THERE ARE strident calls upon the media to make amends for its omissions and commissions, its pervasive intrusions into the privacy of individuals and the havoc it has wrought in the lives of many unfortunate victims. As a media person, I have always been extremely worried about these tendencies on the part of the media and have expressed my views that the media should introspect, and try be a responsible player in our democratic polity.
But the media, at the same time, cannot remain a toothless entity. It has necessarily to be aggressive, it has to gate-crash into domains that are closed to public review, and bring an objective view of things and developments to the public.
This is a tricky situation. How to strike a fine balance between the concerns of the public's right to information and the individual's right to privacy? Who is a private individual and who is a public person? How to define them and how to strike this nuanced position while reporting on them and their activities? And what constitutes private activity and public activity and where does the line of private activity of a public person and public activity of a private person merges or demarcates?
For almost a quarter century I have agonized over these questions and recently when I saw these clamours for public apology from our media to an American academic for some reports against him, I was thinking about these things again.
Here let me say that I am taking up the case of Dr Richard Franke only as a case study and I do not in anyway wish to express an opinion on his personal or academic activity. I presume that he is a well-meaning academic genuinely interested in Kerala and its people and all the past calumny against him, enumerated in the recent book by Dr Thomas Isaac and Mr N P Chandrasekharan and known to us Malayalis through various news media in the past few years, are simply baseless and the figment of the imagination of a politically motivated media.
Now a few questions arise. I will take up only two right now. First, how far the demands for an apology are legitimate; and two, whether there is any substance to the charge that the reports in media against Dr Franke proved to be an infringement on academic freedom?
This plethora of media campaign against Dr Franke was launched by Patom magazine of Mr Sudheesh, which was later taken up by many other Malayalam newspapers and other publications. The motivated nature of these campaigns was self evident, and most readers remained un-persuaded by most of these charges levelled against Dr Franke, Dr Isaac and a few others. It was a political shadow-boxing within the CPM, to which most of those involved in this battle actually belonged.
That means, the entire episode was part of our contemporary political life in the past few years. All the players were public persons and most of them were in the game for gains of a political nature and are endowed with political power in various ways.
Still, they make a camouflage attack on the media as if there was an infringement on media ethics. Indeed there was twisting of media ethics because the media often failed to check the authority of news items fed to them, but that in no way could be a case for seeking an apology from the media or the launch of an Inquisition from politicians. If anyone had been injured in such a scenario, it was the media itself because they suffered in their credibility, but here again there is no way a media organization can cross check such items fed to them because the Communist parties work behind iron curtains. They will not respond to media inquiries, but they still expect the media to play by rules. That is a very funny idea about democratic ways of functioning, indeed. A similar example could be when someone say, "head I win, tail you lose...!"
The second aspect that needs probing is whether there is any infringement on academic freedom. Dr Franke appears to be a US academic with some long- term connections with Kerala and has done some serious works here. He has been generally enthusiastic about Kerala and its development models though many may have differences with his points of view.
The charge is that his explanations were not given its due and that the campaign had been continued without any hitch even after such an explanation was offered. But why did Dr Franke become an object of attack? Was it because he was from US or was it because he was inadvertently (or perhaps even deliberately) involved in the CPM inner struggles?
The fact of the matter is that Dr Fanke became a target not because he was an academic or he was from US, but because he was seen to be taking a big role behind the curtains; being close to leaders in one faction in CPM and was also seen to be working with them on certain areas of serious concern to Kerala society and politics. When you are in politics, you are bound to receive attacks. Here, you see nothing academic, but everything is political. And in a political society, if anyone wants to exempt themselves from public criticism, why not take a leave and go back to your ivory towers, gentlemen? Why blame media in an injured tone when you confront your own battered pubic image?
When I launched this series of thoughts on the need for critical engagement on the part of media, I was aware of the severe accusations launched by this book.
But now that even a normally sober Sajan joins the brigade of critics, I must respond. I know Sajan himself had some part to play in it because he was among those experts who had read the text before it was published. Hence when I go ahead with my comments I hope Sajan would not get hurt, like the good comrade Ramakumar who finds me weak and unconvincing
I must say I do share a large part of the criticisms raised against the media in the book by Dr Isaac and Chandrasekharan, though I am not convinced about the premises on which they do so.
First, what kind of a book is this? Is it simply a partisan propaganda work by a group of individuals who belong to a political party, or is it a sincere attempt to study the inner workings of the media and its limitations in our society?
It started out as a serious critique and then sadly ends up as a partisan propaganda work which falls flat in convincing the reader of the objectivity of the arguments and the sincerity of their purpose. They highlight issues that are convenient to them and ignore issues which are not suitable to their purpose.
I will take up just one or two examples from the book to argue my points. First, it says that after the days of 'liberation struggle' when media played a critical part in attacking the Communists, it was in 2000s that the media took up such a concerted role. The People's Plan and Lavalin reporting are two major points they use to drive home this argument.
What they conveniently refuse to discuss is the political origins of this media strategy. They are quick to deride the media while they are unwilling to discuss what were the reasons which prompted the CPM to set up a number of investigation commissions in the State and local level in these days? What were the findings of these commissions and what did it tell the party about its inner workings ?
Now the defence will come that these are internal matters of the party. But here they are attacking the media for reporting things based on internal information, and even in the cases where such official commissions were set up why can't the party reveal all that they came by?
That would put a question mark on the sincerity of purpose and the manufactured consent that the media is the villain of the piece. But the media has been mainly a tool in the hands of the two powerful groups in the CPM and both groups had made much use of it. But unfortunately such a complex scenario of cynical use and misuse of media in the internal power struggles and the naked fights for control of the party never gets any mention here.
In the study on People's Plan, they say it was the media which had destroyed such a major effort at decentralization of power. Then they go ahead with the Sudheesh-Patom sob story and says the media parroted all that ultimately killing the programme.
