In defence of Pandit Nehru

Darryl D'Monte talks about his recent participation in a discussion on Nayantara Sahgal's book on Nehru, which delves into Nehruvian policies, his cherished dreams, his lasting legacy and its importance in today's time.

At a time when the entire legacy of Nehru is being questioned – admittedly the pitch has been queered by the dubious, corrupt Congress party regime in recent times – it was appropriate that none other than the Nehru Centre in Mumbai held a discussion on his niece Nayantara Sahgal’s new, edited book Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation (Speaking Tiger, 192pp), which this columnist chaired.

Cover image of Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation. Pic: Speaking Tiger

All ten contributors and his niece in her introduction put up a strong defence of the first Prime Minister. Predictably, Mani Shankar Aiyar, a close buddy of his grandson, Rajiv, distinguishes Panditji not only as a man of action, but of the right action, as distinct from Vallabhai Patel. To elaborate this point further, he questions whether Nehru was the thinker and Sardar the doer, as is often stated nowadays.

Aiyar lists four great contributions of Nehru: Democracy, Secularism, Socialism and Non-alignment. He reminds us that of the 150 countries liberated in the world after 1947, India is the only one of its size and diversity to remain a democracy. One has only to cast an eye on our immediate neighbours, even across the Palk Straits, to drive home that point.

The one exception among the contributors is the journalist and author Hartosh Singh Bal, who was born in the 1960s and therefore didn’t treat Nehru as his Chacha or in other words, inherit his legacy.

Historians Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee note that at independence, over 8 out of every ten Indians (over 9 in the case of women) couldn’t read or write. An Indian could be expected to live for around 30 years, which meant the poor died much younger, echoing Susan George’s 1976 expose How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger (freely downloadable at https://www.tni.org/en/publication/how-the-other-half-dies).

Per capita income had been shrinking annually at 0.2 percent per year for the 30 years preceding 1947, encompassing the terrible Bengal famine. Farm output was shrinking at 0.72 percent per annum and foodgrains even faster at 1.14 percent. They write: “Nehru was to launch a brilliant multi-pronged strategy to lift India out of this morass which set an example to numerous other countries emerging out of colonialism after the Second World War.”

Author of Nehru’s India and Nehru's niece Nayantara Sahgal. Pic: Speaking Tiger

However, as the historians observe, neo-colonial authors like Tirthankar Roy, a labour expert formerly from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and now in the economic history department of the London School of Economics (LSE) and his fellow LSE economist Lord Meghnad Desai, who was once a leftist, dismiss the colossal economic achievements of Nehru.

Desai characterises the first 44 years after independence, till the ushering in of economic liberalisation in 1991, as a ‘wasted opportunity.’ They probably derive this inference from the runaway success of the erstwhile Asian Tigers, now joined by the mother of all big cats, China, which substituted a protectionist policy towards domestic industry by export-led growth.

However, as has often been pointed out, all the Tigers, Japan in particular, also relied on fierce state-led industrial protectionism in their early growth years. Also, they weren’t faced by a unique Indian dilemma: how to propel a huge country like India, with half its population below the poverty line, into the 21st century?

Sunil Khilnani, in his The Idea of India (1997, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York) writes: "It was by no means a foregone conclusion that, after 1947, India would embark on a path of planned industrialisation. Its huge agrarian economy was one of the most impoverished in the world; from Gandhi it had inherited a vision deeply opposed to the project of industrial modernity; and, although it possessed powerful industrial capitalists (at the end of the Second World War, India was the tenth largest producer of manufactured goods in the world), they did not form a united class strong enough to push through a project of industrialisation against a society of rentiers, farmers and traders.”

All capitalists like the Dalmias and Birlas made their killing by hoarding goods (hence, rentiers) during the First World War (the Tatas from opium sold to China) and investing their considerable surpluses in a wide range of industries.

While it is undeniable that post-independence, in many cases, protectionist policies coddled Indian industrialists and shielded them from the searing winds of global competition, the state did help manufacturers to grow by capturing the “commanding heights of the economy” – the public sector – which laid the foundation for a somewhat delayed private sector take-off.

Rather than Nehruvian policies, or possibly only partly because of them, Indian industry chose to take the path of least resistance and look to short-term gain rather than invest for the future. Nowhere was this clearer than in the textile industry, which first was hamstrung by the British Raj protecting and promoting Manchester rather than Bombay or Ahmedabad.

However, cotton textile mill owners like the Tatas and Mafatlals chose to bleed their mills and invest their considerable profits into more lucrative industries in Mumbai such as heavy machinery, chemicals and petro-chemicals, in chronological order. When the time came in the 1970s and 1980s for the mills to compete with the Tigers, they couldn’t because their machinery was obsolete.

The Mukherjees state upfront that had India adopted a laissez faire policy in the 1950s, it would surely have headed towards becoming a “banana republic”.  Indeed, at the Nehru Centre book discussion, a member of the audience asked panellists what would have happened had the Jan Sangh, the progenitor of the BJP, ruled India instead of the Congress in 1947.

The audience at the discussion, Nehru Centre, Mumbai. Pic: Nehru Centre Library

According to Aruna Pendse, who teaches politics at Mumbai University and was one of the two participants at the discussion, it would have almost certainly meant throwing in our fortunes with those of the US. That would have further meant participating in the Cold War instead of adhering to Nehru’s non-alignment.

