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Vol. 8 No. 32
LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE
THEIR FIGHT TO FREE US FROM DARKNESS AND IGNORANCE, TO BE WILD, AND TO MAKE MUSIC, CONTINUES. THIS INDEPENDENCE DAY, WE REVISIT THE NEW INDIAN PATRIOTS
A PROPHET OF THE JUNGLE >Page 8
THE BAREFOOT CONSERVATOR Ecologist Debal Deb’s indigenous rice bank is a brave effort to counter Indian agriculture’s dash towards genetic erosion >Page 5
PART II
DEBAL DEB CS LAKSHMI BINDESHWAR PATHAK DV GIRISH HARISH HANDE MANISHA CHAUDHRY SANDIP PATIL JOCKIN ARPUTHAM RAJAT GOYAL ZUBAIDA BAI RITWICK DUTTA LAILA TYABJI RATISH NANDA SIBABRATA KARMAKAR BINALAKSHMI NEPRAM GEETA MENON SUNIL ABRAHAM CLAUDE & NORMA ALVARES
LIGHT FROM THE MATCHBOX
A slum dweller’s most famous advocate the world over, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jockin Arputham believes the urban poor can’t live in islands of enforced development >Pages 1213
THE CUSTODIAN OF RUINS
The man behind the restored Humayun’s Tomb and other Delhi monuments, Ratish Nanda’s efforts rejuvenate history by embracing the present >Page 17
DON’T MISS
in today’s edition of
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SELFIE SWARAJ
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LOUNGE First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream. LOUNGE EDITOR
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NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)
ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT SUNDEEP KHANNA ANIL PENNA IRA DUGAL LESLIE D’MONTE ©2014 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
The fight for freedom continues T
he best of times need watchdogs. A children without threats to their health and promised land needs heroes and longevity—a basic right our healthcare patriots. Anywhere you look, the rhetorical system has denied to millions of women. promise of good times is upon us. After So while these stories are celebratory, the staggering numbers of the general they are also cautionary. election’s mandate, the new government History has proved that in the best of has spelt out a highly ambitious agenda. times, dark corners of the imagination And a state of collective elation is can throw up challenges to a free and palpable everywhere. open society. The Internet’s hate This is an opportune time to revisit the propagandists, religious fanatics slapping theme of our special Independence Day public information litigation (PILs) issue of 2009: modern-day freedom against literature and art in the name of fighters. We look past the narrative of offence, threats to forests and wildlife development and which may not be nationalism and meet immediately evident, people who have been but will destroy human confronting what’s ill or life in the long run, the INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL dogmatic about India neglect and extinction every day, on the ground—and there is so of indigenous art and history, the much that is wrong. Let’s call him the new proliferation of disease and infections— Indian patriot. these are advancing maladies. The If Team Modi has to eradicate open modern-day freedom fighter’s job is defecation by 2019, it needs Bindeshwar formidable. Pathak, a Brahmin by birth, who tirelessly We worship the men and women who helps build new toilets in our villages every fought to free us from colonial rule. They day. By spending more than two decades are in our poetry, cinema and history mapping and embracing the perilous textbooks. This issue looks at the present. ecosystem inside the Bhadra Wildlife The fresh rhetoric of nationalism makes Sanctuary and Tiger Reserve in Karnataka’s these visionaries and workers more coffee paradise, D.V. Girish has proved relevant than ever before. that man can live near the tiger without Tell us who your heroes are from this either jeopardizing the other’s interests. list. Write to us at lounge@livemint.com. Zubaida Bai, an innovator from Chennai, has created a kit for women across the Sanjukta Sharma world that ensures they can give birth to Issue editor
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MONDAYS Play Things: Everything fun, from the PlayStation to the cricket stadium, and from power drives to dice rolls. By Rudraneil Sengupta and Vishal Mathur
TUESDAYS Hunger Games: What’s new with food and how we interact with it. By Sumana Mukherjee, Seema Chowdhry and Prerna Makhija
ALTERNATE WEDNESDAYS Understatement: Analysing popular culture statements made through actions or words. By Shefalee Vasudev
ALTERNATE WEDNESDAYS Political Animals: On the intersection of politics and art. By Sanjukta Sharma
FIRST THURSDAY OF THE MONTH The Sex Talk: A monthly blog on gender and sexuality. By Dhamini Ratnam
ALTERNATE FRIDAYS Between The Lines: On readers, writers and publishers of the past, present and future. By Somak Ghoshal
ALTERNATE FRIDAYS Eye Spy: A look at the world of art from close and afar. By Somak Ghoshal ON THE COVER: IMAGING: MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT
LOUNGE LOVES | SHIKHANDI AND OTHER TALES THEY DON’T TELL YOU
Secret histories India’s bestselling mythologist has a new collection of forbidden stories from the past B Y S OMAK G HOSHAL somak.g@livemint.com
······························ evdutt Pattanaik’s new book could be an excellent resource for sex education, not only for young people but also— and especially—for those defenders of Hinduism who are outraged by the notion of every form of intimacy other than heterosexual intercourse in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation. In Shikhandi And Other Tales They Don’t Tell You, India’s bestloved English-language mythologist exhumes stories from the epics, scriptures, folklore and apocryphal sources to reveal the unabashedly candid sexual proclivities of the ancients. From same-sex desire to genderbending behaviour to crossdressing to bestiality, the range of activities these texts describe is exhaustive. Rather than confining himself to the subcontinent, Pattanaik traces the genealogy of these practices to other cultures and eras as well. In the first section, he chronicles social attitudes to alternative sexuality from the time of the Vikings to the Egyptian pharaohs to Confucian China, concluding that “discomfort with sexual conduct” can be “traced to the valorization of cel-
D
ibacy and the rise of monastic orders in all cultures”, among other reasons. The so-called pagan civilizations abounded with examples of sexually amorphous characters: Odin, the one-eyed leader of the Viking gods, was known for exploring his feminine side; Set, who is part of Egyptian mythology, killed his brother Osiris and had sex with his nephew Horus; and emperor Ai of China made popular the phrase “passion of the cut sleeve” after he severed the sleeve of his royal robe to avoid waking up the man he loved. In the second half, Pattanaik introduces 30 indigenous tales that push the limits of conventional sexual imagination. He does
Shikhandi And Other Tales They Don’t Tell You: By Devdutt Pattanaik, Zubaan/Penguin, 179 pages, `299.
not, however, stop merely at the telling of these vignettes, but goes on to add a set of observations at the end of each of them in order to make the reader aware of the multiple layers of meaning and mysteries inherent in them. As a result, even familiar narratives, such as the story of Shikhandi, come alive with a fresh complexity. After describing this incident of biological mutation—from female to male (that too, by borrowing someone else’s genitalia)—Pattanaik raises questions about inheritance, conflicts, and feelings that commentators
tend to gloss over. “What about Shikhandi’s relationship with his wife?” he asks. “How does it feel to know that your husband was a woman on the wedding night and Mythmaking: then is a man in the following nights, sporting someone else’s genitalia?” In spite of the light touch, Pattanaik’s erudition is apparent in his knowledge of little-known facts, such as Bhisma castrating
An illustration from the book. himself to ensure foolproof celibacy (in the Jain Mahabharat) or the origin of “the hijra’s clap”. He mentions an episode from the Skanda Purana dealing with the passionate attachment between
two women of different castes that led to the establishment of the “Shudri-Brahmani-tirtha”. There are several stories of Arjun, the third Pandav, and Krishna, the blue god, assuming the guise of women, and enjoying their sexually ambivalent adventures. “The soul,” a key focus in Hindu thought, “has no gender”, writes Pattanaik. Every follower of Hinduism should cherish such a sentiment.
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AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL
A desultory list of what’s going on
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LANCE CPL DERRICK K./WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
he Spectator, the conservative English weekly (its tag line when I was a subscriber used to be: “Firm but unfair”), had a column called “Low Life”, written by Jeffrey Bernard. It chronicled his life of poverty, drinking and
losing money on the horses. Every so often, the magazine’s contents page would carry the line “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” to alert readers to the fact that Bernard’s column was not appearing in the current issue, because he was in hospital again. He died in the late 1990s, after having a leg amputated for diabetes, and leaving behind some of the best column writing in English. “Nothing ever happens,” Bernard once reported, about how dull his average day was, and it probably took heroic effort to sum up a sedentary life. That is how it is with me as well. I have been struck down by illness and am stuck at home. Not that I have anywhere to go, of course, but when hale I am theoretically free to sally forth into the world my wonders to perform rather than spend my time filling this screen with a perennial moan. Being unwell gives me the opportunity to sum up what is going on, so here, in desultory fashion, are some things. I learn from the papers that Rich Froning has won the CrossFit Games again, an incredible achievement, like Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France all those times. The doping doesn’t really bother me, and its effects are grossly exaggerated. Speaking of exercise, I have been remiss on this front again, my own pull-up rig being unpulled-up on and the training rings hanging from it like two nooses. I’m unwell so that is fine. Though no running has happened for
many, many days, a third set of headphones for the iPod Shuffle has arrived (these ones have ear-hooks), ordered no doubt in a moment when hope again overwhelmed experience. I read somewhere that running is the exercise that comes most naturally to man, in which case it must have skipped a generation in my family. In other news, the malt hoard is well. It used to be that I would sound panic stations when the stock of Islay fell below 40 litres (danger mark). But now I’m more relaxed about such things. In the garden, another goldfish has died in the lily pond. One remains—a hardy fellow who darts about among the dark and ugly guppies, though I don’t think they see him as their superior. The lily leaves are flat on the surface and unremarkable. It must have taken something special for Claude Monet to imagine them in 70mm, as those who have seen his vast, wall-sized paintings know. The lily itself is priapic in the morning, shooting up to receive the sun. In my illness I have taken to making constant demands, harassing the poor servants, who now pretend not to hear my bellowing. The cat Sheela is also pretending to ignore me, but I’m overruling his (long story, but Sheela is a he) useless protests and carrying him to bed for my siesta. A cat’s breathing rate is about the same as a man’s. Unlike dogs, which pant, a cat can curl up and lie on your
Gods and heroes: (left) Krishna on television; and CrossFit champion Rich Froning. stomach without disturbing you for a 40minute snooze. Despite my condition, I go on TV, only half aware and my voice sounding like an old woman’s. Also on the debate are Shashi Tharoor (too soft for the TV debate business—it needs boorish people like Piyush Goyal and Meenakshi Lekhi, both of whom I respect). And there is Chetan Bhagat (smart, coherent, articulate: I must read some of his stuff). Meanwhile what I am in fact reading is two Hindi works recommended by my friend, the writer and newspaper editor Meenal Baghel, against whom I have waged a decades-long, unresolved war over Indian literature (I say it’s mostly crap and she disagrees). One of them—Kashi Ka Assi— immediately takes me by surprise, there being bad words and scatology in its opening pages (nice one, Meenal). Surprising because the author Kashinath Singh reveals himself in his jacket photograph as an avuncular man, and in fact a professor. I set the book aside for closer inspection when my wits are more about me.
The other one, Eeshwar Ki Aankh, is a selection of essays by Uday Prakash. I read one, “Hamare paas kyon nahin hai Arundhati Roy ya Vikram Seth” . It is disappointing. The facts are wrong at the starting blocks. He claims Yeats translated Tagore. His argument is so tired as to collapse upon itself (I’m using an illness image here to sympathize with my condition). Then I notice at the end that it was written by Uday Prakash as a newspaper column. That’s all right, then, all is forgiven. The papers report Justice A.R. Dave of the Supreme Court saying that Indians must go back to their “ancient roots and traditions” and that children in their early schooling should be introduced to texts like the Mahabharat and Bhagavad Gita. Justice Dave was at the Gujarat Law Society and said, “We lost our gurushishya parampara. Had it been alive today, we would not have been facing problems of terrorism and violence in the country.” Since he was not saying this ex cathedra, and was making a general argument about our society, one may
engage with his lordship’s opinion without fear of being seen in contempt. Here goes: I don’t think there are many Indians, of whatever faith, who are ignorant of the stories of the Mahabharat and the Gita. The epics are everywhere in our popular culture, from film and cartoon to comic and TV serial. I would submit two things. First, that India’s major problem is not violence: The media’s problem is violence. There is a difference. Second, is the Gita the solution to violence? Its message of slaughtering brother and uncle because one is pumped full of righteous conviction is of total war. Terrorism cannot be crushed by war. We have conclusively learnt that from America’s adventures. Justice Dave accepts that this opinion of his will worry some Indians and “Somebody who is very secular...so-called secular will not agree... But had I been the dictator of India, I would have introduced Gita and Mahabharat in class 1. That is the way you learn how to live life.” I wonder: Has his lordship given thought to the negatives of his “had I been dictator of India” dream or only that his dictatorship will produce a happy nation of epic readers? The guru-shishya parampara—which is essentially mindless mimicking of a revered preceptor—is alive and well in India, particularly in our schools. No danger of losing tradition there. What is required in India—good, independent thinking—cannot come from the gurushishya parampara. But I am unwell, and could be wrong about this of course. Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakarpatel
SOHAILA ABDULALI MIND THE GAP DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP
Borders without doctors
B
arkha Bai is dying. As will all of us, however fat our wallets and impenetrable our denial. But Barkha Bai’s dying seems unnecessarily painful, given the care that surrounds her and the respect she’s earned through a long
and dignified life. Here in this little village tucked into the Western Ghats, Barkha Bai is the leading matriarch. Her three sons are prominent locals: Between them they are active in politics, run the local store, own and farm plenty of land, and supervise labour at a local farmhouse (ours). More important than her sons right now, of course, are the women in her life who are tending to her. It’s the old story, familiar everywhere from this monsoon valley to the tundra: Women look after the sick and dying. She lies on the clean floor of one of her sons’ houses, clothed only in a sheet, and they hover restfully about her, ready with water, massages, clean linen, and anything else she requires. Anything, that is, except relief from her pain. About two months ago, she fell and broke her hip. Her family isn’t poor and they took her about 30km away to Karjat for treatment. The doctors there advised them that surgery would be expensive and ineffective, and there was nothing they could do for her. So the family, not wanting her to languish in hospital, brought her home to spend her last days
in peace. But it’s hard to be peaceful when you can’t move without pain. What is it about India that we can’t seem to take on board the idea that feeling pain is not a necessary evil? This attitude transcends economic and urban/rural barriers—when my father lay in hospital in mortal pain, we had to beg and make a scene before we could get our hands on some narcotics to dull the agony. Here in Tembre, though, there’s nobody to beg to. You can walk from one end of the valley to the other without worrying that you might bump into a doctor. You won’t bump into a doctor because there are no doctors. In India, according to the latest World Economic Forum report, there are 0.7 doctors for every 1,000 people. That puts us 97th on a list of 140 countries, in terms of physician density. You won’t find even seven-tenths of a doctor within spitting distance of Tembre village. Barkha Bai’s “doctor” comes to visit her from the next village. He deserves the quotation marks because he isn’t a doctor at all. He’s a compounder who essentially promoted himself to doctor, something that happens frequently in
our great country. It’s sort of like an assistant cook eventually moving up to being in charge of the kitchen, except that healing humans isn’t really analogous to chopping onions. He checks her blood pressure, tells the family it’s too high, gives her a glucose shot, and pushes off. I go to pay my respects. Barkha Bai has been an enduring, friendly presence in our lives for three decades now. She was a merry soul. Now she lies diminished, incapacitated on the floor, hardly able to see. She clutches my hand. “When will I be well again?” “Soon,” I lie. “Soon!” Across the river from this sombre scene, my mother’s cupboard is full of acetaminophen and ibuprofen, and we know plenty of doctors we could ask for prescriptions for stronger drugs. But we can’t. We could give the family liquid Crocin to ease the pain a little, but that involves a huge risk. If Barkha Bai has liquid Crocin this morning and happens to die tonight, her family could easily turn up and accuse mine of murder. Our new government is full of talk about taking India into the future. There are many plans for technological, economic, international progress. That’s great. But Barkha Bai and so many others have more modest needs than that. They need someone close by who knows how to help them sleep through the night. Mati, the Adivasi woman who makes occasional appearances here in Mint Lounge (I get quite a thrill whenever I think of Mati and The Wall Street Journal
Unattended: Patients at a government hospital in Siliguri, West Bengal. being somehow connected), came to visit today. She’s been having aches and pains, and she deals with them in two ways. One is coming here and taking some acetaminophen from us. The other is buying a `5 half-price ticket on the state transport bus, going 13km to the government hospital, and paying `10 to get a cursory exam and a glucose drip (“sui”). No doubt that gives her energy, but she would get the same treatment whether she had flu or cancer. She has never had a full physical exam in her life, and she never will. One of the wonderful things about our country is that we are less likely than people in many other places to throw away our sick and elderly, to hide them in institutions and carry on with our lives. But the picture of the fading elder surrounded by her dedicated (mostly female) caregivers isn’t particularly edifying when all over India people are lying at home, suffering needlessly because there isn’t anyone around who is qualified to take good
medical care of them. So we sit and wait, trying not to think of Barkha Bai’s tormented days and nights. Very soon we will see the flames rising from the funeral pyre right here on the rocks beside the river. They’ll look very dramatic, the leaping orange between the foaming white of the river and the neon green of the monsoon grass. A bright tableau subverting the colour scheme of the Indian flag. The drongos and bee-eaters will swoop over the flames and Barkha Bai’s pain will end at last. Sohaila Abdulali is a New York-based writer. She writes a fortnightly column on women in the 21st century. Write to Sohaila at mindthegap@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sohaila’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/mindthegap
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Debal Deb at his home in Kolkata with five of the rice varieties that he grows on his farm. farm.
