Growing Nuts is a Vicious Cycle

On July 12th, The Hindu documented the death of Renuka Aradhya, a 35 year old farmer, who committed suicide at Kaarekurchi in Gubbi taluk of Tumakuru district.

If you missed reading about his demise, you can hardly be blamed. The story is a familiar, predictable one - depressingly familiar and infuriatingly predictable - to anyone who has an ear for news that concerns the lives of 263 million farmers (the number, as per the 2011 census, that includes both cultivators and agricultural labour).

Two hundred and sixty three million human beings and their children, whose futures have been missed between two economic stools in the last twenty four years of liberalisation, who have been designated ‘laggards’ in the growth process of an emerging economy, who live outside India’s urban agglomerations and suffer the real pain of being exposed to the real costs of ‘development’.

Aradhya had four acres of land on which there were coconut and arecanut trees; apparently, he had taken a gold loan of Rs.90,000 from State Bank of Mysore, Rs.70,000 from the Primary Land Development Bank and Rs.3 lakh from private money lenders.
 He killed himself because his borewell failed.
 …..which meant drilling another borewell. In Tumakuru district, among India’s most water stressed districts, this is a minor form of fracking, no less; it means reaching into the depths of the Earth, over a thousand feet below the ground. The cost? At least a couple of lakhs, which he could not raise in loans.
 ……as a result, his coconut and arecanut farm dried up.
…..which meant he would not be able to pay the annual interest on loans of Rs. 1.30 lakhs (@ 15% on loans taken from banks, @ 36% on ‘private’ loans). The question of principal repayment must not have crossed his mind.

The only reason I remembered to cut this little news item out was that I had spent a couple of days near Tumakuru in a training campsite, a day before Aradhya killed himself.

This is original hard rock country, the outstanding beauty of the scrub and the weathered adaptation of the human and cattle contributing to an ineffable beauty at sunrise and sunset. While arecanut is a traditional crop in the area, the last two three decades have seen three changes in the economics of arecanut, each debilitating in its impact on the farmer, all taken together a recipe for a crisis
1. The first change is the intensity of arecanut plantation, driven by the rapid growth of the pan masala and the gutka industry. Walking around the area, I saw arecanut everywhere, intensely planted and profusely watered from the bowels of the Earth. Water, from underground aquifers that have been charged for decades, now being consumed with imprudence born out of ignorance, short-term economics and peer behaviour. Yet, for every two farms that exhibited the verdancy of assured, timely irrigation by borewell water, there was one that had been abandoned, the plantation standing forlorn in a caked, brown field, cast to the dry winds, just as its owner had been cast to an uncertain fate.
2. The second change is in the rainfall or, more accurately, its absence. Tumkaru has shrivelled into a dehydrated zone, its lakes long gone, the underground aquifers rapidly receding as farmers pump even more water out in a viciously spiralling downward cycle of recession.
3. Yet, this is not all. Arecanut, with its volatile economics has, over the years, become the femme fatale of the farmer. An example: the price of arecanut rose rapidly in 2014 to Rs. 900 a kilogram in August 2014; more areas were planted up, more borewells dug in a mindless frenzy, many farmers seeking a way out of earlier distress, other simply avaricious . Today the price is about Rs. 280, a drop of seventy percent in one year.

Most of us who live in cities do not really appreciate the import of such a drop. To put this in perspective and use an example, imagine you had all your income coming from an index fund on the stock market that you hoped would appreciate above the rate of inflation. Imagine now that, instead of crashing, as it did, by about 4% on Black Monday in August, it crashed 70% to about 7000 points – the number it was at about ten years ago. Considering the inflation in the last decade, you would be at least twice, possibly three times, poorer than you were then.

India’s cash crop farmers – growing cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, arecanut, ginger – have recessed into a state of permanent poverty because their Sensitive Index has crashed. It is a crash that has driven millions in the last few years to poverty from a level that might have been modest, yet above subsistence .

