Missing the forest for the .....

Question: would you agree to having a fine tooth removed and replaced by an implant because it helped GDP?
No?  Well, you are holding back India’s growth story.
Read on…
 
I am going through an old issue – December 2000 - of Sanctuary mag and there is a feeling of depressing familiarity. It quotes the then Director of Project Tiger as stating (at the Millennium Tiger Conference in 1999) that, in about 25 years since the launch of Project Tiger in 1973, India had lost half of its standing tiger forests – 150,000 square kilometres of forest land that would never again see another tiger pugmark.
Let’s put that in perspective:
That is 15 million hectares. 37 million acres
About 70 times the combined size of Bandipur + Nagarhole + Wayanad.
…and we now know that in 2000 the destruction had only begun.
 

A ghastly haircut this. Meghalaya 2022

In 2020-21 – just one year, mind you – we are told that about 31 lakh trees (largely in forests) were cut for public infrastructure projects: largely roads, which are now a national obsession. We are told that you need to break an egg to make an omelette, so this is inevitable. An equal number were planted somewhere, we are told, so there’s no problem. And then, voila! We are told that India’s forest cover has increased. 

Fiction flows.
 

Fact: few planted trees survive.  

Even if they did, a forest is not a collection of trees, it is a living, dynamic, complex, interactive ecosystem about which we know, well, nothing really.  

We do not know what we do not know.

 
Yesterday was World Water Day and you must have read the odd trite tweet as a tribute, perhaps a eulogy.  The day earlier was International Day for Forests and we must wonder if these are different.
Forest = water.
 
Stand up for our forests. 
They need you.
You need them.
 

Dhan

 Above everything else, it is helplessness that gets you angry. 

At a nearby Reading Room, I browse through the Business Standard and stop at a page that should not merit a second glance.  The next page looks exactly the same.  Turn over.  The same.  And a half-page more.  On these three-and-a-half pages are thousands of account numbers in tiny print, so small that they seem like lines of badly sewn stitches.  
It is a gold auction notice.  

This we – you and I - know: there is an alternate universe where men and, more significantly, women pledge their gold for small loans to address a medical issue or perhaps admission fees for a child in a private school or, unhappily, the costs of adhering to social mores for an unaffordable wedding.  Often, one loan repays another, one crisis ends, another begins, but they soldier on, sometimes lurching and stumbling their way through the maze of crippling interest rates, processing charges, late fees that choke and unforgiving penalties. They never forget that the gold loan needs to be repaid, for gold is never sold, only pledged.  Gold – though I am no fan of it – is social acceptance, comfort, protection, insurance, even identity.  There is a hidden language in that metal in this alternate universe. 

In this auction notice, read the signs of a crisis in that universe. 

That universe isn’t far away: our domestic help’s family could be living there, as could a family in interior Karnataka struck by Covid or a welder in Pudukottai whose machine shop shut for good after two waves of perdition.  It is their gold that will be sold to feed the collection-and-recovery frenzy reported with diligence to anxious collection managers.  In the old days, these gold hand-loan sort of guys were called ‘blade companies’ in God’s own country, but one can buy respectability:  get the  Kaun Banega Crorepati mascot to endorse you (he was once bust too, but has misplaced the experience).  Or, better still, IPL.   

To take my mind of this, I pick the Business Line up.  Lost reprieve, for it comes right back, this time through an ad.  The same lender has, on this same day, yet in another newspaper, announced its financial results: record profits and collections are the highlights.  As I read this, I wonder if that distressed family in interior Karnataka made this financial performance happen.  I know the answer.
And that makes me angry, in a feeble, helpless way. 

But in the universe I inhabit, the stock markets are booming, Dhanteras rocked while the crackers wouldn’t cease and economic news is about the recovery that the experts did not expect.  The chimera is real here and only a party-pooper would think otherwise, for the collateral damage is below the bonnet.  Only the paint matters. 

Yes, those three-and-a-half pages of badly sewn stitches in the Business Standard tell a story.  We need to listen. 
And help in every way we can. 

