Propagating Heirloom Seeds

 Kansari nu Vadavno, the Bhil Adivasi women's organisation led by Subhadra Khaperde has been reviving the cultivation of the traditional indigenous seeds of Western Madhya Pradesh over the past eight years. These women farmers have not only succeeded in cultivating over thirty varieties of traditional seeds ranging from millets, rice, wheat, pulses, oilseeds and fibre to vegetables, but have also spread them across the country by participating in organic seed festivals. Bicchibai and Gendabai two stalwart farmers of the organisation are participating in the latest Organic Seed Festival in Indore with their cornucopia of seeds and are holding forth before farmers, consumers and the media about the importance of this campaign to save the agro-biodiversity and so the food security of Western Madhya Pradesh.

Revisiting Machla

 Three decades ago Subhadra Khaperde and I came to Indore from Alirajpur to start rights based work in a new area so as to expand the mass base of the organisation. We stayed on the campus of the Gramodyog Vidyalaya of the Sarvodaya Shikshan Samiti in the village Machla situated about 13 kilometres from the city for about two years. At that time we had very little money so we used to live at subsistence levels initially. We used to go around on a bicycle trying to sell copies of a monthly magazine that we used to publish at the time to eke out some funds. Slowly, we started doing consultancies and then landed a project for organising Bhil Adivasi women to fight for their reproductive health and rights and work got under way in the nearby districts of Dewas and Khargone and today the organisation (https://lnkd.in/dV-nhpBz) has a vast spread across the whole of Western Madhya Pradesh working to make the independence gained 77 years ago more meaningful for the masses who still lead a precarious subsistence existence at the margins. So this campus in Machla has a special place in our hearts.

Some of the shootings for the film on our love story, Rah Sangharsh Ki, episode four in the series Lovestoriyaan on Amazon Prime Video (https://lnkd.in/dKbUsT6C), were shot in Machla and so we had an opportunity to visit it again last year and revive those sweet memories. Ravi Uchhe, one of the cinematographers of the film, has shared a lovely photo of us that he took at that time.

Plant Your Love and Let it Grow

Forty years ago I read an article by the American author and environmentalist, Wendell Berry, in the Humanist magazine about the tremendous therapeutic value of farming and living in rural surroundings. I was in the third year of college at the time studying to be a civil engineer. That was the time I was reading Gandhi and the Upanishads also. A few months down the line I decided that I would also live in a village and farm. So eventually after my graduation I landed up in a village and from there in another village and finally in Alirajpur among the Bhil Adivasis. However, since I had also been reading Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin and the like in college, even though I ended up living in a village, I could not do much farming. Most of the time I was into grassroots mass mobilisation for the rights of the Bhils. So, like in the famous Grateful Dead song "Casey Jones", all the time there was trouble ahead and trouble behind. Consequently, farming was the last thing that crossed my mind as I was high on, not cocaine, but revolutionary spirit, often laced with the local Mahua!!

As things would turn out, a decade later I married a farmer's daughter, Subhadra. She too had drunk of the revolutionary spirit and that too of a feminist flavour and so we continued our dangerous political train driving, a la Casey Jones, spending our time in and out of prison and crashing head on into the oppressive train being driven by the Government!! But that became increasingly risky and after a particularly painful clash against the Government in 2001 in which we lost four of our sangathan members in police firing, we gave up on militant mass mobilisation and retired to the city of Indore to pursue sedate service delivery work and research.

Then in 2012 Subhadra decided she wanted to do farming. Staying in the city of Indore was becoming more and more claustrophobic for both of us. So we began searching for land. Thus started a wild goose chase. We wanted land close to a forest in hilly terrain and in an Adivasi area where there was one of our Sangathans and it had to be close to Indore with phone and internet connectivity. Too many parameters to satisfy and so we could not get land easily. Finally in 2015 we did get our land in Pandutalab village in Dewas district that satisfied all our conditions. It has been five years since and now we have a farm and farmhouse self sufficient in water, energy and food situated on the edge of a dense forest.

However, while Subhadra dived into farming with gusto along with the Adivasi couple we had engaged to help us, I still used to live and work on the farm off and on in a desultory manner and so could not test Berry's claim that farming has a therapeutic value. But from the month of June this year the Adivasi couple has left and so since then I have put in long stints of living and working on the farm as it is not possible for Subhadra to do all the work on her own. Farming is hard work both physically and intellectually. There are so many variables that have to be taken care of that one is on one's toes all the time. Normally, this results in considerable tension for the farmer these days. However, we are not normal farmers. Berry, in that article that I had read forty years ago, had given a sage piece of advice that one should not be dependent for one's livelihood on the farm. We have followed that advice and so we earn our money from other activities, which is possible because there is internet available on our farm, and do farming for the food and the physical and mental rigour.

Consequently, in these two and a half months my mental and physical health has improved considerably. One chronic ailment of mine has for the time being been completely solved. For some fifteen years now I have had a skin condition called psoriasis which results in scaling and itching of the skin. In all these years I have tried, allopathy, ayurveda, naturopathy and what have you but the problem has persisted. One dermatologist even told me once that I would have to reconcile myself to living with psoriasis till the day I die as if it was my second wife. When I told Subhadra this, she said that it was my third wife because the Adivasis were my first love and she was effectively my second wife!!! But now this long standing problem has vanished completely. No scaling of the skin and no itching whatsoever even though I have not been applying any medicine at all for the past two and a half months. Of course it may relapse but at least for the time being psoriasis has vanished.

Subhadra of course takes farming very seriously as a mission. She began farming again because she found that the women with whom she worked for their reproductive health were all anaemic because they were not eating properly. Delving into the problem she realised that it is the unsustainability of farming in this country that is at the root of malnutrition and disease. So she is on a crusade to bring farming and women back to health. For me, however, over the past two months farming has become a labour of love. Something that I had first dreamt about forty years ago in college has now been actualised. As the lyrics of a famous song by Eric Clapton go -
"Standing at the crossroads, trying to read the signs
To tell me which way I should go to find the answer,
And all the time I know,
Plant your love and let it grow"