She cited, as an exemplar of such kowtowing to US imperialism, the case of Thailand which, incidentally, has never been colonised but may be said to have felt the hot breath of neo-colonialism under US tutelage. It has served as an US army base for decades. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, it was an “R&R” (rest and recreation, partly a euphemism for prostitution) centre for American troops. That undermining of the country’s morals persists, as any visitor to the fleshpots of Patpong in Bangkok or the beaches of Pattaya can testify.

Moderating perspectives

Lest the reader infer that this columnist is a die-hard Nehruvian, one must set the record straight. All environmentalists believe that many of the so-called development policies that Nehru and his daughter pursued actually ended up adding to the misery of the marginalised.

In 1985, I published a book titled Temples or Tombs? Industry versus Environment: Three Controversies (Centre for Science & Environment) where I turned on its head Panditji’s oft-quoted remark (in Hindi, actually) when he opened the Bhakra-Nangal dam in 1954:

Probably nowhere else in the world is there a dam as high as this...As I walked around the site, I thought that these days the biggest temple and mosque and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind. Which place can be greater than this, Bhakra-Nangal?

The fact is the emphasis on such infrastructure and heavy industry – the commanding heights – were at the cost of agriculture, village crafts and small enterprises, which explains why much of India is still mired in poverty.

Although Nehru once said that “Everything can wait but not agriculture”, it took the food crisis of the 1960s which propelled us towards reliance on US “ship-to-mouth” PL 480 grain aid shipments, to serve as a wake-up call.

Ironically, it was only through another US-inspired innovation, the Green Revolution in wheat, that the country became self-sufficient in food (though it became reliant on input-intensive agriculture, now veering into cash crops instead of food).

Again, Nehru’s attempted land reforms were so necessary for farm output to increase by allowing sharecroppers or the landless to acquire their own two or so acres. But at best, these were half-baked; at worst, the contemporaneous Gandhian Bhoodan (voluntary land donation) movement hardly dented the problem.

Still, the failed transformation of agriculture took place in a democratic framework, unlike our Big Neighbour to the East, China, where countless peasants – demographers put it between 18 and 32 million – died in “The Great Leap Forward” from farming to industry.

Daniel Thorner -- the renowned American economist who fled his native country during the McCarthy era, made India his home and introduced peasants in the study of agriculture along with D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma -- once pointed out that India achieved on the farm front in just 21 years after freedom what it had taken the previous 200 years to accomplish.

Incidentally, Nehru himself said, in 1948, “What is a young man’s ambition today?...They think of becoming economists, because an economist plays a big part in the modern world.”

Current debates

In today’s India, more than Nehru’s economic policies, it is his political and sociological inclinations, particularly on Kashmir and secularism that have come under severe fire. The late poet A.K. Ramanujam once likened Nehru’s penchant for diversity to what an Irish politician said about trousers.  The very same vestment was singular at the top, but plural at the bottom.

In somewhat the same vein, ecologists believe that tropical ecosystems harbour the most diverse life on the planet; by extrapolating this to India’s society, the more diverse it is, the more robust it will turn out to be.

 

At the discussion- Aruna Pendse( left) , Darryl D'Monte (center) and Rakesha Chaturvedi (right). Pic: Nehru Centre Library

At the Nehru Centre book discussion, a discordant note was struck by the other panellist, Rakesha Chaturvedi, who teaches junior college at the NSS Hill Spring International School in Mumbai. She called for the integration of the minorities into the “mainstream” and asserted that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shouldn’t be blamed for Muslim fundamentalism.

By contrast, Bal elaborates on the perceived wrongs on the part of the Hindu right in his chapter titled “The Truth-teller”.  He writes, “The RSS’s worldview has internalised the idea of defeat by colonial powers, and now seeks refuge at hostility at everything suggestive of that defeat.” He goes beyond the Raj to cite the psychological wounds inflicted by Islamic rulers and adds: “The RSS’ hatred of Christianity and Islam is only a manifestation of a much larger malaise.”

Upping the ante, Chaturvedi advocated splitting Pakistan into four separate ethnic nations which alone would ward off the unwanted attentions towards India of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Otherwise, Pakistan was held together only by the hatred of India. “India is a nation with a military, Pakistan a military nation,” she remarked.

Pendse replied that dismembering Pakistan would be most unsustainable for that country. Besides, what kind of nation would we then have on our border? It would bring the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) to our very doorstep, and considerably heighten the threat of terrorism.

She asked the audience to remember the threat posed by the separatist movement of Khalistan.  Had he been alive, Nehru -- who believed in the five principles of Panchseel – would never have interfered with the internal affairs of his neighbours in the aggressive manner that Chaturvedi spelt out.

In conclusion, I remarked that after two visits to Pakistan, I have learnt what Pakistanis think of India. They perceive us as this huge country, with the fourth or so largest army in the world and one which has beaten Pakistan to becoming a nuclear power.

