Deschooling Farmers

A new bill in Tamil Nadu puts farmers at the thrall of agriculture university graduates On the last day of its budget session the Tamil Nadu assembly passed 30 bills without any discussion. One of them was without parallel. If the governer signs the bill, writings of Thiruvalluavar, Oovaiyar and many more poets would become unlawful as they have several things to say about farming. Let us forget the people long dead. Even prominent personalities associated with agriculture like Norman Borlaug, the doyen of the modern agriculture system, cannot give suggestions to farmers in Tamil Nadu.
A first suggestion will attract a fine of Rs 5,000; they will be fined Rs 10,000 if they repeat their crime. They might even be imprisoned for six months. The Tamil Nadu State Agriculture Council 2009 says only those with a degree from three universities in Tamil Nadu can counsel farmers. Such esteemed advisors will be called agricultural practitioners—like medical or legal practitioners. All farmers of Tamil Nadu will have to abjectly follow the agricultural graduates. Many of these graduates would have seen a paddy plant for the first time during their college life. What the agricultural universities all over the world have done so far is to pick up farmers’ innovation, work on it, improve it and give back the farmers their knowledge—packaged very often as a new product. Has an agricultural university ever discovered a food crop or pioneered the domestication of any animal species? During colonial rule, agriculture universities were geared towards the export market and towards mills in Manchester. But many British scholars did acknowledge farmers’ knowledge. One of them, Albert Howard, declared “Indian farmers will be my professors for next five years”. In every village community the knowledge of farming is embedded in folk songs, stories, and riddles. A Tamil riddle asks: “ Adi kattula, nadu mattula, nuni veetula. athu yenna? (What is the item at whose base lies the field, cattle is at its middle and the house on the tip?) This answer is paddy. The riddle can give a lesson or two to our agriculture economists. When paddy is harvested we leave the basal portion in the land as it is of no use to the farmer or the cattle. The straw goes to cattle, which give the farmer milk and supplies draught power and provides manure. The land and the cattle were nourished from what the farmer cannot use. The result was the tip, the grain, kept inside the house. The green revolution taught the farmer to feed the soil with fertilizer, a work he earlier left to nature. It brought in new types of seeds, which left his cattle without fodder. He was forced to sell the cattle and lost the manure. He could not keep the grain inside the house; he had to sell it to repay loans. He also had to part with his wife’s jewels and the land documents. If the government was seriously interested in helping the farmer then it should have directed the scientist to go to the villages and learn from them. Let’s take the technology that officials and those used to jargon refer to as the system of rice intensification. The farmers had begun using the method since the late 1990s but the government programme began in 2002. That farmers are way ahead of government thinking is a challenge to the managers of agriculture science, who have sold themselves to Monsanto and other multinationals. In fact, the vice chancellor of the Tamil Nadu Agriclutural University had, sometime ago, said, “The university will promote Bt brinjal seeds.” Laws will not stop farmers from sharing experiences. But this bill, if enacted, will rob the farmers the choice of to whom he/she should listen. This is a violation of one’s fundamental right. (R Selvam was a government official till 1994 when he began organic farming) Courtesy: Down to Earth, Sep 15, 2009

Questions of real national security

Policies with regard to agriculture, education and health need to change in order to ensure a meaningful and wide-ranging security for this country.

The arms business is probably the second largest business in the world after the food business. It is, therefore, not surprising that we consider national security to be just what the defence and allied services provide the country.

But there could not be a greater illusion than that. With all the weapons in the world, we must not consider ourselves secure unless we have agriculture security (which is synonymous with food security, farmers’ security and rural sector security), education security, and health security. If India were secure on these fronts, there would have been no so-called left-wing extremism affecting a quarter of the districts: in many areas the government’s writ does not seem to run now.

We waived farmers’ loans, but did we take steps to empower them so that they do not need to take any more loans? What we did was for political gain. For what we did not do, the explanation is that we pay only lip service to farmers’ security.