freedom from
EXTINCTION
DEBAL DEB
The barefoot conservator THIS ECOLOGIST’S INDIGENOUS RICE BANK IS A BRAVE EFFORT TO COUNTER INDIAN AGRICULTURE’S DASH TOWARDS GENETIC EROSION Text by Chitrangada Choudhury Aga Photograph by Indranil Bhoumik/Mint
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he Sunday morning in July marked the fifth straight day of rain in the fecund foothills of the Niyamgiri range in western Odisha’s Rayagada district. The delayed showers heralded the year’s busiest period for ecologist Debal Deb and his right-hand man Dulal as they prepared Basudha— a 2-acre farm unlike any other in India—for an intricately planned growing season. Wrap your mind around this: Over the coming days, the farm would see the planting of 1,020 indigenous varieties of rice—part of a remarkable effort under way since 1996 to rescue a sliver of India’s genetic diversity from extinction. This wouldn’t just mean planting 1,000 varieties of rice saplings on a plot one-tenth the size of Mumbai’s Oval Maidan, and watching them grow. Maintaining the genetic purity of each of these heirloom varieties, year on year, necessitates an intricate sowing plan crafted by Deb, 53, and his colleagues, so that no two neighbouring varieties flower at the same time, thus guarding against cross-pollination. Deb published his methodology in the Current Science journal in July 2006, after field-testing it for six years. The constant addition of vanishing varieties to
Deb’s growing collection—last year, it numbered 960—means the plan needs seasonal redesigning. Rice—daily sustenance for a majority of Indians—is a grass species, believed to have been domesticated over 7,000 years ago in a broad region extending from the north-eastern Himalayan foothills to southern China and South-East Asia. Over the centuries, human hands selected thousands of different strains, evolved in response to specific ecological niches. The undulating region of western Odisha, called the Jeypore tract, was one of the world’s leading areas of diversification, where a great number of rice varieties, also called landraces, were developed by cultivators—“the unnamed, unknown, and greatly talented scientists of the past,” as Deb describes them. In the 1960s, when Deb was growing up in Kolkata, India was estimated to have over 70,000 such rice landraces. According to a 1991 National Geographic essay, just 20 years later, with scientists and policymakers chasing high yields through aggressively pushed modern, input-intensive hybrids, over 75% of India’s rice production was coming from less than 10 varieties. This devastating and irreversible
genetic erosion from India’s farms continues: For example, rice varieties from West Bengal that Deb collected just five years ago are no longer being cultivated. The disappearance is insidious. “It can result from something as innocuous as a farmer dying, and his son dropping the variety,” says Deb. “I witnessed this on a farm in Birbhum, with a rare twograined variety called Jugal.” An Indian Institute of Science alumnus and a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, US, Deb abandoned his job at the World Wildlife Fund in the mid-1990s after struggling to convince colleagues to fund documentation of Bengal’s vanishing rice varieties. “Conservation organizations suffer from what I call megafauna species syndrome,” he says, acerbically. “Tigers—yes. Rhinos—yes. But if some earthworms or beetles are going extinct because of chemical pollutants on a farm, who cares?” Deb headed out to villages in search of indigenous rice, often travelling on bus rooftops or by foot; an iconoclast by temperament, the small, wiry man still abjures institutional links, relying on teaching assignments in European and American universities and donations from friends to sustain Basudha. He
particularly sought out areas that were remote, un-irrigated, and had marginal farmers who could not afford chemical inputs and seeds from the market. “The places Indian elites like to call ‘backward’, such as tribal areas, were those with the greatest chances of having retained these varieties over time,” says Deb. “When I would find such a variety, I would ask the farmer’s family for a handful, explain why I wanted it, thank them for preserving a vital part of our heritage, and urge them to not give up cultivating it.” Deb has collected 1,020 desi rice varieties over the past 18 years. They come from 13 states across north-eastern, eastern and southern India. Kashmir, with two indigenous varieties, is the latest entrant to the seed bank, which Deb has named Vrihi, Sanskrit for rice. There are seeds that will grow in soils with high salinity, or conditions of submergence; others are drought- or floodtolerant; yet others are resistant to attacks from varying pathogens; some are suited to dryland cultivation. There are medicinal varieties as well as 88 aromatic varieties. These landraces—embodying centuries of accumulated knowledge—and farmers who can work with them are crucial for sustainable ecological agriculture, argues Deb. Annual seed conservation training and a distribution effort centred on the small farmer complement his in-situ conservation project, resulting in an informal personal network of about 3,000 cultivators. Farmers who approach Basudha for seeds get them free of cost, with a plea to grow them and in turn become distributors to other farmers, to help reduce the chances of the variety becoming extinct. Last December, having heard of the seed bank, 40 Malkangiri farmers travelled over 200km to Basudha’s doorstep and demanded indigenous seeds for their farms. “Not one asked about yield
“ ”
THE PLACES INDIAN ELITES LIKE TO CALL ‘BACKWARD’, SUCH AS TRIBAL AREAS, WERE THOSE WITH THE GREATEST CHANCES OF HAVING RETAINED THESE VARIETIES OVER TIME.
or market price,” says Deb. “It was a very moving moment for us.” Deb is also proud that the farm stands on common land in Rayagada’s Adivasi village of Kerandiguda: its residents invited Deb after taking seeds from his bank, and hearing that he was in search of a place to house his project. The communitarian ethos defining Deb’s work contrasts sharply with agricultural policymaking, where the voices of the small farmer—the largest group of Indians—are often impossible to detect. Take, for example, a gene bank built in recent years by the Odisha government. Located in a government building in Bhubaneswar, 900 varieties from across the state are sealed in aluminium foil packets, and preserved at zero degrees in an impressive facility. It is a laudable effort. Only, how does an average farmer access it? Officials watching over the collection say they cannot give farmers seed samples to cultivate since these might fall into the wrong hands (seed companies that might exploit the genes for developing new proprietary seed lines). Never mind that the entire collection was built with farmer contributions from across the state. Why does the state not officially release these desi varieties in the market to encourage use and, thereby, survival? The release process, admit bureaucrats, is skewed towards modern, commercial varieties developed by breeders in government labs or private seed companies. Besides being inaccessible to the average farmer, says Deb, official gene banks neglect the process of life’s coevolution by freezing seeds in time. “Bring out seeds of a pest-resistant variety after 30-40 years. They will have lost some major traits of defence since in the meantime the pest has evolved,” he says. “They might be useful for research but are not geared towards our farmers in the field.” Deb counters the official argument that indigenous varieties result in inferior yields: “I have several varieties which outperform the so-called highyielding varieties.” High yields do not ensure food security, he reminds, pointing out that India is home to record stockpiles of rice and wheat, as well as a quarter of the world’s undernourished. Over lunch—greens, vegetables, dal and rice combining eight different varieties from the farm—Deb asks if we can evaluate our heirlooms in money. “Imagine a unique painting, a sari...an ornament which has been in your family for 200 years—would you sell it off to make money?” he asks. “That’s how these indigenous rice varieties are—they are our culture.” Chitrangada Choudhury Aga is an Odisha-based journalist. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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FORGETTING
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL
CS LAKSHMI
The herstory maker THIS AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN HAS SPENT THE PAST 25 YEARS ARCHIVING WOMEN’S LIVES AND STORIES Text by Dhamini Ratnam Photograph by Nayan Shah/Mint
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key is thrown down to us from a window on the second floor. “Lock the door on your way up,” we’re told, as the curious face retreats. Ascending the stairs, we cross a room on the first floor which has rows of gleaming shelves—the sort one sees in a well-kept library—with its door invitingly left open. A board that declares this to be the Neera Desai Memorial library hangs serenely, bearing a photograph of the late feminist, credited for shaping women’s studies in India, reading a book. On the second floor, we meet the face at the window. Pooja Pandey, administration officer, holds her hand out for the key and offers to escort me to the top floor, where C.S. Lakshmi, the force behind the country’s first dedicated archives for women, sits. Twenty-five years on, Lakshmi’s biggest relief is that her organization, Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, or SPARROW, owns three floors in an apartment complex in a northern Mumbai suburb. Her struggle for freedom from oblivion has often found a worthy opponent in the city’s real estate. The trust was started by the renowned Tamil author, who writes under the pen name of Ambai, in her bedroom in 1988. As it grew bigger, and donations ebbed and wavered over the years, SPARROW moved several homes: a garage in Versova, a tiny flat in Andheri (East), another in Juhu. In 2008, however, it settled in Dahisar and the office was named, rather appropriately, The Nest. Ambai’s migration, however, began many years before SPARROW. Born in Coimbatore and raised till the age of 7 in what was then Bombay before shifting to Bangalore, Ambai, now 69, completed her doctorate in American studies at New Delhi’s Indian School of International Studies (which merged with the Jawaharlal Nehru University around the time she attended it) and then thought of creating archives that would document and preserve stories of, and by, women. Back then, explains Ambai, as the rain falls heavily on the leafy lane outside, there was a clan of women writers if one wanted to pursue women’s writings. But to understand their context, crucial documents such as journals, women’s magazines or private letters were not thought important. “Soft material, or non-official documents, was considered insignificant when it came to women’s writings and writings on women,” says Ambai, who admits that she was often dissuaded from pursuing a postdoctorate on women’s writings in India by peers or seniors. “All that is junk,” they would tell her. Ambai, then in her 20s, had had it with the moralists. A year before she went to New Delhi, she had taught at a village school in Tamil Nadu (“I was a great Gandhian then,” she says), but was asked to leave. Not only did she fail to admonish a young student who wrote her classmate a letter pledging life-long allegiance, she also told her students about the importance of wearing undergarments. She refused to pray before an idol of the principal’s daughter that was erected in the school compound, where the assembly was held each morning. In October 1967, Ambai reached the Capital. By then, she had become a published author, having written her first story at the age of 16 for a Tamil magazine. Earlier that year, she had written another piece called Siragugal Muriyum (Wings Get Broken), about a sensitive woman married to an insensitive man. To her dismay, none of the magazines she approached wanted the piece. She sought out an editor of a Tamil publication in New Delhi and asked him what
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C.S. C.S. Lakshmi Lakshmi at at the the library library and and archives archives section section of of SPAR SPAR ROW’s ROW’s office office in in Dahisar, Dahisar, Mumbai Mumbai..
I WANTED THESE ARCHIVES TO HAVE COMPLETE AUTONOMY. ELSE THE (MUMBAI) UNIVERSITY WOULD HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT WHAT WE SHOULD STORE AND WHAT WE MUSTN’T.
was wrong with her story. She recalls that meeting well. “He came to the hostel I was staying at, and we spoke standing at the gate. He said there was nothing wrong with my story, but I had sent it to all the wrong magazines.” “That’s when I began to think of why women write what they write,” she says. A problem loomed: If no one thought writings about women were significant, then no one would make the effort to document them. Ambai realized that archives which preserved writings, pictorial representations, oral recordings and subsequently, videos of and regarding women, were the need of the hour. “Every woman has achieved something through acts of assertion. I don’t think there is any history that is not worth being seen and retrieved,” she says. In 1974, Ambai completed her PhD and began teaching at a few colleges in New Delhi, including the all-women Miranda House. The same year, the first women’s studies centre was inaugurated in Mumbai’s Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women’s University, or SNDT. It was meant to happen: Ambai got in touch with the few assertive women behind that centre, who offered to support her project. These included Neera Desai, Vina Mazumdar, secretary of the first committee on the status of women in India (CSWI), which brought out the seminal report “Towards Equality” in 1974, and the indomitable feminist academician Maithreyi Krishnaraj. Ambai says she resisted opening the archives as part of the university. “I wanted these archives to have complete autonomy. Else the university would have had something to say about what we should store and what we mustn’t.” With 10-year funding from the Dutch organization Hivos, SPARROW began testing its wingspan. In 1997, it began to make video-documentations of women, and over the course of that year, conducted six visual history workshops with artists from cinema, theatre, sculpture, dance and traditional painting. By 2008, it had made 25 films. These included films on yesteryear actor, producer and distributor Pramila (born Esther Victoria Abraham), from whom they also took several black and white photographs of film stills and movie posters for the archives; photographer Homai Vyarawalla; and political activists such as Ima Thokchom Ramani Devi from Manipur and Jarjum Ete from Arunachal Pradesh. In 2006, SPARROW held a five-day writers’ camp at Kashid, a few kilometres from Mumbai. Over 50 writers in 20 languages participated. SPARROW published the English translations of their writings, accompanied by author interviews, in a series starting 2008 with Hot Is The Moon, edited by poet Arundhathi Subramaniam (the first volume comprised excerpts from interviews, stories and poems of writers in four languages— Tamil, Kannada, Konkani and Tulu). The fourth volume, If The Roof Leaks, Let It Leak..., with poems and stories from Hindi, Santhali, Sindhi, Maithili, Punjabi and Dogri, has just been released. Simultaneously, SPARROW has also maintained archives of books, newspaper clippings, cartoons and other pictorial representations, and advertisements filed assiduously under headings such as “Alcohol/Cigarettes”, “Condoms”, “Household” and “Textiles”, among other things. “We decided to focus on biographies and autobiographies, written by men and women, instead of theoretical books,” says Ambai. Each shelf has a tiny muslin potli (pouch) that contains a home-brew (of camphor and spices) to keep away silverfish. Old, brittle texts are wrapped in handmade paper which, as librarian Sharmila Sontakke informs us, is desirable wrapping material. The first floor also houses two special rooms—an archival vault, with dehumidifiers and air conditioners, which contains beta tapes of the 25 films they have made, and another room (also equipped with an AC and a dehumidifier), with all the audio tapes of their oral history recordings of women. “The activity of archiving needs to be objective,” says Ambai, when quizzed about whether she chooses to leave out stories or histories that don’t follow a feminist ideology. “It is not for me to judge. It is more important for me to know about their lives,” she says. For Ambai, the act of archiving itself is a feminist intervention. And history, she knows, will remember that. dhamini.r@livemint.com
L7
LOUNGE INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
Bindeshwar Pathak in Hirmathla, Haryana, with the family of autorickshaw driver Yunus. They are getting a fourth Sulabh toilet built.
freedom from
OPEN DEFECATION
BINDESHWAR PATHAK
The sanitation Santa Claus THE MAN BEHIND SULABH SHAUCHALAYAS HAS TRANSFORMED THOUSANDS OF LIVES BY HELPING PEOPLE BUILD TOILETS IN THEIR HOMES Text by Seema Chowdhry Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
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ijaylakshmi was 14 when she came to Hirmathla village in Mewat district, Haryana, from Rajasthan. The first lesson she learnt at her marital home was to wake up at 4am every day and leave the house with a lota in her hand, accompanied by her mother-inlaw, in order to defecate. She could almost never go out to relieve herself during the day and had to wait 12-14 hours before she would be herded out again in the evening to “relieve the pressure”. Vijaylakshmi’s parents had a toilet in their home. In 2011, 18 years later, Vijaylakshmi’s house got its first Sulabh toilet. Today, most of the 146 homes in this village, a 90-minute drive down Sohna-Gurgaon Road, have at least one Sulabh toilet. Some have two, three or four, depending on the number of daughtersin-law in the house. In Hirmathla, each 4x3Kx6ft Sulabh toilet cost around `15,000, with `12,000 donated by RailTel Corporation of India as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative and `3,000 contributed by the householder. The toilets have a stone slab for a roof, a flimsy aluminium door, a pot at a 28-30 degrees slant, and no flushing facility. Yet Vijaylakshmi, her sister-in-law Shakuntala, and their mother in-law are happy. Vijaylakshmi says she doesn’t get
as many headaches as she used to, nor does she fear being stoned or grabbed when she “relieves pressure”. Shakuntala can sleep until 6am, and their mother-inlaw is thrilled that she no longer has to stand guard while others defecate. The sarpanch (village head) Mammandin (who uses only one name) has announced that he will fine anyone found defecating in the open. In 2012, the village received the Nirmal Gram award, given to villages that are fully sanitized and free of open defecation, and Mammandin is determined not to tarnish that record. Bindeshwar Pathak, 71, the man responsible for this transformation, listens with amusement and pride. He founded the Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement in 1970, and developed the Sulabh Shauchalaya System (a low-cost, two-pit toilet technology that uses a litre of water), spending more than four decades trying to get people to make and use toilets in their homes and eradicate the practice of manual scavenging. Yet he says he learns something new every time he meets people who are using Sulabh toilets. Mammandin’s stance impresses him, but he has also discovered that some of Hirmathla’s girls, married outside the village, are struggling because their marital homes lack toilets. “Get the
names of the girls and the villages they are in. We must get toilets built there right away,” he instructs Sulabh’s project in-charge and motivator for Hirmathla. “The lack of toilets and defecating in the open has its roots in our cultural practices. For Hindus, old texts like the Devi Puran advocated shauch (defecation) as far from the house as possible. For Muslims, since they came in as rulers, access to manual scavengers to clean up after them was easy, and so even though they had toilets, there was no need for them to incorporate a system which did not require manual cleaning,” says Pathak, dressed in his trademark wine-red Nehru jacket and crisp white kurta-pyjama. A Brahmin by birth and a landowner from Bihar, Pathak, who has been awarded the Padma Bhushan (1991) and the Stockholm Water Prize (2009), says there was no toilet in his home when he was growing up—it was, incidentally, large enough to accommodate a temple and a water well. He did stints as a schoolteacher and a travelling salesman for his family’s home-grown Ayurvedic medicine before being enticed into taking up a job in Patna for `600-a-month with the Bihar Gandhi centenary celebrations committee. The job, as the publicity incharge, was temporary and didn’t pay `600, but he stayed on.
