopians manage hunger better than us.” For indeed, they do these days. At least by the measure of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index. Ethiopia ranks a notch above us at 93. Draw the baseline anywhere in the 1990s, and you’ll find Ethiopia worked better at reducing hunger than we did. Pakistan ranks ahead of us, too, at 88. China logs in at 47. All our South Asian neighbours do better than us on this index, except Bangladesh. And who knows when it will overtake us? None of the countries boasts an economy growing at 9 per cent a year.

You’d think it was an issue worth some attention. But it was hard to find panels debating this on television. Or any editorials in the newspapers doing the same. No Ministers or top babus soothing the nerves of the hungry. No experts with furrowed brows warning that the trends could continue, even worsen.

The GHI is by no means the only measure of what’s happening. The United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organisation put it simply in 2006. Its State of Food Insecurity in the World report confirmed yet again that we have the largest number of undernourished people in the globe. The 2004 edition of the report had shown that India had added more people to the “newly hungry” in the planet than the rest of the world together. There, too, nations much worse off had done far better. Between the years 1995-97 and 2000-02, hunger grew in India at a time when it fell in Ethiopia.

There was also another link begging to be made. Not just between the Sensex and hunger stories. Let’s revert to the latest maternal mortality figures released by the WHO and others. Some 536,000 women died in childbirth in 2005. Of these, every fifth one of them, at least, was an Indian. That is, 117,000 of them. A total that could only be matched by Nigeria, Afghanistan and Congo together. Almost 99 per cent of all these deaths worldwide occurred in developing countries. Much of this, again, is amongst the poorer sections of the population.

If we were to look at specific groups or communities, this would be even clearer. Let alone on the hunger index, India’s rank in the U.N.’s Human Development Index is anyway dismal. There, at 126, we are below Bolivia, Guatemala and Gabon. Yet even that rank does not tell the full story. If we were to isolate the rich and the better off as a group, they might enter the top 10 nations. Efforts last year to look at adivasis as a group led pretty much in the reverse direction. One study found that if we were to derive the HDI for our tribes only, they would rank in the worst off 25 nations of the world.

That’s quite easy to believe. Canada has always been among the top 10 nations of the world in HDI rankings. In fact, it occupied the top slot for some years. Yet, a survey of its native or indigenous people towards the end of the last decade placed them at rank 63. That is, all those natives living on “reservations.” Across the world, tribal people mostly have a poor HDI profile.

And so it is in India, too, where they are pretty much at the bottom. The study that found their HDI to rank amongst the bottom 25 nations of the world, also found things to be worse by the region. The tribes of Orissa, it reports, fall below even the low end of the HDI of sub-Saharan African nations. This is by no means the only study to tell us how India’s tribes are doing. There are tons of official data to show us that in great detail. But there’s no rush to debate their survival in expert panels. They mostly get covered when they resist displacement. Often with loss of life. They make up just eight per cent of the population. But account for over 45 per cent of those losing their lands to projects.

The furore now on the import of wheat is welcome. At least the media have begun to look at the issue. But surely, it is also worth discussing how we came to import wheat in the first place. And how a nation with so many in hunger ended up exporting millions of tonnes of grain this decade. That too, at prices lower than those we offer to millions of poor people in this country.

New heights of misery

And no matter how the Sensex is doing, the misery index for the poor scales new heights in one sector after another. Health costs still mount. They push people into debt even faster than before. A study done for the WHO in six Indian States found that 16 per cent of households it looked at were pushed below the poverty line by heavy medical costs. Nearly 10,000 families from lower income groups were covered by the survey for the years 2002-05. Some 12 per cent had to sell their assets to meet health expenses. Over 43 per cent had to resort to loans for the same reasons.

Our answer to this has been: more of the same. More privatisation. Less and less of a public health system. In Mumbai, extortion by hospitals has become so frequent as to actually find mention in the media. But journalists do not get to make the link between the gutting of public services and the public’s misery. Much less can they track this in terms of private profiteering. That would go against the publication or channel’s stand of privatisation as a cure for all ills.

More than once this year, the Bombay High Court has warned hospitals against the cruel practice of holding back the body of a patient — demanding lakhs of rupees from the family before returning it. It still happens, though. Now even at government hospitals leased out to private managements. So a low income family is suddenly told it owes the hospital a huge sum of money. And that the body of its five-year-old girl will be released only when that sum is paid. A fine example of public-private partnership as it works today.

In fact, it would be good to devise a health index spanning the reform years. One that looks at how both rich and poor have done health-wise. How many years of life, for instance, are taken away from you by ill-health if you are one of India’s less well off citizens? In the world of the media, though, only one index matters: the Sensex. Watching which has spawned a whole little industry in itself. The numbers who pronounce on and debate it (in the media, anyway) are impressive. The oracles reading equity’s entrails for omens. Maybe we need a media relevance index. An MRI scan of mass-produced mediocrity

‘Incredible India’ right here at home

2007-10-28T01:17:00.001-07:00

The week-long ‘Incredible India’ campaign in New York aimed at boosting the vibrant image of an emerging, powerful India at 60 and showcasing its diversity. But the real action was at home.

Those focussed on the $10 million event in New York are missing out on the real thing. The bharatiya khana, sangeet and natak unleashed on the Big Apple are not a patch on the carnival at home. ‘Incredible India’ is happening right here. It came fully alive two weeks ago with the Congress government of Andhra Pradesh declaring that rice would be sold to the poor at Rs.2 a kilo. It also announced a doubling of widow pensions from Rs.500 to Rs. 1000. And the same for State-level pensions of freedom fighters. Soon after, it pledged that it would not raise power charges for the next five years. Along with these came a slew of other pro-poor announcements. Some, if not all the measures, were things any government ought to have done long ago.

The rice at Rs.2 a kilo annoyed the opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP). After all, its founder, N.T. Rama Rao (NTR), was the true author of the scheme. But the TDP leaders had to be cautious about describing this as ‘stealing our clothes.’ For, their own government had shed those clothes with alacrity in the post-NTR era. So, instead, they announced ‘nine hours of free power daily for farmers’ — the very first policy the Congress signed into effect on taking power in 2004.

The TDP also promised farmers loans at four per cent interest. Not to be left out, the “Loksatta,” a movement that decries the populist stunts of other parties and which sees itself as cleaning up politics, showed itself as a force with a difference. A one-hour difference. It offered eight hours of free power as against the more lavish nine hours of the TDP. And, of course, rice at Rs.2 a kilo. The Telangana Rashtriya Samiti closed the bidding at 12 hours of free power for farmers. The TDP topped it off with the promise of three cents of land for poor urban families to build homes.

India is never more incredible than when polls are on or around the corner. And politics is never more focussed on real issues either. At that point, the blah of software superstardom or nuclear nirvana is simply buried. Unlike newspaper editors and channel anchors, most politicians know who votes. To messily paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the human mind more than the knowledge that its owner is to be hanged in a fortnight. Elections appear to produce that result in Incredible India.

To gain a sense of just how incredible India gets, look at the latest on the National Rural Employment Guarantee programme. This is the single most vital action of the UPA government thus far. Never mind that it embraced the programme kicking and screaming in protest. Or that it badly under funded it. Never mind that a hundred days of work for only one person per household was much less than needed. Never mind, too, that earlier this year the number of districts under the scheme was doubled, but the funds were not.

Suddenly, it is to cover all districts of the country. The media say this happened because the request came from Rahul Gandhi. Well, good for him. Maybe, he can even get the government to fund it better. And extend it to all seeking work, while raising the number of work days. What’s incredible, though, is the instant conversion of the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister to avid fans of a programme they cared little for and adopted under duress from their allies.

No less impressive is the sudden hike in the minimum support price for wheat, rice and other crops. Till this moment, the government was happy to import wheat from Australia at far higher prices than it was willing to give our own farmers. No amount of distress could move Delhi’s hearts of stone. But elections can. There is now a rise of Rs.250 per quintal in the MSP for wheat, overnight. Of course, this does not set things right. And the hike of Rs.50 per quintal of paddy comes towards the end of the procurement season. But it is a sign of events to follow.

In Maharashtra, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s heart has begun bleeding for Mumbai’s displaced mill workers. Mr. Deshmukh is appalled to find that mill owners have not been honouring their commitments. (Gee, who would ever have suspected them of that?) And that workers are not getting the housing they were promised. This is not right, says the saddened Chief Minister, to a public that has known all of this for a very long time. Mr. Deshmukh’s heart now beats in sync with the electoral clock.

Only weeks earlier, the Chief Minister was in danger of losing his job for all the opposite reasons. He had scoffed at the farmers of Vidharbha — standing right in the zone of their suffering — and mocked their “innovative” ways of cheating. The uproar over those remarks drew the usual “quoted out of context” defence.

But all that is past now. No context is greater than the poll context. And if you are Chief Minister of one of the country’s richest States, it’s not a context you want to be thrown out of.

Meanwhile, the TDP in Andhra Pradesh finds that the Congress selling rice at Rs.2 a kilo is “panic reaction.” The idea had always been a TDP original. In truth, the TDP, while in office, had done away with the move after NTR’s time. It had forced a number of other costs on its people. Utility rates were hiked massively, sparking major State-wide protests. User charges were imposed on poor patients at government hospitals. The hospitals themselves were being set up for a transfer to private control. But now the party wishes to provide “quality power supply to the farm sector.” And pledges “to halt the auction of Government land” and check the growth of “shops selling liquor.”

The crisis in Karnataka also has firm roots in Incredible (or Electoral) India. At the point of stirring the cauldron, the cooks have forgotten what went into the recipe. It all makes for the kind of gripping drama Bollywood and television can never capture. It’s hard to make a compelling script without any kind of hero. But India’s Silicon Valley has managed it.

On the Ramar Sethu issue, alas, Incredible India has lost its way. When mythology takes over, it’s hard to discuss more vital problems of unique marine parks or the fate of local fishermen. If countless millennia of deposits and sediment formed such a bridge, it stands to reason that process will continue. So it’s worth pondering the fortune you will spend each year on cleaning up your planned route. Instead, we’re stuck with the mythology. But for the BJP, that’s Incredible India.

Impact on media

Incredible India will also, at some late and brief point, make its impact on the media. It is possible, though not certain, that Bollywood and cricket might get just a little less coverage for a while. So far this season, we’ve been seeing the merging of the two. Shah Rukh Khan at the T20s, for instance. Some space will have to be found, though, for the clichés of bijli, sadak, paani. And television will trot out its intrepid anchors, eyes flashing in made-up anger, berating squirming politicians over their lack of concern for the problems of the aam aadmi. Of course, with full knowledge that this is a minor diversion before we go back to the serious business of covering Paris Hilton, Shilpa Shetty and the Sensex.

The politicians are in fact way ahead of the media. At least in sensing public concerns and moods. They do not rely on SMS polls with a sample size of zilch, which declare with certainty that 97 per cent of Indians think that Thursday is better than Wednesday. Media antennae are far more crippled than those of the politicians they despise. Remember those magisterial pronouncements of the mega-pundits on the eve of the 2004 polls? All those they hope no one will recall the next time around? The most famous one was this — and it came from a highly visible media personality less than a hundred hours before the results were out:

“The era of the massive election rally has long been over. People now have work to do. This election was fought more in the media than in the streets. Television is now the new electoral battleground and, as with more developed democracies, will increasingly replace public meetings and door-to-door campaigns as the mode of campaigning. A recent … opinion poll has clearly shown that a large majority of voters now make up their minds on the basis of what they learn from the media.”

As famous last words, those rank right up there with Tarzan’s Who Greased the Grapevine? But that won’t stop them from being repeated. The media are slow learners. Welcome to Incredible India. Goodbye New York, Hello Hyderabad.

The decade of our discontent

2007-10-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

Sixty years on, rural India is a shambles. The most severe agrarian crisis since the eve of the Green Revolution rages on.

Rural India is a funny place. In 60 years we haven’t managed — except in three States — to push through any serious land reforms or tenancy reforms. But we can clear a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in six months. In the sixth decade of our independence, structural and other inequalities deepen, and rural India is in big trouble

The first lead story on the front page of a major English daily four weeks ago was striking. A young man from Chandigarh had paid Rs.15 lakh for a ‘fancy’cellphone number. It wasn’t long before the rest of the media got into the act. Soon we saw his parents distributing sweets to mark their son’s achievement. Newspapers editorialised (in front page ‘news reports’) on how this reflected India’s new confidence. Our ‘aggro’ in the period of economic reforms and liberalisation.

It surely reflects something. A class exists to whom it is perfectly natural for a leading Indian magazine to act as luxury scout. Its publisher’s letter tells them that “for $115,000 a box, 500 limited edition Dragon Gurkha cigars are now available. In 80 year old camelbone boxes that once belonged to a Rajasthani ruler.”

The average monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) of the Indian farm household is a long way from Rs.15 lakh. And further from $115,000. It is, in fact, Rs.503. Not far above the rural poverty line. And that’s a national average, mixing both giant landlords and tiny landholders. It also includes States like Kerala where the average is nearly twice the national one. Remove Kerala and Punjab and the figure gets still more dismal. Of course, inequality is rife in urban India too. And growing. But the contrasts get more glaring when you look at rural India.

About 60 per cent of that Rs.503 is spent on food. Another 18 per cent on fuel, clothing, and footwear. Of the pathetic sum left over, the household spends on health twice what it does on education. That is Rs.34 and Rs.17. It seems unlikely that buying unique cellphone numbers is set to emerge a major hobby amongst rural Indians. There are countless households for whom that figure is not Rs.503, but Rs.225. There are whole States whose average falls below the poverty line. As for the landless, their hardships are appalling.