I could have added that if anything, Pakistan suffers far worse Islamic terrorist attacks than this country, almost on a weekly basis. I could have further added, quoting Gandhiji, someone who is also the Hindu Right’s bête noire: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

These times call for a much greater and reasoned adherence to Nehru’s cherished ideals than ever before.

Darryl D'Monte

24 September 2015

Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

On the waterfront in Mumbai

Mumbai’s port land should be redeveloped to benefit, among others, the dock workers and slum dwellers, says a recently released report by city based NGOs Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) and Hamara Shehar Vikas Niyojan Abhiyaan. Darryl D’Monte analyses the report.

Mumbai’s port land extends over 752 hectares (ha or 1,858 acres), occupying one-eighth of Mumbai’s island city, making the Mumbai Port Trust (MPT) the city’s largest owner of real estate. The port comprises the largest of 12 ports owned by the central government. The 14-km-long eastern waterfront stretches from Colaba at the southern tip to Wadala in the northeast of the city.

However, with the development of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port at Nhava-Sheva on the mainland across the creek from the island city, the MPT is in decline. For two decades, the central and state governments have been debating what to do with the land now valued at up to Rs 1 lac crore in the market. MPT earns only Rs 200 crore a year from port revenue and by leasing out such land to corporates like Taj Hotels, Hindustan and Bharat Petroleum.

The fate of Mumbai’s port land acquires national significance because it will send a signal when other derelict industrial and infrastructure land in older cities like Kolkata and Kanpur come up for redevelopment.

Mumbai port around Darukhana, the site of ship-breaking industry. Pic: Prabirkumar Talukdar

YUVA & HSM

Mumbai based NGOs Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) and Hamara Shehar Vikas Niyojan Abhiyaan Mumbai (HSM) recently released a study report titled People’s Perspective on the port redevelopment in which they question the corporatisation of ports, recommended by the World Bank in its India Port Strategy Report in 1995.

The World Bank report suggested large-scale privatisation, easing of government controls, modernization of infrastructure and making way for experts to manage port affairs. Last year, an international consultant was appointed to suggest amendments of the Major Ports Act, 1963.

The NGOs allege that once converted into entities under the Companies Act, ports will get financial and operational autonomy. This will enable ports to monetise land, which is their biggest asset, and poor stakeholders like the workers, slum dwellers and fisherfolk will get a raw deal in the process.

In a chapter titled “Mumbai in the Dock”, which dealt with this subject in a book I published in 2002, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills (OUP), I cited how London’s Docklands were privatised by Margaret Thatcher, virtually doing away with planning. Among other problems, this neglected the need of local residents, many of of them Bangladeshis, and didn’t address their housing or employment.

The NGOs have conducted a survey of the encroachments and informal settlements of the poor on MPT land. This, they say, will establish the right of these communities and give them a slice of the pie when the land is up for redevelopment.

They call for abandoning current planning practices which have vitiated the holistic development of Mumbai and argue for an inclusive, participatory model which takes all stakeholders into account. It must also prioritise social goals and people’s concerns.

The NGOs advocate incorporating these concerns into the draft Development Plan, the earlier version of which was scrapped after public outcry earlier this year and is now being redrafted. However, this is the domain of the municipal corporation, whereas the MPT land belongs to the central government.

The case of the mill land

From the mid-1990s, Mumbaikars lost the opportunity to wrest 162 ha (400 acres) for public housing and open spaces when the land occupied by the mills, 242 ha (600 acres) was to be redeveloped, according to Mills for Sale: The Way Ahead (Marg, 2007), edited by me. The mills occupied only a third that the docks do, and the redevelopment of the latter should avoid the mistakes committed in the former instance.

In 1991, the Maharashtra government instituted a one-third formula, whereby mill owners or developers had to surrender a third of the plot they occupied for low-cost housing, another third to the municipal corporation for amenities like open space, and sell or develop the remaining third. However, they received floor-space index or buildable rights in relation to the size of the plots on the two-thirds they gave up.

In 2001, the state government introduced a new clause, which required owners to part with two-thirds of only vacant land. Since mills – for that matter, factories or ports – have a large footprint, Mumbai lost out in the process. The metropolis has only 1.2 sq metre of open space per inhabitant today, one of the lowest in the world, specially for a mega city with more than 10 million people.

Rani Jadhav panel report

The two NGOs have analysed the proposal of a committee headed by the former MPT Chair, Rani Jadhav, which was submitted last year but has still not been made public. However, repeated leaks have revealed its findings.

Mumbai port redevelopment plan, Rani Jadhav report. Pic: Urban Design Research Institute

It ascribes the dereliction of MPT docklands to changes in the shipping industry, mainly to the switch to container traffic, which Mumbai can’t accommodate due to its shallow draft. This explains why bigger ships move to Nhava-Sheva.

The NGOs question the excessive emphasis in Jadhav’s report on catering to the tourism industry, with a “world-class” cruise terminal for luxury liners and a giant Ferris wheel on the lines of the London Eye. It also recommends a floating hotel or “floatel”, food courts and creation of 161 ha (400 acres) of open space. Many such activities may exclude locals not only from employment but access.

Jadhav’s report begins by pointing out that port cities worldwide face the global syndrome of the de-industrialisation of city centres. The relocation of industrial activity due to modernization of manufacturing and goods handling methods has led to dereliction and redundancy in vast tracts of inner city harbours.