It was there that Pathak was introduced to the Bhangi Mukti (or liberate manual scavengers) movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas on sanitation. “Non-violence, satyagraha, so many things that Gandhi taught have been reiterated over and over again, but not many people picked up the cause of bhangis, of sanitation, of not defecating in the open,” says Pathak. “Stopping defecation in the open will not only mean better health for people but will also be an important factor in curtailing rapes in rural India,” he adds, explaining why he decided to build 106 toilets, one in every house, in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, on a war footing after the rape and hanging of two girls in May. Most of these will be ready by the end of August. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 600 million Indians deposit 65 million tonnes of human waste in the open every day. The 2011 Census of India found that 53% of Indian households do not have toilets. In villages, the figure is higher: 59.4% of rural India practises open defecation, according to December data from the National Sample Survey Office. The census also found that the country needs 115 million toilets—and if Parliament is serious about eradicating open defecation by 2019, there is a lot of work to be done. “My only advice is, don’t repeat the mistakes of the past,” says Pathak, rattling off a few that sanitation activists have combated through the 1980s and 1990s: allocating a pittance for toilets, restricting help to those below the poverty line (BPL), not giving bank loans for building toilets, not adopting the twopit toilet system, not having motivators and regular follows-ups to see if the toilets are in working condition, and not pushing for the beneficiary to be responsible for some part of the toiletbuilding process. “Over the years, we have seen that if you get the two-three sampan (well-todo) people in a village to build a toilet in their home, it becomes easier to convince the rest. Don’t leave the leader out of the
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STOPPING DEFECATION IN THE OPEN WILL NOT ONLY MEAN BETTER HEALTH FOR PEOPLE BUT WILL ALSO BE AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN CURTAILING RAPES IN RURAL INDIA.
equation because he is the influencer and his actions are inspirational. This has to be a trickle-down, not a bottom-to-up revolution,” says Pathak. He is also a great advocate of motivation and follow-ups. According to the 2011 census, India has 5,924 subdistricts (that includes blocks and tehsils). “If each block trains five people—one person for five-six panchayats, i.e. about 25-30 villages—you can have a miniarmy of about 30,000 motivators who can work not just to encourage the building of toilets, but also be trained to talk about health benefits. They must also have access to resources to get the toilets fixed if something goes wrong. This is very important since most people will be firsttime users and have to be trained to maintain a toilet,” says Pathak. One of the most common reasons that toilets in rural India become dysfunctional is that balls, debris, rocks or pieces of cloth, etc, block the pipes. “We need people to help villagers deal with these problems. The pit we build in villages is not cemented at the bottom. This allows human excreta to decompose and prevents build-up of toxic gases, which are so common in septic tanks. Each pit takes about four-five years to fill up and once it is closed off, the second pit can be put in use while faeces decompose in the first one,” explains Pathak, adding that he hopes the new Union rural development minister, Nitin Gadkari, will look into a Sulabh proposal to train motivators as health workers. He is yet to pursue this with Gadkari. Where toilets cost less than `20,000, Pathak believes the onus of getting the material should rest with the householder, while construction should be the job of a government-appointed agency. “If an NGO or a thekedar (contractor) makes the toilet from start to finish, there will be complaints about the material used. Lend the money to the householder directly though a bank to get the material and help him find a trained mason (through an NGO or agency). Let the householder have a stake in his toilet.” At Hirmathla, Pathak’s sustained effort is paying off. Yunus, an autorickshaw driver, is getting a fourth toilet constructed on his family’s 60x90ft plot. Isn’t that too many for such a small plot? “No, no. There are five brothers (33 family members live on that plot), each with a separate kitchen and a small hutment to their name. Why should each family not have a toilet of their own? The daughters-in-law feel more comfortable taking care of the toilet demarcated as theirs and the children will not be tempted to defecate in the open if they don’t have to wait in a long line at home,” says Pathak. seema.c@livemint.com www.livemint.com See related story video at www.livemint.com/bindeshwarpathak
L8
LOUNGE INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
freedom to
BE WILD
DV GIRISH
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A prophet of the jungle THIS COFFEE FARMER CHANGED THE WAY THE TIGER, OTHER WILD ANIMALS AND NATURAL VEGETATION COEXIST WITH HUMANS Text by Ananda Banerjee Photograph by Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint D.V. Girish at the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary and Tiger Reserve, Chikmagalur.
ill about a decade ago, if villagers from the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary and Tiger Reserve in Karnataka needed anything, they had to walk 25-30km through the sanctuary to reach the nearest roadhead. Wild elephants often traversed that path. During the monsoon, when streams rose, they would have to use a treacherous footbridge made of a few logs. Without this, they were cut off from the rest of the world. The 492.46 sq. km wildlife sanctuary is just 40km from India’s coffee capital Chikmagalur. Yet the people living there had no access to electricity, running water, healthcare, schools, transportation and communication. Most families recount horror stories from those days—of being mauled by bears, children picked up by leopards at night, and women attacked by herds of wild elephants while collecting firewood. In 2003, a quiet environmental revolution helped resolve this mananimal conflict. That year, the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary became the first “inviolate” or “people-free” wildlife sanctuary in the country and many environmentalists saw the Bhadra voluntary resettlement as a model of conservation. The man who was instrumental in making this happen is D.V. Girish, a coffee planter and wildlife conservationist from Chikmagalur who shared a rapport with the villagers living in the forest. Girish, 45, made his first trip to the sanctuary as a nine-year-old on a school excursion. Since then, he has returned to the forest every year—in later years, more as a birdwatcher. “During British rule, these forests were used as hunting grounds. The area then was sparsely populated. But as the population figures increased, the conflict between man and animal sharing space grew. The number of animals dwindled due to poaching and habitat disturbance. Unregulated collection of firewood and forest produce went on unabated. There was illegal extraction of bamboo by paper mills, illegal encroachment and forest fires. There were about 3,000 cattle grazing inside the forest,” says Girish. The people had their own set of problems. “I witnessed elephants destroying crops, raiding granaries, wild animals killing livestock and attacking and mauling humans. We had this amazingly beautiful place with one of the best forests but no protection from the law; each year saw the forests getting degraded,” says Girish. The plight of the people inside the sanctuary was pathetic. “It was a hopeless situation. More than 60% of the population was landless labourers at the mercy of landlords. They were without economic opportunities,” he adds. Talk of rehabilitating these inhabitants outside the sanctuary began in the early 1990s. “Rehabilitation of these inhabitants was a complex matter. The people wanted to enjoy the basic civic amenities they were deprived of but at the same time were also sceptical of shifting to a new environment. They had to be convinced,” says Girish. Along with relocation, the menace of the bamboo mafia, illegally extracting huge quantities for paper mills, had to be controlled. The plan for three small dams on the Bhadra river was perceived as a threat to the entire ecosystem. Girish’s NGO, the Bhadra Wildlife Conservation Trust, joined hands with other NGOs to fight these battles. In 1996, they were successful in stopping the construction of the dams. Initially, there were many challenges. “Though we were pushing the
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THE PEOPLE HAD TO BE COACHED EMOTIONALLY TO GIVE UP A LIFE THEY HAD KNOWN AND TO FACE A NEW WORLD WITH BETTER FACILITIES.
relocation idea and interacting with forest officers, politicians and the people, money and land for relocation were issues we had to handle. Also, the quick formation of a team sensitive to the sentiments of the dislocated people was required. The people had to be coached emotionally to give up a life they had known and to face a new world with better facilities,” says Girish. The resettlement process had two components. First, acquisition of land with funds from the Central government. Second, rehabilitation and physical shifting of these people, funded by the state government. The resettled were divided into four groups—landless labourers, people with 1-2 acres of land, 3-4 acres, and those with more than 5 acres. The landless got an acre of irrigated land and the other three groups got land according to their former holdings inside the forest, besides a housing plot and civic amenities like drinking water, roads, a school, health centre and shopping complex. Almost a decade after the initial talks of rehabilitation, the villages were relocated from the sanctuary. Villagers were handled settlement rights in November 2001. By March 2002, more than 60% of them had shifted out of the sanctuary. In 2003, the process was completed, and the forest declared people-free. In all, 13 villages with 464 families were rehabilitated outside the wildlife sanctuary. Today, the relocated families farm their own land. Girish sees people who are better off economically and socially than they were as forest dwellers. “They do not live in fear of conflict with animals. Some have diversified into animal husbandry and other businesses,” he says. The successful resettlement has been chronicled in a scientific paper, Making Resettlement Work: The Case Of India’s Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary, by conservation biologist Krithi K. Karanth, published in the journal Biological Sciences in 2007. After comparing her surveys in 2002 and 2006, Karanth concludes: “The Bhadra relocation is now complete and is considered a success by the government, nongovernmental organizations, and many relocated people. “There are many important reasons for this project’s success. There was no forcible eviction of people from Bhadra, with some people voluntarily choosing to relocate and others choosing to relocate once they received fair compensation. The hardships (especially wildlife conflicts) faced by people living in the reserve, the opportunities available to them (particularly their children), facilities provided, and equitable land tenure appear to be the strongest reasons for their willingness to relocate. Active participation by the non-governmental organizations and government ensured that the households received adequate support throughout the process.” Today forest and wildlife occupy the space that villages once did. “The 53km drive from one end of the sanctuary to the other end has only wildlife, no people, villages and cattle to disturb nature,” says Girish. The forest is home to tigers, leopards, wild elephants, bison, sloth bears and the Malabar flying squirrel, as well as a robust avian population. Girish attributes his passion for wildlife to his mentor K. Ullas Karanth, a tiger biologist who pioneered a new technique for counting tigers. According to Girish, it was Ullas Karanth, director for Science-Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society, and director, Centre for Wildlife Studies, who mooted the idea of a possible rehabilitation of villages marooned inside the forest. Shekar Dattatri, a conservationist and former member of the National Board for Wildlife, sums up Girish’s achievement: “He is fiercely protective of the wildlife and forests of Chikmagalur and neighbouring areas in Karnataka. One of his greatest achievements is the number of young people he has influenced and mentored over the last two decades. While Girish himself is a hard act to follow, the local youth are a force to reckon with. Their dedication to conservation will help safeguard the area well into the future. Girish gave the relocated families the confidence to move towards a new life.” ananda.b@livemint.com
L9
LOUNGE INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
Harish Hande visits Rosamma Vergies in Vandse village, Karnataka. Her home is fitted with a two light solar system.
freedom from
DARKNESS
HARISH HANDE
Here comes the sun THIS INNOVATOR MADE THE SOLAR LAMP A VEHICLE NOT JUST FOR ELECTRICITY, BUT FOR EDUCATION AND INDEPENDENCE
Text by Priya Ramani Photograph by Gireesh GV
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arish Hande doesn’t care about electrifying India, he wants the solar lamp to transform this country. Of course he was pleasantly surprised when newly appointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he would back the growth of solar power so that every household in India has at least one lamp by 2019, but Hande has also observed, for the last 15 years or so, that the ministry of new and renewable energy unfailingly gets a new secretary every six months. “Some don’t feel it’s an attractive post, some are quickly shifted, some retire,” he says with the air of a veteran who has figured out how to make things work despite policymakers. But these are all relatively minor niggles. Hande, 47, won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2011 because the ideas at Selco (Solar Electric Light Company—India), the solar energy equipment supplier company he cofounded in 1994, shine brighter than the lights it sells to the poor. Take, for instance, Selco’s Light For Education project whose participants include around 30,000 children in Karnataka. Solar panels are installed on school premises and the battery, about the weight of a lunch box, is
given to children. Children charge the batteries when they come to school. If they don’t come to school, there’s no light at home. “We stole the idea from the midday meals scheme,” says Hande. Stole and innovated. Or the way Selco tackled the unique problem faced by a community of poor drum-makers in Bangalore. They were willing to pay for solar power, but they had one condition. They were often evicted, with only 15-20 minutes to gather their belongings. Could Selco design a system they could run with? No problem, a design school graduate who works at Selco conjured up a solar system on a cart. Around 1.2 billion of the world’s population doesn’t have access to reliable electricity, and 400 million of these people live in India. Hande, who jokes that while growing up, his bread and butter came from a coal-fired plant in Rourkela (his father worked in power distribution at the Steel Authority of India), understood early that coal and gas wouldn’t be enough to meet India’s growing energy needs. Yet, as an energy engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a doctoral student at the University of
Massachusetts, US, Hande’s interest in solar was restricted to its supply security dynamic (the sun as a source of energy is limitless) and its environmental impact. Until a visit to the Dominican Republic in 1991 taught him a new lesson in thermodynamics. He saw the poor paying for solar lights and realized that renewable energy could be a catalyst for social change. So he spent the next two years in Sri Lanka and India—in darkness. He took time off to see how communities in both these countries lived without electricity. “I realized I didn’t know what happens after 6pm. We were just making decisions based on Excel sheets,” he says. He learnt a few things: The moment you don’t know a language (Sinhalese), the artificial hierarchies of a formal education crumble and you are treated like anyone else; none of his formal education was useful, except perhaps the confidence he had gained by living in a hostel. In Sri Lanka especially, communities came together after dark, usually in Buddhist temples, to vent their frustrations; in India, the lost time was usually spent in isolation and the kerosene lamp made people even more depressed. “It
was my most efficient period of time, I joke,” he says. That’s also probably when he realized that the poor don’t want sympathy. They want partners and collaborators. He worries about the hierarchies he believes English-speaking India imposes on the rest of the country. He knows he may not be able to influence the thinking of a top dog at a Bangalore-based research firm who asks him how he ever manages to have “intellectual discussions” in rural India. Or the suit who eagerly shares that his children “teach” their rural counterparts every weekend. But he hopes he can someday convince urban children to partner with fellow Indians who don’t speak their lingo. “How do I tell kids that we are all part of the same society? That they need to learn from each other to create some sort of social equity? How to make kids interested in solving problems?” Selco gets hundreds of internship applications from masters’ and PhD students every year but very few are Indians. Of the 300 applications last year, five were from this country. “I’ve now resorted to guilt-tripping parents and students when I speak to them. In the next 10 years if you complain that Americans and Europeans know more about India than you do, then you are to blame, I tell them,” Hande says. At Selco at least, they try to break these barriers. Nearly 85% of Selco’s employees, including chief operating officer Mohan Hegde (a practising folk artist on weekends), come from rural India. Hegde and K. Revathi, president, have been running the company since 1 June when Hande retired as managing director to take charge of the Selco Foundation, the company’s think tank. All the brainstorming for solutions and innovations to help fight poverty takes place at the foundation. The business side executes the ideas
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HOW DO I TELL KIDS THAT WE ARE ALL PART OF THE SAME SOCIETY? THAT THEY NEED TO LEARN FROM EACH OTHER TO CREATE SOME SORT OF SOCIAL EQUITY?
and the company’s incubation cell teaches entrepreneurs how to replicate these successes across India (four projects are already under way in Manipur, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh; Selco is helping 25 more entrepreneurs raise funds). Formal qualifications are not a prerequisite for any job at Selco. Twenty-eight-year-old Raghu, who greets me when I arrive and gets us tea at the Selco office in Bangalore, started out as a driver and now handles administrative duties. “He’s going to be a branch manager by the time he’s 32. That’s our goal for him,” says Hande. In rural areas they joke about Selco’s hires: Are you part of the laptop or the non-laptop crowd? Hande checks all the boxes of someone who truly believes in sustainability. He doesn’t own any asset, he says he has about three-four pants and shirts, he borrows his father’s 1994 Maruti 800 when he needs a car, and his daughter Adhishri was 8 when she first started saying: “Is it needed or is it wanted?” He got his cues from mentors like Neville Williams, his co-founder and a solar energy pioneer who made it to the CIA watch list after a trip to Vietnam to protest the “American War”; from photographer Jon Naar, who was a British spy in World War II; and from Paul Maycock, who predicted way back that the cost of producing solar energy would plunge by 2015. “These are guys who talked about sustainability in a very different manner. I miss their passion. Now you go to a meeting and it’s all about ties and suits.” Hande sees the poor as asset creators, and not as a bottom of the pyramid sales opportunity. “Don’t sell to the poor. That’s our fundamental rule. And if you’re selling to the poor, make sure that the value you’re giving to the poor is much more than the monetary value they give you back,” he says. So when Selco representatives found that 32 Sidi families in rural Karnataka spent more money annually on candles, kerosene and to charge their mobile phones than it would cost to set up a simple solar system, they had to fix this. No bank was willing to lend the money to these families, so Selco offered a 100% guarantee on their behalf. Six months later, the bank reduced this guarantee to 20% as the payments were regular. “The best response was from the Sidis,” says Hande. “They said, light is great but once the solar loan is done, I will take a loan for a sewing machine.” They had become bankable. priya.r@livemint.com
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SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
I
n 2008, Manisha Chaudhry was in Samastipur, a sleepy town in Bihar, for a government-organized book fair. Schoolteachers from all over the state had come to buy books recommended by the state government. Thirty titles by Pratham Books, the non-profit organization that Chaudhry heads as editor, were on that list. Every day during the three-day fair, a little girl would be standing near the Pratham counter, staring at the books. The girl, her hair a golden brown, looked malnourished. If someone tried speaking to her, she would sprint away. On the third day, Chaudhry managed to speak to her and ask if she wanted books, and if she went to school. The girl replied that she used to—her parents had stopped sending her. Then she picked up a story card lying on the counter and read it. “The victory that I saw on that little girl’s face at the end of it,
and the way she smiled, I gave her the entire set of books. I was happy doing what I was doing,” says Chaudhry. Fifty-two-year-old Chaudhry joined Pratham Books as a consultant four months after it was set up on 1 January 2004. It now publishes books in Indian languages, including tribal languages, multilingual books, and books for the underprivileged. Rohini Nilekani, Ashok Kamath and Rekha Menon registered Pratham Books in Bangalore with the goal of having 300 million Indian children in the age group of 3-14 hold a book in their hands. It has reached around 52 million children in the last 10 years. But Chaudhry is not too happy to put out mere statistics. “You can mask many kinds of truth by flashing statistics,” she says, adding that she is proud of the quality of their books, and their translation into many languages. “The impact of books cannot be
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measured immediately, for one never knows how far it will take the child. If I look back on my life, I cannot trace one book that changed my life. But I know that cumulatively many books have done the job,” she says. Chaudhry was born in a family that believed in using the mother tongue at home. “Though I went to an English-medium school, both sides of my family insisted that we talk in Hindi at home,” she says. There was no dearth of literature; her mother and grandmother were voracious readers, and encouraged the children to read too. She became an avid reader at an early age, deciding that books were the “only decent profession” she could engage in. But it wasn’t books that she started her career with. Her sister, 10 years elder, used to run a nonprofit when Chaudhry was in high school and acquainted her with the
MANISHA CHAUDHRY
A book in little hands
FOR THIS EDUCATIONIST, CHILDREN’S BOOKS CAN FUEL AUTONOMY OF THOUGHT AND DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF OUR FUTURE
Text by Saurabh Kumar Photograph by Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Manisha Chaudhry in a class at a Pratham Centre, New Delhi.
idea of community development. Later, while pursuing her graduation in English at the Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi, she was introduced to feminism by her professors. Right after college, she joined Kali for Women, India’s first publishing house dedicated to women, started by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon in 1984. Around four years later, she enrolled at Jamia Milia Islamia for a master’s in mass communication. She married a batch mate while pursuing her master’s and started consultation jobs once she had finished it. These were mostly in the fields of gender development. Her rendezvous with early-years education started towards the end of the 1990s when her own children, a boy and girl, were about to start school. “I chose to be a mother who would be around for her children and I would read a lot of books to them. This made me aware about this idea of presence or absence of children’s books and this made me think about the space,” she says. It was at this time that the work of the Pratham Education Foundation, a non-profit working on innovative learning, came into prominence. The need for specialized books for children in Indian languages was felt, and Pratham Books was established as a separate trust. Apart from her work at Pratham Books, Chaudhry has translated many books, stories and documents from Hindi to English and English to Hindi, which have been brought out by publishers like Oxford University Press and Zubaan Books, since 1986. One of her works, a translation of the Hindi novel Ailan Gali Zinda Hai by Chandrakanta, which was published by Zubaan Books under the title A Street In Srinagar, was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2012. At Pratham Books, she has been part of various educational initiatives, including the 2008 Bihar project, under which they supplied 2.1 million books to around 70,000 government schools. In 2006, the Pratham Education Foundation produced a series called Shishu Vachan. These `10 books, used to introduce children to reading, were later converted into `2 story cards and have been used for the government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme. Chaudhry was also involved with Bookaroo, an annual travelling
IF WE LOOK AT INDIAN SOCIETY CULTURALLY, IT IS A MISHMASH OF VICTORIAN VALUES, ANCIENT VALUES AND SOME MODERN CONSUMERIST VALUES.