This is less than a half truth. They do not even look at the various steps in the evolution of the People's Plan and where it actually went awry. If they had, they would have seen that it was the inherent weaknesses in the plan implementation and its meagre results compared to the Himalayan hopes it had generated, that was the real problems for its failure.
This dichotomy of what is actually achievable and the insurmountable hopes it could generate, leading to inevitable disillusionment which the writers do accept as a fact, had been pointed out right from the beginning by experienced and sober critics as you can see from the critical articles in the anthology, People's Plan: An Experiment in Decentralised Planning, edited by me and published by Calicut Press Club in 2000 based on a workshop organized by none other than the media people who are now facing the music for its failure! One hoped at least almost one decade on, Dr Isaac and others would show a little more willingness for soul-searching on why it failed instead of the easy of option of media-bashing.
But the gem comes in a comment where they assert, it was a sense of guilty consciousness on the part of media people, most of whom were former SFI cadres, that led the media to this pseudo-left critique of the programme! What a cheek to rubbish people who had been in SFI, who had suffered much and at least some of whom had faced lathis, knives and even bullets, who had taken up work in the media instead of the much coveted full-time political work and tried to do their job of reportong of the goings on in the corridors of power!
I do not know whether this wonderful insight comes from Chomsky original or is a contribution from our neo-Chomskys to the critique of media in 21st century. I must admit, as a former SFI cadre, it left me gasping for breath as I too happen to be a critic of left politics now...!
I was struck by a phrase from Damodar on the contemporary media practice of media criticism familiar to us. He described it as third degree methods of criticism.
Most people would laugh it off as an exaggeration but those who are familiar with the way media-persons are forced to work these days in Kerala would know this aptly describes the reality that confronts us today. There is an atmosphere of latent violence in the every day life of a media-person and he/she has to face crude violence or abuses and threats almost on a day to day basis. Often they erupt into an act of physical violence on the person who represents the media in the field and in most cases he/she works fully aware of the threats to his/her safety. This is no exaggeration: ask any media person- whether male or female- and they would tell you how unsafe the profession has become in the most literate Kerala society. Very few of these incidents, which take the form of direct physical attacks, are reported in the media and most others like threats and abuses are hushed up or silently borne for fear of provoking further attacks or threats. This is a contemporary reality.
Some of these are so ugly and some really comic: When I watched the video of the threat to Vidhu Vincent, a female reporter, from a group of Church believers, I was horrified because the ugliness of mob violence on a feeble female was so evident in all its details. She later left the profession.
When I heard about a friend in Indian Express who was bashed up at a bus stop in Thalassery, I asked him what happened. It was a rally of a big political party there and the buses were all stranded in the roads and he said something to the person next to him about the way they were persecuting the public. Men from the jatha overheard and he was pulled out of the bus and bashed up. He refused to complain because he was afraid next day he would face a fresh bout of violence.
My worst days as a journalist were when I worked with a television channel and I remember with horror the continuous harassment, abuses and threats I faced. They were friendly fire, as they say coming from guys who had an ownership role in it! Some of the people who were abusive were men of some senior positions and one of them today happens to be a member of Parliament.
But the saddest part is not physical violence or continuous threats. It is the loss of means of livelihood which could completely paralyze a person. Most camera-persons are forced to buy their own equipment in small organizations and when they are attacked, the loss is huge. Once when I worked as president of the Kozhikode unit of KUWJ, there was an attack and around a dozen people were injured but when I went to the hospital to see them, the major complaint was not about the injuries or pain, but about the loss of equipment like cameras and lenses and there was no way they could get that back in shape.
Now what I suggest is that an atmosphere of fascist tendencies is fast growing in Kerala and politicians and local mafias are the main culprits. It is a fearsome thing that such attacks are now getting an official stamp as even senior politicians do not care when media people are attacked.
Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts
Monday, April 19, 2010
Saturday, December 19, 2009
In Defence of Thejas Daily: A Reply to Critiques
WHAT IS the responsible media's job in a democracy?
For the past quarter century when I was active in this profession, I was under the impression that we are the watchdog and we need to a keep barking and if possible do some biting too.
But going by the Central Home Ministry's letter (sent by the Ministry's National Integration wing's director Y K Baweja, to Kerala chief secretary, asking effective steps to curb Thejas daily and fortnightly, I think the government is now thinking of providing some new roles to the media in this country.
The letter is an excellent piece of media criticism. It needs a thorough critical analysis, but right now I will quote here only the four major points they have raised in the letter:
First, they say Thejas in its editorials and articles speak up against the Government of India's policy line on Israel and the United States.
Second, they say the paper in its articles and editorials dubs the Government's actions to control extremism in the country as State terrorism.
Third, the paper opposes the Government of India's actions and policies in Kashmir to control extremism and tries to debunk all the initiatives there.
Fourth, the paper tries to look at issues and developments from a communal point of view.
While I was writing these points for a discussion forum, I had not a copy of the letter with me. I was quoting from the media reports that appeared in various publications and channels like the New Indian Express, Deshabhimani, India Vision and Amrita TV. Since then, I have been able to get a copy though a friend and it urges the State chief secretary to take effective steps to curb the operations of Thejas so that it does not vitiate the communal atmosphere in the state of Kerala.
The letter warns the government of Kerala about Thejas daily as well as fortnightly. I have been closely associated with Thejas daily (run by Intermedia Publishing Ltd, while the fortnightly has a different ownership pattern), an from its inception on January 26, 2006, I was its executive editor. It was one of my primary responsibilities to keep the newspaper under a firm professional control and I think I had done the job fairly well. There were mistakes and criticisms, but I must say that it was a fairly well edited and professionally run newspaper. Then how did the government of India find it a threat to communal peace in Kerala is a mystery to me.
I was watching the public reaction to this and was happy that most people thought this was a serious encroachment on media freedom and there was nothing its pages that warranted such a criticism or perceived punitive action. That is good, but I do not know how the Government proposes to go ahead in the coming days as it appears there is some concerted and serious moves on the part of the officials to put difficulties before Thejas daily.