MPT’s inept handling of changes in cargo and shipping has resulted in a shift of such activities to new ports, leaving land open for a variety of entertainment and waterfront activities that, it says, can be enjoyed by all classes of society.

The report cites how MPT handled 59 million tonnes of cargo in 2013-14, around a tenth of that handled by major ports. As much as 77 percent of its cargo -- 61 percent of ‘liquid bulk’ like oil products and 16 percent for transshipment to other centres – is handled offshore, which shows that the port can remain operational despite opening large tracts for redevelopment.

The revenue from liquid cargo makes up for the losses on general goods. MPT also has to pay large pensions to its retired dockworkers. The report recommends that future activities should be offshore, for which the MPT has built a long jetty, enabling larger oil tankers to dock, releasing the pressure on the waterfront and making it available for public purposes.

As much as 275 ha have been leased to public sector companies, oil and petroleum industries and the defence authorities. Another 136 ha have been leased to private parties for commercial uses.

After litigation, the MPT was able to retrieve 64 ha from tenants. According to an incomplete survey by the port estate department in 2002, 7.5 ha have been encroached upon, with 14,365 hutments.

Certain areas on the waterfront have been transformed into informal small-scale industrial units for ship-breaking – a hazardous and often banned activity – and ship repairs etc that even supply materials and skills for the country as a whole. These workers have been classified an informal and migrant, and the informal economy occupies this 7.5 ha.

A ship-breaking unit in Darukhana, Mumbai port. Pic: Prabirkumar Talukdar

The Jadhav report envisions opening up 28km of the waterfront – twice the current length – much of which is occupied by derelict docks. A 121 ha area will be created into an environment zone and at least 30 percent of the land will be converted into parks, playgrounds, plaza, maidans and so on.

Its vision is described as Open – for new recreation and tourism uses; Connected – for seamless local, regional and national connectivity, through multiple transport modes on land and sea; and Green – with promenades and open spaces.

A citizens’ initiative called APLI – A Port Land Initiative – Mumbai took a more people-friendly approach towards redeveloping the area with mixed-use residential areas which would include “project affected people”, a heritage corridor centred around the much-neglected Sewri Fort, a watersports facility to replace the toxic ship-breaking yard and a marina, along with a cruise ship terminal. It had the backing of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber and the Graduate School of Architecture of Columbia University.

What the NGOs report

The two NGOs take a different view of what they term a vibrant informal economy that has been in existence there for decades. They oppose the proposal to create a centralised planning agency, the MP Land Development Authority, which will bypass the municipal corporation. The authority can constitute a Special Planning Authority under the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning (MR&TP) Act, negating any role of elected representatives.

By declaring the port “sick”, exactly like the 54 cotton mills were, the government is opening up a Pandora’s Box of privatisation, they fear. Most mills, almost entirely those in private hands but also those in the public sector, have been transformed into malls, glitzy office complexes and high-end residential towers.

The rehabilitation of these workers when they are displaced hasn’t been addressed. There is no consistent housing policy, and those living in the port communities live a “sub-human” life. There are ten toilet seats for around 15000 people.

The NGOs estimate there are 30000 slum households – twice what the 2002 survey assessed -- with 150000 people on this land. Mumbai city is a stakeholder too, they assert, in sharp contrast to what happened with the mills.

The two NGOs argue that Section 33 of the MR&TP Act also gives a local planning authority powers to prepare detailed micro-level plans for areas requiring “comprehensive development”. This follows the same process as preparing the 20-year Development Plan, which requires public hearings at the local level.

Other port redevelopment projects

They have cited international experience to bolster their case. London, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and Barcelona are some cities which have rejuvenated their docklands with varying results, as we have seen in London’s case. The City in London – with a capital C, the world’s financial capital – is situated there and there is little local employment or housing.

The Jadhav committee looked somewhat closer home, at ‘smart city’ examples of Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Australia, where digital technologies boost port efficiency and reduce the use of resources.

The NGOs specially cite the redeveloped port area of Ciudad Vieja, in Montevideo, Uruguay, which is home to primarily poor residents in spite of banks, trading companies and other business enterprises in the vicinity. There is a special scheme for this area, within the overall Montevideo plan. The heritage of this historical city centre is preserved and the decline of its population arrested by projects to resettle inhabitants. There are moves against urban segregation, while more public space has been opened to the public, with improved public transport and restrictions on the entry of cars.

In Singapore, which has the advantage of a deepwater port, efficiency has ensured the vibrancy of this area. Long term planning, rigid political control and decisive administration are the key political elements that have earned the city-state its exemplary status for urban planning.

Darryl D'Monte

25 October 2015

Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

Book Review: A HUMAN GAZE

Harsh Mander's new book Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India talks about the growing inequality and the lack of compassion amongst the rich for the poor in India. Darryl D'Monte reviews the book which despite its candidness about the grim realities offers a message of hope and promise.

01 September 2015 -

Without putting too fine a point on it, the images of Indrani Mukerjea, who has allegedly murdered her own daughter, reveal a somewhat different plot than what has so far appeared in most of the media.

She is usually portrayed in a sleeveless top with a plunging neckline, holding a glass of wine or a cocktail. The backdrop is usually one of a bar, with its neon-lit garishness betraying more than a hint of hedonism.