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books festival for children, between 2008-11 and is an adviser to the Kahaani Festival, another annual event for children. Pratham’s latest publication is a 10-book series called Adi Kahani, in four tribal languages in Odisha, using the Odia script. “It is because of the team that we have been able to put books in Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi and four tribal languages in the hands of children,” she says. Chaudhry views the work as part of a continuum. For if society aspires to have a workforce that is even slightly skilled, she believes it is important for them to be comfortable reading in their first language to start with—and for this they need to have access to good books in that language. “If we look at Indian society culturally, it is a mishmash of Victorian values, ancient values and some modern consumerist values,” she says. Society, she believes, is frightened of autonomy of thought and does not want anyone questioning the social structure. But if we are to create an egalitarian society, she says, it has to start with small acts of autonomy—and reading books of your choice for pleasure is a small step that opens up the mind to big ideas and thoughts. “For education to be truly meaningful, regardless of the background of the child or social disadvantage one suffers, it is only with little acts of rebellion or autonomy that one begins to establish the notion of freedom,” Chaudhry says. saurabh.k@livemint.com
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Sandip Patil, with his machine and staff, at the Sidbi Incubation Centre, IIT, Kanpur.
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SANDIP PATIL
The man with the invisible thread A CANAL WORKER’S SON RISES FROM A DEPRIVED CHILDHOOD TO PUSH NEW FRONTIERS IN THE EXCITING BUT FRAUGHT WORLD OF INDIAN NANOTECHNOLOGY Text by Samar Halarnkar Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
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andip Patil, 32, will tell you about his PhD in reusable adhesives—inspired by a frog’s foot—how he never used that degree to find a job, and how he hopes his fortune will come from a machine that spins fibres about 1,000 times finer than a human hair, virtually invisible threads that can be woven together to create revolutionary new textiles, filters and medical materials. Patil will also tell you about the days his father—a first-gradeeducated former contract farmer and now canal worker—struggled to put two meals on the table, how the young Patil left home at age 6 because there was no school near his home in northern Maharashtra and how he is, to this day, the only person from his village to get a college degree. To understand what independence and freedom can mean to a person trying to break free of generational shackles and break through scientific
frontiers is to understand Patil’s journey from the arid village of Pimpri—where his younger brother is still a cotton farmer—to the cerebral expanses of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). It is to understand the role of not just doggedness and education but mentors, ideas and ideals in the course of crossing those frontiers. Patil’s frontier is nanotechnology, the science of very small things, the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules. It is an emerging discipline that has seen great interest in India over the last decade, but there have been far too few breakthroughs and commercial applications, things that transform everyday life. Patil hopes to change some of that with a fabric that can resist cold and water. His work flows from something called high-voltage electro-spinning, a technology patented more than a century ago
but put to use only since the turn of the 21st century. Simply put, nanoscale electro-spinning is modern weaving, with threads you cannot see, drawn from a drop of liquid polymer, or material. Patil’s machine infuses a polymer drop with an electric charge and spins it out of a fine nozzle in the form of a jet. When the threads dry and lose their charge after contact with air, what is left are super-thin fibres, each no more than the width of a virus. Electro-spun thread is strong yet stretchable and infused with the properties of the polymers it is spun from, raw material for a range of new applications. The machine that made this virtually invisible thread was fabricated in-house at IIT-K after Patil’s mentor, Ashutosh Sharma, a much-awarded professor (among many others, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences, 2002, and the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer
Science, 2010), asked him to make one four years ago. “I took that challenge,” says Patil, whose speech still carries the brogue of his native land. “The machine was the only reason I did not take a job. I invested everything I had in it.” That amount came to `9 lakh, a fortune for a canal worker’s son. It was cobbled together with his student scholarship and money borrowed from friends and Sharma, who, despite being a fount of nanotechnologies, has found Indian industry inadequate to the task of commercializing them. “My philosophy is, instead of chasing companies, create them,” says Sharma. His trendsetter was Patil, who overcame nerves not just with encouragement, but a clear plan for profits. His company, E-Spin Nanotech Pvt. Ltd, was founded in 2010. He developed the original machine with help from Sharma and other students, six of whom got their MTech degrees and two PhDs from working on that prototype. Patil has since sold 20 machines— all experimental scale to aid nanotech research—to laboratories in the US, Denmark, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, recovering the `9 lakh investment within a year and turning a net profit of `50 lakh. In financial terms, it is all very modest, but in terms of pushing nanotechnology across a frontier, Patil’s little company is significant. As you read this, he should be ready with the first electro-spinning machine for the commercial market, ready to spin nanofibres for those cold- and rain-resistant garments. His machines are fabricated in-house by local mechanics. Patil is satisfied that he has balanced his wildly differing worlds. “My mom wanted a nice house,” explains Patil. “During my PhD I built a house for my parents, and I told
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I TOOK THAT CHALLENGE. THE MACHINE WAS THE ONLY REASON I DID NOT TAKE A JOB. I INVESTED EVERYTHING I HAD IN IT.
them I don’t need anything from you.” While Patil’s chosen path offers independence and excitement, it will not be easy. One of Sharma’s breakthroughs seven years ago offers a cautionary tale. Inspired by the way a frog’s foot sticks to any surface, Sharma, Patil and a team of researchers created a new sticky tape, reusable and 30 times stronger than normal. They mimicked a frog’s patterned footpad—laced underneath with glands and blood vessels—to create a soft, elastic material filled with air- or oil-filled micro-channels. It was a clever trick, but no one quite knew how to get the froginspired sticky tape to a production line. By 2011, Sharma and team had it figured, but three years later, it is—despite a global patent— frustratingly distant from market. After 10 months of negotiations with the representative of a global company he does not name, Sharma found himself frustrated when the man resigned: “They say, can I talk to their people in Minnesota?” Start-ups are the only way that Indian scientific research can reach the country’s great, growing market, says Sharma—especially start-ups that take the road less travelled. It’s much harder and unsexy to make machines from scratch in a country that grew its global reputation from— and created a comfort zone in— writing software or computer code. The emerging world of nanotechnology increasingly underscores a variety of products, from skin lotions (the cosmetics company L’Oréal has one of the biggest banks of nanotech patents) to filters on battle tanks. In this nano world, manufacturing changes dramatically. Things are not built directly, with bolts and power drills, but indirectly, through temperature changes and electric fields—as applied, for instance, to the liquid polymer drop in Patil’s machine— that persuade individual atoms and molecules to assemble themselves into a useful object, such as the nanofibre that the canal worker’s son has learnt to weave. “We will roll up our sleeves and get into the hardware,” says Sharma. “To do that, the first thing is to convince a middle-class student not to look for job security.” With Patil, he’s had a promising start. Samar Halarnkar is a Mint columnist and the author of A Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures Write to lounge@livemint.com
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Jockin Arputham with women and children near his office in Dharavi, Mumbai.
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URBAN POVERTY
JOCKIN ARPUTHAM
Light from the matchbox A SLUM DWELLER’S MOST FAMOUS ADVOCATE THE WORLD OVER, THIS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE NOMINEE FROM DHARAVI BELIEVES THE URBAN POOR CAN’T LIVE IN ISLANDS OF ENFORCED DEVELOPMENT Text by Sanjukta Sharma Photograph by Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
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ockin Arputham can be an onlooker or a heckler, depending on where he is and who he is up against. At a delegate meet of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), an alliance of organizations across Asia, South Africa and Latin America that work for the rights and uplift of shack and slum dwellers, he comfortably takes the back bench. Arputham, current SDI president and founder of the National Slum Dwellers Association (NSDA), and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, has led from the front for nearly 40 years. Sheela Patel, director and founder of The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (Sparc), NSDA’s partner in the fight for the urban poor in
India, moderates the meeting at a hotel on Grant Road, Mumbai, while Arputham sits in the last row listening intently to presentations or chatting with friends in the hotel lobby. Most of the time, Arputham, or “Jockin sir”, as the slum dwellers of Mumbai call him, is every bit a Dharavi man—astute, resourceful and intrepid. Since the 1970s, he has been the voice of Mumbai’s urban poor that successive governments have not been able to ignore. He has made the slum dweller’s life visible in this overpowering, forgetful city. He has guerrilla tactics for “no eviction without alternative” drives— holding on to a stay order till eviction is about to start, causing the police inconvenience; sending unwashed
women in a large group to police stations so the officers on duty listen to them quickly and let them go; camouflaging his small frame behind dupattas and saris of women to avoid police arrest; and gathering thousands together to paralyse streets. On paper, Arputham has been arrested more than 50 times. But that alone ought not to have got Arputham the Padma Shri and Ramon Magsaysay awards—both gleaming on a shelf at his Dharavi office—and the Nobel Peace Prize nomination. It has been reported that the Swedish minister for public administration and housing presented his nomination and, so far, he has the support of ministers from Norway, South Africa and Brazil.
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Arputham has been heard perhaps because he has not compromised on the belief that development for the urban poor has to be “bottoms up”. “You can’t come to Dharavi, which I consider a special economic zone (SEZ) in itself, producing lakhs of idlis every morning for Mumbai’s cheap breakfast, where various other such industries flourish, and say you have a model from Shanghai and you believe that it will work here. It won’t,” Arputham says. “None of the poor are living at anyone’s mercy. They are earning.” He has been talking to corporators, politicians, ministers in the state and Central governments, about slum housing and loans for more than two decades. “The first step is affordable
housing of course, but that’s not enough. Give them small, interest-free loans to buy a one-room place of their own. If they can’t pay the loan back, ask them to leave. That will give us a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging to the city, because after all you Mumbaikars can’t function without us. We do all your work,” he says. Arputham’s differences with the Dharavi Redevelopment Project committee are on issues of “enforced development”. “I hope real estate companies enter Dharavi soon too. Hope residential societies and slums can coexist, and gain from each other.” Sparc’s Patel believes the Indian media has often written carelessly about Arputham—ignoring his inclusive philosophy for slum development. “He is not just a rabble-rouser, alienating the need for developing a city’s infrastructure.” It’s mostly women who work out of Arputham’s pad at Dharavi—an office, a living space as well as a hub for NSDA workers. Arputham believes seven of every 10 workers in an organization should be women. The NSDA works closely with the women of Mahila Milan, a nationwide collective of women’s savings groups that aims to empower women from slums, shanties and pavements. “Why I have got here today and why my work has yielded results is because I got women from my slum to work for me. They communicate better and understand big, complex problems much better than men,” Arputham says. Women surround him wherever he is; they are doing the most crucial jobs, his close colleagues at the NSDA say. Arputham’s desk is a large mattress with big pillows and bolsters—imagine a small-town cloth trader sitting crosslegged on his gadda and doing business. His awards adorn the walls and there is an endless supply of sweet, milky tea from the kitchen. He eats little and sleeps less, say NSDA workers. “He dreams and plots with alert, wide open eyes,” says Guna Shekhar, a worker close to him, whom Arputham considers one of his successors in field work. In nearly four decades, Arputham, now 67, has enabled the relocation and rehabilitation of 37,000 families in Mumbai. According to the 2011 census, around 65 million people were living in
slums across India, and 60% of Mumbai’s 12 million people were in slums. The census defines these slums as “unfit for human habitation” for a variety of reasons. Starting from Mankhurd’s Janata Colony, a gigantic slum destroyed in 1976 to make way for the housing of the neighbouring Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc), Arputham’s field of operations has expanded from the slum to the city to the country and now, to the world. His politics is the same everywhere: Acknowledge the urban poor as one of you, share the city’s resources with them, find ways to live with them. “In all countries the basic problems are the same; housing, sanitation, water. Comparatively speaking, a slum in India is likely to be safer than, say, one in São Paulo. Here, everybody is looking for a chance to sell something, make money out of selling whatever he gets his hands on. In many countries in Africa and Latin America, mostly cash-crop countries, they are waiting to steal or waiting for someone to rescue them,” Arputham says. In the world of “Jockin sir”, politicians are outcasts. “All of them, including now Medha Patkar and Mayank Gandhi and all the Aam Aadmi Party politicians who made pro-poor speeches in their campaigns, are anti-poor and anti-
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I SOMETIMES REGRET NOT FULFILLING MY FAMILY DUTIES... I HAVE ONLY THOUGHT OF MYSELF AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE URBAN POOR AND THE URBAN RICH.
slums. We have never seen them, they have never engaged with us.” He believes there is still no real, sustained development in slums; every government has failed. “Man, woman and child sleep without a curtain openly on streets. What kind of a country is this? Why are they here, who let them come here and then let them rot like this?” he asks, in the polemic fashion he has mastered over the years, and which has got the attention of policymakers the world over. For Rose Molokoane from Oukasie near Pretoria, South Africa, representing her country at the SDI meet in Mumbai is familiar territory. She has known Arputham since 1991. Their friendship goes back to an SDI conference in the UK, when Molokoane first heard Arputham speak. “He spoke out of the experience of his own life, while we were trying to find solutions from outside, trying to find precedents. I walked up to him and asked if he would visit South Africa.” Back home, she convinced organizations working on similar issues to invite him to work with them for a week. He went back many times after that first visit. He has led presentations on issues related to slum dwellers at the national department of human settlement, South Africa. “There was a lady named Lindiwe Sisulu who was the chair of the department. Jockin floored her with a speech. She said she saw her father in him, an anti-apartheid activist.” Molokoane says South Africa has the second largest presence in SDI today largely because of Arputham’s constant support and effort. Arputham is a midnight’s child. On 15 August 1947, hours after the tricolour was hoisted, he was born in the Kolar Gold Fields, Karnataka, to an uppermiddle-class Tamil family. His father worked at the local goldmine, and was known and paid well for his precise work at the blast sites. “I remember two boys used to chaperone me to school and fetch me back home. But by the time I was 18, there was no food in the house when I returned from school.” The family’s ebbing fortunes forced him to think of leaving. “I left one day for Mumbai, like millions do every day. I stayed on the streets for three years and then found a place at the Janata Colony in Mankhurd, and found a job.” In his early 20s, he formed a company called Lift and Shift, hiring local boys and girls to clear garbage, clean the ground and move machines at Barc. Shekhar, whom Arputham has mentored since he was an adolescent, says: “For as long as I remember, he could gather people around him in minutes. He would just draw crowds and everybody would listen.” At the Janata Colony, he set up an informal school where older children taught younger children. (Arputham himself has studied till class VII, and says he “couldn’t teach anyone anything”.) “My first experience with the power of community was when I got thousands of children from the Janata Colony to carry a load of mosquito-breeding garbage wrapped in paper and dump it in the nearest municipal office. Our complaints had gone unheard for too long,” he says. The Janata Colony received threats of eviction in the 1970s and Arputham staged many rallies, a few also in New Delhi, before prime minister Indira Gandhi met him and promised him safety. But in 1976 the municipal authorities razed the colony. Arputham moved to Dharavi, which became the universe from where he would reach slum dwellers all over the world. “I sometimes regret not fulfilling my family duties,” says Arputham, talking about his decision to marry in the early 1970s. “We separated soon because I could not think of providing just for one family. I have only thought of myself as a bridge between the urban poor and the urban rich.” He says he talks to his three daughters, who now have their own families, every day. Like all grandparents, he can’t get enough of his grandchildren. Everybody in that room at the Krishna Palace Hotel, Grant Road, who had congregated to discuss strategies for SDI hoped the peace prize would come home. “When he wins it, it will be a win for the power of negotiation, and for the cause of fighting for what you are,” says Molokoane, almost in tears. sanjukta.s@livemint.com
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e, in India, have a habit of talking negative,” says Rajat Goyal, director of the India chapter of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (Iavi), a global not-forprofit, public-private partnership working towards the development of vaccines to prevent HIV infection and AIDS. “Although I don’t know if we will have a vaccine during my lifetime, I am sure we will have enough scientific breakthroughs by then to help the human population.” Suitably for a scientist engaged in one of the most complex and elusive missions in contemporary medical research, he avoids making tall claims. “My prolonged exposure to mortality and interest in science motivated this move,” says Dr Goyal, an oncologist by training, with years of work experience abroad. “I was treating cancer patients, some of whom were also carriers of HIV. Their suffering was excruciating.” At the time, having AIDS was as good as being given “a certificate of death”, he adds. “What can I do to change this? I kept asking myself.” After he moved back to India and worked in industry for a while, the answer presented itself in the form of directorship of Iavi. “It is my belief that several infectious diseases, even those of the future, that affect the immune system can be prevented or tackled by vaccines,” the 47year-old says. Diseases can be notoriously unpredictable, especially in their patterns of evolution. “A vast amount of science already exists that can understand pathogen behaviour,” says Dr Goyal, “and yet, the complexity of the immune system remains as challenging as ever.” While the popular attitude to cancer sufferers is usually of pity, HIV tends to invite stigma. “The instant reaction is: cannot happen to us, because people like us do not take drugs or practise unsafe
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THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I USED TO THINK PREVENTION OF HIV WAS A MYTH, BEFORE I WAS, THANKFULLY, PROVEN WRONG BY THE THAI TRIAL.