We are All Fools

Which industry has seen phenomenal growth since World War 2? It is food. People have been encouraged to eat more and more as part of the general consumerist thrust to increase consumption. So the moment people's incomes have gone up they have begun consuming more food along with other things. The economy can grow only if we consume more. This is why we also have to eat more. Not just in quantity but also in variety. Our plates these days not only have more helpings but they also have more categories of food.
This is nowhere more so than in China. The phenomenal growth and prosperity that China has seen since the 1980s after it opened up its economy and became the world's manufacturing hub, have been accompanied with a corresponding increase in consumption. Not only that, China became the global hub for producing meat and exporting it and so huge meat farms were constructed. The Chinese always used to eat wild animals but the huge increase in prosperity led to an equally massive increase in the quantity and variety of wild animals that they consume.  Over a hundred varieties of wild animals are consumed by the Chinese. One adverse consequence of this over the past decade has been that virulent mutants of a virus that causes influenza, the corona virus, called zoonotic viruses, which reside in some of these wild animals like bats and pangolins, invade the humans who are eating their meat. Thus, there was the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus epidemic that originated in China and then spread around the world at the turn of the century killing 774 people. Then about a decade ago there was the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) zoonotic virus that originated from camels in Saudi Arabia. Another nation that had seen huge prosperity. Too much eating of camel meat resulted in the virus invading the humans and killing 858 people. Similarly, there was the Nipah virus, which comes from pigs, outbreak in 1999 in Malaysia which had a rerun in Kerala a couple of years back killing 20 odd people. A couple of years ago the zoonotic Ebola virus had a devastating run in western Africa killing 11,500 people. It is not only the rich who are eating more, even though, obviously they are consuming more than the less wealthy. So deeply has consumerism spread through society that even those with less money freak out once in a while on exotic and expensive food in the same way as almost everyone in society these days aspires to drive a motor car or stay in a luxury condominium. While it is difficult to do the latter, it is fairly easier to eat a one off exotic meal.
Another aspect of this emergence of China as the global manufacturing hub is that, cities have expanded displacing the rural people in its periphery and converting them into cheap labour in the same way as in the early years of capitalist development in England. A phenomenon that has been named by Marx as primitive accumulation as opposed to accumulation that takes place in established factories. The outsourcing of manufacturing work to China and other Asian and African countries is a manifestation of primitive accumulation as labour and other protective laws that prevent exploitation of workers are absent. These are the people who also work in the wet markets catching the wild animals and then selling their meat.
This transmission of these zoonotic viruses from animals to humans followed by human to human spread resulting in high fatalities did not disturb humans very much as they were quickly isolated and did not overly affect the developed economies of the west. So humans continued on their wayward ways increasing their consumption of wild animals, especially in China. Consequently, nature struck again. In November 2019 another mutant of the corona virus, which has now been named SARS Cov 2 and the disease as COVID 19 by the World Health Organisation (WHO), spread to humans in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province in Central China. China is generally secretive about such things and so the matter was kept under wraps for more than a month till the disease got out of hand. Primarily because unlike the earlier zoonotic viruses, COVID 19 is highly infectious like the original flu virus and also quite deceptive, remaining in the host without producing symptoms for long periods of time while the host went about infecting others. By the end of December 2019 matters had got out of hand in Wuhan and so China reported the matter to the WHO. Surprisingly, WHO instead of sending an expert team to Wuhan to assess the situation, accepted China's word that it had things under control and just recorded the information. The problem reached epidemic proportions by January end with huge increase in cases and deaths and so China locked down Hubei province which was the initial epicentre of the outbreak.

  The WHO, however, dithered. Even after China allowed its personnel to visit Wuhan and study the disease outbreak, it did not initially declare the situation to be a public health emergency of international concern. This despite the fact that cases of infection were being reported from all over the world by this time and it had become clear that the disease was much more infectious than those caused by the earlier zoonotic viruses even though its fatality rate was not as high as theirs. So even with a lower fatality rate, the immensely higher rate of infection would cause huge problems especially among the aged and those with comorbidities of other diseases like diabetes and heart malfunction, which too, incidentally, are related to over eating and consumerism. Finally, on January 31st 2020 the WHO did declare the COVID 19 crisis to be a public health emergency of international concern. International air travel began to be restricted and some screening and quarantining began to be done of air travellers at airports but since most passengers did not show any symptoms of the disease despite being infected they passed the screening test and went into their countries spreading the virus further. Despite clear indications that the disease had become an epidemic and was spreading fast throughout the globe, the WHO not only refused to declare it as such but on the contrary its Director General criticised people for spreading alarm and held meetings with Social Media platforms to curb posts that said that the virus would cause serious problems. Thus, Facebook set its algorithms to automatically censor any post with the words related to corona virus in them. Whereas the reality was that the virus was spreading across the globe surreptitiously very fast and by the end of February the number of new cases daily outside China had surpassed that in China.
The result of this dithering by the WHO was that mass congregations continued as usual in other countries and especially in Europe and the USA. The biggest mass congregations take place in sports events and especially football matches. Throughout the month of February the matches in various football leagues in Europe continued unabated with thousands of fans congregating in them and the virus had a field day surreptitiously propagating itself widely. Even though screening and quarantining of symptomatic cases was being done worldwide and so the overt spread of the disease was stalled for sometime, actually the disease was spreading very fast through the asymptomatic infected persons thus setting up the scene for a subsequent explosion. The WHO still advised against large scale travel and trade restrictions even though it upgraded the risk of global infections to very high from high.
The number of cases, deaths and the countries affected began to explode in the month of March and much belatedly the WHO finally declared the COVID 19 outbreak to be a pandemic on March 11th, a full one and a half months after China had locked down Hubei province. Governments across the world began stopping air travel and taking steps to prevent mass gatherings but by that time it had become too late and the asymptomatic infected people had spread far and wide and were beginning to display symptoms of the disease in a surge of new cases. Even the most developed country in the world, USA, is now staring at a scary 100,000 deaths by the time the virus has run its course. The main reason behind the WHO dilly dallying and Governments not taking more stringent measures to restrict air travel and trade is their fear that this would adversely affect the global economy and profit making. First consumerism is promoted to spur economic growth and when that has an adverse impact on nature and there is a corrective reaction from it, action to contain it is delayed for fear of impacting economic growth and profit making. A classic catch 22 situation if ever there was one. This is the vicious pathology of economic growth that has gripped human kind. Now the push back from nature in the form of the COVID 19 pandemic  has resulted in a steep decline in economic growth and a serious disruption of the global economy. Whereas, in earlier crises we had to contend mainly with demand recession, this time there will be disruption in both supply and demand as businesses will find it difficult to resume operations after a prolonged lockdown. Throughout the world the capitalists are clamouring for state bailouts as a result as they always do after becoming socialists in times of crises.
India too has been deficient in its response to the pandemic. Following, the global trend it too delayed the quarantining of foreign air travellers coming into the country and so the virus spread through the country and especially in the cities that had international airports like Mumbai, Kochi, Delhi, Ahmedabad and the like. So even though a stringent national lockdown was initiated from 25th March onwards, the disease is spreading continuously in a few hotspots in the country. Luckily most of the country is free from the virus and some areas like Kerala have succeeded in controlling its spread. Moreover, due to some unknown reason the level of infection and the death  rate in India are very low. Even though it has been argued that since the level of testing in India is low there is a possibility that many cases are going undetected, this may not necessarily be true.
The Worldometer data upto 19.4.20 midnight  for 26 countries which had more than 10000 cases (China is excluded because the testing data is not available for it) has been given in the scatter plot  below.