It is not that inequality is new or unknown to us. What makes the last 15 years different is the ruthlessness with which it has been engineered. The cynicism with which it has been constructed. And the scale on which it now exists. And that’s at all levels, even at the top. As Abhijit Banerjee and Thomas Piketty put it in a paper on “Top Indian Incomes 1956-2000,” “The rich (the top 1 per cent) substantially increased their share of total income [in the reform years]. However, while in the 1980s the gains were shared by everyone in the top percentile, in the 1990s it was only those in the top 0.1 per cent who made big gains.”

“The average top 0.01 per cent income was about 150-200 times larger than the average income of the entire population during the 1950s. This went down to less than 50 times as large by the early 1980s. But went back to being 150-200 times larger during the late 1990s.” All the evidence suggests it has gotten worse since then.

Industry’s hostile response to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s meek comments on CEO salaries is just a sign of how entrenched such privilege now is. The editorials of most newspapers blew Dr. Singh out of the water. So it is odd and worth noting, that one of the very best pieces on concentration of wealth in recent times comes from the Executive Director of Morgan Stanley. (The Economic Times, July 9, 2007). “We believe,” writes Chetan Ahya, “that the social pressure arising from widening inequality has increased in the past few years, driven by globalisation and the rise of capitalism.” He finds the “rising social challenge on account of the rise in inequality” a worrying trend. He also finds that “the inequality gap in wealth is even starker … Our analysis indicate an increase in wealth of over $1 trillion (over 100 per cent of GDP) in the past four years — and that the bulk of this gain has been concentrated within a very small segment of the population.” Mr. Ahya rightly sees “social and political upheaval,” as the outcome of some directions we are taking. As in the case of farmers and SEZs.

Structural inequalities

All this comes atop existing structural inequalities in rural India. In 60 years, we never resolved the issue of land. Nor those of forests and water rights. Or of appalling levels of caste and gender discrimination. We never really addressed our structural or other inequalities. Now we’re working hard at making them worse.

Even at the start of the reforms period, the bottom half of rural households accounted for less than 3.5 per cent of total land ownership. The top ten per cent of households owned well over 50 per cent. That’s for all lands as a whole. If we took into account only irrigated land, the picture is more frightening. Add productive assets, and it gets still worse. In one estimate, over 85 per cent of rural households are either landless, sub-marginal, marginal or small farmers. Nothing has happened in 15 years that has changed that situation for the better. Much has happened to make it a lot worse.

The direction of policy on farming — central to rural India — is simple in its main idea. To take agriculture out of the hands of farmers and place it firmly in the hands of large corporations. Every move, every policy, only pushes this idea further forward. We are witnessing the largest displacement in our history. It is not happening in a dam or a mining project. It’s happening in agriculture. And we haven’t a clue yet what we will do with the millions we’re busy shoving off the land. This is not being done with tanks and bulldozers. We just make farming impossible for small holders. And we create no options for those whose livelihoods we so cheerfully destroy.

The early decades were at least decades of hope. There were improvements, significant if not impressive. In literacy, life expectancy, and other human development indicators. There was a sense that “India lives in her villages.” The slogan that caught the nation’s imagination, even if in wartime, was ‘jai jawan, jai kisan.’ The farmer was seen as carrying the nation’s future on his or her shoulders. (More normally ‘his’ since women are to this day denied property rights and not seen as ‘farmers.’) At least, that was the image.

Sixty years on, rural India is a shambles. The most severe agrarian crisis since the eve of the Green Revolution rages on, but does not hold elite or media interest for long. Farm incomes have collapsed. Hunger has grown very fast. Public investment in agriculture shrank to nothing a long time ago. Employment has collapsed. Non-farm employment has stagnated. (Only the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has brought some limited relief in recent times.) Millions move towards towns and cities where, too, there are few jobs to be found. Many move towards a status that is neither farmer nor worker. A huge pool of menial labour or domestic servants. (In one estimate, there are close to two lakh girls from Jharkhand in Delhi alone, in work of this kind.)

A credit squeeze has pushed lakhs of farmers into bankruptcy. This after encouraging, even pushing them towards high-cost cash crop cultivation with its attendant risks. In Kerala of 2003-04, raising an acre of vanilla cost 15 to 20 times what it took to raise an acre of paddy. But farmers were asked to rush in regardless. The price of vanilla has sunk and the credit flow has stopped. And several such growers have taken their own lives.

We fail to invoke even those measures the blatantly unfair WTO allows us; this means the prices our own farmers get for products like cotton collapses by the season. The huge subsidies attached to U.S. cotton — over a million bales dumped on this country in just 2001-02 — are not challenged. Duties are not raised. We’re glad to trade the interests of our poor for another 30,000 H1B visas.

The government tells us over 112,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1993. A gross underestimate but the figure is bad enough. These are suicides driven by debt. And the indebtedness of the peasantry, so the National Sample Survey tells us, has almost doubled in the past decade.

It is not as if there is no resistance, no voices raised. The people have spoken to their governments and all of us in election after election. In protest after protest. And good things, too, have happened. Like the NREGA. But the larger direction is overwhelming. And it is one that races towards catastrophe, disaster having already been achieved. We, however, are more interested in the cellphone number worth Rs.15 lakh. And maybe there’s a point in that. The ‘fancy’ number was purchased on borrowed money. Our orgy in inequality plays out on borrowed time.

Nine decades of non-violence

2007-10-28T01:15:00.002-07:00

Countless rural Indians sacrificed much for India's freedom, to fade into oblivion later, seeking neither reward nor recognition. Gandhian Baji Mohammed, who has been active for 70 years in one or the other cause, is amongst the last of this dying tribe, writes P Sainath.

We were sitting in the tent, they tore it down. We kept sitting," the old freedom fighter told us. "They threw water on the ground and at us. They tried making the ground wet and difficult to sit on. We remained seated. Then when I went to drink some water and bent down near the tap, they smashed me on the head, fracturing my skull. I had to be rushed to hospital."

Baji Mohammed is one of India's last living freedom fighters - just one of four or five nationally recognised ones still alive in Orissa's Koraput region. He is not talking about British brutality in 1942. (Though he has much to say on that, too.) He's describing the vicious attack on him during the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, half a century later. "I was there as part of a 100-member peace team." But the team was given no peace. The old Gandhian fighter, already in his mid-seventies, spent ten days in hospital and a month in a Varanasi ashram recovering from the injury to his head.

No hatred in his heart

There is not an iota of anger as he describes the event. No hatred towards the RSS or Bajrang Dal that led the attack. Just a gentle old man with a charming smile. And a firm Gandhi bakht. He's a Muslim who heads the anti-cow slaughter league of Nabrangpur. "After the attack, Biju Patnaik came to my home and scolded me. He was worried about my being active even in peaceful protest at my age. Earlier, too, when I did not accept this freedom fighter's pension for twelve years, he chided me."

Baji Mohammad at home in Nabrangpur, Orissa with his most precious possession: a photo showing him in one of Mahatma Gandhi's protest marches.
Picture: P Sainath.

Baji Mohammed is a colourful remnant of a dying tribe. Countless rural Indians sacrificed much for India's freedom. But the generation that led the nation to it is dying out swiftly, most of its members in their late 80s or 90s. Baji is closing in on 90.

"I was studying in the 1930s, but did not make it past matric. My guru was Sadashiv Tripathi who later became Orissa Chief Minister. I joined the Congress Party and became president of its Nabrangpur unit [then still a part of Koraput district]. I made 20,000 members for the Congress. This was a region of great ferment. And it came fully alive with satyagraha."

However, while hundreds marched towards Koraput, Baji Mohammed headed elsewhere. "I went to Gandhiji. I had to see him." And so he "took a cycle, my friend Lakshman Sahu, no money, and went from here to Raipur." A distance of 350 km of very tough, mountainous terrain. "From there we took a train to Wardha and went on to Sewagram. Many great people were at his ashram. We were awed and worried. When could we meet him, if ever? Ask his secretary Mahadev Desai, people told us."

"Desai told us to talk to him during his 5 p.m. evening walk. That's nice, I thought. A leisurely meeting. But the man walked so fast! My run was his walk. Finally, I could no longer keep up and appealed to him: Please stop: I have come all the way from Orissa just to see you."

"He said testily: "what will you see? I too, am a human being, two hands, two legs, a pair of eyes. Are you a satyagrahi back in Orissa?' I replied that I had pledged to be one."

"Go,' said Gandhi. "Jao, lathi khao. (Go and taste the British lathis.) Sacrifice for the nation.' Seven days later, we returned here to do exactly as he ordered us." Baji Mohammed offered satyagraha in an anti-war protest outside the Nabrangpur Masjid. It led to "six months in jail and a Rs. 50 fine. Not a small amount those days."

More episodes followed. "On one occasion, at the jail, people gathered to attack the police. I stepped in and stopped it. "Marenge lekin maarenge nahin,' I said. (We shall die, but we shall not attack.)"

"Coming out of jail, I wrote to Gandhi: what now? And his reply came. "Go to jail again.' So I did. This time for four months. But the third time, they did not arrest us. So I asked Gandhi yet again: now what? And he said: "take the same slogans and move amongst the people.' So we went 60 km on foot each time with 20-30 people to clusters of villages. Then came the Quit India movement, and things changed."

"On August 25, 1942, we were all arrested and held. Nineteen people died on the spot in police firing at Paparandi in Nabrangpur. Many died thereafter from their wounds. Over 300 were injured. More than a thousand were jailed in Koraput district. Several were shot or executed. There were over a hundred shaheed (martyrs) in Koraput. Veer Lakhan Nayak [legendary tribal leader who defied the British] was hanged."

Baji's shoulder was shattered in the violence unleashed against the protesters. "I then spent five years in Koraput jail. There I saw Lakhan Nayak before he was shifted to Berhampore jail. He was in the cell in front of me and I was with him when the hanging order came. What should I tell your family, I asked him. "Tell them I am not worried,' he replied. 'Only sad that I will not live to see the swaraj we fought for.'" Baji himself did. He was released just before Independence Day - "to walk into a newly free nation." Many of his colleagues, amongst them future Chief Minister Sadashiv Tripathi, "all became MLAs in the 1952 elections, the first in free India." Baji himself "never contested the polls. Never married."

"I did not seek power or position," he explains. "I knew I could serve in other ways. The way Gandhi wanted us to." He was a staunch Congressman for decades. "But now I belong to no party," he says. "I am non-party." It did not stop him from being active in every cause which he thought mattered to the masses. Right from the time "I took part in the bhoodan movement of Vinoba Bhave in 1956." He was also supportive of some of Jayaprakash Narayan's campaigns. "He stayed here twice in the 1950s." The Congress asked him to contest elections more than once. "But me, I was more sewa dal than satta dal. (More service oriented than power seeking.)"

Greatest moment

For freedom fighter Baji Mohammed, meeting Gandhi was "the greatest reward of my struggle. What more could one ask for?" His eyes mist over as he shows us pictures of himself in one of the Mahatma's famous protest marches. These are his treasures, having gifted away his 14 acres of land during the bhoodan movement. His favourite moments during the freedom struggle? "Every one of them. But of course, meeting the Mahatma, hearing his voice. That was the greatest moment of my life. The only regret is that his vision of what we should be as a nation, that is still not realised."

Just a gentle old man with a charming smile. And a sacrifice that sits lightly on ageing shoulders

AGRO CRISIS

2007-10-28T01:15:00.001-07:00

Farmer's diet worse than a convict's

Several women in Karnataka's Mandya district like Jayalakshmamma, whose husband committed suicide four years ago, still stand up to the unending pressure with incredible resilience, writes P Sainath.

When Jayalakshmamma finishes her 12 hours of labour - on those days she can find work - she's entitled to less than a fourth of the rice given to a convict in prison. In fact, the rice she gets on average for a whole day is far less than what the incarcerated offender gets in a single meal.

Jayalakshmamma is not a convict in prison. She's a marginal farmer whose husband H.M. Krishna, 45, killed himself in Huluganahalli village of Mandya district four years ago. This district was among the worst affected by the farm suicides of 2003 in Karnataka. In this State, her BPL (below the poverty line) card entitles her to only four kg of rice (and a kg of wheat) a month. True, those four kg are subsidised by the State. But she cannot afford to buy a lot more than that at prevailing market price. She is also one of over a lakh of women across India who have lost their husbands in suicides arising from the farm crisis these past 14 years.

"Four kilograms a month means about 135 grams a day," says T. Yashavantha, who is from a farming family of the same district. He is also State vice-president of the Students Federation of India. "Even an undertrial or convict gets more." What's more, they get cooked rice. She gets four kg of grain. Jail diets in the State vary according to whether the prisoner is on a "rice diet," a "ragi diet" or a "chapati diet." Jail officials in Bangalore told The Hindu "those on rice diets and doing rigorous imprisonment get 710 grams of cooked rice per meal. Those on non-rice diets get 290 grams of rice. Undertrials and those doing simple imprisonment [who are on rice diets] get 505 grams of rice per meal."

The convict doing rigorous imprisonment does eight hours of labour. Jayalakshmamma does 12 or more. "But her entitlement is 45 grams per meal if she has three a day," points out Mr. Yashavantha. She doesn't have the time, though, to make comparisons. Her daughter now works at breadline wages in a Bangalore garment company. "At most she can send us Rs.500 in a year," she told us at her village. This leaves her son and herself at home. Their joint entitlement on the BPL card would yield 270 grams per day. That is: they would together still get less rice than even a prisoner on "ragi diet" gets - 290 grams or more.