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sex,” Dr Goyal explains. “But so many actually get infected while receiving transfusions, for instance, and still get stigmatized for no ‘fault’ of their own.” Apart from scientific research, Iavi is involved with advocacy and communitybased activities to raise awareness about HIV. “The National AIDS Control Organization, (Naco) has contributed immensely to spreading knowledge about the virus,” says Dr Goyal. “We may not be able to change sexual practices and risky behaviour very easily, but we can at least hope to reduce the incidence of HIV from epidemic to endemic levels by making the masses more informed.” But while AIDS can be turned into a chronic disease from an acute one, can it be fully and effectively conquered? “There was a time when I used to think prevention of HIV was a myth, before I was, thankfully, proven wrong by the Thai trial,” says Dr Goyal. Also known as RV144, this clinical trial, combining two vaccines, was carried out in Thailand in 2003, and the volunteers
RAJAT GOYAL
Mender of maladies THIS SCIENTIST IS LEADING A MISSION AGAINST AN ELUSIVE ENEMY, WORKING TOWARDS A VACCINE TO PREVENT HIV
were tested for HIV till 2006. When the findings were released in 2009, initial reports showed that the rate of infection among those who had received the experimental vaccine was 31% lower than those who had not. However, like many such attempts, it proved unstable and could not be scaled up for manufacturing—though it did give rise to new hope. In India, too, the first phase of the trials succeeded. The MVA (modified vaccinia Ankara) vector model, which is currently in use, is a good one, though not robust enough to be turned into a mass deliverable product. “My belief is that India has the wherewithal to become a centre for excellence in HIV research,” Dr Goyal says. Our scientific professionalism, he adds, is increasing, and though we may not have as much government spending on HIV eradication programmes as the US or China, international agencies have been putting in funds. The first line of antiretroviral therapy (ART), given to patients suffering from AIDS-related complications, is free to everyone in India thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, which is making low-cost drugs. “Naco has opened ART centres across the nation, reducing the incidence of infection by as much as 57%,” Dr Goyal says. “Our manufacturing capacities have not gone up comparably, but if we become cognizant of the need for increased production, targets can be achieved as well.” However, while pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) such as Truvada, taken to prevent HIV infection, is gaining prominence in the West, Dr Goyal feels India is not yet ready for such measures. “Truvada has come to India with a mixed bag of reactions,” he says. “Our culture and practices are such that you would feel sceptical about using it in this country.” We continue battling tuberculosis, Dr Goyal points out, due to multi-drug resistance. Compared with other nationalities, more Indians are resistant to antibiotics owing to the easy availability and misuse of drugs here. “How will you control the programme if you introduce PrEP in such a scenario?” he asks. But there are other ways in which India can make a contribution to HIV research. “We need to realize that biomedical research, that is studying the population and its immune system, is very important,” says Dr Goyal. Geographically, strains of the same virus have been known to differ, so it is hard to tell whether a single vaccine will work globally. India, with its density and diversity of population, especially in the rural areas, provides a usefully wide sample. “We have a vaccine and are trying to make it better before it goes into another trial run around 2016-17,” says Dr Goyal. “Our aim is to figure out what percentage of the population it will be able to influence, and how effectively.” He is convinced about one thing though: “If we are going to find an end to AIDS, a vaccine has to be part of the journey.” somak.g@livemint.com
Text by Somak Ghoshal Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
Dr Rajat Goyal, director of Iavi India, at his office in New Delhi.
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Jockin Arputham with women and children near his office in Dharavi, Mumbai.
freedom from
URBAN POVERTY
JOCKIN ARPUTHAM
Light from the matchbox A SLUM DWELLER’S MOST FAMOUS ADVOCATE THE WORLD OVER, THIS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE NOMINEE FROM DHARAVI BELIEVES THE URBAN POOR CAN’T LIVE IN ISLANDS OF ENFORCED DEVELOPMENT Text by Sanjukta Sharma Photograph by Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
J
ockin Arputham can be an onlooker or a heckler, depending on where he is and who he is up against. At a delegate meet of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), an alliance of organizations across Asia, South Africa and Latin America that work for the rights and uplift of shack and slum dwellers, he comfortably takes the back bench. Arputham, current SDI president and founder of the National Slum Dwellers Association (NSDA), and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, has led from the front for nearly 40 years. Sheela Patel, director and founder of The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (Sparc), NSDA’s partner in the fight for the urban poor in
India, moderates the meeting at a hotel on Grant Road, Mumbai, while Arputham sits in the last row listening intently to presentations or chatting with friends in the hotel lobby. Most of the time, Arputham, or “Jockin sir”, as the slum dwellers of Mumbai call him, is every bit a Dharavi man—astute, resourceful and intrepid. Since the 1970s, he has been the voice of Mumbai’s urban poor that successive governments have not been able to ignore. He has made the slum dweller’s life visible in this overpowering, forgetful city. He has guerrilla tactics for “no eviction without alternative” drives— holding on to a stay order till eviction is about to start, causing the police inconvenience; sending unwashed
women in a large group to police stations so the officers on duty listen to them quickly and let them go; camouflaging his small frame behind dupattas and saris of women to avoid police arrest; and gathering thousands together to paralyse streets. On paper, Arputham has been arrested more than 50 times. But that alone ought not to have got Arputham the Padma Shri and Ramon Magsaysay awards—both gleaming on a shelf at his Dharavi office—and the Nobel Peace Prize nomination. It has been reported that the Swedish minister for public administration and housing presented his nomination and, so far, he has the support of ministers from Norway, South Africa and Brazil.
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Arputham has been heard perhaps because he has not compromised on the belief that development for the urban poor has to be “bottoms up”. “You can’t come to Dharavi, which I consider a special economic zone (SEZ) in itself, producing lakhs of idlis every morning for Mumbai’s cheap breakfast, where various other such industries flourish, and say you have a model from Shanghai and you believe that it will work here. It won’t,” Arputham says. “None of the poor are living at anyone’s mercy. They are earning.” He has been talking to corporators, politicians, ministers in the state and Central governments, about slum housing and loans for more than two decades. “The first step is affordable
housing of course, but that’s not enough. Give them small, interest-free loans to buy a one-room place of their own. If they can’t pay the loan back, ask them to leave. That will give us a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging to the city, because after all you Mumbaikars can’t function without us. We do all your work,” he says. Arputham’s differences with the Dharavi Redevelopment Project committee are on issues of “enforced development”. “I hope real estate companies enter Dharavi soon too. Hope residential societies and slums can coexist, and gain from each other.” Sparc’s Patel believes the Indian media has often written carelessly about Arputham—ignoring his inclusive philosophy for slum development. “He is not just a rabble-rouser, alienating the need for developing a city’s infrastructure.” It’s mostly women who work out of Arputham’s pad at Dharavi—an office, a living space as well as a hub for NSDA workers. Arputham believes seven of every 10 workers in an organization should be women. The NSDA works closely with the women of Mahila Milan, a nationwide collective of women’s savings groups that aims to empower women from slums, shanties and pavements. “Why I have got here today and why my work has yielded results is because I got women from my slum to work for me. They communicate better and understand big, complex problems much better than men,” Arputham says. Women surround him wherever he is; they are doing the most crucial jobs, his close colleagues at the NSDA say. Arputham’s desk is a large mattress with big pillows and bolsters—imagine a small-town cloth trader sitting crosslegged on his gadda and doing business. His awards adorn the walls and there is an endless supply of sweet, milky tea from the kitchen. He eats little and sleeps less, say NSDA workers. “He dreams and plots with alert, wide open eyes,” says Guna Shekhar, a worker close to him, whom Arputham considers one of his successors in field work. In nearly four decades, Arputham, now 67, has enabled the relocation and rehabilitation of 37,000 families in Mumbai. According to the 2011 census, around 65 million people were living in
slums across India, and 60% of Mumbai’s 12 million people were in slums. The census defines these slums as “unfit for human habitation” for a variety of reasons. Starting from Mankhurd’s Janata Colony, a gigantic slum destroyed in 1976 to make way for the housing of the neighbouring Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc), Arputham’s field of operations has expanded from the slum to the city to the country and now, to the world. His politics is the same everywhere: Acknowledge the urban poor as one of you, share the city’s resources with them, find ways to live with them. “In all countries the basic problems are the same; housing, sanitation, water. Comparatively speaking, a slum in India is likely to be safer than, say, one in São Paulo. Here, everybody is looking for a chance to sell something, make money out of selling whatever he gets his hands on. In many countries in Africa and Latin America, mostly cash-crop countries, they are waiting to steal or waiting for someone to rescue them,” Arputham says. In the world of “Jockin sir”, politicians are outcasts. “All of them, including now Medha Patkar and Mayank Gandhi and all the Aam Aadmi Party politicians who made pro-poor speeches in their campaigns, are anti-poor and anti-
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I SOMETIMES REGRET NOT FULFILLING MY FAMILY DUTIES... I HAVE ONLY THOUGHT OF MYSELF AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE URBAN POOR AND THE URBAN RICH.
slums. We have never seen them, they have never engaged with us.” He believes there is still no real, sustained development in slums; every government has failed. “Man, woman and child sleep without a curtain openly on streets. What kind of a country is this? Why are they here, who let them come here and then let them rot like this?” he asks, in the polemic fashion he has mastered over the years, and which has got the attention of policymakers the world over. For Rose Molokoane from Oukasie near Pretoria, South Africa, representing her country at the SDI meet in Mumbai is familiar territory. She has known Arputham since 1991. Their friendship goes back to an SDI conference in the UK, when Molokoane first heard Arputham speak. “He spoke out of the experience of his own life, while we were trying to find solutions from outside, trying to find precedents. I walked up to him and asked if he would visit South Africa.” Back home, she convinced organizations working on similar issues to invite him to work with them for a week. He went back many times after that first visit. He has led presentations on issues related to slum dwellers at the national department of human settlement, South Africa. “There was a lady named Lindiwe Sisulu who was the chair of the department. Jockin floored her with a speech. She said she saw her father in him, an anti-apartheid activist.” Molokoane says South Africa has the second largest presence in SDI today largely because of Arputham’s constant support and effort. Arputham is a midnight’s child. On 15 August 1947, hours after the tricolour was hoisted, he was born in the Kolar Gold Fields, Karnataka, to an uppermiddle-class Tamil family. His father worked at the local goldmine, and was known and paid well for his precise work at the blast sites. “I remember two boys used to chaperone me to school and fetch me back home. But by the time I was 18, there was no food in the house when I returned from school.” The family’s ebbing fortunes forced him to think of leaving. “I left one day for Mumbai, like millions do every day. I stayed on the streets for three years and then found a place at the Janata Colony in Mankhurd, and found a job.” In his early 20s, he formed a company called Lift and Shift, hiring local boys and girls to clear garbage, clean the ground and move machines at Barc. Shekhar, whom Arputham has mentored since he was an adolescent, says: “For as long as I remember, he could gather people around him in minutes. He would just draw crowds and everybody would listen.” At the Janata Colony, he set up an informal school where older children taught younger children. (Arputham himself has studied till class VII, and says he “couldn’t teach anyone anything”.) “My first experience with the power of community was when I got thousands of children from the Janata Colony to carry a load of mosquito-breeding garbage wrapped in paper and dump it in the nearest municipal office. Our complaints had gone unheard for too long,” he says. The Janata Colony received threats of eviction in the 1970s and Arputham staged many rallies, a few also in New Delhi, before prime minister Indira Gandhi met him and promised him safety. But in 1976 the municipal authorities razed the colony. Arputham moved to Dharavi, which became the universe from where he would reach slum dwellers all over the world. “I sometimes regret not fulfilling my family duties,” says Arputham, talking about his decision to marry in the early 1970s. “We separated soon because I could not think of providing just for one family. I have only thought of myself as a bridge between the urban poor and the urban rich.” He says he talks to his three daughters, who now have their own families, every day. Like all grandparents, he can’t get enough of his grandchildren. Everybody in that room at the Krishna Palace Hotel, Grant Road, who had congregated to discuss strategies for SDI hoped the peace prize would come home. “When he wins it, it will be a win for the power of negotiation, and for the cause of fighting for what you are,” says Molokoane, almost in tears. sanjukta.s@livemint.com
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e, in India, have a habit of talking negative,” says Rajat Goyal, director of the India chapter of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (Iavi), a global not-forprofit, public-private partnership working towards the development of vaccines to prevent HIV infection and AIDS. “Although I don’t know if we will have a vaccine during my lifetime, I am sure we will have enough scientific breakthroughs by then to help the human population.” Suitably for a scientist engaged in one of the most complex and elusive missions in contemporary medical research, he avoids making tall claims. “My prolonged exposure to mortality and interest in science motivated this move,” says Dr Goyal, an oncologist by training, with years of work experience abroad. “I was treating cancer patients, some of whom were also carriers of HIV. Their suffering was excruciating.” At the time, having AIDS was as good as being given “a certificate of death”, he adds. “What can I do to change this? I kept asking myself.” After he moved back to India and worked in industry for a while, the answer presented itself in the form of directorship of Iavi. “It is my belief that several infectious diseases, even those of the future, that affect the immune system can be prevented or tackled by vaccines,” the 47year-old says. Diseases can be notoriously unpredictable, especially in their patterns of evolution. “A vast amount of science already exists that can understand pathogen behaviour,” says Dr Goyal, “and yet, the complexity of the immune system remains as challenging as ever.” While the popular attitude to cancer sufferers is usually of pity, HIV tends to invite stigma. “The instant reaction is: cannot happen to us, because people like us do not take drugs or practise unsafe
freedom from
DISEASE
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I USED TO THINK PREVENTION OF HIV WAS A MYTH, BEFORE I WAS, THANKFULLY, PROVEN WRONG BY THE THAI TRIAL.
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sex,” Dr Goyal explains. “But so many actually get infected while receiving transfusions, for instance, and still get stigmatized for no ‘fault’ of their own.” Apart from scientific research, Iavi is involved with advocacy and communitybased activities to raise awareness about HIV. “The National AIDS Control Organization, (Naco) has contributed immensely to spreading knowledge about the virus,” says Dr Goyal. “We may not be able to change sexual practices and risky behaviour very easily, but we can at least hope to reduce the incidence of HIV from epidemic to endemic levels by making the masses more informed.” But while AIDS can be turned into a chronic disease from an acute one, can it be fully and effectively conquered? “There was a time when I used to think prevention of HIV was a myth, before I was, thankfully, proven wrong by the Thai trial,” says Dr Goyal. Also known as RV144, this clinical trial, combining two vaccines, was carried out in Thailand in 2003, and the volunteers
RAJAT GOYAL
Mender of maladies THIS SCIENTIST IS LEADING A MISSION AGAINST AN ELUSIVE ENEMY, WORKING TOWARDS A VACCINE TO PREVENT HIV
were tested for HIV till 2006. When the findings were released in 2009, initial reports showed that the rate of infection among those who had received the experimental vaccine was 31% lower than those who had not. However, like many such attempts, it proved unstable and could not be scaled up for manufacturing—though it did give rise to new hope. In India, too, the first phase of the trials succeeded. The MVA (modified vaccinia Ankara) vector model, which is currently in use, is a good one, though not robust enough to be turned into a mass deliverable product. “My belief is that India has the wherewithal to become a centre for excellence in HIV research,” Dr Goyal says. Our scientific professionalism, he adds, is increasing, and though we may not have as much government spending on HIV eradication programmes as the US or China, international agencies have been putting in funds. The first line of antiretroviral therapy (ART), given to patients suffering from AIDS-related complications, is free to everyone in India thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, which is making low-cost drugs. “Naco has opened ART centres across the nation, reducing the incidence of infection by as much as 57%,” Dr Goyal says. “Our manufacturing capacities have not gone up comparably, but if we become cognizant of the need for increased production, targets can be achieved as well.” However, while pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) such as Truvada, taken to prevent HIV infection, is gaining prominence in the West, Dr Goyal feels India is not yet ready for such measures. “Truvada has come to India with a mixed bag of reactions,” he says. “Our culture and practices are such that you would feel sceptical about using it in this country.” We continue battling tuberculosis, Dr Goyal points out, due to multi-drug resistance. Compared with other nationalities, more Indians are resistant to antibiotics owing to the easy availability and misuse of drugs here. “How will you control the programme if you introduce PrEP in such a scenario?” he asks. But there are other ways in which India can make a contribution to HIV research. “We need to realize that biomedical research, that is studying the population and its immune system, is very important,” says Dr Goyal. Geographically, strains of the same virus have been known to differ, so it is hard to tell whether a single vaccine will work globally. India, with its density and diversity of population, especially in the rural areas, provides a usefully wide sample. “We have a vaccine and are trying to make it better before it goes into another trial run around 2016-17,” says Dr Goyal. “Our aim is to figure out what percentage of the population it will be able to influence, and how effectively.” He is convinced about one thing though: “If we are going to find an end to AIDS, a vaccine has to be part of the journey.” somak.g@livemint.com
Text by Somak Ghoshal Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
Dr Rajat Goyal, director of Iavi India, at his office in New Delhi.
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Zubaida Zubaida Bai Bai at at the the production production facility facility of of ayzh, ayzh, 30km 30km from from Chennai. Chennai.
freedom from
RISKY CHILDBIRTH
ZUBAIDA BAI
A pack of good health THIS INNOVATOR MADE A KIT THAT FREES WOMEN IN MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD OF THE THREAT OF INFECTION DURING CHILDBIRTH Text by Nelson Vinod Moses Photograph by Nathan G/Mint
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rowing up in Chennai, a young Zubaida Bai wanted to study further after completing class XII. A reasonable request, except that in her family, nobody—male or female—had made it to college. The women in her family were usually married in their teens. Plus, Zubaida’s father did not have the finances to put her through college. Undeterred, she decided to fight fate. At 33, Zubaida Bai was the founderCEO of ayzh (pronounced “eyes”), a low-cost women’s healthcare company based in Chennai and Colorado, US. Her biggest achievement: JANMA, a birthing kit sold and distributed through non-governmental organizations and healthcare companies. JANMA (birth in Hindi) kits consist of six things: an apron, a sheet, a hand sanitizer, an antiseptic soap, a cord clip and a surgical blade. They meet the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines of “six cleans” during childbirth—clean hands of the attendant, clean surface, clean blade, clean cord tie, clean towels to dry the baby and wrap it, and clean cloth to wrap the mother. A jute purse in five colours contains the kit and and it can be used as a purse after delivery. From mundane struggles with a traditional Muslim family to being a successful innovator, Zubaida Bai’s journey has been one about exercising the right to
free choice although that involved selling her jewellery to get ayzh off the ground. Soon after school, Zubaida took a year off, selling retail banking services doorto-door for ABN Amro, cold-calling customers and earning her first pay cheque when she was 17. Soon she was in college, studying mechanical engineering, and went on to become the first graduate in her entire family. After graduation, she dreamt of designing cars, but ended up at auto-parts company Sundram Fasteners. “I was the only girl on the entire floor, all I did every day was change the dimensions on a CAD design or take printouts. I was getting fat from all the thayir saadam (curd rice),” she recalls. She was soon planning her escape. Scouring the Internet for a master’s degree, she secretly applied to various universities. After an acceptance letter for a fully funded scholarship to an M.Tech programme at Dalarna University, Sweden, arrived, she told her parents. Her father thought this was one of those infamous scams that promised you a job and ended up hiring you as domestic labour. But finally, Zubaida left home. In the summer of her first semester in college, she took a road trip, was part of a students’ exchange programme, visited Poland and, during a period of self-discovery, she decided to start wearing the hijab, though no one in her family did.