There is no clear relationship evident from the graph as the data points are scattered all over. The trend line that has been fitted shows an  inverse relationship that the more the testing done, the lesser is the case per test ratio or level of infection!! However, the level of fit of the trend line is very poor as it explains only 8.2% or the data. Thus, globally there is very little relationship between the level of testing and the level of infection and there is a small likelihood that with higher testing the the level of infection may show a decline.
Another saving grace seems to be that 80% of those who test positive for the virus are asymptomatic. That is they do not show any symptoms of the disease. The WHO has so far not found any evidence of asymptomatic transmission. That is unless the virus comes out of the body through droplets it will not spread and if there are no symptoms of cold then the virus cannot come out. It is when the asymptomatic person becomes symptomatic that the danger of spread begins and since in 80% of cases this does not happen so if the overall infection rate is low as it is in India.
This then brings us to the discussion of the lock down that has been imposed to control the pandemic. Due to the dilly dallying earlier the lockdown had to be imposed at short notice without taking into account the effect it would have in the immediate and long terms. The immediate effect was to jeopardise the livelihoods of the migrants who would not be able to sustain themselves without earnings and in the long term the economy and so employment would take a severe hit due to the stoppage of economic activities. The revenues of Governments both at the centre and in the states too would take a hit at a time when their financial health was anyway bad due to an under performing economy and the badly designed Goods and Services Tax. Even though the lockdown has been partially lifted now, nevertheless, since the main drivers of the economy like the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad etc are still in the grip of the disease and likely to be in lockdown for an extended period the portents for the future are not good. This is more or less the situation across the world as production and employment have taken a serious hit. However, the western developed nations not only have social safety nets in place but they have also given stimulus packages of upto 10% of the GDP to tide businesses and citizens through this crisis. The Indian Government has just rearranged the budget numbers so far and not really offered any substantial stimulus either to businesses or to its poor citizens.
Coming back to the capitalist origins of this crisis it must be remembered that the various laws of conservation of energy and mass which form the basis of physics also govern economics. Unfortunately, the fools who guide modern economics and advocate unlimited growth fuelled by the urge to make profits, think that these conservation laws do not apply to their discipline. The greater tragedy is that we, the common people, have also fallen for this fraudulent economics and have been indulging ourselves in an orgy of consumerism unleashed by it. Nature has now sent a stern message calling out our foolishness. If we do not heed it then it has more sufferings in store for us in future.

Should We Laugh Or Cry?

The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been given the prestigious "Champion of the Earth" Award for this year by the United Nations Environment Programme jointly with the French President Emmanuel Macron for launching the International Solar Alliance. He has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Bharatiya Janata Party member from Tamil Nadu for launching the world's largest public health insurance programme - Ayushman Bharat. Are these two programmes indeed game changers as claimed to merit such high recognition? Let us find out what the reality is.

The foundation of a successful public health programme is its primary health outreach. Most illnesses start as primary health problems and need to be tackled at the initial stage itself to prevent them from escalating into immediate or chronic health problems of a serious nature. Unfortunately, the government primary health infrastructure and servicese in this country, especially in the rural areas, is woefully inadequate and dysfunctional. Consequently, most people have to rely on quacks and tradtional medicine men for their primary health problems with devastating consequences. Both these categories of health service providers practice irrational medicine and complicate rather than cure people. We try to provide rational health care, which also includes advising people to change their diet to make it more nutritious, but the hold of irrational food intake and healthcare is so strong on the minds of the people, promoted in no small part by the fast food and pharma industry, that we do not make much headway.

One lady who stays just across the road from our field centre in Pandutalab village and who had seen us cure many people, some in her own family, steadfastly refused to follow our advice. She would alternately go to a quack to get intravenous drips and visit the traditional medicine men to shoo away the evil spirits that had allegedly made their home in her. In between, her father in law expired. This gentleman too had disregarded our advice and despite being a diabetic and sufferer of hyperacidity and hypertension, refused to take proper treatment and relied on traditional healers and quacks instead. As the woman's condition deteriorated further, the traditional medicine men said that her late father in law's spirit had entered her and given the fact that she and her father in law had had quite a few tiffs while he as alive, he was now taking vengeance.

Then one day her husband called me saying that the lady was in very bad shape and getting spasms and would have to be admitted to hospital. This is not the first time that we had got such calls from people in dire medical distress and so I told him to bring her to our office in Indore. We took her to a senior general practitioner doctor and after examining her he said that she was suffering from a combination of hyper acidity and anxiety related problems which had become severe due to long neglect and mistreatment. She was given an injection of an anxiety relaxant drug and prescribed a course of anti acidity and anti anxiety treatment. Within a week she was cured of the severity of her illness and has recovered so much that she is able to work. The treatment is continuing because it will take at least three months to clear the ill effects of the long neglect completely.

Her two sisters in law, who live with her in the same house but in different rooms, also are suffering from various ailments and they too practice the same combination of cure from quacks and traditional medicine men. One of these women has recently become ill and she says that since her sister in law has been cured, the father in law's spirit has now moved into her and is causing her problems.

There is not only a need for providing extensive rational primary health care free of cost to the people but also a massive information and education campaign to convince people to follow proper nutritional diets, sanitation and hygiene practice. Innumerable studies have shown that public investment in primary health care is recovered many times through taxes from a population that is much more productive due to being healthy. Yet the "Ayushman Bharat" programme has bypassed this important basic foundation of a public health programme and instead targeted the secondary and tertiary health problems which require hospitalisation. So far the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana has not been able to adequately provide for even this hospitalisation care as the costs incurred by the people is much more than the insurance cover in most cases. This will plague the new programme also which while making bold to cover the world's largest number of people through insurance has made a financial provision of just Rs 200 per person for this. Which in effect means that those being hospitalised will get very little actual support. So this neglect of primary health care combined with a measly provision for secondary and tertiary health care will result in the Ayushman Bharat programme coming a cropper and belying its Nobel Prize winning rhetoric of being the world's biggest public health programme.

What about the claims of the International Solar Alliance (ISA)? It has been set up primarily to ensure that countries lying within the two tropics, which have greater solar insolation, the "sunshine countries", utilise fully their solar potential and so reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To this end a financial target of 1 trillion dollars has been targeted to be raised from developed countries which are mostly out of the tropical zone but which have both the financial and technical resources to give a big push to solar energy. To this end the ISA has roped in the old warhorse of many such grandiose development plans, the World Bank, to achieve its goals. Specific to India the goal is to have 100 GW of solar power by 2022. Given that the current installed capacity of solar power is only 23 GW this looks a far fetched dream. What is of greater concern however, is that the thrust of the solar policy in India is towards the installation of mega solar parks instead of towards greater decentralised generation through the involvement of communities and individuals. Thus, the subsidies for solar power are going to big corporations which are setting up huge solar parks and not so much to the poor to encourage them to set up rooftop systems. A vast number of households throughout the country in rural areas is without reliable supply of electricity and even today kerosene lamps are being used and post harvest processing is a serious problem. Rural industries are not being able to take off due to lack of electricity. This is to be contrasted with Germany where 90 per cent of the solar energy comes from rooftop decentralised units. Under the circumstances just making grandiose announcements in international fora and then involving the World Bank, which has consistently funded anti-people development, is a well orchestrated farce like the Ayushman Bharat programme.