I saw that in some public fora, there were criticisms raised against me personally and some even raised questions about my credibility to speak about media freedom vis a vis the contemplated actions towards Thejas, in response to the first part of this post I quoted above.
Below, I am just quoting a post I made where I try to explain my position vis vis Thejas and its role in Kerala society and media:
I am returning here not to defend myself or my paper against public criticism because I have said earlier in this forum itself that as a media-person, I do consider myself a public person and I am willing to be subjected to pubic scrutiny. Not only my public life, but even my private life.
So let the question of my personal credibility, raised here, remain there unanswered.
But I think it is absolutely necessary for us to ask some important questions in the charged atmosphere that is Indian journalism today. It is about the charge that certain newspapers and certain media-persons are communal, they need to be hauled over the coals for violating our public morality; they need to answer for and provide proof for their loyalty to the nation and its ideals. And some others are whiter than white, they are secular without a spot; they only deserve the nation's undivided attention and adulation.
This, at best, looks like a nursery story of black and white world; a world of certainties and no gray areas. That Punjabi bureaucrat in charge of National Integration in Home Ministry (!!), who has passed a judgment on the (lack of) secular credentials of Thejas, a Malyalam newspaper from deep south which he has not even seen most probably, must be living in such a world of fantasy. God save him and his nation.
Now what is the reality?
Let me give my take on this: When I returned to the regional media after a long spell in the national press, what I could see was a terribly fragmented media scene with substantial sections of the people just left out of its ambit. You cannot imagine the kind of gap and communication vacuum that existed here. You can say such a situation is the national reality, and why bother about it?
Well, I think the difference at least in Kerala was that those people who were feeling left out and dejected and frustrated were still in a position to build upon their limited resources. Unlike Gujarat or other places in the north, where the 'Final Solution' is almost achieved in the case of Muslims, (“they will not dare to make a noise any more...”), Kerala offers a peculiar situation where members of the community, though frustrated and angry, do have the resources and powers to fight back and build a life of their own.
In this context, we must remember in the 90s there was the rise of a militant tendency among the youth (Madani was one example, SIMI & NDF were some others) and this did cause serious introspection and concern among many, especially among the Muslim community. I was a reporter with Indian Express in Malabar and I did have deep and intimate contacts and communication with various players and had a deep idea of these concerns and the search for new options and solutions.
Those days I was arguing for a new alliance among the restive Islamic youth and the left wing, as you can see in my many articles of this period, including the Indian Express edit page piece, The Radical and the Faithful, published some time in late 90s. But we know such a turn never took place, and the left, to my mind, was taking political advantage of the helplessness and frustration of these people.
Now we are at a crossroads: Things are taking a bad turn and we hear reports of youngsters even from remote Kerala getting shot on Kashmir border; they are being taken into custody even from Afghan or Bangladesh borders. So what? One might ask. The police and border cops will take care of them. As far as Kerala's own security is concerned, who said we do have any problem here? Of course, even if there are a few malcontents, the forces are capable of handling them.
But I do feel we cannot and should not opt for such a solution. The only way is to go through a democratic process, a dialogue process and a process of engagement and empowerment.
So in the past four years when we were running this newspaper, we had to take up strong and uncompromising positions; tough stances. We were asking why the six men from Muslim community were shot dead point blank at Beemapalli, we questioned the claim of the police that the boy from Pakistan who came here to meet his relatives was a terrorist (which he was not), we said there is a different tale to tell for Shahansha (in Love jihad case)... no other paper cared to tell this story as we did.
Now can anyone in their sense describe these as communal propaganda? I don't think so. Of course Thejas, in its editorial today(December 19, 2009), has thrown the challenge: All its editions during the past four years are available in public domain (also available online free of charge), and just locate one sentence in all these that can be dubbed a deliberate, malicious and hateful attack on another community, (must be easy as some honourable people have discovered that we are full of venom spewing it every day), and confront us in the public sphere with the proof.
A post-script:
On Monday, I heard on India Vision an interesting comment made by media critic S Jayasankar: "On the centenary year of Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai's banishment, Tejas' N P Chekkutty also can hope for a place in history through another deportation!"
For the past quarter century when I was active in this profession, I was under the impression that we are the watchdog and we need to a keep barking and if possible do some biting too.
But going by the Central Home Ministry's letter (sent by the Ministry's National Integration wing's director Y K Baweja, to Kerala chief secretary, asking effective steps to curb Thejas daily and fortnightly, I think the government is now thinking of providing some new roles to the media in this country.
The letter is an excellent piece of media criticism. It needs a thorough critical analysis, but right now I will quote here only the four major points they have raised in the letter:
First, they say Thejas in its editorials and articles speak up against the Government of India's policy line on Israel and the United States.
Second, they say the paper in its articles and editorials dubs the Government's actions to control extremism in the country as State terrorism.
Third, the paper opposes the Government of India's actions and policies in Kashmir to control extremism and tries to debunk all the initiatives there.
Fourth, the paper tries to look at issues and developments from a communal point of view.
While I was writing these points for a discussion forum, I had not a copy of the letter with me. I was quoting from the media reports that appeared in various publications and channels like the New Indian Express, Deshabhimani, India Vision and Amrita TV. Since then, I have been able to get a copy though a friend and it urges the State chief secretary to take effective steps to curb the operations of Thejas so that it does not vitiate the communal atmosphere in the state of Kerala.
The letter warns the government of Kerala about Thejas daily as well as fortnightly. I have been closely associated with Thejas daily (run by Intermedia Publishing Ltd, while the fortnightly has a different ownership pattern), an from its inception on January 26, 2006, I was its executive editor. It was one of my primary responsibilities to keep the newspaper under a firm professional control and I think I had done the job fairly well. There were mistakes and criticisms, but I must say that it was a fairly well edited and professionally run newspaper. Then how did the government of India find it a threat to communal peace in Kerala is a mystery to me.