Back in Chennai before her second semester ended and coaxed to meet a potential suitor, Habib Anwar, she feared the worst. “(But) he said that he was looking for an educated girl, who he would like to work rather than sit at home and squabble with his relatives,” says Zubaida. Anwar supported Zubaida’s plan to study further as well. Soon they were married. Much later, he would be instrumental in providing the necessary support to make ayzh a success. In 2006, Zubaida gave birth to the first of her three sons, Yasin. It was a painful experience. She needed surgery, was forced to rest for two months and took close to a year to recover fully. In her childhood, she had witnessed the lack of healthcare facilities for her mother, close relatives and community, and the lack of financial resources to pay for these if they did happen to be available. Sometime in 2009, as part of a master’s in business administration in global social and sustainable enterprises at the University of Colorado, US, Zubaida came to India to research ideas that could be developed into products. She worked with Chennai-based non-profit Rural Innovations Network (RIN), making the JS Milker, a vacuum-driven cowmilking machine, low-cost and commercially viable. In Rajasthan, she met a vil-
lage dai (midwife) who had just delivered a baby with a grass-cutting sickle. This was her a-ha moment. She started reading up on institutional childbirth. She stumbled upon a clean birth kit (CBK) while attending a tech event in Denver, US, promoted by the non-profit healthcare organization PATH. The kit had a plastic sheet, a Topaz blade, a piece of thread, a small square of soap, and a plastic coin. All this was wrapped in a box with instructions. She then travelled halfway across the world to Nepal, where a group of women was assembling the kit. Unimpressed with the quality of the kit, she searched for more samples, but found none that matched her expectations. But she knew she was on to something, and started building her own improved version, using off-the-shelf components and assembling them. By 2010, she had put together a rudimentary clean birthing kit called JANMA, which she tested in Bangalore, through her gynaecologist. The innovation won the Global Social Venture Competition for business plans at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad in March 2010, and followed it up by topping the Camino Real Venture Competition at the University of Texas at El Paso, US, later that month. Zubaida Bai also received a 2010-11 fellowship related to maternal health from Ashoka, an organization which identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs. At one event, she met the who’s who of the world of maternal health. “They were folks who were shaping the future of maternal health. These are people I would have found impossible to meet, especially Wendy Graham, who does research on how clean birth kits prevent infections,” she says. Her interactions confirmed her belief that a product such as JANMA would have a market. By 2011, they had sold 2,000-3,000 JANMA kits, priced at $2-5 (now around `120-300), in India and had made some inroads into the US. After the initial success, though, Zubaida Bai hit a wall. Ayzh needed funds for operating costs, scaling up and distribu-
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WE WANT TO BUILD A CORPORATE ENTITY, WITH A GROUP OF COMPANIES THAT WILL FOCUS ON WOMEN’S HEALTH AND EMPOWERMENT.
tion channels. Forced to return to India after completing her course at the University of Colorado, Zubaida and Anwar had two MBAs and two children between them, and no jobs. Those were trying times. Even as friends and family advised one of them to get a job, Zubaida and Anwar calculated that they needed $300,000 for one-and-a-half years for ayzh to get off the ground. A social impact firm assured them of $50,000 if they could raise $100,000 and $20,000 if they raised nothing. Everything hung in the balance till the end of 2012, when they were awarded the $80,000 Echoing Green fellowship. They also got a Canadian government grant for another $100,000, while an individual investor put in another $100,000. This was the turning point. In 2013, they clocked $100,000 in revenue, and sold 50,000 kits in India, Haiti, Laos, Afghanistan and Africa. The JANMA kit’s relevance is irrefutable. According to the UN, India’s maternal mortality ratio per 100,000 live births reduced by 65%, from 560 in 1990 to 190 in 2013. But that still means 50,000 women die every year in India while giving birth. Seventeen per cent of the women die from preventable infections. More than 300,000 infants in India die the day they are born, according to the report “Ending Newborn Deaths, Ensuring Every Baby Survives”, by the nonprofit Save the Children and Joy Lawn, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Zubaida’s goal for ayzh is threepronged. She wants women to have power over their health by introducing new products for post-partum haemorrhage, a new-born kit, maternity pad and other innovations in reproductive health and family planning. Instead of creating products from scratch she wants to leverage the ayzh distribution platform to aggregate and sell products already available in the market. And, finally, she wants to launch an innovation lab for low-cost healthcare products, so that an entrepreneur with an idea does not have to go through the same grind that they did. To realize this ambition they are currently in the process of raising $3 million in funding—a huge sum for a social enterprise selling low-cost products to bottom-of-the-pyramid customers—from social impact investors. “We want to build a corporate entity, with a group of companies that will focus on women’s health and empowerment. Habib saw his mother struggle doing sewing and embroidery and I saw my mother struggle as well. They always brought in money, but were not appreciated and treated as an asset,” says Zubaida. Nelson Vinod Moses is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist who writes on social entrepreneurship. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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S
ometime in 2001, in the temple town of Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, lawyer Ritwick Dutta had his moment of epiphany. He was trying to assimilate the proceedings of a public hearing for the Kalpakkam nuclear installation. It was, he recalls, “the theatre of the absurd”. For one, it wasn’t really for the “public”, who were ill-informed, and misinformed. Crucial information, which included the results of a cancer-screening survey of the area, were never made public. The mandatory environmental impact assessment made no mention of the potential impact on health or fisheries, the mainstay of the locals, who made their opposition to the nuclear reactor clear. The already existing facilities (since the 1980s) had created havoc in their lives: Fish catch had plummeted, and terrible afflictions were leaving them impoverished. What the people wanted was inconsequential. Immediately after the hearing, it was announced that the new reactor would be installed within six months. Dutta was there as part of a project with the Human Rights Law Network, a collective of lawyers and activists, but
he realized that one had to look beyond the obvious. “I was there on a human rights issue. But it was equally one of the environment, ecology, marine life, which would be devastated by the plant,” he says. He realized that his chosen path, protecting wildlife, had other dimensions. Protecting the livelihood of the local fisherfolk would also conserve the fragile marine ecology. “In that sense our goals were the same,” he says. He also understood the scale of environment injustice, and that environment law required singular focus. It could not be only a subset of human rights, or worse, an act of charity. Dutta calls it the “Haridwar effect, wherein 99 of the cases you might represent are entities with poor environment/human rights track records, but then you graciously do one PIL (public interest litigation) pro bono.” So he took the decision to finally put to use his law degree, pursued largely so he was fruitfully engaged while he spent time volunteering with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), mainly frequenting shady bazaars, more often than not disguised either as a flashy babu or a scruffy vagabond
freedom to
BE GREEN
in the hope of getting the inside track on the illegal wildlife trade. Armed with a diploma in environmental law, his experience in the field and a firm commitment to protect natural habitats, Dutta decided to pursue environment law—taking on companies like Vedanta, Lafarge and Jindal Steel & Power Ltd from 2003 on. In 2005, he co-founded the Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) with another environment lawyer, Rahul Choudhary. One of thei rfirst successes was in December 2007, when environment clearance for the `9,000-crore Polavaram project was quashed by the National Environmental Appellate Authority on the grounds that no public hearing had been conducted in the areas of Odisha and Chhattisgarh that would be affected. Polavaram was to displace 200,000 people. This success came after many failures. Dutta would, thereafter, strategically take his cases to the National Environment Appellate Authority, which he says had dismissed all the appeals filed in its decade-long existence—till Polavaram. It was with the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee (on
RITWICK DUTTA
The case for our forests
THE 40YEAROLD LAWYER HAS TAKEN THE BATTLE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT TO THE COURTROOM WITH MORE THAN 350 CASES
Text by Prerna Singh Bindra Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
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forests and wildlife cases) that Dutta was able to garner some support for, among others, the Dongria Kondh tribe that was opposing Vedanta’s proposal for bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills they held sacred. Dutta took the case up to the Supreme Court, which asked Vedanta to get approval from the tribals. They rejected it. In 2007, Dutta set up the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Resources and Response Centre, which provides an accessible database on environment impact assessment reports, along with a critical analysis. A basic flaw in the EIA process is that the reports are prepared by private agents engaged by companies, and hence may not be objective. Many of them have come in for a great deal of criticism. “An EIA for a 3,000 MW hydel project in Arunachal Pradesh listed two species of tiger, two unknown cobra species and a yet unrecorded Brown Pied Hornbill! Given that these were all new to science, I figured it was reason enough to call for a moratorium on the project, and go for a comprehensive wildlife survey!” Dutta says. Irony and humour are traits that he displays often, along with the ability to see humour in the bleakest of situations. It keeps him sane, he explains. As does his closet passion for seasonal flowers. “Which guy would admit to liking flowers?” he asks, laughing. He grows and nurtures many varieties. When he was a child, the family stayed for some years near the Kaziranga National Park in Assam, and much as the iconic greater one-horned rhino had an influence, Dutta says the family’s gardener, with whom he spent many happy hours while he tended their garden, had something to do with his life’s purpose too. With the 40-year-old lawyer taking the battle for the environment to the courtroom, leisure has become a luxury. He has dealt with over 350 cases so far. For instance, he took on the Gujarat government for its refusal to move Gir’s lions to another suitable habitat (a review petition filed by the state government has been dismissed); and fought the encroachment of the New Kalagarh irrigation colony within the Corbett Tiger Reserve (the Supreme Court has ordered it removed). He has fought many big-ticket projects, representing local communities against the Jindals’ mining company in Chhattisgarh; horticulturalists opposing Lafarge’s limestone mining in Himachal Pradesh; mango farmers in Ratnagiri battling JSW’s thermal power plant; and dams in Uttarakhand and the North-East, including the contentious Lower Demwe Hydro Power Project which will submerge swathes of prime rainforest, and the sacred
SETTING UP AN INSTITUTION IS THE BEGINNING; IT HAS TO BE UTILIZED, MADE EFFECTIVE SO THAT IT SERVES ITS PURPOSE.
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Parshuram Kund, in Arunachal Pradesh. He has won some battles, but the fight continues. Dutta dismisses the argument that green laws and environmental activism are hurdles to growth. “That’s a myth that is being perpetuated. Virtually all projects—over 95%—are cleared; every day over 330 acres of forest land is diverted in India,” he says. The cases that come for legal challenge are less than 1% of those approved. He is the most active lawyer in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) set up in 2010. “Getting a functional environment court in the country was a struggle,” says Dutta, who has been training people across the country on the NGT Act. “Setting up an institution is the beginning; it has to be utilized, made effective so that it serves its purpose.” What drives Dutta is his determination to protect the last remaining natural wild habitats, and what he calls “environmental democracy, a process to arm communities with knowledge, and to give them a voice in projects which impact their lives and livelihood.” “It is not just about the environment any more. The way approvals (to projects) are being granted speak of poor governance.” He cites the case of the Mahan mines on the periphery of the Mohan Ban Reserve Forest in Madhya Pradesh, which he says will devastate more than 1,200 hectares of the finest sal forests, rich in wildlife, for coal that is not expected to last more than 14 years. “Essentially, we are going against our own Constitution, which upholds freedom of expression, and the duty to protect the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures,” Dutta says. Prerna Singh Bindra is a wildlife conservationist and editor of TigerLink. Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com See related video story at www.livemint.com/ritwickdutta
Ritwick Dutta near the National Green Tribunal, New Delhi.
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freedom to
USE SKILLS
LAILA TYABJI
The crafts revivalist
FOR 30 YEARS, THE FACE OF DASTKAR HAS WORKED WITH CRAFTSPEOPLE, DOCUMENTING THEIR ART AND PREPARING THEM FOR AN URBAN CLIENTELE Text by Shefalee Vasudev Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
I
n 1949, a two-year-old girl came to Bombay from Belgium, where her father had served as India’s first ambassador. She was pale-skinned, cute, funny and only spoke French. “I was such a joke in India,” recalls Laila Tyabji. She promised herself that she would never be laughed at again, lost her French and became the Indian child she was. Tyabji was born a few months before the metaphorical midnight into a Sulaimani Bohra Muslim family of Delhi in 1947. In 2012, Tyabji was honoured with the Padma Shri Award for her long and inspiring contribution to India’s crafts sector as a co-founder, and now the chairperson, of Dastkar—a society for crafts and craftspeople. Her only regret receiving it was that it was given by Pratibha Patil, who Tyabji felt was an inappropriate choice as president. “Especially as the attempt was to tell us that her appointment was a triumph for women,” she adds. Clarity of thought and commitment to larger goals in life distinguish her from the six purposeful women who founded Dastkar in 1981. The other five founding members moved on with goals of their own, while Tyabji stayed on and became the face of Dastkar and its Nature Bazaars held all over India. Despite a large, welldelegated team, people only want to speak to Tyabji when they call the office. Even if it is just to ask for directions to Kisan Haat, now the permanent venue for the bazaars in Delhi. Tyabji spent years trying to get a permanent venue. As a young student at the Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun who would later study art in Vadodara and go on to work with Japanese artist Toshi Yoshida in Tokyo, her perseverance has never deserted her. Spirited and outspoken, Tyabji rode motorcycles in the 1970s before feminism gained momentum in India. Tyabji remembers feminist activist Kamla Bhasin telling her many years ago that it was because she painted her toenails that she saw her as a social butterfly. That was till Bhasin saw her working assiduously in the villages of Bihar and yet fitting in perfectly in south Delhi’s drawing rooms. In the late 1970s, Tyabji got a three-month assignment from the Gujarat State Handloom & Handicrafts Development Corporation Ltd’s Gurjari outlet, to go to Kutch as a visiting designer. Her belongings in a steel trunk, she drove through villages, documenting the work of craftspeople, finding things for Gurjari, preparing them for an urban clientele. “Three months became six. I would sit with the women to do the embroideries and the patchwork. The only way to teach is with personal intervention, that’s how you can hone skill,” she says. Kutch became the hotbed of work and inspiration for her, its crafts evoking a lifelong quest; its craftspeople, her friends and protégés. “Beyond her image as a sophisticated and stylish woman, Laila could make and hold a bridge with craftspeople. She has been there for them through calamity and crisis; from teaching them how to price their products to valuing themselves. The respect and affection they have for her is rare,” says Archana Shah, founder of the chain of Bandhej stores and author of Shifting Sands, Kutch: Textiles, Traditions, Transformations, launched by Tyabji in New Delhi earlier this year. After returning from Kutch, Tyabji,
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Laila Laila Tyabji Tyabji at at Kisan Kisan Haat, Haat, New New Delhi. Delhi.
I WOULD SIT WITH THE WOMEN TO DO THE EMBROIDERIES AND THE PATCHWORK. THE ONLY WAY TO TEACH IS WITH PERSONAL INTERVENTION, THAT’S HOW YOU CAN HONE SKILL.
whose personal style then was about motorbike helmets and textiles, worked as a buyer and merchandiser for Taj Khazana, the store known for finely curated Indian arts and crafts, at New Delhi’s Taj Hotel on Man Singh Road. “A small logistics issue about the Assam state emporium not being able to supply handmade cane baskets to the city-based Taj Khazana propelled the Dastkar idea. That rural craftspeople needed new and commercially viable markets and a bridge to meet their customers and sell directly to them,” she says. The first Dastkar crafts bazaar was held at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi in 1981. Mapping the personal and creative direction for craftspeople, forming a link between them and their city buyers, and doggedly working on design issues, pricing, sizing and policy changes for the evolution of the crafts sector as a business model could sum up Tyabji’s work at Dastkar. “They are skilled professionals and should not be treated as downtrodden or as relics as they often are,” insists Tyabji, who has also been associated with Sewa (the Self Employed Women’s Association) of Lucknow. Designer Aneeth Arora of péro, who has been following Tyabji’s work for the last 10 years, says this assimilation of crafts and textiles at Nature Bazaars helps her tremendously as a designer keen on textile exploration and use. The bazaars, feels Arora, are research centres to understand innovation and locate weavers to work with from different regions. Tyabji’s path, though, is not always well-paved. Craftspeople are deeply conservative, averse to experimentation, nervous about newness. They don’t understand fast colours, form or financial management, she explains. “When you begin you are cocky and romantic, but craftspeople can also start misbehaving. Sometimes you put in so much work but what comes out is a mouse.” That’s why she has always been a hands-on mentor. Till Tyabji turned 50 and decided to cut her hair short and only wear saris, thus creating the lasting image we have of her, she only wore clothes she had hand-stitched and hand-embroidered. In her closet hangs a fine collection of pherans, anarkalis and a variety of long kurtas with Lambani, Kutchi and Chikankari embroidery done by Tyabji—each piece stunning. She still paints her toenails. And still hand-embroiders in her free time. She stopped wearing a watch 25 years ago, when she realized that being chronically punctual while working in rural India, where time was a flexible concept, was stressful. She is more nonchalantly stylish than ever before. Short, salted hair, handloom saris, Kolhapuri chappals, kohl-lined eyes, jewellery that is distinctive but never too craftsy, Tyabji cuts a tall figure on India’s “most stylish” lists. “Laila is knowledge-oriented, decisive and endlessly patient without using her personal influence to change the tide of things,” says Shelly Jain, personnel and programme head at Dastkar and Tyabji’s colleague of 17 years. Her home mirrors her; it is modern Indian without ethnic monstrosities for artefacts. And as its mistress, the only daughter among four siblings, she cooks, bakes, knits and sews enviably. She admits she came close to getting married a few times but “shrank back” because she was never sure how she would feel 15 years down the line. She shrugs in her characteristic way even as her god-daughter Urvashi Kumari Singh comes up to hug her amma. “She is a fair, cool and sometimes irritable mom,” says Singh. Is there a retirement age when the trajectory of Dastkar and its chairperson might move in different directions? “I have been trying to retire for the last five years, but haven’t been successful so far,” says Tyabji. That’s when a little emotion wells up—who on earth wants her to retire anyway. “You can’t imagine Dastkar without Laila,” as Jain says. shefalee.v@livemint.com www.livemint.com See related story video at www.livemint.com/lailatyabji
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Ratish Nanda outside a Lodiera tomb in Lado Sarai, New Delhi.