Often, I have wondered about what I have achieved in all these years, slogging it out in the field to try and bring some people centric sense into development in this country. When I see the ground reality of people living in adverse circumstances due to a combination of ignorance and faulty planning and the grandstanding of policy makers beating their chests about initiating more such faulty planning I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.   

The Great Sugar Conspiracy

This year I have taken a resolution not to eat sugar in any form. This means that I am off sweets altogether. This is because sugar is the primary cause of obesity, hard disease and diabetes. Even though I am neither obese, nor a heart patient and nor a diabetic I have been bothered by the fact that I still have fat around my abdomen despite a rigorous daily exercise schedule and a low carbohydrate diet. However, on doing further research to try and find a solution to this midriff paunch, I found that sugar was the culprit. It appears that with middle age as the metabolism weakens the excess sugar that one consumes (all sugar as the energy needs of the body are fulfilled by the carbohydrates and proteins consumed) is processed by the liver into fat and deposited around the abdomen. So regardless of how much exercise one does, I do a rigorous two hour work out every day, the paunch around the midriff stubbornly refuses to vanish. So the only solution is to remove sugar from one's diet completely. This means taking the hard decision to abstain from sweets, cakes, chocolates, icecreams and the like!! Well I have taken it and over the last two months the paunch has shrivelled up considerably and I am optimistic that it will vanish completely in the future!!!
While researching the perfidies of sugar I came across a conspiracy to promote sugar between the nutritionists, food industries and pharmaceutical industries that has completely devastated the human race.
In the 1970s nutritionists wrongly targeted saturated fats as being the cause of obesity and heart disease whereas a British scientist, Yudkin, contended correctly that it was sugar that was behind these problems. However, Yudkin was silenced and instead sugar was promoted in a big way in the food industry resulting in a huge spike in obesity, heart disease and diabetes which has now assumed epidemic proportions. Sweet eating has become a major pastime among people across the world and their subsequent visits to doctors is fuelling the profits of the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

 

What is most worrying is that the prevalence of diabetes is increasing alarmingly among the poor also, especially the urban poor, as their food habits are changing and they are consuming sugar rich junk foods and drinks instead of more wholesome food. India is faced with a huge public health challenge as a consequence of this rising trend of diabetes among the poor who do not have the economic resources to fight this disease on their own. So after devastating the western populations with sugar rich junk foods and drinks, the food multinationals have targeted the developing countries in search of profits and the poor in India are in for an even greater health disaster.
SAY NO TO SUGAR has to be the slogan. This will incidentally also solve a major water availability related problem by drastically reducing the acreage under sugar cane which is a huge water guzzler.

कथा निर्माण और संघर्ष की

मजदूरों और किसानों का संगठन छत्तीसगढ़ मुक्ति मोर्चा का संस्थापक कार्यकर्ता, शंकर गुहा नियोगी, एक मशहूर मुहावरा का सृजन किया था – "संघर्ष और निर्माण"। उनका आशय था कि केवल जन संघर्षों से बुनियादी सामाजिक – आर्थिक बदलाव नहीं आएगा बल्कि साथ ही वैकल्पिक विकास का ढांचा रचनात्मक कार्यों के द्वारा खड़ा करना होगा। शिक्षा, स्वास्थ्य एवं आजीविका के क्षेत्र में रचनात्मक कार्यों के माध्यम से जन संगठनों को एक विकल्प तैयार करना होगा क्योंकि जन संघर्षों से यह संभव नहीं है। गुहा नियोगी एक असाधारण नेता थे और इसलिए वे छत्तीसगढ़ मुक्ति मोर्चा के अपने साथियों को एक साथ उच्च कोटी के संघर्ष और निर्माण करने के लिए प्रेरित कर पाये थे। उनसे प्रेरित होकर हम लोग भी खेदुत मजदूर चेतना संगठ के माध्यम से पश्चिमी मध्य प्रदेश के भील आदिवासियों के बीच बीसवी सदी के अंतिम दशक में वैसे ही करने के प्रयास किए थे। परंतु गुहा नियोगी जैसे काबिल न होने के कारण हम जन संघर्ष अधिक किए एवं निर्माण के कार्य पीछे रह गए।

सन 2001 में परिस्थितियों में व्यापक बदलाव आया। आदिवासी स्वशासन के लिए देवास जिले के उदयनगर तहसील में एक व्यापक जन आंदोलन चल रहा था जिसके तहत कई गाँव में ग्राम सभाओं द्वारा प्रशासन को दर किनार कर अपना शासन खुद चलाया जा रहा था। सरकार को लोगों की इस स्वनिर्भरता पसंद नही आई और दमनात्मक कार्यवाही कर भारी पुलिस बल का प्रयोग के द्वारा संगठन को ध्वस्त कर दिया गया। इस कार्यवाही में संगठन के चार साथी पुलिस की गोली खाकर मर गए और मुझ समेत दर्जनों कार्यकर्ताओं को जेल में ठूस दिया गया। दो माह बाद जेल से रिहा होने के बाद हमने देखा की न केवल संगठन भयावह दमन के कारण पूरी तरह से टूट चुका था बल्कि प्रमुख कार्यकर्ताओं, जिन में मैं भी शामिल था, पर संगीन अपराधों के कई सारे झूठे प्रकरण दर्ज कर दिये गए थे। क्योंकि मेरे आदिवासी साथी कार्यकर्ताओं के पास न्यायालयों में इन प्रकरणों को लड़ने के लिए जो भारी भरकम पैसों की ज़रूरत थी वह नहीं थे, इसलिए यह राशि जुटाने का काम मेरे ज़िम्मे आ गया। इसलिए मुझे जन संघर्ष का काम पूरी तरह से छोड़ कर पैसे कमाने के लिए शोधार्थी और सलाहकार के रूप में काम लेना पड़ा। इसके अलावा इन प्रकरणों को लड़ने के लिए मुझे कानून का गहरा अध्ययन करना पड़ा ताकी हमें सज़ा न हो। वकीलों के भरोसे कभी प्रकरण छोड़ नहीं सकते क्योंकि वे कई बार ठीक से लड़ते नहीं है।