I was watching the public reaction to this and was happy that most people thought this was a serious encroachment on media freedom and there was nothing its pages that warranted such a criticism or perceived punitive action. That is good, but I do not know how the Government proposes to go ahead in the coming days as it appears there is some concerted and serious moves on the part of the officials to put difficulties before Thejas daily.
I saw that in some public fora, there were criticisms raised against me personally and some even raised questions about my credibility to speak about media freedom vis a vis the contemplated actions towards Thejas, in response to the first part of this post I quoted above.
Below, I am just quoting a post I made where I try to explain my position vis vis Thejas and its role in Kerala society and media:
I am returning here not to defend myself or my paper against public criticism because I have said earlier in this forum itself that as a media-person, I do consider myself a public person and I am willing to be subjected to pubic scrutiny. Not only my public life, but even my private life.
So let the question of my personal credibility, raised here, remain there unanswered.
But I think it is absolutely necessary for us to ask some important questions in the charged atmosphere that is Indian journalism today. It is about the charge that certain newspapers and certain media-persons are communal, they need to be hauled over the coals for violating our public morality; they need to answer for and provide proof for their loyalty to the nation and its ideals. And some others are whiter than white, they are secular without a spot; they only deserve the nation's undivided attention and adulation.
This, at best, looks like a nursery story of black and white world; a world of certainties and no gray areas. That Punjabi bureaucrat in charge of National Integration in Home Ministry (!!), who has passed a judgment on the (lack of) secular credentials of Thejas, a Malyalam newspaper from deep south which he has not even seen most probably, must be living in such a world of fantasy. God save him and his nation.
Now what is the reality?
Let me give my take on this: When I returned to the regional media after a long spell in the national press, what I could see was a terribly fragmented media scene with substantial sections of the people just left out of its ambit. You cannot imagine the kind of gap and communication vacuum that existed here. You can say such a situation is the national reality, and why bother about it?
Well, I think the difference at least in Kerala was that those people who were feeling left out and dejected and frustrated were still in a position to build upon their limited resources. Unlike Gujarat or other places in the north, where the 'Final Solution' is almost achieved in the case of Muslims, (“they will not dare to make a noise any more...”), Kerala offers a peculiar situation where members of the community, though frustrated and angry, do have the resources and powers to fight back and build a life of their own.
In this context, we must remember in the 90s there was the rise of a militant tendency among the youth (Madani was one example, SIMI & NDF were some others) and this did cause serious introspection and concern among many, especially among the Muslim community. I was a reporter with Indian Express in Malabar and I did have deep and intimate contacts and communication with various players and had a deep idea of these concerns and the search for new options and solutions.
Those days I was arguing for a new alliance among the restive Islamic youth and the left wing, as you can see in my many articles of this period, including the Indian Express edit page piece, The Radical and the Faithful, published some time in late 90s. But we know such a turn never took place, and the left, to my mind, was taking political advantage of the helplessness and frustration of these people.
Now we are at a crossroads: Things are taking a bad turn and we hear reports of youngsters even from remote Kerala getting shot on Kashmir border; they are being taken into custody even from Afghan or Bangladesh borders. So what? One might ask. The police and border cops will take care of them. As far as Kerala's own security is concerned, who said we do have any problem here? Of course, even if there are a few malcontents, the forces are capable of handling them.
But I do feel we cannot and should not opt for such a solution. The only way is to go through a democratic process, a dialogue process and a process of engagement and empowerment.
So in the past four years when we were running this newspaper, we had to take up strong and uncompromising positions; tough stances. We were asking why the six men from Muslim community were shot dead point blank at Beemapalli, we questioned the claim of the police that the boy from Pakistan who came here to meet his relatives was a terrorist (which he was not), we said there is a different tale to tell for Shahansha (in Love jihad case)... no other paper cared to tell this story as we did.
Now can anyone in their sense describe these as communal propaganda? I don't think so. Of course Thejas, in its editorial today(December 19, 2009), has thrown the challenge: All its editions during the past four years are available in public domain (also available online free of charge), and just locate one sentence in all these that can be dubbed a deliberate, malicious and hateful attack on another community, (must be easy as some honourable people have discovered that we are full of venom spewing it every day), and confront us in the public sphere with the proof.
A post-script:
On Monday, I heard on India Vision an interesting comment made by media critic S Jayasankar: "On the centenary year of Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai's banishment, Tejas' N P Chekkutty also can hope for a place in history through another deportation!"
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Thejas Daily: A Note on the Beginnings of an Experiment
Journalism is an unappeasable passion that can be assimilated and humanised only through stark confrontation with reality. No one who does not have this in his blood can comprehend its magnetic hold, which is fuelled by the unpredictability of life. No one who has not had this experience can begin to grasp the extraordinary excitement stirred by the news, the sheer elation created by the first fruits of an endeavour, and the moral devastation wreaked by failure.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
THEJAS DAILY was launched on January 26, 2006 as a unique experiment in mass media, with an uncompromising pro-people position in its editorial line and a vast mass base in financial sources and support base.
The newspaper stands for protection of the rights of the most dispossessed and marginalized segments in Indian society, namely the Muslims, Dalits and other backward sections. It upholds their democratic rights, their economic and social rights and above all their human rights. It is steadfast in its commitment to these ideals and its editorial policy is evolved through a process of democratic consultation based on a firm commitment to the principles of equality, dignity and social justice.
Launched by Intermedia Publishing Ltd, a company with grass-root level support, the newspaper has its editorial offices and press at Media City, on the national highway at Nallalam, in the outskirts of Kozhikode city. A multi-edition newspaper, it also comes out from major cities like Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, and Kannur. The fifth edition will be launched from Kottayam shortly. The newspaper has a widely read internet edition, www.thejasonline.com and an electronic edition, www.thejasepaper.com, which is a paid service for our vast network of readers in other parts of India and abroad.
The origins of the newspaper:
Though Thejas daily was launched on the Indian Republic Day in 2006, the idea behind such a newspaper was there for a long time. In fact, Thejas as a new title was launched over a decade ago, from 1996, first as a monthly and now it comes out as a fortnightly.