freedom from
NEGLECT
RATISH NANDA
The custodian of ruins THE MAN BEHIND THE RESTORED HUMAYUN’S TOMB AND OTHER DELHI MONUMENTS; HIS EFFORTS REJUVENATE HISTORY BY EMBRACING THE PRESENT
Text by Mayank Austen Soofi Photograph by Pradeep Gaur/Mint
H
e was taking photos of an obscure Lodi-era tomb in south Delhi’s Lado Sarai when a man rushed out of it, and attacked him with an iron rod. Ratish Nanda was hospitalized for a week. Fifteen years later, standing fearlessly outside the monument, he says, “That man had occupied this gumbad (dome) and wanted to demolish it to build his garage.” Today, the tomb and Nanda are both intact. Nanda has become a healer of Delhi’s crumbling monuments. He has been involved in the conservation of more than 100 of them. And last year, the team led by the 41-year-old conservation architect finished restoring the Capital’s Humayun’s Tomb, the first of the great buildings raised by Mughals in the subcontinent. “Since we started preliminary work on the tomb in 1997,” says Nanda, “the number of its visitors has increased by 1,000%.” Such a feat would have been impossible even for Nanda—he has personally catalogued and photographed more than a thousand known and unknown monuments in Delhi—had he not been heading the India operations of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), a Switzerlandbased philanthropic institution that focuses on revitalizing Muslim communi-
ties across the world. Nanda is always dressed in coloured kurtas, and there is a hint of sarcasm in his smile. He is married to a journalist whom he met when she was reporting on Humayun’s Tomb, but it was with some hesitation that he agreed to meet for a profile, saying: “Meaningful conversation can only happen when a lot of people put their feet forward. If one person takes the entire credit, it is unfair to the rest.” Since 2007, Nanda has been pioneering the Urban Renewal Initiative project in central Delhi’s historic but filthy Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti, a village just across the road from Humayun’s Tomb. Besides restoring dozens of medieval-era monuments in the area, AKTC’s venture (in partnership with government agencies) aims to lift the living standards of neighbourhoods around the monuments. In a country where restoring a heritage structure often risks the forced removal of its squatter populace, the initiative to give people a stake in the preservation of their locality’s monuments is novel. And thankfully, it seems to be working. A 14th century stone well in the basti long abused as a dump has been detoxified. Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s derelict tomb has been restored with marble inlays and red sandstone. At
least one public park has been cleared of drug addicts. Enrolment in the refurbished primary school has increased from 130 children to 660. Hundreds of young people in the basti have acquired basic skills in computers and the English language—some of them now lead heritage walks for tourists. Garbage is collected from one-third of the houses. Restoration work on the additional buildings in the Humayun’s Tomb complex continues alongside. Like a CEO who spends too much time poring over PowerPoint presentations, Nanda talks mostly in bullet points. “No.1, a conservation project must have all the required human and financial resources it needs, otherwise there is more damage than benefit. No.2, conservation and development must be parts of the same project.” Referring to the gloriously beautiful Atgah Khan’s Tomb, a monument unfortunately encircled by the basti’s multi-storeyed shanties, Nanda says, “If you want to preserve that building, you first have to take care of the people living there in unsanitary conditions.” That’s the tough part. Nanda began with easier tasks. After setting up the AKTC office in India, he did nothing more complicated than working on the garden in Humayun’s Tomb. “It looked
like a ruinous municipal park,” he says. “There were rows of Ashoka trees instead of the plantation that the Mughals favoured.” For conservationists like Nanda, the focus is not only to undo 20th century’s “mindless alterations” to sites or monuments that disfigured their character, but also to aggressively restore these to the designs and intentions of their original architects. So the Ashoka trees in the gardens surrounding Humayun’s Tomb were replaced by orange, lemon and pomegranate trees. “This was India’s first privately implemented conservation project and also the first scientifically carried out garden restoration,” says Nanda, who then moved base to strife-torn Kabul in Afghanistan to restore the destroyed garden around emperor Babur’s tomb. “Being the only private organization undertaking conservation at any of India’s protected monuments,” says Nanda, “we need to think through every conservation decision a million times prior to implementation.” Experience has fine-tuned Nanda’s historical understanding of conservation. This is critical in India, where thousands of monuments have been subjected to such irrevocable damage that it is difficult to imagine them in their original look and setting. “It’s a philosophy in two parts,” he says. “First, you have to understand the monument through a process dependent on the highest level of documentation and archival research. Second, the conservation plan must be implemented with the help of master craftsmen who work with a multi-disciplinary team of architects, engineers, historians and designers.” This is revolutionary, considering that periodic facelifts of monuments have exclusively been the work of archaeologists. “Our country has 3,000 years of building history in which the repairs of centuries-old structures were traditionally done by craftsmen,” says Nanda. “The British dismantled the system and put engineers, trained to build modern structures, in charge of the restorations, a pol-
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IF RUINS ARE ALLOWED TO REMAIN RUINS, THEN WHAT YOU ARE SEEING TODAY WILL FURTHER DISINTEGRATE AFTER TWO GENERATIONS.
icy that remained unchanged after independence. You can see the fallout (of that policy) on Humayun’s Tomb, where we had to remove one million kilograms of concrete that engineers had added over the years, ostensibly to stop water penetration into the monument.” Nanda’s method of dealing with the seepage copied the techniques of craftsmen from previous eras. He applied lime plaster or chuna, making the dilapidated buildings look uncomfortably new. This literal whitewash horrified quite a few of Delhi’s aesthetically minded citizens who have developed a taste for decaying edifices. “Some romantic people prefer ruins, but our techniques are guided by the consideration of how to make a monument survive in a state that is as close to its original condition as possible,” says Nanda. “If ruins are allowed to remain ruins, then what you are seeing today will further disintegrate after two generations.” Nanda did not inherit this passion for old buildings—his mother, who raised him, was a professor of political science. Like most Delhiites, he was happily oblivious to his city’s tombs and domes. While working on an urban history assignment as a first-year architecture student, he was shocked to discover Sultanate-era structures at a stone’s throw from his family home. This life-changing assignment was given to Nanda by his beloved teacher, historian and author Narayani Gupta. On graduating, Nanda was hired by the Delhi chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) to exhaustively document the Capital’s monuments. For three years, the young man rode through the city on his Kawasaki Bajaj, armed with two cameras, a sheaf of maps to mark the locations of buildings, and a photocopy of Zafar Husain’s legendary compilation, List Of Mohammedan And Hindu Monuments: Delhi Province. The result was the two-volume catalogue Delhi: The Built Heritage, which lists over 1,200 monuments, complete with photographs of all the featured buildings. It was during the legwork for this listing that Nanda encountered the violent mechanic in Lado Sarai. The incident brought the building to the notice of Intach, which eventually rescued it through a conservation project. For some ruins, it is too late. Last year, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) informed Parliament that it could no longer trace 35 protected monuments in the country—12 of them were in Delhi. Such a loss is crushing, but despair won’t help. “We have started with a 10year conservation project at Qutub Shahi’s Tomb in Hyderabad,” says Nanda. That may be Humayun’s Tomb, Part 2. mayank.s@livemint.com
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Sibabrata Sibabrata Karmakar Karmakar playing playing at at aa Bhromara Bhromara gathering gathering in in Kankurgachi, Kankurgachi, Kolkata. Kolkata.
freedom to
MAKE MUSIC
SIBABRATA KARMAKAR
Songs of the soil FOR CLOSE TO 50 YEARS, THIS FORMER POLITICAL ACTIVIST HAS BEEN RECORDING AND DISSEMINATING THE 150PLUS FOLK MUSIC FORMS OF BENGAL Text by Shamik Bag Photograph by Indranil Bhoumik/Mint
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ifteen years ago, when Paresh Chandra Ray visited Kolkata for the first time and took the underground Metro, his thoughts wandered to his life as a rickshaw-puller in the busy north Bengal town of Siliguri. It wasn’t easy being a rickshaw-puller and a folk music exponent at the same time: The brute physicality demanded of the former role took a toll on the refinement required of the latter. Relentless days of toil in the sun and rain meant that Ray’s voice cracked from the physical strain. Then there was the additional stress when the municipal authorities made it mandatory for rickshaw-pullers to pay a hefty registration fee to enter the lucrative city limits. Ray couldn’t pay the fee, but had to sometimes ferry passengers to the restricted areas or lose a portion of his daily income. His rickshaw was soon confiscated and Ray—by then an enlisted artiste at All India Radio—found himself composing a song in the folk music mould on the travails of a poor rickshaw-puller in fast-changing times. “Many people suggested that I give up my work as a rickshawallah and concentrate only on music. But I couldn’t have survived merely as a singer,” says the 60-year-old man who
has been a rickshaw-puller for 33 years—and still occasionally plies one. Ray has been a singer of the rarely heard bhawaiya folk form and player of the near-extinct string instrument sarinda for even longer. “Nobody cares for that kind of music these days.” Bhromara did. Registered as a Kolkata-based institute of folk culture, its spearhead, Sibabrata Karmakar, was guided by the simple motto of “collection, preservation and promotion” of Bengal’s rich repertory of folk music forms. So it scouted for unknown artistes like Ray and organized their travel and stay in Kolkata to record their oral music traditions. As a Leftist political activist in the 1970s, Karmakar would often visit villages to conduct research for a Doordarshan project on folk music culture. On these trips, he was exposed to unfamiliar folk music. Later, while conducting a Union government-funded survey on the dissemination of tribal folk art and culture in three Bengal districts, he felt the need to chronicle many of the 150plus folk music forms in Bengal. “Since most songs are passed on orally, there were melodic and lyrical changes across generations. Folk songs were also being presented in modern foil. If the templates of the original forms were not
preserved, listeners would never know about the music’s origin. The loss would have been tremendous,” says Karmakar. Loss and repossession are both equally at the root of Bhromara. Formed in 1962 as an informal musical assembly by refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) settled in the KankurgachiPhoolbagan area of east Kolkata, the group would meet often to rehash songs from their uprooted past. Initially, it was their way of reimagining displacement. Karmakar, as secretary, felt the need to move beyond the musical musings of the past. Sikorer Sondhane (In Search of Roots), an eight-cassette compilation of rare folk music involving over three dozen rural musicians, released by Bhromara between 1992-95, is today acknowledged as a signpost in ethnomusicology and the study of indigenous music from Bengal—particularly so since nearly 30% of the musicians recorded have since died. Snake charmers, goatherds, rickshawpullers, daily-wage earners, buskers and landless peasants came together to record songs encompassing genres like chotka, halua-haluani, leto, jhumur, bhadu, bhawaiya, gambhira, kushanpala, alkap, shari, dehototyo, saapkhelano, Santhali, Vaishnavi, baul, bic-
ched and bhatiali—a veritable treasure trove of exceptional sounds and melodic cultures. The effort found patrons in Kolkata artists, writers, sound engineers and music-shop owners. Publishers offered their services for free to promote the two volumes of Sikorer Sondhane. While the owner of a famous film studio offered space for recording, the rural artistes could only be recorded live, in single takes and in the open, for they were unused to closed studio rooms. “For one week, we cooked, ate and slept together with the artistes in a large hall to make them comfortable. Only after that could we record,” says Karmakar. “We became hawkers of the albums and most of us would carry copies in our side bags. Our enthusiasm was even more since the sale proceeds were earmarked for the welfare of the singers and musicians,” he adds. At their small and austere Salt Lake apartment, Karmakar has a willing collaborator in his wife Lakshmi, who not only participates in Bhromara’s activities but lends her singing voice during performances as well. Coming from a family of refugees, Karmakar’s rise in Bhromara has been propelled by enthusiasm and initiative. His own modest salary as a lower-rung public health department employee of the state government or the absence of largesse from sponsors for Bhromara doesn’t stop the 59-year-old from dreaming big. “Before I die, I would like to build a folk music archive where researchers and scholars can peruse rare music, books and documents. My work will go on till that is achieved.” The lack of an air-conditioned archive has meant that many of the field recordings and books have been lost to the elements or have been pilfered. He rues the loss of one recording in particular: the rendition by the late Ganga Charan Biswas, a village quack, of a rarely-heard Huduma Deo
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WE BECAME HAWKERS OF THE ALBUMS AND MOST OF US WOULD CARRY COPIES IN OUR SIDE BAGS. THE SALE PROCEEDS WERE EARMARKED FOR THE WELFARE OF THE SINGERS...
number, a chant performed in the dark by naked village women in some parts of north Bengal while praying for rain. “The resource crunch has meant that Bhromara has lost some of its early momentum. Most of us want to do things but can’t,” says Debabrata Dey, a musician and member. Dey used his own money recently to buy a sound recorder that he uses for on-site recordings of rural musicians, displaying the kind of commitment that keeps the musical flame alive at Bhromara. Notwithstanding the scarcities, which have stalled many of their ambitious projects, the Karmakars’ home has regularly welcomed rural musicians, who have stayed with them while visiting Kolkata for concerts, felicitations or medical reasons. It is a relationship that has emboldened Karmakar. “Binoy Ray, a chotka singer, could only tell me that he needed `15,000 for his daughter’s marriage after staying with us for three days. Maybe he couldn’t earlier because of a musician’s self-respect. I arranged performances for him and raised `40,000. But he wouldn’t accept a rupee more than what he needed. My life has been enriched by such interactions,” says Karmakar. The enrichment is mutual. “Bhromara took care of all expenses and even compensated for the man days we lost. For me, it wasn’t about the money, but the respect and love I got, something that I could never imagine as a rickshaw-puller,” says Paresh Ray. Ray, whose sons are now working, still visits Kolkata whenever he is invited by Bhromara. For the lasting relationships formed over the years have carried over to the many music concerts, festivals, seminars and musical instrument exhibitions organized by the 52year-old organization. The organization uses a school room in Kankurgachi on weekends to practise and disseminate folk music and its mores among its city-based members, an exercise that has continued since the early days, when refugees sought consolation in music. Joynal Abedin Mondal, a 76-year-old fakiri musician from Nadia district, sounds aggrieved at Bhromara’s inability to financially support his songwriting endeavours. Yet his memories of being at the 50th anniversary celebrations of Bhromara in Kolkata, where the animal herder and singer was invited, are that of privilege and honour. Fittingly, then, Bhromara’s contribution comes through in a song composed by him, championing Bhromara as an organization that stands up for fringe and poor musicians, handholds the blind and provides a podium for voices that haven’t been heard. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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n the summer of 2012, when thousands of young workers and students of north-eastern origin returned en masse to their hometowns and villages from New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, fearing persecution and attack, Binalakshmi Nepram emerged as one of the region’s most eloquent ambassadors. Her advocacy for the North-East had started much earlier, but in those months, she burst on to the social media firmament as a voice of the region. But her core work, which connects the infiltration of small arms into the North-East with the plight of women who have survived violence in Manipur, goes far beyond online polemics. Forty-year-old Nepram is behind two organizations—the New Delhi-based Control Arms Foundation of India (Cafi) and the Imphal-based Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network (MWGSN). Both work towards a
women-led disarmament movement in the country. While Cafi works in tandem with organizations around the world, including the United Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (UNPoA) to curb the distribution and proliferation of small arms, MWGSN counsels and provides support to women who have lost family members. For Delhi, Nepram says, the “war” in Manipur is foreign, but to deny its existence is wilful indifference. She says 60 battalions of the Armed Forces patrol every inch of Manipur. There are 32 insurgent groups. “How can you still not call it a war zone? You don’t even allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter there.” According to her findings, on an average day, three-four Manipuris, mostly men between the ages of 19 and 40, are shot dead because of the ongoing conflict, leaving behind young
women with young children. This war is more than 50 years old. There has been a series of ethnic armed conflicts in the North-East since the 1940s. The region has around 70 major population groups and subgroups, speaking around 400 languages and dialects. Perhaps in no other region of India, South Asia or the world have militant outfits mushroomed to such a degree. They now form a complex matrix that Union home ministry policies and global humanitarian agencies may fail to understand or resolve. Manipur’s women have spoken out loud against atrocities related to insurgency and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (Afspa). And in a sense, Nepram continues the battles that Irom Sharmila and Ima Ngambi started. Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since 2000, demanding the repeal of Afspa, and is currently on trial for
freedom from
SMALL ARMS
BINALAKSHMI NEPRAM
Imagine there’s no gun INDIA’S LEADING EXPERT ON THE IMPACT OF SMALL ARMS ON HUMAN LIFE ALSO REHABILITATES MANIPURI WOMEN WHO HAVE SURVIVED THE VIOLENCE IN THE STATE Text by Sanjukta Sharma Photograph by Priyanka Parashar/Mint
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
“attempt to commit suicide”. She survives on feeds through a nasogastric pipe. Ngambi, a mother and wage worker from Imphal, stripped naked along with other women to protest the rape of Thangjam Manorama Devi in 2004—an act that instantly grabbed headlines in the national media. Nepram is sceptical of the fame that the other famous Manipuri, M.C. Mary Kom, enjoys. “Her life and work is an inspiration to many. However, it’s sad that she has now only become a ‘brand’, a ‘product’. We truly wish she emerges out of this.” She is waiting to see if the Mary Kom biopic releasing next month will have an impact on the state because the screening of Hindi films has been banned in the state since 2000. “Growing up there, I thought all this was natural. It was only after I came to New Delhi that I realized that the situation was not at all normal. I then stumbled upon a 1997 UN document titled Trafficking In Small Arms And Sensitive Technologies. That book, combined with a paper on small arms written by the Canadian government, changed my life,” says Nepram. Pursuing south-east Asian studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, she discovered during her research that 57 different types of illegal small arms were making their way into the North-East from China, Pakistan, Belgium, Afghanistan, the US, Russia, Myanmar and Israel. In 2004, she founded Cafi to mobilize civil society and hold informed debates on arms control. In 2013, the UK-based organization, Action on Armed Violence, described her as among the 100 most influential people in the world working on armed violence reduction. In 2006, Nepram received the WISCOMP Scholar of Peace award from the Dalai Lama Foundation. Nepram is the sixth child of Yensembam Ibemhal Devi and Nepram Bihari Singh. Her mother, a zoologist, retired as the principal of a school in Imphal and her father was an additional director in the state industries department. “I realized the values of a working mother much later in life. I learnt the basics of math and science from my mother. My father was like an artist.” Nepram remembers watching the film The Killing Fields, based on the genocide in Cambodia, along with her father when she was 10. “When I visited Cambodia, it brought back scenes from the film in my mind,” she says. Violence was an integral part of her
GROWING UP IN THIS REGION, I THOUGHT ALL THIS WAS NATURAL. IT WAS ONLY AFTER I CAME TO NEW DELHI THAT I REALIZED THAT THE SITUATION WAS NOT AT ALL NORMAL.
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childhood. “I grew up in a quaint little locality called Heirangoithong and have special memories of it. The Heirangoithong massacre of 1984, where 13 civilians were shot dead by the CRPF jawans, is etched in my memory.” Nepram has authored four books, among them a novel titled Meckley (2004), about that massacre. In 2004, another violent incident that she witnessed on Christmas eve led to the formation of the MWGSN. A group of three gunmen dragged a 27-year-old and shot him dead. “Till today, his wife Rebika Akham does not know who the killers were and why they killed her husband,” says Nepram. The MWGSN offers small loans to women like Rebika for occupations that range from silk reeling and weaving, lucrative in the state’s vibrant handicrafts sector, to fishery and mushroom farming. The soft-spoken Manipuri often travels outside India to talk about her ideas on disarmament. On those trips, she also meets Manipuris living in those countries, seeking their support for a secure Manipur. Her other love is poetry. About insurgency, Nepram writes, The birth of insurgency is in — Damaging “governmentality”, Dirty policies and politics. The birth of insurgency is in — Witnessing innocent deaths, Wronged arrests and torture. The birth of insurgency is in — Hungry bodies Haunted futures. sanjukta.s@livemint.com
Binalakshmi Binalakshmi Nepram Nepram at at the the office office of of the the Control Control Arms Arms Foundation Foundation of of India India (Cafi) (Cafi) in in New New Delhi. Delhi.