कुछ वर्ष बाद सन 2005 से कई नए कानून पारित हुए, जैसे कि, सूचना का अधिकार कानून, वन अधिकार कानून, महात्मा गांधी राष्ट्रीय रोजगार कानून, पंचायत कानून आदि जो लोगों को वह अधिकार प्रदान किए जिसके लिए पहले आंदोलन कर जेल जाना पड़ता था। इसके पहले के दो दशकों से चल रहे तमाम जन पक्षीय आंदोलनों से बने दबाव का ही नतीजा था कि यह प्रगतिशील कानून पारित हुये। इस प्रकार इन क़ानूनों को लागू करने का एक नया कार्यक्षेत्र का निर्माण हो गया। इसी समय मेरे आदिवासी साथियों ने मुझसे कहा की हमें हमारे द्वारा सन 1987 में पंजीकृत किया गया एक संस्था, जो की निष्क्रिय पड़ा था क्योंकि हमारे पास संघर्ष से फुर्सत ही नहीं था, को सक्रिय बनाकर उसमें अनुदान लेकर निर्माण का काम करना चाहिए। क्योंकि केवल क़ानूनों को लागू करने के लिए अनुदान जुटाना मुश्किल था इसलिए हमने शिक्षा, स्वस्थ्य, भू एवं जल संरक्षण आदि निर्माण मूलक कार्यों के लिए अधिक अनुदान मांगे और इस पर कार्य शुरू कर दिये। इस प्रकार संघर्ष के बदले हमारे लिए निर्माण प्रमुख नारा बन गया।

संस्थाओं के माध्यम से निर्माण का कार्य संपादित करने की दुनिया ऐसी है की किए गये निर्माण मूलक कार्यों के बारे मे लिखना ज़रूरी है ताकी इस के बारे में व्यापक प्रचार हो सके और आगे भी काम के लिए आवश्यक भारी अनुदान आते रहे।  मैं हमारे काम के बारे में बहुत लिखने लगा पर इस लेखन को पत्र पत्रिकाओं में प्रकाशित करना एक टेढ़ी खीर निकला। या तो वे हमारे लेख छापते ही नहीं थे या उनमें बहुत सारे संशोधन करवाते थे जो मुझे पसंद नहीं था। तब एक मित्र जो ब्लॉगिंग करता था, यानी इंटरनेट द्वारा वेब पर खुदके एक ब्लॉग या पत्रिका बनाकर उसमें लिखता था, मुझे भी ऐसे करने की सलाह दी। इसी प्रकार मैं भी सन 2007 में www.anar-kali.blogspot.in नामक एक वेब पत्रिका प्रकाशित करना शुरू कर दिया। यह एक बहुत अच्छा निर्णय था क्योंकि मैं हमारे काम के बारे में विस्तार से लिख पाया और यह तुरंत पूरी दुनिया के पाठकों के लिए प्रकाशित भी हो जाता था!!  विश्व भर से अनेक पाठकों से वार्तालाप और विचार विमर्श हो पाया जिससे कि हमारे काम के लिए हमें नई सोच और दिशा मिली। हम नए नए क्षेत्र में काम करना शुरू कर दिये जिनमें जलवायु परिवर्तन का शमन एवं महिलाओं का प्रजनन स्वास्थ्य सब से महत्वपूर्ण है।

जल वायु परिवर्तन का शमन में हम न केवल ग्रामीण इलाकों में वन, जल व भू संरक्षण का काम किए है बल्कि हमारा इंदौर शहर स्थित कार्यालय में भी पर्यावरण संरक्षण का काम किए है ताकि कम से कम जल वायु परिवर्तन हो एवं हमें उत्पादक शारीरिक काम करने के अवसर मिले। एक प्रकल्प इस में है कार्यालय के रसोई और बगीचे के हरा कचरा को खाद बनाकर गाँव के खेतों में पहुंचाना। यह काम बहुत मेहनत का है और शारीरिक रूप से तंदुरुस्त रहने में मदद करता है जैसे कि नीचे दिये गए चित्र से स्पष्ट है।

सन 2001 के बाद की लंबी अवधि में भारतीय राज्य व्यवस्था एवं उसे चलाने वाले शासक वर्ग द्वारा आम जनता के खिलाफ चलाये जा रहे अनेकों अन्यायी मुहिमों के विरुद्ध मैं कोई जन संघर्षों में भाग नहीं लिया हूँ और इसलिए मैं पहले जैसे जेल भी नहीं गया हूँ। हमारे खिलाफ दर्ज किए गए झूटे मुक़द्दमे और कुछ अन्य जन हित याचिकाओं में मैं ज़रूर प्रकरण जीता हूँ पर किसी भी व्यापक राजनीतिक आंदोलन से जुड़ा नहीं हूँ। अधिकतर समय निर्माण मूलक कार्य और शोध में बिताया हूँ। मैंने हमारे द्वारा किए गये जल संरक्षण के कार्यों पर शोध कर एक Phd उपाधि भी हासिल कर लिया हूँ हालांकि यह भी एक नई शिक्षा ही थी क्योंकि शास्त्रीय शोध के तरीके एवं जमीनी काम के तरीकों में ज़मीन आसमान का फर्क है। यह ही एक बहुत बड़ी विडम्बना है कि आज की स्थिति में संघर्ष का काम और निर्माण का काम एक साथ करना बहुत मुश्किल है एवं संघर्ष के काम के लिए साधन जुटाना और भी मुश्किल है।

दस साल तक लगातार मैं वेब पर मेरा ब्लॉग लिखते आ रहा हूँ एवं यह लेख मेरा 500वा लेख है। इसे मैं निर्माण कथा नाम दिया हूँ क्योंकि इस दौरान मैंने वैकल्पिक विकास की दिशा में अनेक संतोषजनक प्रयोग किया हूँ। परंतु यह भी सोचकर दुखी होता हूँ कि जन संघर्ष के बिना केवल छुटपुट निर्माण मूलक कार्य से व्यापक पैमाने पर वैकल्पिक विकास एवं जन राजनीति स्थापित करना संभव नहीं है एवं जन संघर्ष की दुनिया से मैं दूर चला गया हूँ।

  

Teach Your Children Well

Subhadra and I are both field workers and articulate thinkers and speakers at the same time. So our home is always a hotbed of social change activity and hot debate. Our son has grown up in this milieu and so we never thought it necessary to specially sit with him to inculcate our values. However, now that he is in high school, we find that the words of the famous song by the folk group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) have come true - "feed them on your dreams, the one they pick, the one you'll know by, don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry"!! Our son has rejected our dreams and decided to go in for a mainstream career instead. That is why I now feel that possibly we should have tried to tell him in a more systematic way about why we are doing what we are doing as activists.
I mention this as a preamble to contextualise my review of a thin but very important booklet written by Suresh Ediga consisting of stories that he told his daughter and son at bedtime. Suresh makes his living as a software professional in the United States of America but is at the same time an activist involved in social issues not only in America but also in India and especially in Andhra Pradesh from where he originally hails. He started off informally telling stories about the various social issues which he champions to his children at bed time and later made it into a regular activity. These story telling sessions are not one way but interactive, so that his children too ask piercing questions that help to clear the thinking process of the story teller and the listeners. In the context of our son's preference for the mainstream, I feel that Suresh's initiative is a very good one as it makes thinking and debate around social issues a regular feature of growing up for children and may help them to better counter the problems of mainstream development.