They own around 0.4 acres and had leased two acres before Krishna's suicide. "On the former we grew vegetables. On the latter, we had sericulture. Vegetable prices have been terrible. Once, we got Rs.1 a kilo for tomatoes. And water costs came to Rs.9,000 (or Rs.70 per hour) over six months." Now they have only the 0.4 acres. "We also sold all our livestock after his death." They have been paying off his loans and most of the compensation they received appears to have gone this way. "My boy Nandipa grazes the goats of others but there's no daily income from it." Instead, they will share the offspring of the animals - if any - with the owner. "I myself make Rs.35 a day working this off-season."

"I wanted Nandipa to study. But he was in despair. Three years ago, then aged 12, he ran off to Bangalore and worked in a hotel. There he was beaten by the owner. He ran away, took the wrong train and landed up in Mumbai. After a while, he was brought back."

"All widows have problems. But those bereaved by the farm crisis suffer worse," says Sunanda Jayaram, president of the women's wing of the Karnataka Rajya Ryuthu Sangha (Puttanaiah group) "Even after losing her husband she has to maintain his father and mother, her own children and the farm - with no economic security for herself. And she is saddled with his debts. Her husband took his own life. She will pay the price all her life."

In Bidarahosahalli village, Chikktayamma's state exemplifies this. Her husband, Hanumegowda, 38, killed himself in 2003. "The debts are all we're left with," she says, without self-pity. "What we earn won't pay off even the interest on loans to the money lenders." She's struggled to educate her three children - who might be forced to drop out though all want to study further. "The girls should study, too. But later, we'll have to raise lots of money for their marriages as well."

One girl, Sruthi, has done her SSLC exams and another, Bharathi, is in the second year of her pre-university course. Her son Hanumesh is in the 8th standard. Her husband's mother and a couple of other relatives also live in this house. Chikktayamma is the sole breadwinner for at least five people. "We have only 1.5 acres [on part of which she grows mangoes]. So I also work as a labourer when I can for Rs. 30 a day. I had a BPL card but they [the authorities] took it from me saying `we'll give you a new card.'" It never came back, says Mr. Yashavantha. "Instead, they gave her an APL [above the poverty line] one."

Huge debt

In Huligerepura, Chenamma and her family grapple with a debt of over Rs.2 lakh left by her husband Kadegowda, 60, who took his life four years ago. "Sugarcane just sank and it crushed him," says his son Sidhiraj. "We have only three acres," says Chenamma. "It's hard to generate a living from that now." But she and her sons still try. And the family plans to shift to paddy this year.

In Thoreshettahalli, Mr. Yashavantha's father, Thammanna, a farmer for decades, says the farm crisis is biting deep. "Most cane growers are not recovering the cost of production. Input costs go upwards, incomes downwards. Also, some 40 borewells were drilled in this village last month but only one succeeded. People are giving up. You will find farmland lying unused even during season."

What about self-help groups? Jayalakshmamma has paid an initial amount "but the group has not yet launched. And I cannot afford the Rs.25 a week. Nor the 24 per cent interest each year." Chikktayamma cannot think of making such payments regularly. "The SHG concept is a good one," says KRRS leader K.S. Puttannaiah. "But in some cases, they've also become moneylenders. Meanwhile, after the initial compensations, the State has no plan for widows and orphans of farm suicides. When have they even thought about it?"

"Remember, these and all other farm women are breadwinners and have always been so," says Ms. Jayaram. "Yet, they have no land rights and no land security. Even in agricultural labour, they are paid far less than men. Those widowed by the suicides are in constant tension. There are debts hanging on their heads which they did not incur. There are daughters whose marriages are pending. The pressure is unending." It is. But all the three women and many more like them in Mandya stand up to it with incredible resilience and still try to run their farms and feed their families with dignity and respect

FARM WIDOWS

2007-10-28T01:14:00.000-07:00

Suicides are about the living, not the dead

In society's eyes, Kamlabai is a `widow.' In her own, she's a small farmer trying to make a living and support her family. She is also one of about one lakh women across the country who've lost their husbands to farm suicides since the 1990s, writes P Sainath.

A farmer in her mid-60s, Kamlabai Gudhe works as a labourer whenever she can - for grain, not cash. It's all she can get. So she labours, sometimes for 12 hours, for Rs.25 worth of jowar. This is apart from slogging on her own four-and-a-half acres whenever she can. When her crop does succeed, she mostly loses it to wild animals as her farm is on the edge of the jungle. The better her cotton and soybean, the more wild boars and Nilgai it attracts. Fencing the farm would cost Rs.1 lakh. Money she can't dream of.

Kamlabai is one of over 100,000 women who have lost their husbands to farm suicides in India's agrarian crisis since the mid-1990s. She lives in the worst-hit zone: Vidharbha. Her village Lonsawla is located in Wardha, one of the six districts in the region that have together seen more than 6,000 farm suicides since 2001. Her husband Palasram, bogged down in debt, took his life a year ago. She has pulled on, trying to run their farm, living in a house with its roof half gone and two walls about to cave in again. This tiny ramshackle residence is home to five human beings. That includes her son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. In society's eyes, Kamlabai is a "widow." In her own, she's a small farmer trying to make a living and support her family.

How did a landless Dalit come to own a farm at all? The same way she keeps it going. Every moment of Kamlabai's life has been a struggle. She began as an agricultural labourer on a daily wage of Rs.10-12. "That bought a lot more in those days," she says, of a time nearly four decades ago. To this, she added a little bit by collecting and selling fodder to farmers.

"I remember how my mother trudged for hours to collect chara [fodder] and sell it for next to nothing," says her son Bhaskar who is central to her plans to keep their farm afloat. "I got ten paisa per penda [fistful]," she laughs. "But I made so many trips for it, I could make up to ten rupees daily from the chara." That is, she walked more kilometres than she could count to fetch and sell one hundred pendas of fodder each day. Her 16-18 hour workdays paid off, though. From these pathetic earnings she and her husband saved and bought land no one else would at the edge of the forest. That was nearly 40 years ago. She paid Rs.12,000 for four and a half acres. The family then worked like galley slaves to cultivate a very difficult farm. "I had another son, too, but he died."

Kamlabai walks long distances even today, in her mid-60s. "What to do? The farm is six kilometres away from our village. I earn as a labourer when I find work. And then I go to the farm to help Bhaskar and Vanita." She is too old to find work on government project sites. And on those, anyway, exist huge prejudices against lone women in general and widows in particular. So she takes any work she finds.

Between them, the family have nurtured the farm. It looks good and productive. "See this well," she points to a rather large one created by mostly family labour. "If only we could get it cleaned and repaired, we'd have much more water." But that would need Rs.15,000 at least. And that's apart from the Rs.1 lakh that fencing the field would cost. They could convert one acre to a water body at the bottom of a slope on their land. That would mean even more money. Bank loans are now impossible. And proper repairs to her crumbling house would cost another Rs.25,000. "My husband killed himself because of crop loss leading to debt of Rs.1.5 lakh," she says. They've paid off bits of that and the family has run through most of the Rs.1 lakh compensation she got from the State. But creditors still trouble her. "We were doing alright. But then agriculture really failed for several years and we suffered big losses."

Like millions of others, her family was hit by the biggest agrarian crisis in decades. Rising input costs, falling output prices, lack of credit, withdrawal of State support. "It's the same with everyone else in the village, too," she says. Last year brought crop disaster as well. She lost hugely, with Bhaskar betting on Bt cotton. "All we got was two quintals," she says.

The Government then added to the damage. Late last year, it made her a "beneficiary" of a "relief package." Under this, Kamlabai was made to buy a costly "aadha Jersey" (half Jersey) cow she did not want. Though heavily subsidised, she still had to pay her share of Rs.5,500 for it. "The brute ate more than all of us put together," she told us. (The Hindu, Nov. 23, 2006). And "it yielded very little milk."

Reverse rental

Since then, "I have twice given away the cow, but they always bring it back," she says with resignation. Those she gifts it to return it saying "we cannot afford to feed it." So now "I am paying a neighbour Rs.50 a month to look after the animal." A kind of reverse rental. The deal being that if the cow starts giving milk as it should, she will get a half-share. That belongs to an optimistic future. Right now, Kamlabai is paying to take care of a cow the Government promised would take care of her.

But her spirit is as yet unbroken. She still makes that long walk to the farm every day she does not find work. Today her tiny but energetic grandchildren make a slightly comical picture alongside her on the trail. Their survival and future is her biggest motivator. As always, her head is held high, but she can't hold back the tears when she looks at them. Kamlabai has decided that suicide is not about the dead. It's about the living. And for them she soldiers on.

ON CRICKET

2007-10-28T01:13:00.005-07:00

And now for a commercial break

Knowing that big money is undermining the game as a whole, and pussyfooting around it, just isn't cricket, writes P Sainath. nd finally, the business of endorsements in cricket is on the table, however briefly. Thanks to recommendations credited to a bunch of ex-captains. But some of the ex-skippers have begun to jump ship. A couple say they did not press for limiting the number and nature of product endorsements a player can get into. And the Board of Control for Cricket in India, despite wide public approval of the idea, has begun to waffle under sharp attack in the media. Such is the power of corporate rage.

Whether the curbs first announced were the most appropriate ones is another matter. The massive corporate backlash is against the very idea that their rights to milk the game - no matter what damage it causes - can be restricted. Just when it seemed something positive might have come out of our World Cup exit, after all. But the debate at least highlights that corporate pressures on the game are real and dangerous. A fact long known, but little acknowledged. My favourite is a clause reported to be in the corporate contracts of two players: the more time you spend at the crease, the more money you earn. What happens when the interest of the team demands a hurricane, do or die knock? Or if taking root at the crease loses your side the game?

If you've got crores of rupees riding on your shoulders, it will at some point affect your play. More so when you have contracts from sponsors that make failure financially devastating. So many of our cricketers play like gods in their early seasons. There is no fear of failure. Then, they're playing for India, enjoyment, and fun. Soon, they're playing for Brand India, endorsements, and funds. When a team returning from one tour sees some of its players dash off almost straight from the airport to ad-shoots, something is awry. More so when another series is to begin within a very short time. So the ban on shoots 15 days prior to a series, if enforced, might do some good.

Even the most experienced and strong-minded cannot evade the effects of endorsement raj. So imagine a 21- or 22-year-old caught up in this. A kid who has been blazing away at the best bowlers in the world without fear of failure. Once the endorsement web closes in and you have crores riding on your next performance, it's different. That too when you've had a couple of bad outings. With what freedom will you play that next innings? Will you play safe or with spirit? Will you go for the bowling or will you hesitate on that big, bold stroke? Of course players should not be barred from income outside of the game. They have a right to that. But the nature and effects of this source of income went way over the top ages ago and need checking.

In 1986, a study of a single India-England one-day match showed that 72 ads from about 20 companies had been telecast in under seven hours. At that time, this was thought to be a matter of some concern. How trivial those numbers seem today. Not just the match but what Erik Barnouw called the "surrounding territory" is suffused with the sponsors' material. There are pre-match, lunch interval, and post-match programmes designed to showcase the sponsor's products. There are curtain raisers, cheerleader shows, and post mortems that do the same.

There are no more boundaries in cricket. There's only Corporate X's Fantastic Fours, Business Y's Super Sixes and Company Z's Magic Moments. Not to forget some other concern's Sizzling Catches. As this whole culture takes root, the successful player drowns in sponsor money. The distinction between cricket player and product peddler blurs in more ways than one. Logos and uniforms proclaim who owns the players and it's not the country. Once it was just an annoying bunch of ear-splitting ads between overs. Now it's a colossal money-spinning industry in which the game is smaller than the revenue.

It's not just about match fees, really. Nor so simple as the BCCI regulating players' endorsements. The nature of the game's ties to big money - the Board's own deals and those of the media, too - have all got to be looked at honestly. Those calling for increasing the number of selectors should reflect there already are more. Corporate sponsors and agents. They've got too much to lose from `their' players being dropped or sidelined. They will interfere.

But there's more. In one estimate, three players of the Indian side had endorsement work for 60-75 days each last year. It could overwhelm anybody. Imagine the pressure on 20-somethings. Because some of these players are so very good, they will still perform brilliantly at times. Because the stress of so much money riding on them is so intense, they can falter at crucial moments. That's why the ex-captains have rightly spoken about the need to check performance-linked clauses in the endorsements. It is easy to forget that the same players have also won significant victories. Like it or not, if you drew up a list of the country's 20 best players, it would be hard to exclude many of those in the present team. Their replacements, anyway, would simply be fresh prey for sponsors, ads, and agents.

Now that endorsements have at least begun to be looked at, there's one more thing that should be factored into analysis: the role of the media. Hysterical over-the-top stories, astonishing levels of speculation, intense personalisation, are one part of it. Lobbying, plants, and camp reporting are another.

Meanwhile, the media are bashing the `fickle-minded' cricket-loving public, blaming them for the proposed curbs on endorsements. "This is to appease the public," declared one channel. In truth, the media have been far more fickle. Their own polls show the public's stand on these issues is not much different from what it was earlier. However, the media's rah-rah campaign for the team changed drastically with our Caribbean catastrophe. No more cheer India, right?

There is an important link. The same commercial interests that weigh down the players are also massive advertisers. The money they put in there drives the kind of whipped up, concocted feel-good factor you saw in the media prior to the defeats. The players become super humans. A class apart. No need to consider that other teams might be better. Just have yards of newsprint and hours of broadcast time devoted to halo-building and product hawking. This too obviously piles up the pressure on players of any age, let alone 21-year-olds. Fact: It's a game (or used to be). We weren't good enough, we lost. And Bangladesh played with a passion and energy we lacked on the day.

It's no accident that among the first round of stories that appeared as the team faced an exit was on how much corporate sponsors stood to lose. Quite absurd. They made millions before the first match was played in the World Cup. But those stories had to happen. They reflect the reality that the media was set to lose a lot of advertising revenue. They're furious with the curbs. It's not the `gagging' of players that upsets them. It's the money. All those `exclusive' links with players that translate into revenue.