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freedom from
EXPLOITATION
INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL
GEETA MENON
Voice of the toiling woman FOR 30 YEARS, THIS ACTIVIST HAS BEEN FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHTS OF DOMESTIC WORKERS AND OUR HUGE FEMALE LABOUR FORCE Text by Sumana Mukherjee Photograph by Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint Geeta Geeta Menon Menon (front, (front, centre) centre) with with members members of of the the Stree Stree Jagruti Jagruti Samiti Samiti at at the the headquarters headquarters in in Jayanagar, Jayanagar, Bangalore. Bangalore.
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t a time when candlelight vigils, protest marches and police station dharnas are a social media post away, it might be difficult to imagine a period when the middle class shuddered at the thought of raising a voice against the authorities, let alone participating in a mass demonstration. In the late 1970s, India was just such a place. Such activism as there was—disguised as “charity” or “social work”, the acceptable euphemisms—was mostly low-key and scattered, driven underground by the declaration of the Emergency in 1975. In this scenario, a September 1979 letter to the chief justice of India by four law professors and activists was the equivalent of a nuclear blast on a desert island. No one heard it, no one saw it, no one acknowledged the painstakingly listed reasons why the Supreme Court decision on the Mathura rape case was actually a travesty of justice. A year earlier, the highest court in the land had acquitted the policemen accused of the crime because there were no visible injuries, and also because Mathura, a minor Dalit girl, was “used to sex” and so might have coerced the policemen into intercourse. Then, notes CNN journalist Moni Basu in her powerful 2013 piece, “The Girl Whose Rape Changed A Country”, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn published the letter in its entirety. Just six months after the letter was sent, on 8 March 1980, she writes, “Thousands of women marched on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Nagpur... on the issue of violence against women.” The first largescale protest against gender crime transformed the shape of the women’s movement in India. Among those who joined in the protests was Geeta Menon. Already deeply troubled by the societal inequities she saw around her in Mumbai, the postgraduate student of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences co-founded the Stree Jagruti Samiti in Mumbai in the wake of the Mathura rape case agitations. “At that time, we were a movement, not an NGO (non-governmental organization),” clarifies Menon, 58. “Since 1979, I had been working in the slums, organizing and mobilizing communities, building up leadership skills. Our thrust areas were supposed to be education and nutrition but it’s pretty much impossible to separate them from, say, housing or water. So we were basically involved with all the issues that affected the women— since, anyway, the men went off to work and were spared these so-called petty botherations.” This experience, coupled with a sudden rise in instances of dowry harassment across the country, strengthened the case for a platform that would focus exclusively on women’s issues. “Over time, Stree Jagruti Samiti has evolved to represent the toiling woman, the most important people for the city,” says Menon. “These are the women who work in construction, in garment manufacturing and, yes, as part of the domestic labour force (with whom the Samiti has come to be identified most strongly).” If there is one person Menon identifies as her inspiration, it is a Bhiwandi power-loom worker by the name of
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THEN THERE ARE ISSUES OF ‘MOBILEPHONE’ PLACEMENT AGENCIES, INDIFFERENT BUREAUCRACY, LAW ENFORCEMENT. DOMESTICS HAVE NO BENEFITS, NOT EVEN WEEKLY OFFS OR MEDICAL INSURANCE.
Mathiaullah Memon. “He would have been in his 60s when we met him, a veteran of the (political parties) CPI, the CPI(M), the CPI(M-L) and of almost all the jails in the country. All he had was a small radio, through which he kept tabs on whatever was happening across the world, be it Chechnya, Pakistan, or the UK. Though educated in the Urdu medium only till class IV, his analyses were spot-on. He helped us develop dialectical perspectives, which made us see that India was a caste-based civilization, with both class and gender subservient to that framework,” she says. This was an insight that would help Menon immensely in her work with domestic workers, which received a much sharper focus a few years after she shifted base to Bangalore in 1984, following her husband’s transfer. “Till about the 1990s, we were a more general sort of an outfit, working with the unions in the industrial units in Bommasandra on the one hand and also involved with all kinds of community issues, including domestic violence and sexual harassment. In 2007, we got a chance to work with child domestic workers as part of a Unicef project. That’s when we realized that the slums had morphed into labour colonies for the unorganized sector —and that half the women we were dealing with were domestic workers, most of whom had started out as child workers. “So, in 2009, we started the domestic workers’ collectives. In the meantime, I realized that while I was active in the unions, patriarchy would always be a barrier between me and the men. There was no such issue with the domestic workers, who were mostly women. So I decided to focus on them. And once I started working among them, I realized there was no group that was more vulnerable or more invisible, working as they do behind closed doors.” The challenges were posed by the workers themselves, as well as society. “Because of the gendered notion of house work, the workers themselves don’t think they are doing anything much. Then there are feudal mindsets, which still consider people who work for them, be it on the land or at home, to be their property, which, of course, leads to all kinds of abuse,” points out Menon. “Then there are issues of ‘mobile-phone’ placement agencies, indifferent bureaucracy, law enforcement. Domestics have no benefits, not even weekly offs or medical insurance.” The activist’s eyes flare when she recalls a conversation on the non-inclusion of domestic workers under the Karnataka State Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Board (of which she was a member from 2009-11), established in accordance with the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008. “The labour minister himself asked me, ‘What is it that they do? How many hours do they work?’ I replied, ‘They work in your house too, no?’” Domestics were finally brought under the purview of the board in 2011, after the International Labour Organization ratified the Domestic Workers’ Convention. The Samiti kept up the pressure. But as field workers know only too well, it is slow work. “Take the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, the health insurance policy which includes domestic workers in its ambit. The government asked us to collect data but, even after four years, nothing has materialized. Now people are asking us for answers,” says Menon. More than the legislators and officials, though, Menon knows that her biggest opposition comes from deeply ingrained feudal mindsets. “After the draft policy on domestic workers was framed, it was passed around among senior bureaucrats. We got word that they were not very happy with it. That’s the thing, I think: We can talk about justice for everyone, but domestics are too close to home. A change in the master-servant relationship requires us to change our own mentality, which is the most difficult thing.” But as her activist associates know, Menon is no quitter. Possibly the only thing she has ever walked away from is her marriage to a senior hospitality executive, a few years ago, “after all the family responsibilities had been taken care of”, says this mother of two grown-up daughters. “This is where my life lies. I couldn’t be anywhere else.”
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ucked away in a neighbourhood in Bangalore’s upscale Indiranagar residential area is an innocuous, three-storeyed, white building. A grassy empty plot lies opposite. It could be just another house in a neighbourhood dotted by similar structures. The scene changes dramatically inside. People talk animatedly, poring over computer screens, wired in like it is a hackers’ lair. It has a “secret command centre” kind of room in the basement. In the midst of what looks like a geek utopia, a bespectacled man rattles off facts and figures on Internet laws, cybersecurity and digital privacy. Forty-yearold Sunil Abraham started the non-profit research think tank Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in 2008. The venture, which focuses primarily on Internet governance, has attracted investment from philanthropist Rohini Nilekani (ironical, considering Abraham has been an outspoken critic of the Unique Identification Authority of India, or UIDAI, project that was spearheaded by her husband and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani). Over the years,
Abraham has become an authority on issues related to freedom of expression, Internet privacy and security, free software and cyber laws. His efforts have yielded results. The best example is the Justice A.P. Shah committee report released in October 2012. It puts a stamp of authority on Indian privacy principles, and ensures privacy protections “do not have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression and transparency enabled by the RTI (right to information)”, as Abraham wrote in Forbes India magazine last year. “We’re not regulatory hawks,” explains Abraham, an engineer by education. “We don’t have an ideology— we don’t have people who are either left or right. And therefore we don’t want to regulate the private sector for the sake of it, just to cause them more grief. We have great appreciation for the role the private sector plays in the economy.” He adds that their design principles are conservatism, forbearance and equivalence. “With these broad principles, we believe we can get
freedom of
DIGITAL SECURITY
Internet regulation right,” he says. Abraham has actively advocated free speech and privacy of individuals. Last year, in an interview with Mint, he spoke about the need to upgrade the country’s draconian information technology laws. Abraham’s Twitter timeline is full of posts related to open source software, the National Security Agency, hackers, accessibility, and the UIDAI project. A free software advocate, Abraham’s journey in the area of freedom of expression and speech was thrust on him. “I’m a fraud, and a charlatan,” he says, laughing. “I only have a degree in industrial production engineering. I have never been trained to do what I’m able to do today.” In 1998, at the behest of T. Pradeep, founder of the non-governmental organization Samuha, Abraham started an organization called Mahiti. It aimed to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communication technology by using free software. In 2008, Bangalore-based legal researcher Lawrence Liang came to him with the idea for CIS. Philanthropist Anurag
SUNIL ABRAHAM
The online warrior
WITH A VISION THAT COMBINES FREE SPEECH WITH DIGITAL PRIVACY, THIS POLICYMAKER HAS REDEFINED THE ROLE OF THE INTERNET IN SOCIETY Text by Anirban Sen Photograph by Pradeep Gaur/Mint
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Dikshit provided the initial seed funding and CIS was born. Dikshit still continues to fund and support CIS. “I’ve always surrounded myself with competent people,” Abraham says. At CIS, Abraham’s core team is composed mostly of lawyers, social scientists and mathematicians such as Nishant Shah, Pranesh Prakash and Nirmita Narasimhan. “Initially we were like four individual fingers, but after that increasingly we started to punch like a single fist,” says Abraham, who was born and raised in Bangalore. For the first 25 years of his life, Abraham never stepped out of the south. In the next 15 years, he would travel across the world and visit more than a dozen countries. Abraham completed his degree in industrial and production engineering from the Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering in Bangalore and during second year of college, organized a peaceful demonstration of 5,000 college and school students against the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition and the Mumbai riots of 1993. As he talks about the key influences during his days at Mahiti and CIS, one name stands out—noted Internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last year. “His courage is something we might aspire towards,” says Abraham of the computer programmer who was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Other names include Michael Geist, professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and an authority on issues related to intellectual property. “Geist is a gold standard on how to precipitate advocacy change,” says Abraham. Before starting CIS, Abraham had taken up an assignment with the United Nations that helped him develop international acquaintances. While there, he managed the International Open Source Network project backed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Since then, he has been working with the governments of countries such as Myanmar and Iraq on issues like open data and open standards. Such policies help upgrade redundant technologies, help in transparency and promote e-governance. For the Moldovan government, Abraham wrote the open standards policy, which the country’s Parliament did not approve and execute. A similar policy for the Iraqi government became law, and more recently, he has been working with the government of Myanmar. “For Myanmar, I will be working on a national open data policy.
FOR MYANMAR, I WILL BE WORKING ON A NATIONAL OPEN DATA POLICY. GOVERNMENTS ALSO OFTEN ASK FOR OUR HELP ON COPYRIGHT LAWS, IT ACTS, INTERNATIONAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE, ETC.
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Governments also often ask for our help on copyright laws, IT acts, international Internet governance, etc—but most of them come through back-channels and informally,” says Abraham, who spends the little spare time he gets with his daughter. For CIS, one of the biggest achievements over the past five years was being part of the policy framework for the Union government’s draft national policy on standardizing egovernance. The organization has been working to increase Internet penetration in the country, especially in rural areas. Over the past five years, CIS has been part of the Justice A.P. Shah committee, which focuses on privacy laws in India, and is also working on the country’s telecom policy. Colleagues at CIS describe Abraham as a workaholic who doesn’t get in the way of fellow workers. Abraham advocates the management ethos of three sources—that of Al Qaeda, Mahatma Gandhi and Scott Adams, who has written books on management and created the Dilbert comic strip. “The first principle in the Al Qaeda school of management is subsidiarity,” explains Abraham. “The Al Qaeda stands for ‘The Hub’. Al means The, Qaeda means Hub. If you think of the hub in a network, it’s a very important component of a network. It brings various nodes together and helps different nodes connect with one another.” He adds, “Nothing that I say should be misunderstood as an endorsement of the terrorist organization. We have no sympathies for what they do.” anirban.s@livemint.com Sunil Abraham in Greater Noida during a recent visit.
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Claude (left) and Norma Alvares at their North Goa home.
freedom from
PLUNDER
CLAUDE & NORMA ALVARES
The power of two
THIS DUO IS ONE OF THE FOREMOST REASONS GOA RETAINS ITS CHARM AND A GOOD MEASURE OF ITS ENVIRONMENTAL HERITAGE Text by Vivek Menezes Photograph by Assavri Kulkarni
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ooking back on four decades of marriage and an intensely close working relationship with his wife, the Padma Shri awardee Norma Alvares, twinkle-eyed, fiercely moustachioed Claude Alvares says: “We do not know what it is to have a domestic fight. We have not had a fight for these 40 years.” The serenity in this partnership— quite evident to anyone who visits the couple’s relaxed, hospitable home in the north Goa village of Parra—is the cornerstone of an extraordinary record of ferocious battles and activism that is one of the foremost reasons India’s smallest state still retains considerable charm and a good measure of its environmental heritage. Starting in 1987 with Goa’s first-ever public interest litigation to save the coastline’s once-pristine rolling sand dunes, the Goa Foundation, spearheaded by this couple, has won famous victories—from forcing the withdrawal of US-based multinational DuPont (which had planned a factory) to the stunning 2012 decision of the Supreme Court disallowing the billiondollar state mining industry until its unchecked, rampant illegalities were brought under control.
“As one monster bites the dust, another rises like the proverbial phoenix,” says Claude, 66. “We have an intense appreciation, like most other people, of the natural beauty of Goa, so we will fight to protect it as long as it takes.” And so the silver-haired, austerely elegant Alvareses spend their morning walks hotly discussing Goa Foundation strategies for the “significant challenge” of preserving 1,000 sq. km of open forests (more than 25% of the state’s land mass) or its forthcoming lawsuit against the state government’s plan for land use. “Not many people decide at the inception of their married life to do something different from the prescribed format,” says Norma, 62, “so naturally, spending one’s life as full-time activists appears to be unusual, though the experience of our independence movement will show hundreds of individuals who simply threw up a treadmill life for revolution.” Such aspirations were never on the cards for this idealistic couple, who became partners soon after they met at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. He had grown up in Khotachiwadi, Mumbai, and studied philosophy, and she was a
history student from Mahim. Their initial goal of working in Bihar gave way to Goa, where they had friends, and after a relatively unsuccessful stint trying to will an ambitious rural development project into existence, Claude did steady work for the Pritish Nandy-edited Illustrated Weekly Of India while Norma studied law as they raised a family of three boys. Then the Goa Foundation was born. Says Norma: “There have been some disappointments, strategies which didn’t work out, but that is intrinsic to all public interest work. Since social activism is something we chose—as opposed to being academics, which both of us were prior to getting married—we have enjoyed our involvement with issues of a public nature,” says Norma. But legal challenges are only one aspect of their work together. The Goa Foundation’s Green Goa Works Environment Company provides services to treat and convert garbage into manure, and sewage into a resource for plants. In 2008, it took over Goa’s largest garbage dump at Sonsoddo, to construct a landfill and clear out accumulated waste (the
project was later terminated owing to political opposition) and has been entrusted with the installation of ecofriendly, cleanliness systems at Margao’s main marketplace. More than 25 years ago, Claude, and Norma also “wanted to do something about the fact that while European and American publishers succeed in filling up our book stores with their titles, we know very little of the view of people from Africa or other parts of India and Latin America, simply because their books are not available, despite the fact India has much more in common with those countries than the West,” says Norma on email. Thus was born the most unique bibliophile haven imaginable: Mapusa’s Other India Bookstore, crammed from floor to ceiling with publications “exclusively from the global South”, a “one-stop shop for books on environmental issues” with hard-to-find treasures on every shelf, and thousands of loyal customers served by mail order. In 1990, its companion, the Other India Press, came into existence—it is now “the single largest publisher of alternative literature in India, including organic farming, home-schooling, environment and wildlife”says Norma. “Claude and Norma motivate and guide a whole lot of us who are now working on environmental and social issues,” says Nirmal Kulkarni, a 34-yearold herpetologist who is on the state wildlife advisory board, and only one of the scientists and environmental activists who credit the Goa Foundation with setting an example to follow. Kulkarni says, “One goes to them not only for legal advice, but questions and concerns about all larger and smaller conservation issues, for what I would call a very significant conservation philosophy on why we do what we do,
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NOT MANY PEOPLE DECIDE AT THE INCEPTION OF THEIR MARRIED LIFE TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM THE PRESCRIBED FORMAT...
with what motivations.” He is particularly appreciative of the “hardcore study and documentation” side of the Goa Foundation’s contributions, especially its landmark 1993 “citizen’s report on Goa’s ecology and environment”, Fish, Curry And Rice. Though they have perhaps done more than anyone else to preserve their home state’s environmental blessings, the Alvareses are not hopeful about its long-term health. Using the Goa Foundation’s Davidversus-Goliath win at the Supreme Court as illustration for their prognosis, Claude points out that the verdict grants ownership of huge iron-ore assets to the state, which could yield tens of thousands of crores in income over the coming decades. “But the chances of that happening are slim,” he says, because “Goa’s tragedy is that it has run-of-the-mill politicians, who are simply driven to convert our natural and built-up assets of natural greenery, hospitality, and the fantastic image of a tourist destination, into cash for ego and party politics.” Norma says: “The government of India we inherited with our independence has not changed its character or spots even after the transfer of power from the British. It remains a foreign institution, an exotic implant. It has no connection with our political or justice traditions, our cultural history. Thus, while it is required to enforce a constitutional mode of development, it continues by way of habit to implement the older colonial form of development whose interests have always been contrary to the country’s interests.” United in unflinching commitment to their work, and their lives together with three grown sons, the Alvareses readily admit they are like yin and yang, with strongly contrary energies that flow together to become formidably complementary. Claude says: “She is so much better balanced, sober, articulate. She prepares herself. She leaves nothing to chance. I am just the opposite. But somehow, this basket of qualities has taken us so far. We respect each other’s strengths, we make up for each other’s weaknesses.” Norma agrees. “When we sit on the balcao on a sunny day, we know that when we decided that ‘this is the person we want to live our life with’, we did the right thing, so there is never a twinge of regret.” Vivek Menezes is a writer, photographer and founder and co-curator of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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