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

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

Genetically modified food, a hot potato for the Govt

New Delhi: After imposing a ban on smoking in public, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss is working towards banning genetically modified (GM) seeds.

He says his ministry will oppose the entry of GM seeds into the country. The move comes after months of protests by activists, farmers and consumers across India.

“As the Union Health Minister, I will continue opposing it. BT Brinjal is being brought into the country without proper research on its safety. We should oppose it collectively,” Ramadoss says.




The minister's remarks come at a time when BT Brinjal — the first GM vegetable — is on the verge of getting approval for commercial release.

Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal, however, is well known for his advocacy of GM food.

“Of course the Government is pro-GM otherwise the GM technology would not be there. We already have GM cotton and there are many other products that are in the pipeline and will be in the market,” Sibal says.

Inadequate research and lack of independent monitoring of the impact of GM food, more specifically BT Brinjal, will certainly give fodder for confrontation.

There have been reports of several deaths across the world following allergic reaction to GM food.

“Latest Austrian study released three weeks ago shows that the mice become infertile after being introduced to GM foods,” Kavitha Kuruganti, a Green Peace activist, says.

What is worrying activists and farmers is the hurry with which the Government seems to be embracing GM technology, when around 180 countries in the world do not allow it.

Courtesy: CNN-IBN

Anbumani to oppose entry of genetically modified food

KANCHEEPURAM: Union Minister for Health Anbumani Ramadoss on Tuesday said that he would oppose any move to introduce genetically modified food or seeds in the agriculture sector.
Addressing a State-level farmer’s conference, organised by the Thamizhnadu Uzhavar Periyakkam, here, he said, “As a Central Minister I will oppose any move to introduce GM food or seeds in India.”

The Pattali Makkal Katchi had taken a policy decision to oppose introduction of genetically modified seeds.

He said efforts were being made by certain quarters to introduce Bt.Brinjal, a genetically modified variety, without conducting any test on Indian soil.

“The Ministry of Health will oppose it and will not allow introduction of such a variety without conducting proper tests.”

He said the PMK, if voted to power in Tamil Nadu, would present a separate budget for agriculture.

Delivering the special address, PMK founder S.Ramadoss said that heavy loss suffered by farmers in taking up agricultural operations forced them to dispose of their land holdings.
“A day will come when, by issuance of a G.O., your lands will be given back to you and those who had bought from you will be made to enter into a long-term lease agreement with you.”

Dr.Ramadoss warned that if the trend of “taking away” cultivable lands from farmers for setting up special economic zones were to continue, it would lead to a revolt.

If it happened, no government would have the strength to face such situation. Twenty-five resolutions, including a demand for a separate budget for agriculture, industrial status for agriculture, fair and justifiable rate for agriculture produce, setting up of special agriculture economic zones and free distribution of seeds were adopted at the conference.

PMK president and executive president, TUP, G.K.Mani, natural farming concept proponent Nammalwar and Union Minister for State (Railways) R.Velu participated in conference.

Courtesy: The Hindu, 10-12-2008

Climate-ready : Seed multinationals rush for patents

SIX leading multinational seed companies, BASF, Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Bayer and Dow, have claimed patent rights on seeds and knowledge designed to combat the impact of climate change in agriculture.

They have filed 532 applications in various patent offices for such seeds and plant genomes. Monsanto and BASF have a us $1.5 billion joint-venture for developing climate-ready genes.

“It is unacceptable that these six companies should monopolise and control all the dna sequencing that can be used to respond to any kind of stress. There are many local seeds which are drought-resistant, salinity-tolerant and resistant to water-logging. If these are patented, it will be a scary situation,” said Pat Roy Mooney, Right Livelihood Award winner and founder of the Ottawa-based ETC group that works on cultural and ecological issues.

Addressing a conference in Delhi, Mooney said concentration of such patents in the hands of a few companies was not good for world food security. “They could deny access of such seeds to some countries, the prices of these seeds would be extremely high and unaffordable to developing countries,” he added.

Director of the uk-based Institute of Science in Society, Mae-Won Ho, objected to the very concept of patenting of genes. “It is possible that one dna has many functions and several dnas have the same function. This is nature’s gift and should not be patented,” she said.

-Savvy Soumya Misra

Courtesty: Down to Earth Nov 15, 2008