The need for a strong, uncompromising daily newspaper has always been felt especially since the mainstream media, both in English and regional languages including Malayalam, has been unashamedly pro-establishment and spread all kinds of untruths, half truths and rumours that often painted the oppressed segments of Indian society like Muslims, Dalits,tribal people and others in a poor light. The widespread oppression of these people, the social, political and economic marginalization and ostracism practiced against them, the communal violence against them were never properly covered by the mainstream media and the versions of the forces of the state and perpetrators of violence and oppression received undue importance.
Another aspect of this media war against the oppressed people was the deliberate demonization of these communities which painted them as the breeding ground of terrorism and social evils in India. It was such a widespread and deadly strategy that whenever an incident of explosion took place anywhere in India, the needle of suspicion automatically pointed to the Muslim youths and a large number of them were jailed, terrorized, tortured and even murdered in the past many years. The situation of Dalits also is no better. In many cases, such incidents were later proved to be completely false and media stories deliberately planted and willingly purveyed by interested parties.
This media apathy and a sense of alienation and cynicism caused by such a totally one-sided media atmosphere had to be countered for a variety of reasons. First, it was slowly giving rise to a social psychology of frustration and a willingness to take extreme steps that would only mean further alienation and cause harm, thus ultimately playing into the hands of the oppressors who were plotting for such an outcome.
The strategies for counter moves in media:
Thus it was almost self-evident the need for evolving counter strategies in the media which had put the Muslims and other oppressed people in such a hopeless straight jacket.
To counter the massive propaganda, we needed our own strong media organizations, but the question was how to go about it.
The planning and execution of the project to develop Thejas as a daily newspaper run on professional lines with a self-sustaining financial model, was, in a way, a theoretical and practical experiment to answer this serious question faced by Indian Muslims and all oppressed people. It was an experiment to find a pragmatic way out in the capital-intensive, big-money controlled media scene.
There were a few fundamental points on which such a revolutionary media model could work:
First, the newspaper must rely upon a strong band of independent and committed media practitioners who would remain as its backbone, both intellectually and professionally;
Second, the newspaper must be able to provide an intellectually stimulating atmosphere and also be able to give professional satisfaction to its journalists and readers;
Third, it has to develop a new kind of media ethics and professional practice in order to counter the dominant ideology that pervades the entire global media scene, especially as the paper will have to rely mainly on the imperialist versions of news coverage with its embedded biases;
Fourth, any viable media organisation that seeks to replace/challenge the dominant media players will have to master the cutting edge elements in technology to keep it ahead of the competition and to keep itself agile in a highly flexible market;
Fifth, it has to remain financially viable and must be able to rely upon its own resources, for which prudent financial control and extreme care for keeping the costs to the minimum is a must.
How we implemented our strategy:
We worked on these principles in a deliberate, conscious and restrained manner because, in Kerala, where dozens of media experiments have taken place, we have seen dismal failures of many efforts that were launched with big promises. Looking at the media experience, one cannot but conclude that media industry is a big mine-field where not many escape unhurt.
It was necessary to avoid the pitfalls and the only way to go about was through making a realistic assessment of the market possibilities and our own capability to rise to these expectations. The best option for developing a realistic and pragmatic business model was to go to the people, and when a preliminary survey was conducted, it was found that we could sell a much larger number of copies that we were initially hoping for, at the outset itself. The point driven home was that we were actually underestimating our real strength and this came as a major morale booster. Instead of a small newspaper that would remain as a niche player, we were now planning for a major newspaper that would have a statewide presence and a global readership. It was also realised that many of those who were the potential subscribers were to be first-time newspaper buyers. Hence for many, it was the one and only newspaper at home and it was absolutely necessary to make it a complete newspaper, answering all the needs of a normal newspaper reader in Kerala.
That meant larger number of bureaus all over the state and outside, bigger staff at the desk to handle all departments of news from local to international; besides other avenues of news like business, sports and entertainment and a large number of features and special pages like those dedicated to school children, that all major newspapers offered to the readers.
We had to do it within limited means, both financial and professional, and one of the major strategies used was to go for a bunch of young professionals, fresh from the colleges, capable to take over all these tasks. They needed to be trained in all aspects of newspaper operations including news gathering, editing, translating, proof reading, page making, etc, besides internalising thee special, empowering nature of this project. In fact they were to be all-rounders who could match those with years of experience in the profession and committed, socially conscious and responsible media practitioners.
It was not easy to find experienced professionals because the subaltern social classes to which Thejas belong, do not have many such professionals among them. We had to train them from the scratch and that helped us develop a committed and cohesive team with only a few senior people mainly to provide guidance to their daily activities.
That was an immense risk to take because anything could go wrong in a daily newspaper business but the best way to learn swimming is to jump into the cold water, come what may. We did just that and the result is a newspaper that has been reaching Malayali public everywhere, every morning without a hitch ever since January 26, 2006.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
THEJAS DAILY was launched on January 26, 2006 as a unique experiment in mass media, with an uncompromising pro-people position in its editorial line and a vast mass base in financial sources and support base.
The newspaper stands for protection of the rights of the most dispossessed and marginalized segments in Indian society, namely the Muslims, Dalits and other backward sections. It upholds their democratic rights, their economic and social rights and above all their human rights. It is steadfast in its commitment to these ideals and its editorial policy is evolved through a process of democratic consultation based on a firm commitment to the principles of equality, dignity and social justice.
Launched by Intermedia Publishing Ltd, a company with grass-root level support, the newspaper has its editorial offices and press at Media City, on the national highway at Nallalam, in the outskirts of Kozhikode city. A multi-edition newspaper, it also comes out from major cities like Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, and Kannur. The fifth edition will be launched from Kottayam shortly. The newspaper has a widely read internet edition, www.thejasonline.com and an electronic edition, www.thejasepaper.com, which is a paid service for our vast network of readers in other parts of India and abroad.