So, why did the price of arecanut drop precipitously?
In 2013, the arecanut crop in the Malnad and coastal Karnataka region declined by fifty percent due to heavy rain that caused a fungal infection in the plant. As the price of arecanut shot up as a result; many farmers made the switch from food crops to arecanut in a classic, much repeated, example of a failure of systems thinking – doing something without knowing that all others in the boat are doing pretty much the same thing.

The firms engaging in processing arecanut then decided to import it , triggering a slump in prices: in 2013-14, about 18,000 quintals were imported, in 2014-15, over five times this quantity came in.

.. …and why can’t the Government impose import duties on arecanut?
The answer lies in bilateral trade agreements – SAFTA and SAARC - where the member countries enjoy total exemption from import duties.

As you read this, is there the ol’ vicious cycle feeling, a sense of helplessness, a feeling of inevitability, of ineluctable decline in Agriculture’s condition?
There is, equally, the larger question to be asked amidst this tragedy: all this for what purpose?

The accelerated desertification of an entire district, the crippling of its farming community, the felling of natural vegetation and the increased wildlife conflict, all to produce a crop that is the crucial input for a final product known to be addictive and carcinogenic, the single largest cause of oral cancer in India today.

My belief - and you are welcome to agree or disagree - is that the starting point is a ban on pan masala and gutka. If you do agree, please write in to the Health and Agriculture Ministers, asking them to do what is right and, yet, provide the agrarian sector the expertise and support needed to move away from arecanut to more sustainable crops that are benign, useful and remunerative.
It's the least we can do for our planet.

Alfred tips the scales

When I was in college, Alfred (not his real name) who managed the administrative office there, was among the most disliked people around. 

He was the chap we had to meet on most routine matters and his unsmiling, stern demeanour was hardly encouraging.  Now, most students who entered the office did so to find a way out of something; to atone, you could infer, for their sins.  Inadequate attendance was the commonest, a delay in the payment of fees, having misappropriated the parent’s grant of funds for an outing to the cinema, was another, requesting the use of some facility or a pardon for the damage of something that was college property (and where you could be easily indicted) was yet a third reason, but there were several. 

Even before you said what you had come to say, his head, with that neatly cut crop of hair and that clean shaven face with a sneer affixed on it,  would shake in an emphatic ‘No’.  He would look down at some other work he was doing and ignore you then, his manner that of an inspector dealing with a juvenile driver.  If you persisted, as most did, he would eye you with one of his trademark looks that was calculated to induce discomfort if not downright fear.  ‘Ask the Principal,’ he would say, as he turned away from you in final rejection of the pathetic piece of human flesh standing in front. 

It did not help that he was considered the eyes and ears of the Principal.  It certainly did not help that the faculty stayed out his way and refused to get involved,  with practised political ease that had been accumulated over the years. Yes, Alfred was a bummer, if there ever was one, and I made it my policy to have as little to do with him as I could.  Instead I stayed, for much of my tenure in college, in the Principal’s good books.

It was in my final year that I had a particularly bad run-in with Mr Sneer and was needlessly hauled in front of the Principal to explain myself; the actual incident is now a distant memory and quite irrelevant really.  What I do remember is my irritation and a sense of helplessness in dealing with this astute gatekeeper of assumed virtues.

A couple of days later, on a Friday evening, a friend, who was a year junior to me in college, and I cycled upto Rumali’s for dinner.  This venerable restaurant on Church Street, now alas a distant memory, was run by a wonderful middle-aged couple on the small patio of a building and was open only in the evenings.  There were few tables, all overlooking the street and the food was simple yet delightful.  The speciality, if you missed it a couple of lines earlier, was Rumali rotis, and, in this, the restaurant was nonpareil, in a class of its own.  Watching it being made by an expert, who twirled it into the air with flourish, picking it neatly as it landed, was as delightful as was the meal that followed.

Well, Anil and I sat down at the table knowing what we’d order.  A minute or two later, when Anil was talking animatedly - which he always did -, the waiter showed up and asked us in a courteous tone what we’d like. 