The Times of India has likened her to a female Gatsby – someone who came out of nowhere, had nothing much to show for herself apart from her sultry looks, and yet catapulted herself to the highest echelons of  society through relentless self-promotion.

The few images of her slain daughter, Sheena Bora, indicate someone who shares a likeness with her estranged mother. Indrani’s husband Peter has been at the top rungs of the media and has endowed her with the highest profile that any parvenu could hope for. 

Indeed, he was the CEO of Star TV, which is owned by the world’s most ruthless media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. Star introduced India to a new world of glitzy entertainment just as the country liberalised its economy in the early 1990s. No wonder that critics have called the entry of Star the “Murdochisation of the Indian media”.

I wondered about l’affaire Mukerjea after putting down Harsh Mander’s new book,Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India. The media may carry image after image of the bold and beautiful in daily newspaper supplements and late-night shows on TV news channels, but these party-goers and givers and others of their ilk have turned their backs on the rest of India or “seceded” as Arundhati Roy puts it.

Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India, Harsh Mander, Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 418 pp, 2015, Rs 495. Pic: Darryl D'Monte

Mander documents in an almost cold-blooded manner not only the terrible disparity this country has promoted but how, like Marie Antoinette, we have insulated ourselves from “Bharat” and averted our gaze.

India now has the fifth largest concentration of dollar billionaires, after the US and China; the third largest middle class after China and the US; and the single largest concentration of the poor. 

A few years ago, as I have noted earlier elsewhere, the annual UN Human Development Report introduced a “multi-dimensional poverty index” in collaboration with an Oxford-based institute, which showed that India had more poor people in absolute numbers in eight states than the 26 poorest sub-Saharan countries put together. Madhya Pradesh had the worst indices.

Mander notes how Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze refer to “revenues foregone” through policies and measures to benefit the private sector, which since 1991 has been bloated through LPG–liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. In 2011-12, even during the so-called pro-poor policies of the previous Congress government and its president Sonia Gandhi, Rs 5300 billion of corporate taxes, customs  and excise duties were written off, a staggering 5.7 percent of GDP.

Of this waiver, just exemptions on diamond and gold imports – a dire necessity for our Marie Antoinettes -- were estimated to leave the country poorer by Rs 570 billion. This was twice the estimated additional cost of the much-maligned National Food Security law. 

As Mander observes, all hell broke loose over the food security bill, with conservative commentators like Surjit Bhalla and Gurcharan Das calling it daylight robbery. Das believed that cheap food would disincentivise work. The Economic Times characterised it as “money-guzzling”, citing an estimated annual burden of Rs 1,250 billion, figures which, the author says, have to be taken with a fistful of salt.

The author recalls that there was hardly any response from the same brigade when Narendra Modi, then Gujarat Chief Minister, made over 1,100 acres of fertile land to Ratan Tata to relocate his Tata Motors plant, which ran into rough weather in Singur, West Bengal. Tata got this at Rs 900 per sq metre, with dedicated power supply and water thrown in. This was in addition to a loan at 0.1 percent interest, repayable after 20 years. No wonder Tata publicly hugged the CM at the plant launch, much to the dismay of human rights activists opposed to Modi for presiding over the 2002 riots.

Modi also bestowed this largesse on the Ford car company and then on his perennial favourite, Gautam Adani, who invariably travels with him on his frequent trips abroad, almost as his Industries Minister. Adani was given land in the state at what Mander terms “shocking, rock-bottom” rates of between Re 1 to Rs 32 per sq metre.

We must echo what critics of the neo-liberal policy regimes which are sweeping across the world demonise the ‘Bretton Woods Sisters’ – the World Bank and International Fund. In a truly astounding case illustrating the yawning deficit in democratic governance of these two key institutions, the former is almost always headed by an American and the latter by a European (including the philandering Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Some countries are more equal than others.

Records Mander: “It is extraordinary that very recently, these very institutions have begun to acknowledge that they may have been wrong, and drastically so. ‘In far too many countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people. This is not a recipe for stability and sustainability.’ These are not the words of a Left-wing ideologue, but of Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF.

Mander continues, “She goes on, ‘Let me be frank: In the past economists have underestimated the importance of inequality. They have focused on economic growth, on the size of the pie rather than its distribution. Today we are more keenly aware of the damage done by inequality…It leads to an economy of exclusion, and a wasteland of discarded potential.

“She compares rising inequality in the US and India. ‘In the US, inequality is back to where it was before the Great Depression, and the richest 1% captured 95% of all income gains since 2009, while the bottom 90% got poorer. In India, the net worth of the billionaire community increased twelvefold in 15 years, enough to eliminate poverty in this country twice over.”

Mander quotes no less a person than former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram who stated how the tax-GDP ratio was 5.5 percent for direct taxes and 4.4 percent for indirect taxes, “one of the lowest for any large developing country and will not garner adequate resources for inclusive and sustainable development”. As the veteran rural affairs journalist P. Sainath alleged, Chidambaram did nothing to raise taxes but balanced his books by curbing expenditures in the social sector.