Agriculture security concerns seeds, agro-chemicals, water, power and soil. It involves the marriage of traditional and modern agricultural practices; the de facto empowerment of panchayats and women; the marketing of agro-products at fair prices. Such security requires the provision of sources of augmentation of income to agriculturists and village-dwellers through the development of traditional arts and crafts, medicinal plants, and the unparalleled repertoire of fruits and vegetables. Also involved here are organic farming; the use of post-harvest technologies; orchid tissue culture (for example, Arunachal Pradesh has 650 varieties of orchids which, if exploited, can bring the State an income of Rs.10,000 crore a year), mushroom culture, and the appropriate use of fisheries and marine wealth. Other elements include intelligent energy use; the empowerment of the rural sector with knowledge; microcredit; the integration of rural and urban sectors; appropriate research such as on organic farming, bio-pesticides, and the development of varieties with all the advantages of hybrids, that would benefit India: research that is being encouraged under the Indo-U.S. Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture would be of greater use to the U.S. The integration of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme with carefully thought-out developmental plans; prevention and management of disasters such as floods and famine and the cleaning up of land records are also not to be forgotten. Then come a system to prevent, detect and take care of bio-terrorism against agriculture. Emerging new and exotic diseases of plants and animals need to be tackled by setting up centres of plant and animal disease control. Climate change has to be addressed, bearing in mind the fact that a one-degree rise of temperature can bring down the production of wheat by 5 million tonnes. None of the above constituents of agriculture security has been adequately taken care of.

If a power from outside India wishes to control this country’s destiny today, it is not going to drop a nuclear bomb: it only has to control Indian agriculture. And to do that, it needs to control just seed and agro-chemicals production. The Indian government is not cognizant of this: otherwise, more than 30 per cent of the country’s seed business today would not have been under the control of multinational seed companies. Indeed, a moratorium on genetically modified (GM) crops would have been declared until preparations were made to test them adequately.

As regards education, the most important division in the country today is between those (numbering less than 10 per cent) who have access to good education and those (adding up to more than 90 per cent) who have only education without any value. The former are the rulers and the latter are the ruled.

With the extensive commercialisation of both school and higher (including professional) education leading to a university degree, education has become a commodity to be sold and purchased. India is perhaps the only country in which this has happened so extensively, with the buyer getting the minimum that the seller can get away with. So a private school has no hesitation in charging Rs.10,000 as laboratory fees for a Class I student, and there is often no correlation between what is charged and for what amount the receipt is given. You could sometimes get your required registration and university affiliation for an engineering, medical, pharmacy or nursing college that you are setting up by buying off the inspection team and officers of the accreditation authority. It is no surprise, therefore, that 80 per cent of the engineering graduates (in fact, graduates in all areas) India produces are unemployable.

Till the 1960s, there was no commercialisation of education, and government-run or trust-run schools were uniformly good. The children of the rich and the poor went to the same school, and the rich and the powerful had a stake in government schools. Now only the poor send their children to government schools; they might as well not do that too for, at times the school may exist only in name or the designated teacher may not come for weeks on end. Or, if he is a little more considerate, he may send a surrogate replacement for 20 per cent of his salary which he would compensate for by engaging in a more lucrative business activity during school hours.

The Right to Education Bill that has just been passed by the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha, if it is notified by the government, will only be a boon for those who make money in the school business, while it will be a disaster for those who have no access to education today.

Unfortunately, that is what the rich and the ruling classes want. For education is the most important weapon of empowerment, and the best defence against exploitation.

To be truly independent as a nation, and to maintain national dignity, India needs a knowledge society in which every citizen has a minimum amount of knowledge. The country can do that only by decommercialising and decommodifying education and setting up a common school system (for which there has been a continuous demand since the days of the Kothari Commission in the early-1960s) in which the students of the rich and the poor in the same neighbourhood would be studying in the same school without paying any fees, and with a new curricular framework. That is the only way for us to ensure education security.

As regards health security, the lack of a sense of ethics in the medical profession (with some exceptions granted), and corruption in the Central Government Health Service, in the corporate health sector, and in the Medical Council of India, are matters of common knowledge. Inflated bills, pay-offs, unnecessary medical tests and a lack of general physicians are all well-known and well-documented phenomena. In Bhopal on September 24, 2008, a gas tragedy victim was denied medical assistance in the Bhopal Memorial Hospital which was permitted to be set up by Union Carbide expressly for the gas tragedy victims; he died the next day while waiting in the hospital. But who cares?