I looked up and saw Alfred.  For a few seconds, there were three startled faces staring at each other, before he forced a weak smile to appear (the muscles must have creaked from years of disuse).  Never particularly courteous with a waiter, I instantly learnt new manners, “May we please have two Rumalis….” and so on.  He dutifully took the order down and confirmed it in a neutral tone  and then attended to someone else, with us watching his every move, however slight.  

  

When he entered the kitchen though, Anil and I went into whispering overdrive, speculating on his motives for moonlighting.  Our dominant thought, of course, was on just how we could use this priceless information in future negotiations in the college office. 

He brought the food in about fifteen minutes and I could no longer resist the question. “How is it that you work here?” I asked. 

“The college salary is not sufficient, you know,….” he replied in an apologetic tone, leaving the answer mid-way.  I am not sure if there was a “Sir” added at the end, or am I, in sepia-toned reflection, being optimistic ? Along with the surprise of seeing him here was a certain empathy for the man as well; perhaps circumstances had created the mask of aloof severity.

We decided that a good strategy would be to leave a generous tip, but do it in a most discreet way.  If it were today, of course, accepting such a tip would leave Alfred open to a charge of conflict of interest among about thirty other things; at that moment, it just seemed an astute tactic on our part. 

He wordlessly took the bill folder away and pocketed the tip. I thought I saw the trace of a smile.  Sorry, this description is incorrect; the hint of a trace of a smile.  It suggested that we were on a strong wicket with him from now on and both of us chose to keep the little incident away from the troops.

When I had my next encounter with Alfred, it was a confident final year student who strode in to the college office and stated my case.  Alfred looked up, with an enquiring glance, and – this I remember distinctly – shook his head emphatically as he had done a million times before, the sneer intact, the eyes cold. I would be better off, the scorn implied, speaking to the clock on the wall. 

His confidence suggested that I had no negotiation leeway at all and all that privileged information was wasted.  Even worse, I had lost a fortune in a princely tip.  

Waiting for God ought to be good

Some years ago, wifey and I bought tickets to a performance at Chowdiah Memorial Hall of ‘Waiting for Godot’. 

We cannot say that we were not warned.  A theatre friend of mine said that ‘it was a play waiting to be explored, possibly Beckett’s best.’  I had not seen Beckett’s worst and did not know Beckett from Beckham, and therefore – foolishly – disregarded the first part of his sentence.  Wifey’s friend, who is into cinema, said (with a sniff) that, while it belonged to genre of the ‘theatre of the absurd’, it was not the best in class deal (or words to that effect).  Another friend said, ‘How nice!’ and I ignored this warning as well, being rather dense in the head when it comes to interpreting subtle messages. 

Our reason for wanting to watch the play was simple: Naseeruddin Shah was acting in it.  We are big fans of his and he was coming to Bangalore after a while, and, we reasoned, anything he acted in would be fun to watch.  The ticket price was so high that it justified instalment purchase, but I said, What the hell and paid up.

The final, though late, warning was when we entered the auditorium.  As we took our seats and looked around for familiar faces, we saw a sea of beards (the men, of course), thick intellectual specs all around, the kind worn by the crowd that debates existentialism in college canteens, lots of kurtas and most women in starched hand-spun cotton.  All of this was a sure sign that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we continued to ignore the messages from the flight instrumentation panel and twittered excitedly about what was in store.  The chap sitting next to me fetched up with a bag that he almost dragged along and I guessed he probably had a Ulysees, an Odyssey and all of Emmanuel Kant in there.  When I saw the description leaflet that was on the chair, my enthu did pale, for it had all the stuff that I was mortally afraid of: bits like ‘peregrinating ideas’, ‘marsupial folly’ and ‘atrociously wicked’.  By the way, do remember this: if you come across anything that is ‘atrociously wicked’, give it enough space for a blue whale to pass through.  It just means, if you can’t figure it out, don’t worry, others can’t as well.