The virtue of Mander’s book is that it isn’t a diatribe against anti-people policies but an understated critique which is far more effective than a rant. What is more, he illustrates all these dismal policies with accounts of people in dire straits, which he gleaned from his peripatetic travels to the distant-most corners of his city, Delhi and the country at large.

These anecdotes yield reams of human experience which remain in one’s memory, much more than pure economic or sociological analysis would. For instance, at a Big Fight programme on NDTV with moderator Vikram Chandra which dealt with slum dwellers and their demonisation as unwanted migrants, he asked who in the audience had grandparents who were born in the capital. Only Chandra raised his hand; in other words, we are mostly immigrants ourselves.

At an Urban Age conference – organised by the London School of Economics and the Deutsche Bank – in Delhi in November 2014, this columnist presided over a session in which Mander took part. He recounted the answer a pavement dweller in the capital gave him when asked why he slept on the traffic divider in the centre of a busy road at night. Because the traffic fumes kept the mosquitoes at bay, he could catch a few winks.

The author also advocated that schools, which are only occupied for eight hours a day, could be turned into dormitories for homeless children at night. His book details his various encounters at relief camps for riot victims and other vulnerable people throughout the country. He even spent a night at a camp in Ahmedabad after the riots and is honest enough to mention that the single sojourn made him physically sick for several days.

Mander has written a remarkably candid and penetrating book which deserves to be widely read. It isn’t, as might be imagined, a dirge, rather a message of hope and promise. It could well be prescribed as compulsory reading not only for sociologists and anthropologists but, even more urgently, by economists and business school students, those who otherwise espouse the market without questioning it. The hope then is that we will then not simply turn away, but confront what we see.

Darryl D'Monte
01 September 2015

Looking At, Rather Than Away

I approached this book with some trepidation. I imagined it would be a diatribe against the ruling elite and it would be laborious to plough through.

I should have known better; Mander, as his regular columns show, has a light touch. He is never pedantic and fleshes out his understated criticism of the way things are with human anecdotes. Every point is illumined by one or more cases, all poignant and revealing in a way which academic analysis can’t provide.

Very early in this book, he questions the Tryst with the Market, a different destiny that Pandit Nehru would never in his wildest dreams have imagined. The middle and upper classes are getting seduced by the message Greed is Good, and the rest can go to hell.

A mall is a pretty good exemplar of this tendency, which Arundhati Roy has called the “secession” from the rest of India. When Mumbai opened its first, it was thronged by thousands, even the unwashed, who came in droves to experience the wonder of goods in an air-conditioned, sanitised environment – often foreign – in such a brazen, unprecedented display. They caused traffic jams.

The catch was they came, they saw but were not conquered enough to reach for their wallets. This wasn’t what the promoters planned. So they introduced an interesting innovation: only people with cell phones or credit cards would be admitted into it. Some people are more equal than others.

Poverty is violence

Ela Bhatt in a 2013 NDTV programme showcasing the greatest living Indians asserted that “poverty is violence…perpetuated with the consent of society”. Mander regrets that NDTV chose to celebrate its silver jubilee with this show by including tycoons like Mukesh Ambani “and numerous popular film and sports stars … [that] lead opulent lifestyles and do little public service.” I wonder, in retrospect, whether Ambani had already loaned the channel Rs 400 crores two years ago.

Mandar’s theme is clear from his title and it is reminiscent of Katherine Boo’s illiant exhumation of a single Mumbai slum: Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. The reference is to a hoarding advertising marble blocks for the homes of the ultra-rich, which obscures the grim conditions in the shanty immediately behind it.

Roy, in essay titled “Listening to Grasshoppers”, traverses not her well-trodden Naxal territory but the “the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes in a country of their own, somewhere in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite… [this] vast middle class, punch drunk on sudden wealth” has created a kingdom with “its own newspapers, films television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals”.

The journalists’ grapevine has it that a former editor of the Times of India was asked by media students why the paper didn’t carry enough about child malnutrition. He replied that the Times’ readers didn’t suffer from it.

Legitimizing inequality

Mander lists three normative systems which legitimize inequality in our society. The first is the caste system. This reviewer can admit that till he went abroad as an undergraduate, he thought that the caste system had disappeared. At a noisy Cambridge Union debate, when an Englishman harped on it, I declared, to loud acclaim, “You should be castrated!”

In his excellent 1998 book, Words Like Freedom, Siddharth Dube enlightened me that in a typical UP village, boys from landless Dalit families can’t even enter the classroom; they have to bring their own mats to sit outside. When a Thakur’s wife accidentally fell into the village well, and some Dalits fished her out, her first response was to rush home to have a bath.

Mander’s second is the British class system, meant for people with old wealth: the schools’ names, such as one I went to, can trip off people’s tongues. On 26 August, the ToI carried a “top” edit page article titled “Schooling without learning”, alleging that the Right to Education “destroys private schools and destroys standards in public schools”. The old boy/girl network is alive and kicking.

The third is the “celebration of conspicuous consumption associated with the collapse of the socialist world and the rise of neo-liberal, market-led growth…This is the new India which celebrates when India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, follows up his gift of a 60-million-dollar jet-plane to his wife with the most expensive residence in the world, a 27-storey house for a family of four, built at an estimated cost of 1 billion dollars, which boasts three helipads, four storeys of handing gardens, and a staff of 600 domestic helpers.” In a city where six out of every ten people is homeless, this verges on the obscene.