 All the issues discussed in these bedtime stories are very relevant and they have been discussed in a very readable way. What impressed me most is that the booklet begins with the story of the Bhopal Gas Disaster. This disaster encompasses within itself all that has gone wrong with development in India. Whether it is the unsustainable chemical agriculture for which pesticides were being manufactured in the factory or the lax monitoring of the safety measures in the factory, or the way in which the culprits of the disaster were allowed to go scot free, or the heart rending machinations of the government and the courts to deprive the affected people from getting justice or the stark reality that the environment around the factory has not been cleaned up more than three decades after the disaster. Anyone reading the details of the Bhopal disaster and its continuing aftermath will know how rotten is the State in India. I was a little surprised, however, that Suresh, despite his extensive engagement with alleviating the sad plight of farmers in this country has not included a story on that issue.
The booklet is more important for the process it describes than the stories themselves. In these times of the internet the stories and many others on such issues can easily be collated but what is important is the diligence and patience with which Suresh has related these stories to his children and engaged in debates with them. The need for such pro-active parenting to inculcate an understanding of the serious problems of our times was driven home to me today by the aftermath of the Supreme Court judgment of day before yesterday banning the sale and registration of Bharat Emission Standards III (BSIII) vehicles from the 1st of April 2017. Even though the auto companies argued that they have an inventory of around eight lakhs of these vehicles of the value of Rs 12000 crores with their dealers from past manufacture and they should be allowed to dispose of this, the court said that the health of the people is more important than the profit of the auto companies and refused to budge. The result was that the auto companies arranged for sale of their vehicles that were there with their dealers at hefty discounts yesterday and also made arrangements that they would be registered and given the number by today which is the last day for such registration to take place. As a result there were huge crowds in front of the auto dealers throughout the country and all their stock of BSIII vehicles was purchased. Where is the environmental consciousness among the people of this country? Whether it is the auto makers or the people who went to buy the heavily discounted vehicles, the mentality that spurred both is to save or make a quick buck but not save the environment. 
Unless there is a drastic change in mindsets of the new generations to come, more disasters even deadlier than Bhopal will strike sooner or later and so it is necessary to follow the excellent example that Suresh has set to ensure that our children are able to avert such a tragedy.

Philanthropy at its Best

My college days in Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT KGP) were very nice not so much because of the studies or the sports but more so because of the great time spent with co-students doing many other things. After graduating we all went our separate ways despite being so close together for five years. I, especially, having gone off into the wilds of Alirajpur completely lost touch with my college friends. Then after three decades with the advent of the internet and Facebook we began connecting and catching up again and remembering the great times we had spent together in college. Many of these friends are now American citizens but nevertheless they still have a deep connection with the land of their birth and their friends who have stayed back. Nagendra Subbakrishna or Noggy as he is more popularly known is one such individual. We got in touch again after many years about two years ago. We have a practice of having a get together of old IIT KGP alumni when one of us comes in from the USA. So about four of us got together in Bengaluru and had a great time. Noggy then expressed the wish to come and see the wilds of Alirajpur. What with one thing and another he could not make it till about three months back when he along with his wife Kathy came on a visit to Alirajpur. The upshot of it was that both of them fell in love with the school in Kakrana.
Noggy has to visit India frequently every three months or so on work and now he has made it a point to visit Kakrana every time he comes down to India from the USA. On his first visit itself he was disturbed with the fact that the children in the school in Kakrana mostly have to eat pulses and rotis. He said that growing children should get more vitamins and protein. The parents of the children being poor can pay only so much and so the school in Kakrana has to be heavily subsidised through grant funding and as this is inadequate the food quality is nutritionally deficient. Even so attempts are made to provide vegetables. Noggy would have none of this and insisted that more protein and vegetables should be served to the children and donated money for this.
Kakrana being on the banks of the River Narmada has an abundant supply of fish which is first class protein. However, since a majority of the children in the school are vegetarian they will not eat fish. Then another IIT KGP alumnus, Sanjeev Sabharwal, suggested that the children could be given soyabean nuggets which have high protein content and also are tasty to eat. Since they are vegetarian there would be no problem of feeding all the children with it. So I began scouting round Indore to see what the price of soyabean nuggets were. The branded nuggets from top food retail outlets cost as much as Rs 150 a kilo. However, since Madhya Pradesh is the biggest producer of soyabean in this country, soyabean nuggets are available wholesale from top soyabean processors for as little as Rs 55 per kg. So we bought a quintal of soyabean nuggets and transported them to Kakrana. Now twice every week the children are getting fried soyabean nuggets and they are eating them with relish as shown below.

India is ranked 97 out of 118 countries in the global hunger index and Adivasis have much more than their share in the population among the hungry in this country mainly due to income poverty. Hunger affects Adivasi children right from the womb as their mothers are hungry when they conceive. This affects not only their physical prowess but also their intellectual abilities. As mentioned earlier, the parents of the children in the school in Kakrana being poor, they find it difficult to pay large fees and so both the education and the food in the school has to be subsidised through external grant funding which is not adequate. Under the circumstances, Noggy's concern for the nourishment of the students of the Rani Kajal School and his contribution to alleviating the situation by ensuring more consumption of vegetables and protein by the children is philanthropy at its best.

The Rights of the Disabled

Today is International Human Rights day commemmorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Coming as it did after the excesses of World War II, it was a great document comprehensively setting out the basics of liberal rights of the individual for peaceful and just human existence. Article 25 (1)  of the UDHR states -  "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control". This is the only article that mentions that those who are disabled too have the right to live a fulfilling life. This is one area in which in India a lot remains to be done. There are some provisions from the Government to aid disabled people but they are minimal and in most cases inadequate. Therefore, NGOs have to step in to help people with disabilities.

Here is the story of one such disabled person who had to fall back on the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) for help and how he benefited from that. Vanji is the son of a veteran activist of the KMCS, Nevji, who has fought many battles for the rights of Bhil Adivasis in Alirajpur. On one occasion when he and Vanji were returning from the market town of Kavant to their village Vakner on their motorcycle there was an accident as another motorcycle driver crashed into them. Vanji was grieviously hurt and his kneecap was dislocated. Given the lack of proper Government health facilities nearby, Nevji took Vanji to a private hospital in a nearby town Bodeli. The private hospital did not treat Vanji properly and sent him back to his village.

After some time Vanji's leg developed gangrene and he had to be taken back to Bodeli where another doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon said that his leg would have to be amputated from above the knee. Thus, Vanji became disabled and his life became severely constrained. All through this time the KMCS had offered to provide proper medical treatment for Vanji but his father Nevji had decided to pursue his own remedies which included going to the traditional Adivasi medicine men. However, now that his son had lost his leg, Nevji finally came round to the view that the help of the KMCS should be sought. Research revealed that fitting a state of the art artificial leg which gives very good mobility would cost Rs 1 Lakh and other associated expenses. This was clearly beyond the budget of both Nevji and the KMCS. So instead a comparatively less efficient leg was fitted which was available free from the Bhagwan Mahaveer Vikalang Sahayta Samiti (BMVSS) which is famous for having developed the indigenous and cheaply manufactured Jaipur Foot. With time this organisation has collaborated with the Johns Hopkins hospital in the USA to improve the foot design so that now even feet that fold at the knee have been developed and one of these was fitted on Vanji. With a little practice, Vanji soon got habituated to this prosthesis and is now able to walk freely and even raise fifty kilo weights as shown below. He is running a grocery shop quite profitably and is very happy that he has regained considerable mobility.