The origins of the newspaper:
Though Thejas daily was launched on the Indian Republic Day in 2006, the idea behind such a newspaper was there for a long time. In fact, Thejas as a new title was launched over a decade ago, from 1996, first as a monthly and now it comes out as a fortnightly.
The need for a strong, uncompromising daily newspaper has always been felt especially since the mainstream media, both in English and regional languages including Malayalam, has been unashamedly pro-establishment and spread all kinds of untruths, half truths and rumours that often painted the oppressed segments of Indian society like Muslims, Dalits,tribal people and others in a poor light. The widespread oppression of these people, the social, political and economic marginalization and ostracism practiced against them, the communal violence against them were never properly covered by the mainstream media and the versions of the forces of the state and perpetrators of violence and oppression received undue importance.
Another aspect of this media war against the oppressed people was the deliberate demonization of these communities which painted them as the breeding ground of terrorism and social evils in India. It was such a widespread and deadly strategy that whenever an incident of explosion took place anywhere in India, the needle of suspicion automatically pointed to the Muslim youths and a large number of them were jailed, terrorized, tortured and even murdered in the past many years. The situation of Dalits also is no better. In many cases, such incidents were later proved to be completely false and media stories deliberately planted and willingly purveyed by interested parties.
This media apathy and a sense of alienation and cynicism caused by such a totally one-sided media atmosphere had to be countered for a variety of reasons. First, it was slowly giving rise to a social psychology of frustration and a willingness to take extreme steps that would only mean further alienation and cause harm, thus ultimately playing into the hands of the oppressors who were plotting for such an outcome.
The strategies for counter moves in media:
Thus it was almost self-evident the need for evolving counter strategies in the media which had put the Muslims and other oppressed people in such a hopeless straight jacket.
To counter the massive propaganda, we needed our own strong media organizations, but the question was how to go about it.
The planning and execution of the project to develop Thejas as a daily newspaper run on professional lines with a self-sustaining financial model, was, in a way, a theoretical and practical experiment to answer this serious question faced by Indian Muslims and all oppressed people. It was an experiment to find a pragmatic way out in the capital-intensive, big-money controlled media scene.
There were a few fundamental points on which such a revolutionary media model could work:
First, the newspaper must rely upon a strong band of independent and committed media practitioners who would remain as its backbone, both intellectually and professionally;
Second, the newspaper must be able to provide an intellectually stimulating atmosphere and also be able to give professional satisfaction to its journalists and readers;
Third, it has to develop a new kind of media ethics and professional practice in order to counter the dominant ideology that pervades the entire global media scene, especially as the paper will have to rely mainly on the imperialist versions of news coverage with its embedded biases;
Fourth, any viable media organisation that seeks to replace/challenge the dominant media players will have to master the cutting edge elements in technology to keep it ahead of the competition and to keep itself agile in a highly flexible market;
Fifth, it has to remain financially viable and must be able to rely upon its own resources, for which prudent financial control and extreme care for keeping the costs to the minimum is a must.
How we implemented our strategy:
We worked on these principles in a deliberate, conscious and restrained manner because, in Kerala, where dozens of media experiments have taken place, we have seen dismal failures of many efforts that were launched with big promises. Looking at the media experience, one cannot but conclude that media industry is a big mine-field where not many escape unhurt.
It was necessary to avoid the pitfalls and the only way to go about was through making a realistic assessment of the market possibilities and our own capability to rise to these expectations. The best option for developing a realistic and pragmatic business model was to go to the people, and when a preliminary survey was conducted, it was found that we could sell a much larger number of copies that we were initially hoping for, at the outset itself. The point driven home was that we were actually underestimating our real strength and this came as a major morale booster. Instead of a small newspaper that would remain as a niche player, we were now planning for a major newspaper that would have a statewide presence and a global readership. It was also realised that many of those who were the potential subscribers were to be first-time newspaper buyers. Hence for many, it was the one and only newspaper at home and it was absolutely necessary to make it a complete newspaper, answering all the needs of a normal newspaper reader in Kerala.
That meant larger number of bureaus all over the state and outside, bigger staff at the desk to handle all departments of news from local to international; besides other avenues of news like business, sports and entertainment and a large number of features and special pages like those dedicated to school children, that all major newspapers offered to the readers.
We had to do it within limited means, both financial and professional, and one of the major strategies used was to go for a bunch of young professionals, fresh from the colleges, capable to take over all these tasks. They needed to be trained in all aspects of newspaper operations including news gathering, editing, translating, proof reading, page making, etc, besides internalising thee special, empowering nature of this project. In fact they were to be all-rounders who could match those with years of experience in the profession and committed, socially conscious and responsible media practitioners.
It was not easy to find experienced professionals because the subaltern social classes to which Thejas belong, do not have many such professionals among them. We had to train them from the scratch and that helped us develop a committed and cohesive team with only a few senior people mainly to provide guidance to their daily activities.
That was an immense risk to take because anything could go wrong in a daily newspaper business but the best way to learn swimming is to jump into the cold water, come what may. We did just that and the result is a newspaper that has been reaching Malayali public everywhere, every morning without a hitch ever since January 26, 2006.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
My Dalit Servant and a Case of Thermodynamics
SOME TIME ago, Sajan, a friend, was busy setting up his biogas plant in his kitchen. I was one of those who keenly monitored the progress of the effort, and in fact I was disappointed when Bindu came up with a note of dissent, reporting that the plant simply did not give sufficient gas to do the cooking. That was bad. Hence Sajan started hunting around for kitchen waste to refuel his plant.
I was interested in the affair not (only) because all of us are very keen on what goes (wrong) in the other guy's kitchen (and possibly bedroom too.) I had a private motive because I was also having troubles in my kitchen. My problem, then, was a Parishad-type chulha which I had set up that simply did not work.
I talked to many people what was the problem with this chulha, which instead of pumping out smoke through the chimney, was spreading it inside the kitchen making the claim a 'smokeless chulha' somewhat of a misnomer. My wife kept grumbling, and I kept my mouth shut (I was the person who suggested we must have a chulha too!).