Our rural health-care scheme covers just a few diseases. Contrast our health-care efforts with that of China’s recently announced well-thought-of programme of spending $124 billion to modernise its national health-care system in the next three years.

We seem to really care only about the requirements of countries such as the U.S., the multinational companies, and the top 15-20 per cent of our rich and the powerful. According to an article in The Lancet (May 16, 2009), a small country like Ghana lost $60 million since 1951 which it spent on training health workers who have migrated to the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The U.K. alone saved £103 million in training costs by importing Ghanians. It is unclear what the corresponding figures are for India and the U.S., but there is no doubt that the U.S. will be the winner.

Ironically, the Indian government can do everything required to ensure agriculture, education and health security. The Green Revolution was based on our own varieties and not seed companies’ hybrids. Some of the best schools in the country even today are the Central Schools, or Kendriya Vidyalayas. And many of the best institutes of higher learning in every sector are government institutions. Some of our best hospitals, such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, and the Christian Medical College Hospital in Vellore, are run by the government or a trust without a profit motive.

If the present Indian policies with regard to agriculture, education and health security continue to be pursued, there could well be a civil war in the next 10 to 15 years.

-Dr. P.M. Bhargava

(The writer is former vice-chairman,

National Knowledge Commission.)

Courtesy: The Hindu, 11-08-2009

A Time Bomb We Await - Hillary Clinton was here to urge a dangerous deal — that the US never has to clean up another Bhopal mess!

THE FALLOUT of Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India could be dangerously nuclear, literally. Clinton’s India visit had an important agenda – to urge India to pass a law to ensure that a Bhopallike disaster does not trouble its victims for as long as the 25-year-old tragedy has. There is one twist, though. Bhopalis are not the subject of this proposed legislation. Rather, the ‘victims’ that the two Governments are committed to helping are US multinationals like GE that are champing at the bit to supply nuclear equipment and lure India’s $175 billion nuclear market. India expects to set up 40,000 MW of nuclear power plants over the next 20 years.

The poor little rich American corporations are petulant. State-owned companies like France’s Areva SA and Russia’s Rusatom are already in the race to supply equipment to India. But private sector players like GE and Toshiba Westinghouse say they will not invest until India ratifies the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSCNL) and installs a domestic civilian nuclear liability regime. They want no part of the liabilities arising out of a Bhopal-like disaster. Rather, they say, the entire liability in the event of a catastrophe should be borne solely by the Indian operator of the facility. Like his predecessor, President Obama is pushing India to guarantee that the Union Carbides of the nuclear world suffer no losses regardless of the role that may have been played by their equipment or technology in causing the disaster.

Exclusive liability for operators of facilities and supplier immunity may have been the norm in earlier nuclear liability conventions adopted by some nations. “But then, no other nation has suffered a Bhopal like disaser,” states Kanyakumari-based anti-nuke activist S.P. Udayakumar. Indeed, Union Carbide’s decision to deploy flawed design and untested technology contributed substantially to the magnitude of the disaster.

An unnamed minister quoted in a June 27 Business Standard article says the Government has a draft nuclear liability bill ready. “What this will do is indemnify American companies so that they don’t have to go through another Union Carbide in Bhopal,” he said. Local operators, on the other hand, will have to raise $450 million up-front to cover post-disaster compensation costs. Additional costs will have to be borne by Indian taxpayers. The Price-Andersen Act in the US also imposes a similar burden on the American taxpayer. According to Cato Institute, the free market think-tank, this could translate into a subsidy of 2 to 3 US cents for every unit of electricity generated. Another estimate places the annual subsidy extended by the Price Andersen Act to the industry at about $3 billion.

Ironically, the liability cap — $450 million — is exactly what Union Carbide paid for the Bhopal disaster. Whittled down from the original $3 billion that the Government estimated as the cost of compensation, the final settlement when spread across 6 lakh victims amounted to a paltry $500 per victim – insufficient even to cover a year’s medical bills, leave alone pay for treating sick children born after the disaster.