The Government does provide financial help to the BMVSS so that it can provide its prosthesis to people free of cost. However, not all people with disability know of this organisation and so there are many disabled people going round without proper prosthesis in this country despite it being their right to get help from the Government. The Government has now decided to provide state of the art prosthesis that allows a person to drive motor vehicles and run also. It remains to be seen how soon and how effectively this new scheme is implemented. 

The Revolution That Was Not to Be

Yesterday September 28th was the 25th anniversary of the assassination in 1991 of Shankar Guha Niyogi who played a significant role in building up a labour and peasant movement from scratch in Chattisgarh named the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM). His death signalled the beginning of the end of a strong wave of mass mobilisation not only in Chhattisgarh but throughout the country that had raised hopes of a more sustainable and equitable developmental model being established. It is with a wrench in my heart that I write this tribute to Niyogi and the revolution that he initiated but which was not to be as today I find my own dreams as a young man a quarter of a century ago lying shattered about me. 

The CMM had had its beginnings in the fight against some exploitative practices of contractors of the Bhilai Steel Plant at its iron ore mines in Dalli Rajhara. It started as a trade union, Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh in 1977 in the struggles of adivasi contract workers demanding better working conditions and wages. The plant management, instead of employing regular workers and paying them decent wages had adopted the abhorrent practice of hiring labourers through contractors at a cheap rate. A decade long struggle was waged from the mid nineteen seventies till the mid nineteen eighties during which many workers laid down their lives in police firing and attacks by goons of labour contractors while taking part in strikes. Finally the workers got their rights acknowledged by the Bhilai Steel Plant management.

The unique feature of this struggle was that it broke out of the narrow confines of standard trade unionism and encompassed the whole lives of its members. Campaigns were carried out against the two most debilitating problems that beset poor labourers in India - alcoholism and debt bondage to usurious moneylenders. Women were mobilised both to stop the brewing and selling of liquor and to form micro-credit groups so as to alleviate these problems. They also began addressing the problems of patriarchal oppression. A hospital was set up with contributions from the members that apart from providing treatment also developed a community health programme to increase health awareness. On the cultural front, research was conducted to unearth instances of people's struggles in the history of Chhattisgarh that had been glossed over by the mainstream historians. New literature in the form of songs and plays was created and disseminated through repertory troupes to project a positive alternate image of Chhattisgarh that could stand up to the modern urban culture being continually propagated through the mainstream media. The Morcha inspired by Shankar Guha Niyogi began to fan out among the nearby villages and also the ancillary industrial units in and around Bhilai from the late nineteen eighties.

The Morcha was formed in 1982 when the prevailing forms of development and governance were pinpointed as the root causes of all the ills of the people of Chhattisgarh. Not only did these bypass the livelihood interests of the majority but were also destructive of the environment. The industrial area in Bhilai was marked as the local source of most of this mal-development. Thus it was realised that any movement for thoroughgoing change in the Chhattisgarh region could not succeed without involving the labouring masses there. A four-pronged strategy was worked out. The thrust in the industrial regions would have to be to try and get labour and environmental laws implemented. In the villages the stress would have to be on reviving the traditional community spirit and the environment friendly agricultural activities that went with it. Simultaneously steps would have to be taken to get a better deal for farmers in the agricultural input and product markets where traders were invariably cheating them. The third front would have to be against the corrupt and repressive bureaucracy which had been inherited from the British and which was totally insensitive to the needs of the people. Finally an ideological and cultural onslaught would have to be launched against modern industrial and agricultural development by involving the intelligentsia. An alternative vision of a free Chhattisgarh would have to be formulated that was radically different from that of the urban Indian elite. This last was extremely important, as the ideology of modern development had so hegemonised the masses that it was hard to initiate mass action to challenge it.

Niyogi also realised that it was impossible for the Morcha to fight the state in such a comprehensive manner on its own and so he went out of his way to forge a broader front with other mass organisations. At that point of time in 1989 there were a number of people's movements underway in Madhya Pradesh. The various mass organisations of the affected people of the Bhopal gas tragedy had forced the government to make its welfare activities more transparent and responsive to the needs of the people. Medha Patkar and her colleagues of the Narmada Bachao Andolan were carrying out a militant struggle against the building of large dams on the Narmada River. Rajaji had set in motion the process of mobilisation of adivasis and peasants all over the state to demand their basic rights, which was to later evolve into the mass organisation Ekta Parishad of which Subhadra was a part. Finally the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in Alirajpur and the Kisan Adivasi Sangathan in Hoshangabad had established themselves as forces to reckon with as adivasi mass organisations that had brought into focus the adivasis' right to a livelihood in accordance with their culturally and economically distinct lifestyles. The mood was very upbeat among all these organisations and together they did hold promise of better things to come at that point of time.

Shankar Guha Niyogi had begun organising the workers of the various factories in and around Bhilai that had been set up to utilise the steel being produced by the steel plant for downstream manufacturing from 1990. There was gross violation of labour laws in these units and so the workers were working on pittances without the mandatory welfare provisions like permanency of tenure, house rent allowance and pension benefits. The struggle had picked up in strength and there were widespread strikes in most units in the area demanding the implementation of labour laws. The mobilisation spread like wild fire and workers of almost all the units that employed labourers on an ad hoc basis were unionised. This was when the owners of these units decided to gang up and they hired a professional assassin from Uttar Pradesh, Paltan Mallah, to kill Niyogi. This man shot Niyogi dead in sleep at night in his residence at Durg on 28^th September 1991. The immediate response of the BJP government was a negative one in that it did not even acquiesce in the legitimate demand that the police register the names of those being accused by the CMM in the FIR. However, there was a countrywide furore over this and under pressure from the central government it had to order an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Meanwhile the agitation of the CMM continued for the implementation of labour laws in the units in and around Bhilai. The government under pressure from the factory owners was not prepared to implement the demands of the workers that they be made permanent and given proper benefits. Finally the CMM workers sat in dharna near the Powerhouse railway station in Bhilai. This movement for regularisation of workers in Bhilai was taking place at a juncture when a whole new era of globalisation characterised by off-shoring of manufacturing to low labour cost locations was just taking off worldwide. The new watchword for global capital at that time and ever since has been that of  "labour market flexibility" involving the right of the employers to hire and fire labourers at will, pay them subsistence wages and not provide any accompanying benefits that the regularisation of employees entails under labour legislation. These labour laws had been put in place as a result of more than a century of trade union struggles and a clear realisation by the capitalist states in the wake of the Great Depression of the nineteen twenties that unrestricted capitalism without welfare measures for the labouring class would lead to demand collapsing and leading to markets being flooded with goods that no one could buy leading to the collapse of the economy altogether.