Then our servant, a dalit lady who travels from a village to the city to work, said the problem was with the way it was designed: It did not have sufficient space for allowing the smoke to escape into the chimney pipe especially when we kept big pots above it. The problem, then was that of thermodynamics and I decided this was too much of a task for me. I left it at that accepting failure.
But the indifatigable lady was not like me. One day she showed me how to do it. Push it a bit lower and allow more space, and it worked beautifully. Now we cook in it quite often.
I wrote about it because this week I read Sunita Narain, in her Down to Earth column, write about a woman she met in Udaipur, Rajasthan, 25 years ago. She too had such an improved chulha which, however, did not work. What she did was to break it a bit and make it useful, or using our own improved terminlogy, re-engineering it.
I think these incidents are very important and they give us lessons about how to go about improving our people's lives. We need to listen to people who have grassroots level experience, or in other words our technocrats and knowledge-creators need to be a bit more down to earth. Otherwise their wonderful inventions would remain just that: inventions with no practical application.
(For those interested in the Sunita Narain column, see www.downtoearth.org.in)
I was interested in the affair not (only) because all of us are very keen on what goes (wrong) in the other guy's kitchen (and possibly bedroom too.) I had a private motive because I was also having troubles in my kitchen. My problem, then, was a Parishad-type chulha which I had set up that simply did not work.
I talked to many people what was the problem with this chulha, which instead of pumping out smoke through the chimney, was spreading it inside the kitchen making the claim a 'smokeless chulha' somewhat of a misnomer. My wife kept grumbling, and I kept my mouth shut (I was the person who suggested we must have a chulha too!).
Then our servant, a dalit lady who travels from a village to the city to work, said the problem was with the way it was designed: It did not have sufficient space for allowing the smoke to escape into the chimney pipe especially when we kept big pots above it. The problem, then was that of thermodynamics and I decided this was too much of a task for me. I left it at that accepting failure.
But the indifatigable lady was not like me. One day she showed me how to do it. Push it a bit lower and allow more space, and it worked beautifully. Now we cook in it quite often.
I wrote about it because this week I read Sunita Narain, in her Down to Earth column, write about a woman she met in Udaipur, Rajasthan, 25 years ago. She too had such an improved chulha which, however, did not work. What she did was to break it a bit and make it useful, or using our own improved terminlogy, re-engineering it.
I think these incidents are very important and they give us lessons about how to go about improving our people's lives. We need to listen to people who have grassroots level experience, or in other words our technocrats and knowledge-creators need to be a bit more down to earth. Otherwise their wonderful inventions would remain just that: inventions with no practical application.
(For those interested in the Sunita Narain column, see www.downtoearth.org.in)
Friday, December 26, 2008
Global Economic Crisis and Kerala's Future: A report from CDS
THE CENTRE for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapruam, has released its report on Global Financial Crisis and Kerala: Impact & Mitigation Measures, following a request from the State Government to assess the impact and possible measures and policy changes required to overcome he crisis.
The 98-page report (available online at www.cds.edu.in) is one of the first major attempts to put in perspective the crisis and how to face it and also possibly convert it into an opportunity to refocus on our economic priorities. The following observations are on the basis of the executive summary of the report which I had seen yesterday.
What strikes me as an extremely important warning signal in this report is that the already feeble sections of our economy and society are going to be hit hard again in this crisis. These segments, according to the report, are the traditional industries like coir and cashew, the cash crops like pepper, coffee, tea, rubber and spices, fish workers and other export oriented sectors, all of whom are dependent on a highly unpredictable global market. Unlike the IT units that are also likely to be hit, those employed in these sectors do not enjoy any financial stability or social security support at all. In fact most of them were already in dire straits, most of them neck-deep in debt and often witnessing a spate of suicides. I had occasion to do some work on the sectors like cash crop growers inWynad and fish workers in the northern districts. They are in a very serious plight and what has stopped- at least temporarily- the spate of suicides seem to be the steps taken as part of the Central Government intervention in recent months. Our own State Government's Debt Relief Commission has been a mockery of sorts as it could not offer any sensible aid to the majority of people who went there.
That, to my mind, is going to be our experience once again. We are going to get a lot of platitudes from our ruling politicians and precious little by way of action. In fact when I was reading State Planning Board vice chairman DrPrabhat Patnaik's tall claim in the Economic Review 2008 report that it was the State Government's Debt Relief Commission which had put a brake on farm suicides, I thought it was laughable because precisely at that point of time, things were quite different in the field with suicides spreading to new areas likeKuttanad rice bowl in the summer harvest season this year.
So this entrenched middle class segment that effectively control our political establishment, combined with the political leadership and intellectual bandwagon which actually cater to the middle class interest is going to be the real stumbling block in front of any reforms theCDS report calls for. The report calls for very serious policy shifts that will rekindle our economic activity, like a massive promotion of private investment, a private-public partnership, cut in subsidies in power, water supply and other sector to the middle class consumers, easing of legal hurdles in commercialization of agriculture, reducing controls on leasing landed properties, etc, which are all recommendations that go against the present rulers' economic wisdom.
A stark reality stands out in the report: The middle class would gain in this misery of the poor people, because when the prices fall their salaries are going to remain stable and real incomes rise. And when fresh money is pumped into the economy to recharge production, surely they will do everything to corner much of it and will stop any meaningful restructuring like rational power tariff or cut in subsidies or reforms in land legislation or introduction of the system of lease holding of lands to enable the landless to engage in cultivation.
Hence, it is necessary for the poor people to critically examine what is good for them, and not allow this middle class-controlled leadership to decide for them. I do feel that unless they make a determined effort to break this stranglehold of the government-employed, trade unionised middle class people who are holding sway in our public affairs, the really needy are not going to gain anything, and their misery would continue, they would keep committing suicide while the leaders would keep mouthing platitudes on how to bring in socialism...