 

 

When You have a Right to be Angry

In mid-2014,  an intrepid report in Down to Earth documented the horrific plight of the tea garden workers in the Dooars region of West Bengal, the result of a decade of abuse, false promises and chicanery.

The story was reminiscent of the zamindari system of vicious apartheid: pathetically poor estate workers laid waste by starvation living in hideous labour lines; rich owners, most of whom had purchased gardens for the value of the large parcels of plantation land - a rich bet for their unaccounted wealth – living in Kolkata and elsewhere in pampered luxury.  Most of them cared little for their people, the environment or tea and postponed paying wages for months on end when times got rough.  When the costs exceeded revenues and continued to do so, they fled, leaving starving workers -  hundreds of whom have died over the years – and widespread malnutrition and disease.  The story was graphic and telling: a photograph of a woman – a bag of bones and rags - whose meal comprised two chapatis with a filling of tea leaves inside, as she could not afford anything else.  An image of a man on the brink of death, his ribs outlined against a shrivelled skin.  A child with little hope of survival, its eyes glazed.

And I saw these photographs that made my stomach churn, for this was inhumanity, avarice, callous premeditated murder.  

I petitioned the National Human Rights Commission which issued a show cause notice to the West Bengal government.  Who then replied with assurances of minimum food and a dole.  I was satisfied and even self-congratulatory.

I could not have been more wrong.  The story continues, for nothing in the realm of misery for the poor in India changes to their advantage.  What is different this time is that there is a villian who is big fish. 

GP Goenka is not just another businessman.  He has, for many years now, owned Duncans, a tea company that owns a number of estates in the Dooars.  Duncans was, not so long ago, a profitable company, but Goenka made some bad decisions, using the money from tea (and a load of debt) to buy a fertilizer business.

He, though, is not paying the price. 

In 2015, thirteen workers in the Duncan estates died of starvation, for no wages were paid to them and there was no food to eat, the West Bengal Government having a non-functioning PDS.  Thousands of others are in the whimsical hands of Destiny and Empty Promise, as the malnutrition levels of workers and their children in the Duncan estates soar.  Reports speak of human trafficking, of immense agony that each of these families goes through as they have no options but to wait, borrow, wait again.... until there is no borrowing option anymore.  Which is when they resort to selling the only piece left: themselves. 

Why can’t they just move out of there, you ask?  Well, some have, most haven’t.  Because moving, you see, is not easy  for those who have been trod on, cast out, abused and starved.  No labour force can be that mobile for, if it were, the wages paid to labour in India’s cities would never have increased.

Goenka, of course, has his point of view, but, dammit, no perspective, no excuse, no disingenuous self-flagellation (albiet slight in his case) can condone such deliberate, negligent, callous egocentricity.  How can he and every one of his managers stand by silently watching these workers emaciate themselves to physical ruin?  Are they, these ‘tea barons’, not accessories to their deaths? How could any of their defensive actions  be an excuse for a ‘let-them-be-damned’ approach, when the certain consequence of such inaction would be their demise?  Why is this not premeditated murder, a phrase I use again?

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is one of them. 

In 2012, I had embarked with enthusiasm on a new book that would be a travelogue through tea country; a collection of stories and anecdotes from the Brits to the Twits (my term for Twitter users).  Travelling around Assam, I met planters.....and some workers.  The planters’ stories were quaint and olde-world and their anachronistic lifestyle was charming, but the workers’ labour lines – equally anachronistic, but in a very different way – were as appalling as they were putrid.  When one planter – an Assistant Visiting Agent (which is a senior designation) - referred to his labour as being ‘bull headed’, suggesting that they were unthinking enough to not be much better than vacuous-headed animals, I knew I was barking up the wrong tea bush.  I had no wish to meet any more of these wise men, so I abandoned the project.