Marx had pointed out that this situation arises from a fundamental contradiction that has plagued capitalism right from the beginning - that of falling rates of profits due to increasing competition and technological advancement. To keep the profits rolling in, production and sale of commodities have to be expanded continually with the introduction of newer and newer technology while the wages of the labourers have to be suppressed. But there is a limit to how much of this can be done within one country and so a stage comes when there are too many products to sell and too few buyers with the wherewithal to buy them. In the early stages of capitalist development this problem was solved by imperial control, which allowed the European nations to export their excess labour and goods to the colonies. In the immediate post World War II years too the capitalist firms of the developed West could provide good wages and considerable benefits to their labourers at home and thus keep demand high by extracting super profits from the exploitation of the labour and natural resources of developing countries and get around the contradiction. However, as these developing countries too began to catch up and develop industrially competition grew to the extent that it became uneconomical for companies in the developed world to employ regular labour with good wages and side benefits. This forced the shut down of manufacturing units in the developed countries and their relocation in locations closer to cheap natural resources and labour.

Thus globally China in particular and Asia in general was becoming the favoured destination for the off-shoring of developed country manufacturing units and within India an exodus of manufacturing had begun from the traditional centres like Mumbai and Kolkata to places like Bhilai or even less developed locations in search of cheap and unregulated labour markets. Under the circumstances the industrialists in Bhilai would have to cut down on their profitability and global competitiveness considerably to accommodate the demands of the CMM. So they put pressure on the government to crush the movement once and for all instead of negotiating with it. Even after a few days when the demands were not met the workers went on to the rail track and stopped the running of trains on the trunk Howrah-Mumbai rail route on 1^st July 1992. The government was in no mood to find a solution through discussions and so suddenly in the evening armed police began firing on the protesters killing seventeen of them. Then a severe crackdown followed in which anybody connected with the CMM was arrested and beaten up in the police station before being sent to jail. A false case of murder of a police inspector was foisted on the major leaders of the CMM and so they all had to go underground. The whole process of mass mobilisation in the Bhilai region was set back greatly and never recovered from this body blow.

This had its effect on the Dalli unit of the CMM also. The deposits of iron ore in Dalli were slowly coming to an end. So the Bhilai Steel Plant management wanted to introduce machines and mine out whatever was left. They proposed to the CMM that they would give a golden handshake and lay off most of the workers and retain some as permanent BSP staff. The CMM sensing that in the changed global environment there was little possibility of a successful mass agitation against this proposal agreed to it and so over the years the main Dalli mass base of the CMM too has become dissipated.  Finance and Technology, which have considerably increased the repressive and cooptive powers of the state, along with the control of the media and academia has helped capitalism to dissipate not only CMM but also the other mass movements that were bidding bold to challenge it in India with an alternative development model. We have to face up to this reality and seek to counter it with some new means of mobilisation because the old ones that were pioneered by Guha Niyogi are not tenable any more. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. 

A Recipe for Disaster

Prem Singh is studying industrial engineering in a premier government engineering college in Indore city and is in his final year. He is the youngest son of Aap Singh who is a Barela Adivasi farmer residing in Kanad village of Dewas district. A few days ago in another post I had written about how Aap Singh with the help of his son Prem Singh had put together an aeration system in his home to store onions in the hope of getting a better price later. Prem Singh had put to good use his theoretical studies as an industrial engineer to help his father. However, even though he is a student of science first and that of technology afterwards, so specialised has all education become that his knowledge of basic medicine is poor. So when he was taken ill with a bout of high fever combined with vomiting and diarrhoea he first went to the dispensary in his college where he stays in the hostel. The person in the dispensary too, despite being employed to take care of the health of students neither had the knowledge nor the medicines to treat Prem Singh and so he was shifted to a nearby private hospital. The doctor at the hospital, a senior physician, immediately put him on various antibiotics injected intravenously diluted in normal saline. Various tests were also conducted on him. However, neither the fever nor the diarrhoea was controlled even after two days.
Aap Singh on coming to know of this came rushing to Indore and on seeing his son in bad shape argued with the doctor to discharge him as he did not have any trust in his treatment. He said that even the quacks in his village could treat fever and diarrhoea better and they would do it for a few hundred rupees instead of the thousands he was charging. A heated argument ensued that continued for a few hours but eventually Aap Singh had his way and Prem Singh was released. As it was already evening, Aap Singh called me and asked whether they could spend the night at our house before going home. I told him to come home. I went through all the diagnosis, tests and prescriptions and found that apart from having a low haemoglobin level of 10 mg per litre there was not much else wrong with Prem Singh. True he had fever but it was not very high and he was going frequently to the toilet to relieve himself because of loose motion. The doctor while discharging him had given him antibiotic and antacid tablets and paracetamol. Only an anti-diarrhoeal was missing. I told him to give him these medicines and gave an anti-diarrhoeal from our stock. By next morning Prem Singh had recovered and in the afternoon Aap Singh took him home to his village on a motorcycle!!
This whole episode brings out the total disarray in which the health system is in this country. Prem Singh was most probably affected by pathogens in the drinking water in his hostel. Why was he affected while other hostelers were not? It might be because he is anaemic. Anaemia reduces the power of the immune system of the body to resist pathogens. Be that as it may, the illness was not very serious and with proper medication would have subsided within a few days. The dispensary in his college did not have the basic medication for fever and diarrhoea. The specialist doctor of the private hospital that he was taken to administered medicines through intravenous drip despite Prem Singh being fully capable of taking them through the mouth. The two days in the hospital cost him 7000 rupees and even after that he was cured. The administration of medicines through intravenous injections diluted with normal saline had become an irrational bane of treatment in this country as shown in the picture below.

 Intravenous injections should be given only when a person is unable to take food or medicines through the mouth due to a serious medical condition. But nowadays these are administered at the drop of a hat and people too demand that they be given these drips as they feel they are more potent!! So powerful is this myth that we find it extremely difficult to convince people to take simple medicines orally. Aap Singh after coming to my home first asked me to get a doctor to come and put his son on an intravenous drip. It took some hard talking to convince him that his son was not seriously ill and that tablets taken orally would cure him as they did within the space of a few hours.
Thus, the poor in this country are caught in a deadly pincers of malnutrition on the one hand which reduces the power of their immune system and makes them vulnerable to disease, an almost non-existent public health sytem, a rapacious private health system practicing irrational medicine  and a lack of knowledge of basic medicine. A student of engineering who has great innovative power in his field does not know anything about basic medicine and that shows how lopsided our education sytem is. With neither health nor education we have a recipe for disaster.