And then the hush before the curtains were raised.  A chap came on the mike and in a cultured, measured tone, repeated everything that was on the leaflet, no doubt under the deeply embedded impression that theatre goers who watch ‘Waiting for Godot’ have not cultivated the habit of reading (English, at least).  After this Mr. Gibberish had done his bit, we were treated to a few minutes of silence and then the curtains went up to a sound applause. 

Naseer and his pal, Benjamin Gilani, were facing each other in ridiculous wigs and costume.  When they began speaking to each other, it was as if they were continuing a conversation they had begun about twenty minutes ago and, when I confess that I did not understand a word of what they said, I mean it.  After about half an hour of enduring this entirely unintelligible, almost impenetrable, dialogue, I stole a glance at wifey and noticed that she was looking at me as well, as puzzled as I was.  I then looked at the Emmanuel Kant next to me and, well, he was looking at the chap next to him, and so on.  You get the gist.

Occasionally, a couple of the soda glasses or kurtas would burst out into laughter and the audience, that had just got a sense that maybe they were supposed to laugh, would follow.  

I looked at my watch.  Two more hours to go, with Naseer and Benjamin excluding me from their private conversation.  I tried to snooze a couple of times, but just when I felt dreamy and cosy,  Naseer would raise his voice with a theatrical flourish, venting vengeful violence (all ‘v’s if you noticed, alliteration).  It was positively creepy, almost as if he knew I was trying to escape this wrath.

Then, all of a sudden, a woman entered the stage from the left and walked right up to the mike.  “I have an announcement to make,” she spoke, her voice filled with the spirit and tone of theatre, ignoring the two who were waiting for Godot and addressing the audience, “a car with the number plate KA 02 MA 1234 (or something like that) has blocked my driveway and we are unable to take our car out.  The owner of this vehicle must immediately, please, please, remove his car.” 

We both sat up in our seats, alert.  Was this part of the play?  Certainly, if so, it was a most useful adaptation, for Beckett, one guesses, would not have thought of a KA-registered vehicle.  I was tempted to stand up and applaud, hoot and stamp my feet but desisted because I was not sure.  And just as she finished, her husband sidled up behind her, nodding his head and muttering into the mike, “We have tried to tell the management at Chowdiah many times, but they don’t listen…”.  He then backed off, allowing his fuming wife to hog the mike. 

We were all alive now.  Naseer’s face had turned a bright shade of red while the woman was speaking and he now threw his wig on the ground, announced imperiously, “That’s it.  We are cancelling this performance” and stomped off stage.  Benjamin, realising that he had not thrown his wig off, decided to mutter and growl and stomped off too.  Yet, nothing seemed to upset the lady.  She continued, “We are sorry to disturb the performance, but, you see, we had no choice” or words to that effect, while her husband held a banner in the background that read: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  (Actually, he did not do that.  I made it up.  He just stood behind her, hoping to leave the place in one reasonably intact piece.)

As you can imagine, we were now lapping up every second.  This was true theatre, worth every rupee.  Then Mr. Gibberish’s voice came on the mike and in his cultured, measured way said, “Ladies and gentlemen, our apologies for this interruption.  Do take a fifteen minute break, and we will let you know of the status.”  What he was actually saying, of course, was, “Maan, we are up shit creek and don’t want you to enjoy the fun.”

We reluctantly left the auditorium and hung around for a few minutes, sipping something or the other.  “Should we stay back, if the play is resumed?”asked wifey.  “Should we?” I asked in turn.  “Where is the car parked?”asked wifey. 

And the rest, as they say, is history.  We were home in about twenty five minutes.  I have long been tempted to access Wikipedia to find out just who was Godot and why these two were waiting for him, but I feel it will be a humbling experience and hence, best avoided.

Will Softbank save the otter...and a lot of other wildlife?

Softbank, that somewhat eccentric internet company in Japan run by an equally maverick Masayoshi Son, has just announced that it will lead a JV with Bharti in solar energy, investing $ 10 billion – that is about 63,500 crores – over the next ten years to generate, hold your breath, 20,000 megawatts of power. 