Meanwhile, the home remedies being doled out will hopefully not drown the new, welcome look at endorsements. Regional bias as villain has surfaced yet again. Sure, such a bias in selection can be a problem but it is not the root cause of the evil. This view assumes that the supermen who will replace the regional system of selectors will be free of such bias themselves. Is there evidence to support that notion? What if they are only familiar with cricket in the major centres they know? Curbing regional bias surely involves more than just doing away with the old method?

The enduring appeal of all these remedies is, of course, that most have some truth in them. But that truth gets badly stretched. The cult of youth is one of these. It's wonderful to have young players do very well as indeed they often have for India. Making this a mindless mantra ignores that Australia's Dad's Army is the most feared team in the world. It is no less true that everybody has to go sometime. But should that be on performance and record or do we just set an expiry date that treats the capabilities of all sportsmen as being exactly the same: "Best before 2008. Shake well before use."

The others too, we've heard before. And they're all very true: quality pitches. Improve domestic cricket. Better infrastructure. Treat the junior level of the game more seriously. Quite right. But all these would apply to almost any other sport as well. Including those that have produced far better achievers than cricket - without any of the sponsorship or attention it receives. The one huge difference between cricket and all these sports is the money involved. And remember that our team got almost anything it could have asked for. Failure too is part of the game. And others can and will often play better than us. But knowing that big money is undermining the game as a whole and pussyfooting around it, that's dumb. It just isn't cricket.

ON CRICKET

2007-10-28T01:13:00.004-07:00

Growth ideology of the cancer cell

2007-10-28T01:13:00.003-07:00

In that the trend of falling state investment in sector after sector continues, this budget does not break with neo-liberalism. Instead, it just dolls it up. India is still on a path damaging and dangerous to the poor. The UPA has learned nothing and forgotten everything, writes P Sainath.

"As Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate, said, 'Faster growth rate is essential for faster reduction in poverty. There is no other trick to it'." So said P. Chidambaram in his budget speech. Drawing on his words must have seemed a politically correct thing to do. Mr. Chidambaram might want to add another quote to his cupboard. This one from the late Edward Abbey, environmental activist and writer. "Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Few things grow as relentlessly as that cell does, with such fatal results. As the cancer of neo-liberalism claims an ever-higher toll, its greatest theologians now include standard disclaimers in their chant. Growth has to be 'inclusive' and 'sustainable'. Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have earned these escape clauses. In any case, growth in India this past decade has been neither. The appalling distress in the countryside is just one measure of this. Election after election also rubs it in. Especially that of 2004, which brought the United Progressive Alliance to power.

Even going by the government's economic survey, by its own other data, agriculture is choking. Per capita growth has been negative. Farm incomes have taken a beating. Thousands of farmers commit suicide each year. The government has long known there is a frightful crisis on. One driven by human agency, by state policy. Yet, for all the noise, Central plan outlay on agriculture as a share of GDP sees no increase worth the name. Nor is there anything that touches the acute farm distress on the ground. In that the trend of falling state investment in sector after sector continues, this budget does not break with neo-liberalism. It just dolls it up.

One of the most important steps the UPA took in 2004 was to assign the National Commission on Farmers the grim task of studying this crisis. The work of the NCF caught the imagination of farmers nationwide. In Vidarbha or in Andhra Pradesh, farmers when they speak at all of 'relief packages' do so with scorn. What they do demand is action on the NCF's findings. It is hard to find a single one of its many vital proposals addressed in this budget.

There are no steps towards a Price Stabilisation Fund. None at all towards debt relief, let alone a waiver. Nothing has happened that will make input costs cheaper. Racketeering on that front is not only left alone, it can dash on regardless. The 'huge' boost for rural credit does not touch the high interest rates, which are such a major source of the trouble. And government knows very well that small and marginal farmers have gained almost nothing from its earlier 'expansion' of credit. No incentives for food crops in crisis regions. No action, to cite just one problem, to prevent the dumping of American cotton subsidised in billions of dollars and devastating prices here and around the world. (In just marketing year 2001-02, as an official report shows us, U.S. raw cotton exports to India had tripled to more than a million bales.)

There is no move to use valid tools like raising duties to halt a process that is literally killing Indian farmers. Import duty on cotton remains at a low 10 per cent. Indeed, the lowering of other duties in many cases will hit other sectors of Indian agriculture too. Not just cotton. If this is a pro-farmer budget, it's scary to think of what an anti-farmer one would look like. As always, the standards of judging the deal given to poor Indians differ totally from those used to measure what a 'sulking India Inc.,' gets. The big boys shouldn't be too disheartened, though. Business as usual will resume after a pause for the Uttar Pradesh elections.

Even as the budget is hailed as 'pro-farmer', there comes the embarrassment to the Centre from a Congress-led State. Responding to a PIL on farm suicides, the Maharashtra government tries telling the Supreme Court that the Centre's dragging its feet over funds for Vidarbha was a big factor in the problem. True, it backs off pleading an error when this is highlighted in the press. But it gives you a picture of how bad things are.

Many have shown that some of the 'higher allocations' of the budget are negative when adjusted for inflation. The Left, for instance, points out that spending on the government's flagship employment programmes is up by seven per cent. Which amounts to stagnation given inflation levels. The increase in outlays on food subsidies, at 6.2 per cent, means a cut in real terms.

There is also a rather clumsy dodge on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. To begin with, it was given Rs.11,300 crores when it needed much more. And that was for 200 districts. Now it is to be 'expanded' to 330 districts. But the outlay goes up by just Rs.700 crores. So the number of districts covered goes up 40 per cent. The money goes up six per cent.

The 'huge' hike in outlays for health still does not bring us to even the modest two to three per cent of GDP level promised in 2004. View education outlays as share of GDP and you see how far behind we still are. In the end, though, it's not just about sector to sector funding. It's the whole direction. And in that very little has changed. India is still on a path damaging and dangerous to the poor.

Big media, though, now view the Finance Minister with a 'how-could-you' air of injured innocence. He actually had to face some questions on television. He was questioned. But from a point of view which, at most other times, he would have been happy with. That is, the liberalisation and 'reforms process' from a corporate outlook. (India Shining has been back for a while, jostling for space with India Rising and India Poised. But that's another story.)

Mr. Chidambaram accused one interviewer of being obsessed "with the corporate sector." That was code for 'wait till after the State elections.' ("Our programme continues after a small non-commercial break.") He even tried to explain that a 'thrust' on agriculture in fact favoured Indian industry. And he had a real point there. But I doubt it went home. The debate amongst the elite is still in terms of a 'letdown'. A 'setback in the pace of reforms'. For the media, this is India with a shining black eye.

And so we have a budget that gives 'top priority' to agriculture. And eight more farmers have taken their lives in Vidarbha. This is now a region where farmers killing themselves are directly addressing the Prime Minister or Chief Minister in their suicide notes. After the Prime Minister's Independence Day Speech in 2006, you might have expected something different. That was a rare occasion. Dr. Singh spoke clearly of the state of our farmers. Even more rare for an I-Day speech, he singled out Vidarbha for special mention. And he clearly acknowledged a major crisis was on in agrarian India. Not a trace of that sentiment can be found in the philosophy or the numbers of this budget.

Nor is there even a sense that much has been learnt from the polls in Punjab and Uttarakhand. There is even some bravado about how the Congress has fared better in rural Punjab. The price rise, among other things, was and is a major issue. But the government's response to it is at most levels tokenism. Not a lesson has been learnt by this government. Like others before it, it imagines it will make a few 'course corrections' just before the polls. It has forgotten the reasons for its win in 2004. Nor does it want to see just how awful the crisis in the countryside is.

We are now at that mid-way mark where, historically, the Congress revives the Bharatiya Janata Party. A party gasping for breath after 2004 regains its oxygen. The Congress is hard at work on this in Maharashtra, too. The government's terrible power cuts have a clear regional, urban, and class bias. Talleyrand is said to have remarked of the Bourbon monarchs of France after their restoration that they had learnt nothing and forgotten everything. We don't know that he really said that of them. But it fits the UPA. This budget reads like a Bourbon Manifesto

Elite activism: can't vote, can vet

2007-10-28T01:13:00.001-07:00

The Beautiful People whose next-door neighbours never vote are back, teaching the masses - who do vote - how to go about it in the civic elections in Mumbai. This is the upper middle class trying to preen itself in the one process where they matter less, writes P Sainath.

All wards reserved for backward classes and Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes/women will have "candidates of poor calibre." So 'asserts' one of Mumbai's most high profile 'citizen activists' in a daily newspaper in the city. This statement - from a 'civil' society leader - escaped comment or response. Both in that paper and at large. A sign of how easily caste and other visceral prejudices pass off as analysis in the aggressive anti-reservation mood gripping the upper classes.

That isn't all, though. His group is "trying to working out a system of grading candidates." Elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's 227 wards will be held next month. And the rotation of reserved wards is causing heartburn. More so amongst the elite. Some of Mumbai's swankiest neighbourhoods find their wards reserved for SCs and OBCs. (It could hurt property values, you know.) And the bile is out.

Besides, it's that time of year. "Citizens' groups," mostly headed by the very elite, are hogging media time and space. The Beautiful People whose next-door neighbours never vote are back, teaching the masses - who do vote - how to go about it. One group wants a corporate agency to do candidate 'ratings.' (This has rich possibilities. A Candidate Sensitive Index? Call it CANSEX?) Others are running their own aspirants.

Now all this, up to a point, is good clean fun. It is part of the charm of elections in our society that so many feel encouraged to stand. (Including one astonishing BMC hopeful who got just the one vote the last time. And two more who secured two votes each.) It speaks well, too, of the urge to participate in the democratic process. And different groups do so in many ways. Political parties contest wards they know they will lose. Where they might at best get a few hundred votes. Maybe a thousand. They see that as a way of measuring their core vote there. And believe this will help consolidate a nascent base that might otherwise drift towards other parties.

There are also other, truly interesting groups this time. Like one that will contest each of the six wards in Dharavi, Asia's biggest slum. Win or lose they will force a debate on some of the most vital issues of urban development. Including the future of lakhs of families like their own. Maharashtra's scheme for Dharavi sells out residents' interests to real estate sharks. Fearing the destruction of their livelihoods, some locals have formed this group to contest the BMC polls.

And, of course, there are the mainstream political parties involved in the battle for control of a corporation whose Rs.9,000 crore budget outstrips those of some States in the Northeast. This time, Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena will be a spoiler for the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance. Those refused a ticket by the latter now have more ponds to fish in. The Congress-Natiionalist Congress Party's who-will-blink-first alliance bargaining is entertaining. And the re-delineation of wards can make things dicey for some hopefuls. Yet, it is the elite "citizen's groups" that hold the media spellbound. Of course, they have as much a right to fight the elections as anyone else. What is amazing is the media space and legitimacy these groups always get. Never mind that they are the least important in the poll process. Never mind too, that their importance blossoms after the polls. (Why bother with the ballot when you anyway get to run the government later?) A glance at Mumbai's media and you'd think these groups, particularly one, are setting the agenda. That they are re-defining the entire process. The members of group themselves believe it, which is fine. Whether the media should, is the question.

During the 2004 national polls, and the Assembly elections later, the same elite Mumbai crowd hogged hours of television time. They existed wholly in the media, both print and visual. Malabar Hill socialites became 'noted activists.' They played a central role in television debates. And were always accepted at their own valuation. That is, the people the anchor turned to with deep respect as independent, impartial forces without a bias. But with a 'cause' - the cleansing of a corrupt electoral process. Which only they, of course, were capable of. All this tanked horribly at the hustings. As the results rolled out, not a byte was sought, nor a quote supplied, from the previous month's wholesale dealers in profound thought.

This is so across the country. Any outfit launched by ex-IITians, for instance, is a sure-fire media hit. No matter that these sink without a trace at the polls. The last one commanded front page treatment in the press. The highlights included such thoughtful quotes from its founders: "Giving up handsome pay packages, comfort of family and support of friends wasn't that easy." And "My inner voice told me I should invest my efforts in my country... " "People think we are crazy so much so that our families have also failed to understand our motto... " (You'd think that if even your own family failed to understand, you might have a communication problem. One that could hurt you in the campaign.) Some of these were likely sincere, well-meaning people. But you could also have got these same quotes from thousands of others candidates.

However, it was the 'brand' that mattered. At least to the media if not the voter. As one young journalist covering the present round of BMC polls puts it: our approach is simple. Anything that has an 'I' a double 'II' or 'IT' in it makes front page. That is, if you have an IT, IIT or IIM tag. Then the force is with you. Candidates of these brands are covered with near reverence.

It happened in the 2006 polls in Tamilnadu when one of the chosen few "took on Karunanidhi" in Chepauk. Newspapers ran stories on this brave new world battle. It didn't matter that Mr. Karunanidhi had likely never heard of his rival and probably never will. This was an IIT man. Again, of course, he had a right to be in the fray. And to take on Mr. Karunanidhi, if he saw it that way. And it does not matter that he got under 1 per cent of the votes cast and less than two per cent of those notched up by the DMK leader. It does matter that the space the media gave this was misleading to their audiences, cruel to a cub candidate, and harmful to their own credibility.

But with each new election we go through the whole drama again. The media love it when someone they see as 'middle class' gives those ugly politicians "a run for their money." (Usually, the heroes are mostly upper middle class in the Indian hierarchy.) Another big daily in Mumbai has front-paged the decision of three ex-IITians to run in the BMC elections. It goes on.

One tabloid has front-paged several stories of heroic 'citizens activist' groups. These reports carry a symbol - the clenched fist. Not a symbol most of the upper classes would care to have in their own homes. But it's the thought that counts, I guess.