BHOPAL ACTIVISTS are “disgusted” by the attitudes of the Indian and US Governments. “A nuclear disaster will have far greater impact than Bhopal had. Environmental contamination will spread farther. Bhopal has taught us that $450 million is woefully inadequate to deal with a disaster’s fallouts,” said Rachna Dhingra of The Bhopal Group for Information and Action. In 2006 and 2008, Bhopal survivors, including children, walked 800 km to Delhi to demand for economic, medical and environmental rehabilitation, provision of clean drinking water, and punishment of the guilty corporations from the Prime Minister. On both occassions, the PM conceded the demands, albeit after making them wait for months on the streets of Jantar Mantar, and suffer police torture. Till date, he has not delivered on his promises.

Contrast this with the speed at which the UPA and the US Governments are moving to appease corporate interests. During his visit to Washington in March 2009, India’s special envoy Shyam Saran told the Americans that progress was being made on the liability law. In April, he said the internal processes for India’s accession to the CSCNL were complete and promised that the law would be enacted after the national elections. During Clinton’s visit, this was a significant point on the agenda.

A panel discussion organised on the eve of Clinton’s visit to New Delhi was openly critical of the proposed liability regime. But the organisers – the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal – clearly stated that they were not opposed to the concept of a liability regime. “But such a law should be informed by the experiences of disaster victims, rather than be influenced by the interests of corporate perpetrators of such disasters,” a statement by the two organisations clarified.

Such progressive legislation is not without precedent. Post-Chernobyl, the trend in civilian nuclear liability law began tilting towards unlimited liability, and non-exclusive liability. Non-exclusive liability would allow victims to recover compensation from operators under dedicated nuclear liability laws, even while keeping their options open to asserting claims from other defendants under other statutes such as product liability laws. Countries like Japan, Austria, Germany and Switzerland have already done away with the cap on liability.

Austria, through a 1999 law, additionally opened up liability to suppliers and service providers. None of these countries have ratified any of the international conventions relating to liability because these laws do not adequately address victims’ needs.

India’s liability bill is likely to be modeled after a draft prepared by FICCI’s nuclear task force, comprising key beneficiaries namely NPCIL, Tata, Reliance, Larsen & Toubro and Gammon India. Strangely, all this talk about disaster liability, and the normal tone in which these discussions are being held hides a sinister possibility: That despite all assurances given by India’s nuclear proponents that a nuclear disaster will not happen, the fact is that the nuclear industry is already negotiating to cut its losses in the event of a such a calamity. Private industries want the business, but don’t want to bear the risks. The Indian nuclear establishment wants the technology, even if it means exposing Indians to the risk of being hurt by a nuclear disaster. Even worse, it is asking future victims to make do with what little compensation may be on offer from their own tax money in order to ensure that private equipment suppliers are not inconvenienced. If these are the costs, is nuclear power even worth it?

-NITYANAND JAYARAMAN

(The Author is a journalist and

activist volunteering with the

International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal)

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 30, Dated August 01, 2009

Older than the Vedas, the very Indian brinjal doesn’t need a GM variety!

How They Ate It...

4th century BC brinjal recipe from Ettuthogai, an ancient Tamil text: Smear green brinjal with gingelly oil. Roast it on charcoal and then peel it. Mash it when cold. Heat some more gingelly oil. Add mustard seeds, curry leaves, crushed pepper corns, ginger powder and chopped fresh ginger. Finally, add the mashed brinjal and cook briefly till well-blended. (Courtesy: Jacob Aruni)

***

There is an enchanting Tamil folk tale about brinjal. One day a king, delighted with his brinjal fry, praised it lavishly. “It is the king of all vegetables,” his minister agreed loyally. “That is why god has given it a crown on top of its head.” The king then had it cooked every day for each meal, till he grew sick of it. “I can’t eat it any more,” he thundered. The minister didn’t miss a step. “Yes sir, it is the worst vegetable! That is why god has driven a nail into its head,” he put in promptly.