Goenka is a bad guy for sure, but he must savour the company of rogues he is with.  An article in The Mint on January 22^nd 2016 by Sudeep Chakravarti details an investigation by BBC News and Radio 4 into the working and living conditions at the largest plantation companies in Assam, Mcleod Russel (India’s largest tea enterprise by area) and The Assam Company.  The findings were shocking: he quotes from the BBC report  “Images of workers’ toilets and accommodation at the McLeod Russel estates made facilities in Indian slums appear salubrious in comparison, accompanied by details of abject poverty, malnutrition and disease.”  And “Assam Company came in for criticism for not providing workers in an estate protective gear while spraying agrochemicals, and for employing child labour.” After pressure from international buyers, the article states,  Mcleod Russel is making some amends, but you will forgive my pessimism, for I have long abandoned the notion of business being a source of social good.

As if to prove me right, Mcleod Russel declared its financial results four days after this write up, on January 26^th, 2016: profits have dropped big time, one report lamented.  In the three months ended December 31^st, 2015, the company made profits after tax of about fifty seven crores, against about eighty crores from the earlier year’s comparable quarter. I could picture the Khaitans – the absentee Anglophile satrap-owners of Mcleod (with a 45% stake) – weeping at this drop and at the stock market’s phlegmatic view of the company: their own stake in the company was now worth a piffling seven hundred crores thereabouts.  One shivers at their sorry plight, the poor little rich boys of Mcleod Russel, a plight serious enough to make them forget the starvation of a thousand others.

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is, I insist, one of them.

Fifty seven crores of profit in a quarter is about seventy six lakhs of profit every working day.

Enough money, you will agree, to do the right thing.

This Day That Age

This morning, while scanning The Hindu, my attention was drawn to a column I often ignore: “This Day That Age” which carries snippets from The Hindu edition fifty years ago, to the day.

The news item from The Hindu dated July 30^th, 1963 was titled ‘Forest Land for Rayon Firm’.  The text read: 

‘The Government of Kerala have given permission to Gwalior Rayon Silk Manufacturing Company Limited (wood pulp division) at Mavoor to purchase 25,000 acres of private forest land in Malabar area.  This will help the company in the production of rayon pulp and for starting new industries based on timber.  It is also stated that these lands would not be acquired by the Government in pursuance of any legislation regarding nationalising forests in Malabar area for a period of 32 years.’

I read the little note again, its language betraying the hope of the ‘60s, the relative innocence of a Government bent on pursuing industrialisation as the only means of development for a young nation.  It was startling to have seen this, for this was no accidental glance at a column one rarely read; it was meant to be.  Retrieving an old file from the loft, I turned the pages, with clippings stuck to them, until I came to the one on Mavoor.  It was a moment of reflection, some déjà vu as I read the story.

In the early 1990s, after I had graduated from Business School, I was, much as any other B-School grad would be then, caught up by the promise of the era of liberalisation and the stock market boom.  Gwalior Rayon – now Grasim – was a punter’s delight and its relatively young management, represented by Mr. Aditya Birla, was seen as ambitious, global and representative of the New India. 

Mavoor was the hitch in this grand scheme.  For, there was a battle going on at Mavoor, a battle that caught my attention and played the decisive role in changing my career.

One day in the early 90s, the story in the papers caught my attention – it was poignant and well-written.  Gwalior Rayon’s pulp factory, which was located by the Chaliyar river, had, in the thirty years of its existence – from the early 1960s to the early 1990s – sucked its water out and pumped back toxic discharge, destroying the river.  The factory had polluted the air and water with mercury, cadmium and sulphides and consumed almost the entire bamboo wealth of the Wayanad area, a large part of it supplied by a compliant Government at a ridiculous price of Re 1 per tonne (when craftsmen in the surrounding villages were charged many times this price for producing handicraft products from bamboo).  I read that the village folk along the river paid a heavy price for this outrage: malformed babies, hundreds of cancer deaths, severe debilitating bronchial ailments and kidney failures (650 at last count).  I read, with awe, of the courage of K.A. Rehman, who had chosen to fight the company all the way (succumbing to cancer from the emissions, but asking his people, from his death bed, to continue the fight) and of a journalist, Surendranath, who put his career and personal safety on the limb to expose the devil.  I read that, in 1985, Gwalior Rayon had strategically shut the plant down, to put pressure on the Government to be on their side – their argument was that they provided employment to 3,000 people – and that when they re-started operations, it was on even more advantageous terms to them.  I read that every political party had taken the company’s side and used the old argument: when you make an omelette, you break a few eggs.  And I read that the company had rejected the idea of setting up a pollution treatment plant, on the grounds that it would endanger the overall return on investment.