These numbers, by any standard of energy generation - conventional or otherwise, are awe-inspiring, and, hopefully, not just for the media to digest, but real. Pricewater Coopers says that, if implemented today, it would be the size of the entire power generation capacity of Greece or the Philippines. More importantly, this number is 50 per cent of India's current installed hydropower generation capacity. And that is the reason I am attempting to look for unintended consequences of such immense investment. 

But first, about hydropower. Which means, dams. A day after Softbank’s announcement, the Business Standard carried the following write-up: 

 India's largest hydroelectric project has been given all the requisite clearances by the environment ministry in spite of repeated rejections by its own experts. The 3,000-Mw Dibang river valley mega dam in Arunachal Pradesh, once fully built, will wipe clean 4,577 hectares of forest that is also the homeland of a small community of 12,000, the Idu Mishmi. 

The project worth Rs 25,000 crore was approved on September 22 last year without a study to understand the downstream impact. Instead, the ministry has asked that a study be carried out five years after the dam is commissioned. Likely to be completed in nine years, the study will be done, therefore, 14 years later. According to norms, such studies are to be carried out cumulatively for all hydroelectric projects on the river concerned before clearance is given. 

The dam is only one of 17 planned on the river that flows through the Dibru Saikhowa National Park. It was originally rejected by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in July 2013, the apex body advising the ministry on granting of forest clearances. Ultimately, talks between the environment and power ministries pushed the project by overruling earlier rejections. Repeated meetings and letters over the next one-and-a-half years between the two ministries finally succeeded in clinching the forest clearance, government records show. FAC, in spite of comprising some of the most senior forest officials in the ministry, cannot give non-binding recommendations. 

Serious discrepancies in releasing accurate data were repeatedly seen on the part of the state government and project developer, National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), during the clearance process. This included failing to mention that chopping down 325,000 trees would critically endanger the refuge for animals such as elephants, tigers, fishing cats and snow leopards. Unquote 

India's search for power is the single biggest threat to our forests and wildlife and hydropower is a reason – a big reason – why fish are disappearing from our rivers. Many species of fish swim up the river to spawn and lay eggs in sand. Dams stop them from doing so and disrupt their breeding resulting in precipitous decline in native fish after their habitat is modified by dam construction. 

Fish, of course, are also hit by pollution of the rivers, sand mining and unsustainable forms of fishing including the use of dynamite, yet dams probably head the ‘villians’ list. In the last twenty years, India’s race for power has been energised by coal and hydro, at a scale that is mind-numbing.  And, as the fish have disappeared, the otters have too. 

Softbank is certainly not the first company to set up a solar park in India, but in sheer scale and ambition it has the potential to be a game changer. Hopefully - cross my fingers and twist my toes, roll my eyes and rub my nose - hopefully, we are reaching a point where the need for new dams, will be questioned by the decision makers, because a credible, workable alternative – solar energy – now exists, the costs of which have dropped 25% in the last three years, and are dropping every year as new ingenious ways of harnessing the sun’s energy are commercialised. Hence the optimism. And a hope that Softbank will help the otter - and all other forms of wildlife, aquatic and terrestrial - survive.

Curtains at the Play

Sometime in 2011

It has been a long day – an early flight, followed by intense work – and I make it to the performing arts theatre just in time. I flop into a seat by the side door just as the lights dim. This is a weekday, the three short plays are in Hindi, have not been written by anyone famous and have no theatre stars or fetching reviews online, so, from the silhouettes of heads in front, the audience seems thin.

A couple of the usual announcements follow (‘No breaks. Each play of the duration of half-an-hour. Use your mobile phone and you will be hung upside down above a lion’s cage’…that sort of thing). I am hardly listening though, sending messages to friends I’d be meeting later that evening for dinner. The side-door to my immediate left opens and, in the darkness, I faintly notice a man being wheeled in by his assistant. The wheelchair is placed next to me and from the corner of my eye, I see the slumped silhouette of a senior citizen in a kurta-pyjama, his head half forward and cocked to one side, his mouth partly open.