It is not just folk tales that document our love for brinjal. Across the country, brinjal is an intrinsic part of our traditions. For instance, the history of the popular Sode Matha temple, in Karnataka’s Udupi district, is inseparable from the vegetable. Poisoned, Lord Hayavadana asked for a naivedyam prepared from a special type of brinjal called gulla. That variety is now widely known as ‘mattu gulla’, the former being the name of the village where it was first cultivated. For Bengalis who relish their begun bhaja, brinjal is also a must for gota sheddho (a boiled dish of vegetables) that’s eaten a day after Saraswati Puja. And Ayurveda recommends it for its anti-rheumatic and anti-tussive properties. Brinjal is even older than Sanskrit, which had to borrow the word ‘vartaka’ and ‘vrntaka’ from the Munda language.

And now this vegetable, with its illustrious history, faces a period of upheaval as the government prepares to release a genetically modified (GM) variety into the market. And in the tussle between pro-GM and anti-GM lobbies, new details about brinjal are coming to light through an ongoing series of “brinjal festivals” in different cities, and new research on its origins and properties.

Urban consumers, their acquaintance with this vegetable largely restricted to the high-yielding purple varieties, are discovering for the first time the immense range of brinjals available in India—over 2,000 varieties, from the large yellow ‘kotti tale badane’ (literally, cat’s head brinjal) from Karnataka with a texture “soft as butter” to the finger-thin ‘salte begun’ from Bengal, and a host of others—striped and prickly, minute and bulbous. Some varieties are uniquely suited for local dishes, like ‘lamudhadha badane’ used for vangi bhath in the south. Then there is the whitish egg-shaped variety that explains the name (eggplant) Americans gave it when they first cultivated it in the 17th century.

India was familiar with the brinjal for very many centuries before that. The brinjal finds mention in many ancient Indian texts, like Ettuthogai in Tamil, that chronicles the lifestyle of people living two millenia back. Jacob Aruni, a Chennai-based chef, says, “In the text, brinjal comes across as a vegetable for the mediocre, not fit enough for kings who liked to feast on yam, drumstick and banana flowers. Nonetheless, there are detailed accounts of the vegetable being cooked with dal and also fish.”

By raising awareness about the vegetable’s diversity, proponents of sustainable agriculture hope to increase pressure on the government to stop it from releasing genetically modified brinjal—commonly referred to as Bt brinjal—for public consumption. They emphasise the fact that brinjal originated in India. Some countries that have been identified as centres of origin for certain species have moratoriums on genetic modification of those crops. For example, Peru, where potato originated, and Mexico, original home of corn, have a ban on genetic testing of these two. This comes from the fear that the alien gene, mostly sourced from other species, could escape (in some instances it indeed has) from the modified varieties, and contaminate the crop’s entire natural genetic diversity.

“If that happens here with brinjal, all our conservation work would be laid waste,” says Krishna Prasad of the Bangalore-based Sahaja Samrudha, a grouping of organic farmers from Karnataka. The organisation has a seed bank of 52 species found in Karnataka. “Brinjal cross-pollinates openly. There is every chance that all its natural varieties could be polluted.”

With efforts to protect it and celebrate its many varieties, the humble brinjal has become a hot potato for many. To the outrage of brinjal enthusiasts, a government expert committee on GM recently refuted brinjal’s indigenous status, and said it originated in Africa. “Certainly, that is a way of bypassing provisions of the Cartagena Protocol, which demands an extra-cautious approach for testing GM varieties in regions where the crop originated,” says Kavitha Kuruganthi of the Coalition for a GM-Free India.

I.S. Bisht, a principal scientist at the Delhi-based National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, asserts that Solanum melongena L (the botanical name for brinjal) originated in the wild in India and adjoining areas—a view seconded by noted food historian K.T. Achaya, who also states that brinjal is an indigenous vegetable that originated from a wild ancestor. The bureau has acquired and conserved as many as 2,500 varieties of brinjal, 95 per cent of them from India.

So why aren’t more brinjal varieties cultivated widely? Anshuman Das, secretary of Development Research Communication & Services Centre in Calcutta, blames low awareness among urban consumers of the many varieties, which results in poor demand for all except the common ones. “We have to break that cycle to revive these varieties,” he adds. Hopefully, with this newfound attention, a time will soon come when urban consumers will be knowledgeable enough to ask for brinjals by their name. Much like the way we do with mangoes now.

-DEBARSHI DASGUPTA

Courtesy: Outlook, Aug 03, 2009