I had no idea why this battle engaged me as much as it did; there were other environmental disasters around to study as well.  Yet it did, perhaps because it was a Kerala story and not far away from Bangalore, perhaps because it was a people vs corporation debate with a high-profile company involved, perhaps, at a larger level, because it was a development question that I had always wanted to ask.

…and I asked one question to myself: Whose side was I on?  My qualification had aligned me to the side of business, yet my heart wasn’t there.  The more I read about the issue, the more I believed that I was on the wrong side.  Along my career as a private equity analyst, I would have to look at profits, possibly as the sole indicator of success and the thought was far from pleasant.  Perhaps, unwittingly, my initial effort at funding a corporation would create a future Gwalior Rayon; to most fund managers, this would be a dream come true.  To me, this was chilling to contemplate.

The 1990s was when I began to learn about the environment – thanks almost entirely to the Mavoor issue -  intent on making up for a lost education.  It was also the time when the Courts in India were becoming aware of their role as possibly the only authority with an environmental conscience and the days of the plant at Mavoor were now numbered.  When, in 2001, the pulp factory was shut down for good, I was ready to make a change away from the World that I never belonged to.

Five years ago, a blog posted on the issue spoke of a comeback that the river, and its people, had made.  Reading it was as motivating as it was heartening. 

I have cut this little note out from today’s newspaper and have pasted it alongside the older cuttings on Mavoor in my file, for no story has a real ending. 
And to everyone who reads it, there is one message – never, ever, lose hope.  

A Dump of Bullshit

From The Hindu dated Friday May 3^rd, page 14

(with some apologies for a personal interpretation)

“Poverty,” said the Asian Development Bank chief, sipping his bottled water, “amid progress worries me greatly.  It is disheartening that in a region of such rapid progress, we still have a population of more than 800 million people living in absolute poverty.  This, along with growing inequality, remains an overarching challenge” he said, while making his presentation in an impeccably tailored suit, in a air-conditioned room at the Indian Expo Mart at Greater Noida (the outside temperature was 38 degrees Celsius). 

The ADB Chief indicated that the bank’s lending programme may have to be lowered, simply because the income from investments of surplus resources (which are mostly lent to European countries) has come down due to lower interest rates.  Despite the tight financial position, the Chief added, the ADB would still be interested in promoting a number of projects in India (remember, he is greatly worried by poverty).  Such projects include the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor - no doubt, all of India's poor people live along this line or will migrate to it - and other highway and railway projects.  He said that poverty could be eradicated only through (hold your breath: not food, not jobs & livelihood, not income, not security, not healthcare or sanitation) infrastructure development and, towards this end, co-financing with the private sector and attracting offshore funds - perhaps he had Argentina, Greece and Spain in mind - would “act as a catalyst in promoting infrastructure finance.”

Then, the ADB Chief seemed to forget everything he had said.  “It is because of domestic demand that India, China and other emerging market economies in Asia have enjoyed stronger growth and I think it will continue, led by strong consumption demand” he ended.

While he was making this epoch speech, no doubt to applause and encomium, there were two news items that entered the media radar. 

 - For the first time ever, all the fourteen districts of Kerala were declared drought-hit.  Perhaps they do not have infrastructure; of what use is total literacy, when a road to Hell may have made the drought easier to handle? 
 - The Supreme Court strongly endorsed the role of the gram sabha to decide if land must be given away to infrastructure projects, mining or industry.  It is beyond doubt, the Supreme Court said, that there is an organic connection between tribals and their land; that bond must be respected. 