According to the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), not a champion of socialist ideology, only 12% of the population can comprise the middle class. Mander quotes the CEO of Oxfam India to point out that just a 1.5% wealth tax on 65 of India’s uber-rich could lift an astounding 90 million out of poverty. If the country could reduce inequality by just over a third, it could eliminate extreme poverty. However, as anchors on business channels are asking these days, why hasn’t the NDA reduced corporate taxes, as promised in the last budget?

The most telling data on India’s inequality – apart from the recent, suppressed, Socio-Economic Survey, which encompasses caste – is from, surprisingly, the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014. Since 2000, the share of wealth of the richest 1% in the country has been rising, in contrast to the rest of the world, and it now owns nearly half the country’s wealth. The wealth share of the top 10% as increased by a tenth since 2000, which is when the toxic triad known as “Liberalisation, Privatisation & Globalisation” or LPG kicked in here.

Mander’s book should be prescribed reading in universities across the country. The publishers ought to have included an index, so people can check on each vital piece of information. Hopefully, they will do in the next edition.

And some unsolicited advice: he could consider bringing out another version which has b&w photographs and captions instead of text, somewhat on the lines of John Berger’s co-authored classic, A Seventh Man (1975) which dealt with (the proportion of) migrants to Europe at the time. It would remain a lasting testament to our less fortunate brothers and sisters.

http://thewire.in/2015/08/29/looking-at-rather-than-away-9506/

           

How India Can Cut Short-term Carbon Emissions 70%

How India Can Cut Short-term Carbon Emissions 70%

Darryl D'Monte, August 24, 2015

As India works on its voluntary commitments to reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Indian experts have explained how the country could cut its carbon emissions from short-lived climate pollutants by nearly three-fourths using low-cost methods and, in the process, transform the lives of the poor.

The US, EU and China are among the major countries which have declared their commitments; the global community is waiting to see what India does.

India has already indicated that it is going to take minimalist steps as regards its “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” or INDCs (as they are known in United Nations negotiations), as environment minister Prakash Javadekar said. India will take a further cut on its emissions intensity–the amount of energy used to produce a unit of GDP–from 20-25% on 2005 levels to around 35-40%.

To an extent, current science on climate change justifies this policy, as speakers observed at the sixth annual climate conference, organised by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, on equity in the forthcoming UN climate summit in Paris this December.

TISS has developed a “carbon budget” for both industrial and developing countries, which provides a clear glimpse of what each is entitled to emit in an equitable framework.

The total amount of emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in 1850 till 2100 is 641 gigatonnes of carbon equivalent (GtC, 1 Gigatonne = 1 billion tonnes), according to Tejal Kanitkar of the Centre for Climate Change at TISS.

If the world’s climate is not to spin out of control when mean temperatures rise by 2⁰C above 1850 levels, there is a total budget of 270 GtC till 2100, as against 371 GtC already emitted from that baseline till 2011.

Source: Tejal Kanitkar, TISS

Developing counties have only “spent” 97 GtC out of the 371 GtC so far.

Industrial countries have only 50 GtC to spend till 2100, while developing nations have 220 GtC left.

However, based on their INDCs made so far before Paris, rich countries will already exceed this budget by 2030 alone.

If the model developed by TISS with the Delhi Science Forum, which takes into account “historical responsibilities” or past emissions, is applied, rich countries can only spend 39 GtC till 2100.

If developing countries leave it to “business as usual” and commits to what “we think is reasonably possible”, Kanitkar says, a 2⁰C rise is inevitable.

But if they cut their emissions steeply, their development plans will go awry, what Kanitkar terms a “lose-lose situation”.

India’s energy options: What greater efficiency could do

While holding industrial countries responsible for putting the world’s climate – and consequently development – back in order, Kanitkar also believes there are tangible, quantifiable trade-offs in undertaking mitigation actions domestically.

“We can’t be cavalier about it – lots of homework is needed,” she says.

This can be taken further by examining India’s energy options. An aggressive pursuit of efficiency can be a win-win situation, according to Ashok Sreenivas of Prayas, a Pune NGO working largely on energy.

The potential value of saving electricity from appliances is Rs 2.50/kWh (per kilowatt hour, a unit of electricity).

 Buildings can be better designed. Improvements can be made in industrial processes, vehicle technology and agricultural pumps.

This requires imposition of standards, such as those introduced by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency. There can be incentives and penalties.  This will also create a market for energy-efficient processes and products.

Transport accounts for a tenth of India’s GHG emissions. There could be a shift from road to rail across the nation, greater use of public and non-motorized transport in cities and better spatial planning.

 These options will not only reduce GHG emissions but also reduce costs, improve mobility (and hence access to education, jobs etc.), reduce imports and, not least, improve air quality.

Renewable energy is relevant to India for reasons beyond reducing carbon emissions, Prayas states. It uses local resources, impacts the local environment and is price-effective in the long-term.

The government has announced aggressive plans – a capacity of 175 GW by 2022, asIndiaSpend previously reported.