The performance has just begun.

The stories are charming, commonplace and real, the language colloquial and the humour ready and simple, all of which make them happily engaging. Somewhere in the middle though, I hear a gentle snore from my left, not loud enough to annoy, yet hardly soft enough to ignore. This chap clearly did not pay the three hundred bucks I did! Even when he does not snore, he hardly seems to pay attention, for there is no movement of any sort. Not wanting to stare at his face to see if the eyes are open, I curb the urge and stay focused on the play.

When the final play ends, the audience stands up to applaud and the lights on stage come on. We cheer as the actors and the accomplished lady director take their bows and acknowledge gratitude to Prithvi Theatre for hosting the play. The lights brighten and, glancing to my left, I realise – after some initial difficulty – that, for the last couple of hours I have been sitting next to Shashi Kapoor.

The mind protests at once in confusion; it refuses to accept this image, choosing instead to rely on a cache of sepia-tinted, yet bright memories, of my favourite actor and the heart-throb of a million adolescents. Is this him? In that moment, I see the intensity of his performance in Kalyug – the words soft, the eyes expressive, the silence dignified – the starkness of Junoon, and of that one minute, just that minute, in Ijaazat that made all the difference. Of his skill at the masala stuff, led by Deewar, where he was always cut from a different cloth, a shade above, a class, shall we say, apart. Of a guy who always looked like a million bucks (give or take a couple of million). Of a guy with no attitude and an easy, fetching smile and charm. That was my Shashi Kapoor, wasn’t it?

I reluctantly walk slowly away, watching this figure from the corner of my eyes: an old man in the wheelchair, the visage – half-lidded eyes, drooping chin, unseeing eyes marked with disinterest, head unsteady and the slumping posture – only as unreal as a sepia-tinted figure of smoke in the mist.

That evening, though, at dinner, there is a warm feeling to know that I sat beside Shashi Kapoor for a couple of hours one memorable evening.

Shashi Kapoor

( March 18th1938 - December 4th 2017)

Reflecting on a recent Delhi trip and the need to be assertive....

‘Six kgs excess,’ said the lady at the check-in

With a charming, engaging smile

‘Would you please pay by cash, rupees

As the card will take quite awhile?’

I put on my favourite hunted look

As the mouse would before (what else?) a cat

‘Could you please waive this once away

And have a delighted customer after that?’

She shook her head as she wrote the receipt

(The smile was still in its intended place)

I paid up a ransom that emptied my wallet

(And the blood off my cherubic face).

As I walked ashen, the next man checked in

His bag was light; no excess to declare

Built like a hulk, all beef, beer and bulk

HE was excess baggage; it just wasn’t fair!

I thought for a moment of raising the point

That a chap and his bag be together weighed

A limit be placed that charges his flab

And rewards a guy who slim has stayed……(that’s me!)

But I walked on, poorer, a rebel with a cause

Cursing myself as a weakling dimwit.

When I reflect on what held me back

I guess it was the smile that did it.

Avoiding a Dangerous Elephant in the Tall Grass of the Nameri Jungle

We held our breath as the elephant moved
Shaking her head from side to side,
We ducked, hid and prayed in strength
That the wind would not betray our hide.

"Come," urged the leader, in a hoarse whisper,
"We must move behind her ample back,
No noise, no voice, NO camera click,
All which trigger her frontal attack."

We silently formed the line and crept
I bravely brought up the dangerous rear
The eyes that met my gaze were steely
My blood just froze with a nameless fear.

We moved carefully on the path ahead
As the elephant lifted her trunk a-height
She sniffed the air and took a step
Sending us scurrying in frenzied fright.

After awhile, we had crossed danger zone!
And stopped to catch our breath at last
Watching the great head from distance afar
Living the moments just gone past.

A man came up from the opposite way
And looked at us with a puzzled eye
We gave him the gist; he listened and said
"It's my elephant! Doesn't hurt a fly."