The ADB Chief ended his meeting early.  He had to meet another 82 year old economist who, like him, lives in an ivory tower, but in New Delhi.  And then there was a flight to catch to another country, where this polemic pronouncement, this passionate plea for poverty purge, would be delivered to a fawning audience in the comfort of a temperature-controlled convention centre.

Say 'No' to the Demwe Hydro Project in Arunachal

In February 2012, the Hindu, carried two little reports, side by side, on its last page.  The first piece read “Films to help promote Incredible India campaign”, while the piece by its side read “Jayanthi overrules wildlife panel to approve Arunachal dam.”

The irony could not have been greater.

The first report is self-explanatory, so let’s go to the second.  Jayanthi Natarajan is the Union Minister for Environment & Forests, with a mandate to protect and preserve what is left of our forests.  She overruled a committee set up by the National Board of Wildlife that recommended the shelving of a proposal to create a dam across the Lohit river in Arunachal Pradesh (called the Demwe Lower Hydro Electric Project).  This committee, comprising respected wildlife experts, visited the site (which the Minister did not) and detailed the damage to the river and grassland ecosystem, as a result of the dam : fragmentation of wild water buffalo habitat, threats to the Gangetic river dolphin (which, by the way, is our National Aquatic Animal, declared so by Dr Manmohan Singh himself in 2010) and the Bengal bustard.  The ecosystem to be submerged is considered to be priceless and includes a conservation area of medicinal plants, according to the report.  The summary that I read of the report, mind you, did not detail the damage caused to the ecosystem during the construction or the social impact of a large number of construction crews descending on the small villages in the area.

This project is stated to generate 1750 megawatts of electricity, to be transmitted across the country to the power deficit states. About half – I repeat, half - of the energy will be lost in transmission.  The rest will be consumed by the growing business districts that now dot our urban landscapes- malls, centrally cooled homes, climate controlled offices and entertainment parks, none of whom have an idea of just what irreversible damage they are causing to our own collective future.

The Ministry’s defence was that “the spirit of the clearance system (which phrase itself is indicative of the Government’s preference – clearance) demands evaluation of trade offs for balancing the developmental needs with environmental sustainability, examination of the scope of mitigation and capacity of the ecosystems to withstand the impact.  The project, therefore, needs to be considered in the light of this overarching principle.”  In other words, rubbish.

Arunachal Pradesh is not just a part of wild India.  It is the best part of wild India, most of it unexplored, unknown to science and undocumented.  Yet, there are a hundred and fifty dams being built across Arunachal, each with a raison de etre that defeats common sense.  Each dam is a nail in the State’s ecological treasure trove, sealing its future.  My friends, who have spent time across the state, detail the exacting price being extracted: the destruction of livelihoods and forests, increased conflict between humans and humans on one hand, and humans and animals on the other, destruction of tribal culture and loss of their dignity.

Sure India needs power, but at what permanent cost?

Instead of involving the brightest technical minds in this debate and formation of policy, and incentivising energy conservation and dis-incentivising wasteful consumption (such as by paddy growers in Tamil Nadu, where power is free for them), and urgently replacing inefficient transmission lines across the country that create power losses and mandating large office and residential complexes to generate some part of their power need using solar energy, instead of  these sensible measures, the Government’s bureaucrats and vacuous- headed Ministers have moved with ferocity to generate hydro-electric power from every possible source, using their limited understanding of science to destory.   This is the arrogance of power, this is technology without conscience.

So, what can you do?

A great deal.  For starters, do not just take my word, read up on the project (and on the other projects sanctioned in Arunachal).  Then, if you are convinced, please speak up.   Write to the Minister at mosefgoi@nic.in expressing your dismay at her decision and requesting a rethink on the Demwe project.  You may mention that there are smarter options than hydro-power today and that we need to leave Arunachal alone.

Because if we see it as someone else’s problem, we forget Chief Seattle’s immortal words : do not forget, the World is round.