India can tweak policies, such as allowing householders who install rooftop photovoltaic (PV) sets to earn revenue for the surplus electricity they provide to the grid. Such tariffs can be telescopic – they rise with every kWh sold to the electric supply undertaking, providing incentives.

This way, high-end consumers on the conventional grid pay for a high cost resource. In this case, there are no batteries required to store PV energy, making it cheaper and environmentally friendly.

How helping the poor could help India

As many as 800 million households have to make do with poor cooking fuels – a form of energy which is even more vital than electricity. This is both domestically polluting and damaging to the climate.

It also has severe health impacts, Prayas points out. As many as 1.5 million people die prematurely due to household air pollution. It causes 25 million disability-adjusted life years or DALYs — a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health or early death.

Women and young children are most affected in rural homes, while housewives and girls fetch most of the fuel.

The suspended particulate matter and soot generated by inefficient chulhas or cook stoves form a controversial meteorological phenomenon known as the Asian Brown Cloud. These also get deposited on the highest reaches of the Himalaya and the black particles on the snow absorb more heat, causing it to melt.

Apart from the switch to more efficient chulhas, there is a clear development case for rapid uptake of clean, modern fuels like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)), electricity and biogas, Prayas believes.

Control of short-lived climate pollutants like aerosols or black carbon and tropospheric ozone can mitigate the impact of climate change, Chandra Venkataraman and two colleagues from IIT-Bombay point out.

These are not included under the Kyoto Protocol because their mitigation is perceived to yield no reward. However, they can trigger “radiative forcing”, which are changes in the atmosphere due to GHGs, thereby accentuating ocean level rise.

Reduction in these pollutants as well as CO₂ can arrest South Asian sea level rise by 31-50%.

When black carbon increases, it destabilises the atmosphere and can reduce rainfall.

The three IIT authors cite a 2015 study in Nature titled “Soot and short-lived pollutants provide a political opportunity” by two Americans and Veerbhadra Ramanathan from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

Ramanathan, who addressed an International Federation of Environmental Journalists congress in Delhi before the Copenhagen summit in 2009, is the world’s foremost authority on the Asian Brown Cloud.

The US authors believe that cutting soot and these pollutants will deliver tangible benefits and show Paris that collective action by the world is possible. After December, they believe, the demonstration of such action will bestow credibility on the UN diplomatic process in climate negotiations.

The emission sources by sector for GHGs differ vastly from those of short-lived pollutants in India, according to the IIT-B study. Thermal power stations and heavy industry contribute 65% of the country’s GHGs while homes are responsible for 53% of transient pollutants.

Other sources, which also differ greatly, are transport, agriculture and brick production.

Of the 53% contributed to the pollutants by homes, chulhas are mostly to blame, together with kerosene wick lamps. Burning crop residue accounts for 14%, while diesel and petrol vehicles account for another 13%.

A tractor-mounted machine can cut and lift rice straws, sow wheat into the bare soil and deposit the straw over the sown area as mulch (and help to retain moisture in the soil), the authors state.

This reduces the time to sow wheat without burning the rice-straw residue. However, this technology doesn’t necessarily increase productivity or profits. It calls for regulation to curb residue burning and policy support for technology adoption.

There are technologies to switch to more efficient brick kilns, designing them in zigzag lines, rather than a conventional trench. At present only 2% of the country’s kilns employ this process and this, once again, calls for a policy prescription.

Bricks can also be fashioned from fly ash, waste from coal-fired power stations, without firing them. Only 12% of the nation’s fly ash is currently used for this purpose.

Replacing traditional technologies could make India lean and clean

Short-lived pollutants are generated by diverse sectors, using traditional technologies with low energy-efficiency and high emissions in homes, farms and brick production.

Biomass chulhas, kerosene wick lamps and crop residue burning contribute 65% of these pollutants’ emissions, while diesel vehicles alone add 10% of these emissions, amounting to 3,800 teragrammes of carbon dioxide equivalent or Tg CO2 eq (1Tg=1 million metric tonnes) per year.

Mitigation actions using currently available technologies can mitigate 70% of present-day emissions from all these sectors.

The authors ask whether such domestic actions to curb emissions from short-lived pollutants will qualify under the UN climate negotiations as voluntary “common, but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.

A survey of 73 households in Raikhel village in the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra by Anjali Sharma and Tejal Kanitkar of TISS in 2014 found that 90% used only one stove.

Almost a third of the stoves were used to heat water; 35% had no exhaust mechanism, while 40% were located outside the home.

Half the households purchased firewood, given a landscape which is being increasingly deforested. The use of farm waste was low because it was seasonal.

The TISS researchers stressed the benefit of switching to LPG, if homes could afford it. The drudgery of collecting firewood and indoor pollution were important factors which male-headed households didn’t consider.

As speakers at the TISS conference emphasised, while India has to demand greater contributions by industrial countries at Paris, along with funds and technologies for developing countries to mitigate catastrophic climate change, India can voluntarily cut its emissions with such low-cost methods, which are entirely in its enlightened self-interest and vital to its development progress.

(D’Monte is Chairperson, Forum of Environmental Journalists of India.)

Note: The headline and copy has been updated.

http://www.indiaspend.com/cover-story/how-india-can-cut-short-term-carbon-emissions-70-11432