Margins and upsets

One argument the groups now make is that in 83 BMC wards, the victory margin was less than 100 votes the last time. So in theory, if you can get 100 votes, you can cause an upset. The margins may have been narrow. But the top candidates got votes in the thousands. Raj Thackeray's MNS candidates could cause several such upsets. But only on the basis of getting quite a few votes themselves. Even being a spoiler requires some clout.

Meanwhile, the papers though are full of 'tips' and 'ideas' from the groups on how we should vote. These range from the embarrassing to the absurd. And have little to do with the issues that motivate far more conscious voters and citizens than themselves.

It's happened before. The newspapers of 1971 were over the moon with Naval Tata running for the Lok Sabha from Bombay South. They saw this as the best thing ever to happen for the 'middle class.' Good, clean candidates were all that people wanted. For some, the race was a no-contest. Tata would win hands down. In the event, he was trounced by a Congress candidate little heard of at the time, and unheard of since. After that, many good, clean industrialists have settled for buying their way into the Rajya Sabha.

The lovely bit is where the newspaper or channel tells you: "this time it's different." A group of idealistic young whatever have "banded together" to do whichever. The current crop are fighting 'vote bank politics.' 'Vote bank' means those who support someone you can't stand. But something is different this time. And it's appalling. Open jibes at SC, ST, and OBC candidates and voters. Attacks on 'slum appeasement' by politicians. Some members of these elite outfits are closely linked to corporate cabals whose thinking they mirror. Some have also been party to a petition seeking to take away the voting rights of slum dwellers whose huts have been demolished. (Aha! They have no address now. How can they vote?) Even the eccentric charm of the two-vote wannabes is missing in this lot. And they are completely without humour. This is the upper middle class trying to preen itself in the one process where they matter less. They seem not satisfied with the fact that their raj will mostly be restored once it is over.

What the heart does not feel, ...

2007-10-28T01:12:00.000-07:00

After 15 years of a battering from hostile policies and governments, the world of the peasant has turned highly fragile. But the onus of changing is on the farmer. Not on those driving a cruel process and system, who have only contempt for ordinary folk, writes P Sainath.

10 September 2006 - The spraying season is just about to begin in Vidarbha. Which means the region sits on a volcano. This is when a farmer actually holds that can of pesticide in his hand. When a moment's frustration can snuff out a life forever. Even the run-up to the season has been a disaster. More than 200 farmers have committed suicide in two months. August alone saw 111 indebted farmers kill themselves. That brings the total since June last year to 828. Of these, 72 have occurred since Independence Day this year.

We'd be lucky if the Government prepares itself for this season. And if we're even more lucky, the suicides might taper off a bit after the spraying. They have always had seasonal highs and lows. It's vital though never to forget that these deaths are only a symptom of the larger crisis. Not its cause. Failing to see this link means ignoring the main issues. It then becomes "if they're not killing themselves, things are okay." A bad illusion. That said, the numbers are indeed appalling.

Something very fundamental is happening. The central, driving factors behind the suicides remain the same. Rising debt, soaring input costs, plummeting output prices, a credit crunch and so on. But the outcome now adds up to more than just the sum total of these factors. After 15 years of a battering from hostile policies and governments, the world of the peasant has turned highly fragile. Problems that would not have driven many to suicide a decade ago do so now. It takes less to push farmers over the edge because their resistance is down. So fragile is their economy and equilibrium.

The studies and surveys seldom account for one vital factor - the worldview of peasants. How that is changing as their links to the land erode. How their hopes of what's possible are constantly dashed. How, losing their anchor, they drift to a frightening future. How it feels to watch your child drop out of school or college because education has become too expensive. Even as your daughter's marriage is off, because you cannot afford it. You fail to get your ailing mother to a hospital because health is the most costly thing in your world. All this while agriculture itself is tanking. And there's less food on the table. For too many, pessimism soaks the worldview this shapes. And despair gains ground as the coming deity.

But why are farmers committing suicide only in Vidarbha? This question based on falsehood or ignorance or both, is being posed just now. Farm suicides have been on in many parts of the country. In sheer numbers, Andhra Pradesh has had more than any other State. During the Chandrababu Naidu years, they accounted for the bulk of all such deaths in the country. A better question would be why their intensity has been less since then. Or why they could easily go up again in the same State.

Farm suicides have also been on for several years in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere. To imply they are only happening in Vidarbha is false. The agrarian problem is nationwide. So are many of the policies driving it. But all regions are not the same. Some crops are more subject to price shocks. Some communities more vulnerable than others. Some cultivation practices more destructive than others. And some governments are far worse at handling distress than others. No State is exempt from the crisis. But more exposed regions will feel its effects before many others do.

Those covering the Andhra Pradesh suicides in the early years of this decade were often asked this question: why only Andhra? Something is wrong with people there. Among those asking were many from Maharashtra. They were quite sure this could never happen in their State.

Farm suicides have been on for a while in the cotton-growing West African nations, too. As they have in many other parts of the world with farmers into other crops as well. (They occurred in the United States, too, during the Great Depression. And again, as corporate farming snuffed out small holder agriculture in the last quarter of the 20th century.)

But this way of posing it - why Vidarbha? - allows us to spring the next argument. The problem is not distress or debt. The problem is with the 'psyche' of the Vidarbha farmer. Note that this 'psyche' has nothing to do with the lived experience of the peasant. It's about the wiring inside his brain. Having thus derived an 'answer' verging on the racist, we can leave the status quo as it is. Counsel the poor things. They need shrinks. Also, it becomes clear - to those of this view - that the factors are 'social' rather than economic. If we can cut down the 'social evils' like drinking alcohol, things would be okay.

This might even be funny if it weren't so tragically obtuse. For one thing, if liquor is the main cause of farm suicides, there would be little left of the Indian peasantry. Indeed, Vidarbha would have more survivors. The Warkari sect - firm abstainers - have a large following here. Yet this group too has been hit by suicides. Further, why then are there more such deaths in Vidarbha than in Tamilnadu? Liquor is better entrenched in the rural regions of the latter. It also raises the question why alcohol leads rich kids in Mumbai to rape and murder, but leads poor farmers in Vidarbha to suicide.

Sure alcohol can be a factor in some of the deaths. There have been instances of farmers who got drunk, fought with their wives, and took their lives. These have mostly come after financial collapse, crushing levels of debt, and humiliation at the hands of creditors. Interestingly, an investigation by the newspaper Sakaal suggests that the number of suicide victims who had an alcohol problem is quite minor. Normally, the drunkenness argument comes up in the second or third year of a crisis, when denial is still an option. That's how it happened in Andhra. That it should come up so late in Vidarbha's crisis speaks of at least two things. A bankrupt elite scraping the barrel for excuses. And their inept yes-men in the media, ignorant of a larger canvas or history to the issue.

Contempt for ordinary folk

"They did it for the handouts." That's another jibe that reeks of contempt for ordinary folk. It tells us more about the people asserting this than about those taking their lives. The notion is that people destroy their families forever in order to get a 'compensation' of Rs.1 lakh. This reduces the victim to some kind of crazed beast. Yawn. It's all been said before. In 1998, using precisely this claim, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu scrapped compensation for suicide-hit families. Fact: the suicides shot up and were at their highest in the years 1998-2004 when there was no compensation at all.

Then there are the ideologically insane. The members of the sect have no interest in either farmers or agriculture. Only in upholding their Gospel. For them, farmers are dying because they have not been reached by free market reforms. If more of them keep dying after they are reached, it's because the "reforms have not gone far enough." It hangs a halo of righteousness around wanton ignorance.

The same 'commitment' also leads to a spirited defence of large corporations wreaking havoc in agriculture. The stout defence of technologies about which the defender knows nothing. Some of this is, of course, ideological. Some of it is also self-serving. Corporations involved in agriculture have organised foreign freebies for their ideological advocates. At this moment, major efforts are under way to co-opt journalists in affected regions. Yet, we can be proud that the vast majority have rejected such blandishments. So many of Vidarbha's journalists - and activists - remain a scourge of the establishment.

Meanwhile, every other study ends up calling for 'counselling' of the Vidarbha farmers. Calls upon them to change their system of cultivation. Sure there's some reality in this. (The agriculture extension system - which should indeed 'counsel' farmers - has collapsed nationwide.) But why not counsel governments on their policies? Or call for a change in the socio-economic system that drives people to such lengths? The onus of changing is on the farmer. Not on those driving a cruel process and system.

Attempts to 'counsel' them in those terms have been on for years. Andhra Pradesh tried it in 2003. Teams of psychologists, revenue officials and doctors went out to Vidarbha's villages from as early as 2004. To counsel the poor, disturbed souls. In one village, an old farmer greatly embarrassed such a team: "You've given us fine advice on so many things. On coping with stress, curbing our drinking, not fighting with our wives and so on. And you've asked us so many good questions, too. Now ask us one more. Ask us why farmers, who produce the nation's food, are starving. Ask us why the children of those who grow your food, are starving." The team remained silent.

Some of the learned - and well-meaning - team members had been to great medical colleges. And one of the first principles they learned there is sound. "What the mind does not know, the eye cannot observe." Very true. But the old farmer was posing a larger point before society as a whole, not just to the doctors. What the heart does not feel, the eye can never see.

FARMING CRISIS

2007-10-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

Unwilling parents, unwary orphans
In Anantapur, farm suicides are fewer than they were in 2002. But they still happen and could rise again in this fragile region. As elsewhere, agriculture is plagued by uncertainty, writes P Sainath.

In some ways, it was the turning point in Andhra Pradesh. The 2002 visit of Congress president Sonia Gandhi to the State both galvanised her demoralised party and brought hope to families destroyed by the agrarian crisis. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu till that moment seen as invincible by even his opponents began to look less so.

The highlight of Ms. Gandhi's visit to the devastated Anantapur district was a meeting where many from suicide-hit families gathered. Each was issued a special "victim pass" for the event by Congress organisers.

Media reports of the time recall the anguish of the Congress president, appalled by what she heard and saw. This was, after all, the State's worst-hit district in the farm crisis. Hundreds of suicides were being reported each year. Many had been calmly recorded as "suicide due to unbearable stomach ache (kadupu noppi)." Story after painful story poured out. One of the saddest being that of 12-year-old Jayalakshmi Palem. A keen learner, the 7th standard student had killed herself when faced with dropping out of school. Her father Laxminarayana, a small farmer in Mamillaguntapalli village, could no longer pay her fees.

Other girls, too, had killed themselves under similar circumstances. In some households, the suicide of a father was followed by that of his eldest daughter. Often, the girl blamed herself for her father's death, feeling he had taken such a step because he had failed to get her married.

And countless other households had seen suicides, too. The farm crisis was eating into Anantapur. The Congress president's meeting was the big moment for the families to be seen and heard. "Sonia Gandhi spoke to my mother," says 12-year-old Somashekar, younger brother of Jayalakshmi, with some pride. He too might well have dropped out of school later on. The visit and the public focus it got ensured he did not.

It was also the big moment for local Congressmen to be seen and heard by their leader. To make a good impression and grab that photo-op. This, some of them did by declaring to the media that they were "adopting" those families that had lost their breadwinners. It was, says one officer, "a real Kodak moment." For the families it proved a fleeting one. Five years on, most have never seen the parents who "adopted" them. Some might-have-been foster parents flatly deny making any such commitments. Others claim they have done their bit and that is enough.

Jayalaksmi's own home is a fractured one. "Both her parents are across the border in Karnataka, doing coolie work," says her grandmother P. Mangamma. "Their four acres are lying fallow." They had Mangamma leave her own village and move into their house here so that young Somashekar could live on and study in this village.

"There was no option," she says. "Farming had collapsed. But even that coolie work has since become a huge problem. Laxminarayana had a nasty fall from a height at a construction site when the scaffolding there collapsed. His back was injured and right now only his wife can work." So the four-member family depends on the daily wage of one woman - when she can find work, in another State. And on Mangamma's old age pension of Rs.200. "They only come back once in two or three months. And most months they can send just Rs.200 or Rs.300 home."

Surely, this was odd. Media reports say the family was 'adopted' during Ms. Gandhi's visit by Congress MLA J.C. Diwakar Reddy. He is now the State's Panchayati Raj Minister. Neither Mangamma nor her grandson has any harsh words for the Minister. They've just never seen him in their lives. In fact, they haven't seen any of the local leaders since that meeting.

Mr. Reddy remembers it differently. He told The Hindu that he "did not make any promise to adopt the family." However, he "still stands by the commitment" that he did make. Which was, he says, that he would e ducate Somashekar. He is "ready to deposit annually, the full amount required for the boy's expenses towards school fee, books, clothes, and hostel charges." The school Somashekar goes to charges Rs.2,400 a year as fees for a day scholar. Not a small amount in this poor village. Curious turn

This is where it gets curious. The school is not charging the boy any fees. The correspondent of the Sri Vignan T.M. and E.M. school, Mastan, insists, "we have not taken any money from the boy. As his was a poor family, we did not accept any fees at all." Well, at least not since Jayalakshmi's death and Ms. Gandhi's visit.

Mr. Reddy says he deputed a mandal president and a village sarpanch to meet the family after Ms. Gandhi's visit and see to the child's school needs. But, he told The Hindu, "the family sought cash instead."< /p>

Mr. Reddy said he would rather "deposit the amount with the head of the institution in the name of boy." The institution insists it takes no payment at all in this case. And the boy's family does not claim to be making one. Neighbours say that someone did pay a small amount the first year, after which the school stopped charging its fee. But that was it. "So where," asks one villager, "does this leave all these 'adoptions?'"

Anantapur is not where it was in 2002. The district did receive special attention after the change of government in 2004. On some fronts it has seen distinct improvements.

On others, unfulfilled promises and hardship. In this district, there are still those dragged out of school and college by the farm crisis years ago - and who never went back. That includes the holders of full government scholarships forced to quit to help their families in the fields.

Farm suicides are fewer than they were in 2002. But they still happen and could rise again in this fragile region. As elsewhere, agriculture is plagued by uncertainty. Efforts by some groundnut farmers to switch to vegetables, papaya, sweet lemon, and other crops have not quite worked. The next two seasons could prove crucial, says one senior officer.

"A lot more depends on the kind of policies we adopt than on the number of children the Ministers adopt."

FARM CRISIS

2007-10-28T01:09:00.001-07:00

In Yavatmal, life goes on
P Sainath

"The bank recovery teams have stopped coming to my home," Saraswati Amberwar told us in Yavatmal. She lives not far from where President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam will visit on June 15. Her husband Ramdas was the first farm suicide case in Vidharbha to be highlighted in the media, way back in 1998. Since then she has faced years of pressure from his creditors to repay his loans. So it was surprising that the bank recovery men had let up.

"Kishor Bhau gave me a letter which I showed them the last time they were here," she says. "After that, they stopped coming." Even stranger. Kishor Tiwari is the president of the Vidharbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS) and the region's foremost agitator on farm issues. Hardly a friend of the banks, given the countless times he has gheraoed and badgered them on farm loan problems. So what did his letter say?

Roughly translated, it read: "Dear Recovery Officers, Ramdas has appeared before me more than once from Heaven. He says: `I have the money and am waiting to repay you.' Please rush your team to Heaven. Yours sincerely, Kishor Tiwari." After that, says Saraswati, the team never showed up again.

Mr. Tiwari's open letter this week to President Kalam is more polite. It begs him to "spare a few minutes to meet the unfortunate widows of farmers either at Yavatmal or Wardha."

Those and Nagpur are the places the President will touch during his day-long visit. His trip takes him to an event at Amolakchand College in Yavatmal. Also to the Mahatma Gandhi Hindi International University in Wardha. It does not so far include any agrarian distress-related meetings.

Issue of cotton prices

Yavatmal, where the President's main function is, remains one of the most dismal parts of Vidharbha, the region hardest hit by the farm crisis. "This year alone, there have been 428 farmers' suicides in Vidharbha," points out Mr. Tiwari. "Unless urgent action is taken on cotton price, on debt and credit - it will be our worst year ever." And that would be something. The Government officially admits to 1,296 farm suicides due to the "agrarian distress" last year. It records a further 1,348 farm suicides in the same six districts the same year, but denies they were due to agrarian distress.

Yavatmal is one of six districts in this region that together have seen more than 6,000 farm suicides since 2001. Saraswati is among more than 100,000 women across the country who have lost their husbands to suicides driven by the agrarian crisis since the mid-1990s. There are hundreds like her in Yavatmal alone. But her home has seen many VIP visits over the years, including that of Narayan Rane when he was Revenue Minister in the Shiv Sena Government. The compensation of Rs.1 lakh she got was long ago wiped out by debt.

"We're spending Rs.30,000 on my daughter Meenakshi's illness," she says. (Another daughter died in 2004.) "We've sold off several acres and some cattle over these years to cope. But farming gets costlier and more difficult." Yet she sees few options and keeps at it, hoping things will turn around.

In Pisgaon village of the same district Varsha Rasse grabs any work she gets, no matter how poorly paid it is. For two seasons her husband Maruti had leased out their eight acres - throwing in his own labour as part of the deal. "He had to get his sisters married," neighbours told us, "and farming was collapsing." Then, with his own cultivation hit by excessive rains, Rasse committed suicide in 2004. His debt remains a problem for Varsha and their son and daughter are both under five years of age.

"They work harder and harder, and might produce more, but it only gets worse," says Vijay Jawandia, the region's foremost intellectual on agriculture. "All these farmers are fighting impossible odds. The most basic issues have not been touched. They are widows because of indebtedness. The cost of living is rising, so are farming costs. Only their income goes down."

"The Prime Minister's package helped some get fresh loans, but they got no help with the old ones. So now their debt has doubled. The central issue of price has never been addressed by the government. Nor has the issue of huge subsidies in the West for cotton producers there. So prices collapsed and these farmers cannot recover the cost of production. The new debt destroys their creditworthiness. So the banks will not touch them this season. Which pushes them back to moneylenders."

Annapurna Suroshe would agree with him. "We've paid off all our debts from the compensation," she says in Nageshwadi village, "but it doesn't end." It hasn't for her, with two boys and a girl to put through school. When the lease ends on the four acres her husband Rameshwar let out before killing himself last year, she wants to cultivate them herself. "I might as well put in my labour on our own land."

Meanwhile, she's trying to run things from the Rs.25 a full day's labour now fetches her.

Mangalabai Mokhadkar in Rampur - from the only Brahmin farm household seeing such a suicide - has held out longer. In the nine years since her husband Prabhakarrao committed suicide, she's got three of her eight daughters married. Some were married before his death. "No dowry," she makes a point of telling us. Though each wedding set her back by around Rs.40,000. She has not taken a paisa from her sons-in-law. "They took no dowry, how can I do that?" She's also managed to educate the girls. "All of them are matric pass or fail," she says. "Three completed their schooling after he died."

After years of leasing them out, "we will farm our seven acres ourselves this year." But Mangalabai knows the risks. "Look at our village. All families here are in the same boat. Unless something changes in farming, we'll all sink."

"This is the situation in Yavatmal and other districts," says Mr. Tiwari, "these widows are farmers who represent the true picture."

As Mr. Tiwari's letter to President Kalam also says: "We strongly feel that it all is not well in Vidharbha and therefore, it's not the right time for any cultural or dancing session inauguration ...We would be highly obliged if you could spare a few minutes to meet the unfortunate widows."

FARM CRISIS

2007-10-28T01:09:00.000-07:00

In Yavatmal, life goes on
P Sainath

Mr. Tiwari's open letter this week to President Kalam is more polite. It begs him to "spare a few minutes to meet the unfortunate widows of farmers either at Yavatmal or Wardha."

Issue of cotton prices

OPINION: PRIVATISATION OF WATER

2007-10-28T01:08:00.002-07:00

THIRST FOR PROFIT

People pay more for water than corporates do; in many parts of the country soft-drink giants get it almost free. Whole communities lose out as heavyweights like Coke step in. The corporate hijack of water is on and if the current trend continues, India's water sources will be in private hands before long, writes P Sainath.

14 May 2006

2001: THE old man shuffled his feet, acutely embarrassed. No matter which part of India you're in, the first thing you do is offer your guests a glass of water. And this was one part of Nallamada in Andhra Pradesh blessed with that element. Things had changed, though. "Please don't drink it," he said, finally. "See how it is?" he asked, showing us a tumbler. Tiny blobs of thingummy floated atop a liquid more brown than transparent. But then he brightened up. "Will you have Coca-Cola instead? That, this village has." And so it did. As in the Aamir Khan ad. The smaller bottle for Rs. 5.

It's also there in countless other villages where a glass of clean water is now hard to find. And Coca Cola's impact on both drinking and irrigation water sparks revolts across the country. From Plachimada in Kerala to Kaladera in Rajasthan. From Gangaikondan in Tamilnadu to Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh. From Thane in Maharashtra to Khammam in Andhra Pradesh.

2002: M.P. Veerendrakumar, chairman of the Mathrubhumi group of publications, is startled to discover that the Malapuzha river and dam in his native Kerala are "for lease or sale to private parties. "I did not know you could sell and buy dams and rivers." He learns this from a tender he sees in an American daily while on a trip overseas. "This had not appeared in any of our local newspapers."

It had already begun in Andhra Pradesh There, two years earlier, farmers chased away the World Bank's James Wolfensohn. He had come to unveil the confederation of "Water Users Associations" in the state. "Water Users." Oh, what a lovely word! It denotes that special group of folks who use water. The rest of us are non-users, a type of dryland bacteria. But non-users, being a touchy, irritable lot, showed up in large numbers at the Koelsagar dam in Mahbubnagar. Pitched battles were fought and hundreds arrested. The government shifted the plaque of the dam to a safe haven miles away so the Bank Boss could cut his ribbon in peace.

2003: Private theme and water parks in and around Mumbai are found to be using 50 billion litres of water daily. This, while countless women in the slums and chawls of the city wait hours in queues for 20 litres. Meanwhile, anti-Coke battles are hotting up again. Kerala's pollution control board confirms the toxic nature of the sludge spewed out by Coke's plant in Plachimada. The panchayat revokes the plant's licence.

2004: The polls to parliament -- and in some states -- see the rout of the biggest 'water reformers.' Of course, there are many reasons for their defeat. But water is on that list. Sadly for the World Bank, its puff job is already done. So its report "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future" appears as it is -- a year later. It sings the praises of Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra. And it claims they gained politically from the reforms. It says the water users associations were particularly good for Naidu. Because "farmers perceived this to be a reform which moved in the right direction." That is in 2005, a year after farmers in both states hand out some of the worst electoral defeats ever seen to the Bank's heroes.

2005: Bazargaon is a scarcity-hit Vidarbha village that has one sarkari well and gets tanker water once in ten days. It is also host to the giant 'Fun & Food Village.' An elite park which offers 18 kinds of water slides and uses millions of litres as a matter of course. All Bazargaon's water flows towards this 'village.' It's a story repeated in different ways in many places, across many states. Water as a commodity, flows from poor to rich areas.

In Yavatmal, a Maharashtra minister asks farmers at a meeting to "diversify into dairying." The crowd jeers. (Vidarbha has seen over 425 farm suicides in ten months.) The problems of water and irrigation loom large here. "You want us to take up milk production?" scoffs a farmer, rising to his feet. 'When you pay us a price of Rs. 6 for a litre of milk, but pay Rs. 12 for a litre of your bottled water?" The meeting ends early.

People pay more for water than corporates do. The bottled water brigade got treated and cleaned water in Hyderabad for 25 paise a litre for years. This goes into that bottle costing Rs. 12. In many parts of the country soft-drink giants get it almost free. Whole communities lose out as heavyweights like Coke step in. That company used 283 billion litres of water worldwide in 2004. Enough, points out the India Resource Centre, to "meet the drinking needs of the entire world's population for ten days." And the billions of litres it guzzles in India could meet the needs of whole districts in Orissa or Rajasthan for a year.

Yet Coca Cola was the leading sponsor of the "World Water Forum" in Mexico this year. But Coke is not alone in the devastation it inflicts in India. Meet the Real Thing. Central and state governments in this country are privatising water. Coke is just one of the beneficiaries. Oddly, those selling out India's water almost never use the word 'privatisation.' They know how discredited that is. So the buzzword is 'efficiency.' Or 'public-private partnerships.' The real questions are never raised. Should anyone own water? How must it be shared? Who gets to decide? Is water a commodity to profiteer in or is it a human right? Is it more than a 'human' right? Countless other species also need it to survive.

The corporate hijack

The bazaar is large. And top water corporations figure in the Fortune 500 Global list. As Maude Barlow, one of the world's leading water activists, points out, the business "is already considered to be worth U.S. $400 billion annually". And there is lots more to be made. In her stunning book, Blue Gold, Barlow cites the Bank's own estimate of the market size. "In 1998, the World Bank predicted that the global trade in water would soon be a U.S. $800 billion industry, and by 2001, this projection had been jacked up to one trillion dollars." And these revenues are "based on the fact that only five per cent of the world's population are now receiving their water supply from corporations". So as the corporate grip on water tightens, "water could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the future. What if city after city privatises its water services?"

Picture: Public handpumps such as this one could be a thing of the past if states go ahead with privatisation of water supply.

Now you know why our planners, Ministers and bureaucrats are eager to privatise. There is big bucks in it. Major `studies' and contracts are being awarded to private groups. As this deepens, people and governments will suffer huge losses. But government officials and private corporations will make giant gains.

The corporate hijack of water is on worldwide and one of the most important processes of our time. The World Bank and the IMF help ram it through. Water privatisation has often been shoved into their loan conditionalities in the past decade.

In few nations will the damage be as terrible and complex as in India. Here water use is already very unequal. Most irrigation and drinking water in India, for instance, has a clear caste geography. Even the layout of our villages reflects that. The dalit basti is always on the outskirts, where there is least access to water. Barring dalits from the main water sources of the village are not just about the 'social' horror of untouchability. It is also about curbing their access to this vital resource.

It is also closely tied to the framework of class. About 118 million households -- 62 per cent of the total -- do not have drinking water at home. As census household survey data analysed by Dr. S. L. Rao show, 300 million Indians draw water from community taps or handpumps. (Many World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects, by the way, will end up doing away with those community taps.)

About five million Indian families (roughly the population of Canada) still draw water from ponds, tanks, rivers and springs. This is a stratified society. The big dams that have displaced millions of Indians in the past decades have also narrowed control and access to water. Atop this structured inequity, we now install hyper-inequality.

A huge share of India's public health problems are linked to water-borne or water-related diseases. Diarrhoea alone claims lakhs of lives each year. Further reducing the access of poor people to clean water will sharply worsen matters. In State after State, the laws are being rewritten. A prelude to handing over control of both drinking and irrigation water to corporations. The Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act simply prices farmers out of agriculture. If the rates implied in the act are actually imposed, irrigation costs could be in thousands of rupees per acre. It would in fact be more than what most farmers earn per acre.

At the same time as more and more fields run dry, golf courses dripping pesticides and guzzling over a million litres of water a day come up in regions of high stress. Even in Rajasthan. (In the Philippines, there have been shootouts between farmers affected by golf courses and the hired goons of the course owners.)

India is a nation of subsistence farmers. When you privatise the rivers and the streams, the canals and the dams, you privatise rainfall. And you ask for a social tsunami. This is also the swiftest route to corporatisation of agriculture. In that sector, we are already forcing out millions of small private owners called farmers. The task is to hand it all over to large corporations. This policy-engineered agrarian crisis wracking rural India is also about the greatest planned displacement ever in our history Water will be a major weapon used against farmers in this process.

Noble terms serve to whitewash the theft of water from the poor. In Angul in Orissa, the World Bank sought to hand over water to the rich. And called the process 'pani panchayats.' There, the 'rotation' of canal water use saw to it that poor farmers could have a rabi crop only once in two years. With people rebelling, this 'model' collapsed. But not before causing much misery. In Andhra Pradesh, too, the Water Users Associations were mostly headed by the biggest landlords and contractors of the region.

Just think of the trouble we're begging for. Almost every giant political headache in this country is linked to water. The single most explosive issue in South India is the Cauvery waters dispute between Tamilnadu and Karnataka. Then there is the Almatti problem vexing Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka relations. There is the fight over the Kabini waters between Karnataka and Kerala. Even the 'Khalistan problem' had a distinct link to the struggle over the Ravi-Beas waters. Water conflicts in India also affect regions of the same state. The Krishna-Godavari water disputes drive conflict within Andhra Pradesh. The list is endless. Further, across the country, water conflicts of many kinds seep right down to intra-village battles and bloodshed .

Some of our worst troubles with neighbours have also been about water. The Kosi barrage with Nepal. The Farakka Barrage with Bangladesh. Indus waters with Pakistan. Over decades, we've made things a lot worse. The unregulated spread of borewells was an early form of privatisation. The richer you are, the more wells you can sink, the deeper you can go. It has proved quite disastrous. Many poorer farmers have seen their dug wells sucked dry as neighbours collar all the groundwater. In the end, it can destroy the entire village. Mushampally village in Nalgonda in AP has more borewells than human beings. The damage done to the aquifer has been terrible. Even the richest farmers also went bankrupt as water stress peaked.

In his bid to privatise water when chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu wound up the irrigation development corporation of Andhra Pradesh. Which meant it was now each farm for itself. That led to lakhs of new borewells being sunk across the state. With disastrous results. Water shortages in many states have also led to the emergence of 'water lords' who make a fortune by selling the liquid. In Anantapur, some of these are former farmers who find this more lucrative than agriculture ever was. In the cities, millions dwell in slums where they might pay the same rates others do for water. But they get far less and spend far more time in getting it. Against this deadly backdrop comes water privatisation. If even the upper middle classes of Delhi loathe it, imagine the plight of poor people in Chandrapur.

And get this. India could be the first nation in the world to nationalise its rivers and privatise their waters. That is if we go ahead with the great river interlining project. Nationalise? And privatise? The linking scheme would demand the former. The latter we are already deep into. Of course you can, like in Chhattisgarh, sell or lease the river itself.

Those bringing it to you include some of the top corporations in the world. Some of the companies now making a beeline for India have been turfed out of Latin America. Suez, one of the Big Three of water, told the Guardian that "it was almost impossible for it to work in Latin America or Africa. And so, instead, it would "be concentrating on China, India and Eastern Europe." The company did not mention that it had been tossed out of Grenoble in its native France as well. As Maude Barlow points out, that city also jailed its ownAs she also shows, it's not just any racket. It's scale is stunning. "Bottled water costs up to 10,000 times more than tap water in local communities. For the same price as one bottle, 1,000 gallons of water could be delivered to a person's home."

In Bolivia, when the MNC Bechtel took control of the water supply in the city of Cochabamba, it raised prices by 200 per cent. In cities in Peru, Chile and other nations too, water was priced out of the reach of the poor. All of them saw widespread unrest and political turmoil. Tiny Uruguay has set an example for the rest of the world. It amended its constitution in 2004 to bar private control of water and to declare water "a fundamental human right." This followed a referendum where close to two-thirds of the voters rejected privatisation.

The U.S. Ambassador calls for 'Public-private partnerships' (read privatisation) in India. Yet, as a report cited by Public Citizen points out: "About 85 per cent of all the water that comes out of a tap in the U.S. is delivered by a publicly owned and publicly operated system." That was and is the norm. Though the drive for profit will change things there, too.

Meanwhile, in India, the battles have begun. Protests across the country show that people will not take it lying down. Still, with so much money to be made, the privatisers will not just go away. The waters have just begun to get choppy. And we're in at the deep end.

mayor and a senior Suez executive for bribery.

260 million Indians still below poverty line

2007-10-28T01:08:00.001-07:00

Aarti Dhar

A LARGE proportion — 26 per cent or about 260 million (193 million in rural areas and 67 million in urban areas) — of Indians are still below the poverty line, according to India's first Social Development Report released in New Delhi on Friday.

The spatial map and social base of poverty have significantly changed over time and poverty is increasingly concentrated in a few geographical locations and among specific social groups. Among the States, Punjab has the lowest incidence of poverty (6.16 per cent as per 1999-2000 figures), followed by Haryana with 8.74 per cent, and Kerala with 12.72 per cent. Orissa has the highest number of people living below the poverty line (47.15 per cent), followed by Bihar (42.60 per cent), and Assam (36.09 per cent). While poverty levels have shown a decline, there is huge disparity among the social classes with the percentage of the poor among the Scheduled Tribes being 43.8 per cent, Scheduled Castes 36.2 per cent, and Other Backward Classes 21 per cent.

Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, which account for 45 per cent of the country's population, also account for two-thirds of the infant mortality rate in the country (26 per cent in Uttar Pradesh alone), and two-thirds of the maternal mortality rate. Less than 25 per cent of the children in these States are immunised.

Rural Kerala tops the States in social indicators followed by Himachal Pradesh. Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, and Haryana figure among the best-performing States while Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa are at the bottom. The 21 indicators taken into account while grading the States included demography, health care, education, unemployment, poverty and social deprivation.

In the urban scenario, Kerala has been pushed to the third rank. Himachal Pradesh tops the list followed by Punjab, Karnataka, and Assam. At the bottom are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa.

The report, brought out by the Council for Social Development and Oxford, says Kerala has the lowest infant mortality rate of 11 deaths per 1,000 births, followed by Mizoram and Goa at 16. Orissa has the highest IMR of 83 deaths per 1,000 births, Madhya Pradesh has 82, and Uttar Pradesh 76.

Among the disadvantaged classes, the IMR is higher among Scheduled Castes (83). It is 85.2 among the Scheduled Tribes, and 76 among the other disadvantaged classes compared to the rate of 61.8 among the rest of the population. A similar trend is witnessed with regard to the mortality rate of children under five, underweight children, children and women with anaemia.

The report brings out the need to harness the nation's social energy to ensure a fair and equitable process of development, identifies key concerns, and proposes possible intervention measures.

Kerala has the highest literacy rate of 90.92 per cent, followed by Mizoram at 88.49 per cent, and Goa at 82.32 per cent. Bihar has the lowest literacy rate of 47.53 per cent, Jharkhand 54.13 per cent, and Jammu and Kashmir 54.46. However, Mizoram tops the States with the lowest gender gap in literacy with a difference of only 4.56 percentage points.

In Meghalaya it is 5.73 percentage points and 6.34 percentage points in Kerala. Rajasthan has shown a large gap in gender literacy of 32.12 percentage points, Jharkhand 28.56 percentage points, and U.P. 27.25 percentage points.

Ironic as it may sound, Punjab ranks high in the urban social indicators but has the lowest child sex ratio of 798 girls to 1,000 boys. Haryana is slightly better at 819 and Gujarat is at 883. The traditional societies, including tribal communities, have an impressive sex ratio of 975 girls to 1,000 boys (Chhattisgarh), 973 (Meghalaya), and 966 in Tripura — much higher than the national figure of 906.

The Feel Good Factory

2007-10-28T01:07:00.000-07:00

First the good news. There's been a huge decline in poverty levels. The Government, the CSO, the Media, the CMIE, and just about anyone else you talk to is bullish on growth. We have emerged one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The Sensex has crossed the 6000-mark three times in as many months. Our foreign exchange reserves are now so huge that Jaswant Singh commands Indian companies to "Go out and conquer the world. (George W. here we come). We will be there at every step for you. There is over 100 billion dollars of forex reserves. That is to be put to use, not to be kept under a lock and key." Leading economists are telling us we've never had it so good. In the media, The Golden Age is Upon Us. Leave alone the mainstream for a moment. You know it's a new world when the Economic & Political Weekly finds space for a piece that trashes the Millennium Goals as irrelevant. In India, we achieved those a long time ago. What's more, thousands of young Indians are successfully faking American accents. (If you can't beat `em, cheat `em.) And while we may have got thumped in the VB series, we did retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy. That too, against Australia in Australia. Pakistan, here we come. What more could anyone possibly ask for? When have we ever had it so good?
WELCOME to India Shining. To where the government spends - and various media receive - 4,000 million rupees of your money to tell you how good you're feeling.
Let us be fair, though. Most of the India Shining claims are true. As long as we are talking about 10 per cent of the population. When some of this country's top economists and academics tell me we have never had it so good, I believe that too. Truly, some of them have never had it so good. Never in the annals of Indian academia have so many `consultancies' brought so much to so few - at the expense of so many.

But let us not deny true credit where it belongs - to the media as well. India Shines Best when they apply the polish.
In the media world of 2003, India shone brightest - justly so - in Mumbai. All the great events of the year could not rival a single week in that city. Remember those "Century's Greatest Drought" headlines? Or the farmers' suicides? Many young journalists tried hard to tell those stories. But they were denied the space or time to do so by their bosses.
The best figure I could come up with for `national' media journalists covering the rural crisis through one full week was six. Those covering the Lakme India Fashion Week for a full seven days? Over 400 (accredited plus daily pass holders). Between them, they produced in one count, some 400,000 words in print. Also, over 1,000 minutes in TV coverage. Some 800 hours of TV/video footage were shot. And close to 10,000 rolls of film exposed.
India does not get much shinier than that. Consider that this was the main media event in a country where less than 0.2 per cent of the population sports designer clothes. Where per capita consumption of textiles in 2002 at 19 metres was way below the world average. And this was a fashion show which drew more journalists than buyers.
The Sensex might be on a dream run and the markets booming and investors thrilled. But it's still worth recalling this happens in a country where 65 per cent of households do not have a bank account. (In rural India, that is 70 per cent, according to the Census of India household survey.) And where tens of millions of farmers live and die in debt.
The fastest growing sector in India Shining is not IT or software, textiles or automobiles. It is inequality. That has grown faster than at any other time since Independence. And at a stunning pace these past five or six years. What has grown with it, is the mindset that inequality breeds. One that dehumanises the poor. That sees their plight as solely of their own making. Where farmers committing suicide are people with `psychological problems' (code for being nuts). And `you know how much these people drink'.
It is in the shining years that we exported grain to foreign markets at prices far lower than those we forced our own people below the poverty line to pay. At the height of misery in rural Andhra Pradesh in 2002, the hungry were forced to buy rice at Rs.6.40 a kilogram. This, in drought-hit regions. At the same time, we exported rice at Rs.5.45 a kg.
Maybe Walter Bagehot got it right in the 19th century. This early editor of The Economist wrote: "Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult (for them) to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell."
It is in these past few years, too, that India slipped from rank 124 to 127 in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme. That is an index measuring average achievement in terms of "a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living." And it shows that you are better off being poor in Botswana, El Salvador, Guatemala or the Occupied Territories of the Palestine - than in India.
The orgy of celebration over elite consumption, under way these past so many years, is most dangerous. The exercise called India Shining might draw a little criticism in some sections of the media. (Usually those that did not get their share of the ads.) But it reflects fairly a national elite that is into kidding itself big time. (The Congress(I)-Bharatiya Janata Party debate over India Shining is mostly over who applied the polish first.)
Others, too, have joined the celebrations. The global media have done their bit to add lustre to the shine. Last October, an impressed New York Times gave much space to the rise of the Mall Culture in India. Which set off another round of self-congratulatory stories on this subject within the Indian media. The kids eating at McDonalds. The "mushrooming" of fast food joints. The idea of whole families spending much of their weekend at the Malls. All pretty symbolic of India Shining. "Feeding Frenzy" was one cover story last year about how well Indians were eating. How speciality restaurants were booming.
Sure, much of this is true. It is happening. Whether food or other items, rich Indians are consuming on a scale even they have never managed before. In a country which accounts for the largest number of malnourished children in the world. Which is still home to about half the planet's hungry people. Where nearly nine out of 10 pregnant women aged between 15 and 49 years suffer from malnutrition and anaemia. And where about half of all children under five suffer moderate or severe malnourishment or stunting. Most of these are girls. (Luckily, we do have a reassuring headline from The Times of India. That is from its Sunsilk Femina Miss India contest: "Beautiful Women Don't Starve." January 21, 2003)
In at least three States, no mid-day meal scheme was in place in 2003. That is, a year after the Supreme Court made it mandatory for them to have one.
It is an India where, as Prof. Utsa Patnaik devastatingly points out: "The average family is absorbing annually nearly 100 kg less of foodgrain today than a mere five years ago. (That is) a phenomenal drop... never seen before in the last century of India's history." As she has shown, the absolute amount of per capita food availability for the year 2002-03 was lower than during the time of the Bengal famine.
BUT the Utsa Patnaiks are talking of a different territory. Call it India Burning. The planned destruction of agriculture has pushed millions more into mass migrations. That in turn has seen more children drop out of school and even college in large numbers. Dalit and Adivasi students are worst-affected. Studies from crisis districts clearly show that. The number of days landless labourers find work has fallen steeply. For too many, there is no work to be found. Not that it is easy to get it elsewhere. Last year, lakhs of workers from Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh arrived in Bangalore and nearby towns. This simply crashed the daily wage there.

Sure, it is nice that a few thousand youngsters in urban India are getting work at call centres. But it does not begin to address our problems. The years 1996-97 to 2000-01 had seen close to 9 lakh organised sector jobs vanish. Little has happened to turn that around.
In the villages, the collapse of communities has destroyed social bonds and broken up families. The debt owed to moneylenders has mounted as farmers are denied credit by banks. (It is simpler today to get low-interest loans to buy a Mercedes Benz than it is to raise one for agricultural purposes.)
As what little remains of the public health system goes under, people are more than ever at the mercy of private providers. Health expenditure is now the second fastest growing component of rural family debt. Meanwhile, the rich patronise super-speciality hospitals and weight-loss clinics. This season's big media story in Mumbai was the raid on Anjali Mukherjee's weight-loss clinic. Her outfit was accused of supplying `weight-loss tablets' with possible harmful side-effects. That to an elite clientele including a former Chief Minister and an ex-Municipal Commissioner.
There's India Shining in a nutshell. Thousands of well-off Indians trying to lose weight. Hundreds of millions of poor Indians, consuming less calories than before, trying desperately not to lose any more weight. Weight loss versus weight already lost.
The debt crisis in rural India has led to loss of land, spurred more migrations and pushed women and young girls into prostitution. In some villages, the number of marriage functions has dropped sharply as many cannot afford them.
At the other end of the spectrum are "theme weddings". In these, lakhs of rupees are spent on structures that will be pulled down in a few hours. This means building huge canvas and wooden structures replicating, say, the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel for the couple to be wed in. Delhi, in its patriotic fervour, has had Kargil for a theme wedding. Where dead plastic soldiers lie atop the tent, doubtless to bring home the solemn nature of the occasion to guests. These costs are apart from what is spent on food, drink, transport and wardrobes.
And yes, CEO salaries in this period have been shining. Take the list citing Dhirubhai Ambani's last salary. This appeared in The Economic Times a little before his death. It showed him taking home close to Rs.9 crores. (And that from just Reliance Industries.) That is about 30,000 times what a poor landless agricultural worker in Kalahandi might make in a year. Which is around Rs.3,000.
What sort of society can endure such inequality? And for how long? Prof. Paul Krugman of Princeton wrote in The New York Times that he believed a gap of 1:1000 between the lowest worker and the top CEO to be more than bad. He sees that kind of gap as harmful to democracy itself in his country. How do we measure the impact on our democracy of a gap of 1:30,000? A country in which such inequalities still grow swiftly at so many levels?
In Mumbai, bowling alleys opened up in the past few years as part of this growing prosperity. This, on the land once occupied by textile mills - several of whose retrenched workers have taken their own lives. You might spend hundreds of rupees in such places in just hours. The laws then did not permit the use of this space for the leisure games of the rich. So the bowling alley and its add-on facilities went up as a "workers' recreation centre". The millionaires ran their alley. The mill workers face destitution. This is where India Shining meets India Burning.
The spread of such places of diversion for the better off is a major feature of India Shining. Water Parks are high on this list. Last May saw bad water problems in Mumbai. Countless thousands of women queued up for water in the slums each morning for hours on end. In and around the same Mumbai, others had no such problems. There were 24 amusement and water parks using 50 billion litres of water a day for the entertainment of the rich.
In Rajasthan, plagued by water scarcity for five years, we plan more water parks and golf courses. A single golf course takes 1.8 to 2.3 million litres of water a day through the season. On that amount of water, one lakh villagers in that State could have all their water needs met right through summer. This unfolds in a country that wants to spend what equals roughly a fourth of its GDP on linking tens of rivers.
IT has been during these shining years that the Supreme Court of India has pulled up six States - more than once - over starvation deaths. Still the deaths continued to mount. In October 2002, an angered court said it would hold the Chief Secretaries of the States directly responsible for such deaths. But they still occur. In Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa and several other states. Rich Maharashtra has seen a large number of such deaths in its tribal belt.
In 2001, these trends, amongst others, forced K.R. Narayanan to make the harshest Republic Day Speech ever heard from a President of India. "It seems, in the social realm, some kind of a counter revolution is taking place... As a society, we are becoming increasingly insensitive and callous...
"The unabashed vulgar indulgence in conspicuous consumption by the noveau riche has left the underclass seething... One half of our society guzzles aerated beverages, while the other has to make do with palmfuls of muddied water."
Last year in Rayalaseema, I found villagers ashamed to offer me water. It was a filthy, dark brown liquid. Sediment floated around the glass tumbler. However, Coke and Pepsi were easy to get. The soft-drink makers were able to access clean water in the region. But locals could not.
In May 2003, some colonies in Hyderabad were getting water once in two or three days. And that for a few hours. At the same time, the government of Andhra Pradesh was supplying clean, processed water to Coke at about 25 paisa a litre. The same stuff that can be resold to you at about 12 rupees a litre in a plastic bottle.
In the mindset inequality has bred amongst us, one aspect stands out as perhaps the saddest. The lack of outrage over farmers' suicides across the country. Too many academics, researchers and journalists have looked away. Where is the time? When there are so many `purchasing power studies' to be planned? So many consultancies and plugs to be done for the very forces driving the farmers to despair?
In just the single district of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, over 2,000 people committed suicide between 1997 and 2001. Mostly farmers in severe debt. The next two years, too, saw suicides mount. In 2002, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh was frank with the press. He said there had been at least 600 farmers' suicides in his State in the preceding year. One estimate in The Tribune placed the numbers of suicides in Punjab at 3,000 annually. In Uttar Pradesh, it has been sugarcane farmers. In Maharashtra, cotton growers. But when did farmers' suicides as a national phenomenon make the cover of any news magazine?
There is much achievement in India to celebrate. The claims of India Shining are not amongst them. And they will increasingly prove an embarrassment to the campaign's authors. Meanwhile, one small section benefits while many millions suffer the effects of our present economic policies. And while the gap between rich and poor gets ever more obscene, maybe we need another kind of campaign. Call it India Thinking

CEOs and the wealth of notions

2007-10-28T01:06:00.000-07:00

Gross inequality does far more than breed resentment. It destroys millions of lives, devastates the access of the poor to basic needs, dehumanises both its victims and its votaries, and undermines democracy itself.

"THE PRIME Minister wants CEOs to create wealth for the nation. Then he wants them to take pay cuts." That's a slogan gracing the huge hoardings put up by a Mumbai newspaper. It's over two weeks since Manmohan Singh asked the Confederation of Indian Industry's annual general meeting "to resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and discourage conspicuous consumption." But the cries of wounded crorepatis still rent the air.

It must intrigue Dr. Singh that the media have been far more hostile than industry itself. After all, the CII had invited him to speak on `inclusive growth.' This is the politically correct jargon of our times. His speech at the event was as vanilla as it gets. It bore no strictures, carried no warning. In effect, the super-rich were told it was okay to be quite greedy, but not obnoxiously and conspicuously greedy. The subtle distinction escaped his audience and enraged the media. The speech drew more editorials in a week than the subject of inequality did all of last year.

The front page stories were more editorials than news reports. Dailies ran whole pages of "debates" on inequality and CEO pay packets. Pages with headlines such as "India Inc & India Red Ink." Most concluded that, actually, we're not so bad after all on the inequality front. The odd dissenter was published, giving the rest of the rant a focal point and a soft target.

The media see themselves as the cutting edge of India's Brave New World. So it was earlier too, when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance hogged massive publicity for its India Shining campaign. Far beyond even what they had paid for with countless crores of public money. For the media, it was and is a mission. One which produces that warm and righteous glow that only the happy wedding of Cause & Commerce can. The poll debacle of 2004 earned us a brief respite from the mantra.

Weeks ago, Mani Shankar Aiyar made a far more devastating speech on the "classes and the masses." It drew a scathing picture of the state of things. The media absorbed that more calmly. After all, Mr. Aiyar was not the "architect of the reforms." Dr. Singh was, so the sense of betrayal still pours out from the television screens.

One thing stands out, though. The most hated line of the Prime Minister's speech (apart from daring to suggest that CEOs might survive on a few rupees less) was this: "Such vulgarity insults the poverty of the less privileged." That annoyed the media. Should the `reforms' be derailed because of the `resentment' of some over the success of others?

This is the debate at its lowest. Inequality has many faces. The kind we have nurtured in the `reform' years does a lot more than "plant seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots." It destroys millions of lives, devastates the access of the poor to basic needs, dehumanises both its victims and its votaries, and undermines democracy itself. It was there earlier, of course. What's new is the ruthlessness with which we have engineered its growth these past 15 years.

This week's big news is that Mumbai has topped Maharashtra's HSC results with a pass percentage of 76.67. That should not surprise us. The metro's schools and facilities outclass those of other regions. True, even this time, the State toppers are not from Mumbai. They are from Wardha (in Nagpur division) and Amravati. Both in Vidharbha. But at 47.5 and 51.08 per cent, the overall pass percentages of those divisions are dismal. They are way below the State average of 64.25 per cent. And both have fared worse than they did last year.

Here's one reason why. Vidharbha, always electricity starved, saw 12- to 17-hour power cuts at the time the children were studying for their examinations. (It's a region where schools re-open weeks late to avoid exposing children to excessive heat.) The great metro of Mumbai was spared this "power crisis." (Some of the well meaning did write articles on how to be a good citizen and use your air conditioners more efficiently.) In one estimate, a 15-minute power cut in Mumbai could give Vidharbha two hours of electricity. Half that would have helped the students with their examinations. Further, malls and multiplexes lead Mumbai's biggest power guzzlers. But this is the city of 25,000 of India's 83,000 dollar millionaires. Not only home "to the largest number of affluent individuals," as an American Express study puts it. But also having "the fastest growing affluent population in the world." So the darkness is banished to zones such as Vidharbha — which produces more power than the other regions of Maharashtra.

Inequality in the context of growing commercialisation of education means that millions of bright and talented students are shut out from a better future for want of money. That rubs in an old truth. Merit = accident of birth + electricity. (And maybe a dash of geography.) In health, a fifth of Indians no longer seek any kind of medical treatment. Because they cannot afford it. In law and justice, each month brings us a new and shameful example of how the law is not an ass but a far more malleable creature.

Still, what outraged the media most was: CEO salaries. Touching them is "against the spirit of the reforms." Earlier this year, a programme on an English TV channel asked: Has the reform process largely favoured the rich and corporations? Close to 70 per cent of an audience of younger generation corporate executives answered `yes.' The anchor's own take was revealing. When one of the tycoons argued for `inclusive growth' she laughed and told him: "You're sounding like a politician. That's the language they use."

This fortnight's debate did have its moments. Its highlight: Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia defending the Prime Minister's statement on television. Endorsing a call for corporate restraint must have been embarrassing for Mr. Ahluwalia. He said that, er, well you know, ahem, the Prime Minister did not quite really, in his view, uh, say, exactly what was being ascribed to him. Then he brightened up. "It's an issue even in America," he said, quite rightly, of obscene corporate salaries.

Well, it's been an issue there for two decades or more. Five years before Mr. Ahluwalia stumbled upon the debate in the United States, Merrill Lynch, Lucent Technologies, Citigroup, and AT& T axed over 91,000 workers between them. The same year, their four CEOs took home more than $130 million in pay. (Plus more millions in stock options and other sops). Lucent Technologies in fact (as the New York Daily News pointed out) reported a $17 billion loss and sacked 56,000 workers. Then it gave its CEO a $22 million payoff.

Management guru Tom Peters long ago suggested that CEOs be called CDOs: that is, chief destruction officers. Because "you essentially get paid for blowing up your own business before the competition does."

In India, the ILO reports that labour productivity shot up 84 per cent between 1990 and 2002. But real wages in manufacturing fell 22 per cent in the same period. It sees this as "an indication of deterioration in the incomes and livelihoods of workers. Despite the increasing efficiency of their labour." This was also a period when CEO salaries had begun clocking all-time records. Even now, top-end compensations in India are growing much faster than in the U.S.

Meanwhile, two days after the Prime Minister's speech, the media hailed the New Dawn. The emergence of India's first trillionaire in Reliance chief Mukesh Ambani. As one writer puts it: "expressed as a percentage of profits, Indian company heads are far above their global counterparts ... For every Rs.1 crore earned as profit, the Indian CEOs take home Rs.16,800." Global CEOs take home Rs.9,900.

"Government cannot legislate CEO salaries." That's a line running through most attacks on Dr. Singh. They do legislate taxes, though. And also a low-end wage. About the one thing Tony Blair can look back on without shame is his government's minimum wage law. The Guardian points out that as a result of it, "Britain's lowest-paid workers enjoyed a higher improvement in their standard of living since 2003 than those in any other European country."

Over five years ago, Paul Krugman, in a devastating piece on inequality in the U.S., found it obscene when a CEO there earned a thousand times what an ordinary worker did. What about us? Presently, the average package of the top five Indian CEOs is around Rs.13.5 crore. The lowest paid workers in their own companies would earn 15,000-20,000 times less. If we compare these top incomes to those of agricultural workers, the gap would be 32,000:1 or worse.

Dr. Krugman argued that it was not simply economic well-being that such levels of inequality threatened. It was democracy itself. He's in good company. Decades ago, the architect of a very different kind of reforms than those Dr. Singh represents, put it sharply. Dr. Ambedkar warned that a lack of economic and social democracy would spell doom for our political democracy. In Dr. Krugman's own nation, long ago, Justice Louis Brandeis said the same thing: "We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both."