The 98-page report (available online at www.cds.edu.in) is one of the first major attempts to put in perspective the crisis and how to face it and also possibly convert it into an opportunity to refocus on our economic priorities. The following observations are on the basis of the executive summary of the report which I had seen yesterday.
What strikes me as an extremely important warning signal in this report is that the already feeble sections of our economy and society are going to be hit hard again in this crisis. These segments, according to the report, are the traditional industries like coir and cashew, the cash crops like pepper, coffee, tea, rubber and spices, fish workers and other export oriented sectors, all of whom are dependent on a highly unpredictable global market. Unlike the IT units that are also likely to be hit, those employed in these sectors do not enjoy any financial stability or social security support at all. In fact most of them were already in dire straits, most of them neck-deep in debt and often witnessing a spate of suicides. I had occasion to do some work on the sectors like cash crop growers inWynad and fish workers in the northern districts. They are in a very serious plight and what has stopped- at least temporarily- the spate of suicides seem to be the steps taken as part of the Central Government intervention in recent months. Our own State Government's Debt Relief Commission has been a mockery of sorts as it could not offer any sensible aid to the majority of people who went there.
That, to my mind, is going to be our experience once again. We are going to get a lot of platitudes from our ruling politicians and precious little by way of action. In fact when I was reading State Planning Board vice chairman DrPrabhat Patnaik's tall claim in the Economic Review 2008 report that it was the State Government's Debt Relief Commission which had put a brake on farm suicides, I thought it was laughable because precisely at that point of time, things were quite different in the field with suicides spreading to new areas likeKuttanad rice bowl in the summer harvest season this year.
So this entrenched middle class segment that effectively control our political establishment, combined with the political leadership and intellectual bandwagon which actually cater to the middle class interest is going to be the real stumbling block in front of any reforms theCDS report calls for. The report calls for very serious policy shifts that will rekindle our economic activity, like a massive promotion of private investment, a private-public partnership, cut in subsidies in power, water supply and other sector to the middle class consumers, easing of legal hurdles in commercialization of agriculture, reducing controls on leasing landed properties, etc, which are all recommendations that go against the present rulers' economic wisdom.
A stark reality stands out in the report: The middle class would gain in this misery of the poor people, because when the prices fall their salaries are going to remain stable and real incomes rise. And when fresh money is pumped into the economy to recharge production, surely they will do everything to corner much of it and will stop any meaningful restructuring like rational power tariff or cut in subsidies or reforms in land legislation or introduction of the system of lease holding of lands to enable the landless to engage in cultivation.
Hence, it is necessary for the poor people to critically examine what is good for them, and not allow this middle class-controlled leadership to decide for them. I do feel that unless they make a determined effort to break this stranglehold of the government-employed, trade unionised middle class people who are holding sway in our public affairs, the really needy are not going to gain anything, and their misery would continue, they would keep committing suicide while the leaders would keep mouthing platitudes on how to bring in socialism...
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Here We Go to the Moon...!
India's Chandrayaan-1 blasts off; ISRO says will land an Indian on the moon by 2015: news.
Surely we would have loved a vehicle that would launch us to the seat of power...!
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Vanishing Hillocks in Kerala: An Ecological Disaster in the Making
SMALL AND medium-sized hillocks are a common sight in the midlands of Kerala. They are beautiful, giving a curvaceous shape to entire landscape, with plenty of vegetation, most of them covered with all kinds of plants and trees and providing rich grazing areas for cattle. Ecologically they are critical to the region, as they are the main repositories of water resources keeping the millions of wells well furnished, providing drinking water to the people.
Sadly, this is undergoing a fast transformation today. The growing commercialization of land, expanding urbanization and the consequent hectic activity of a booming construction industry has put a death knell for the hillocks. In the past ten to fifteen years, a substantial part of the hillocks in Kerala's countryside have been demolished and carried away for filling low-lying lands for the construction industry, say recent studies which highlight the threats posed by the massive excavation activity now on in various parts of the State. Recent micro-level studies conducted by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), a people's science movement with widespread network in the State, point to the alarming fact that since 1987, more than 50 per cent of the hillocks in the various panchayats and municipal towns that came under their survey, had been subjected to heavy excavation and removal of earth; among them 10 to 15 per cent had suffered extreme levels of losses, if not complete eradication.
The destruction of hillocks can have very serious and long-standing repercussions for the state's drinking water availability, says Dr A Achuthan, an eminent hydrologist and conservationist who was one of the pioneers of the Sastra Sahitya Parishad movement. He said in the next decade, the most important ecological problem the people of the State likely to face is the drinking water scarcity as the State's traditional water sources are now being upset and no new sources are identified. Already in recent years, every summer the scarcity of water in local wells has become such an acutely felt phenomenon in most parts and the gram panchayat, corporation and municipal authorities are hard-pressed to supply drinking water in container lorries in those places, he pointed out.
the problems of water scarcity now being experienced in most parts of the State, the demolition of hillocks and the filling up of low-lying lands, paddy fields and water-bodies are interconnected. The alarming nature of this problem has been recognized by the authorities and has led to adoption of harsh measures like the recent legislation like the Kerala Conservation of Paddy fields and Wetlands Bill, 2007 passed by the State Assembly in July 2008. The Bill seeks to protect the remaining paddy fields for cultivation of rice and other food articles, as according to the State Planning Board, in the period from 1980 to 2007, the State has lost as much as 500,000 hectares of wetland and paddy fields for construction and other commercial activities including conversion of lands for cash crops like rubber.
Much of the low-lying lands and water-bodies were filled up with earth made available from the demolished hillocks that were excavated making use of JCBs, the ubiquitous excavator that is seen in every village today. Village roads are full of earth-mover vehicles which cause frequent road accidents because of their reckless speed to avoid authorities. In a recent accident in Malappuram, an excavator itself was crushed under the crashing earth from above, killing two people instantly. (See picture.) Such accidents are now quite common and go without much comments in local newspapers.
The seriousness of the situation has not been formally assessed by any official agencies though the non-governmental sector has done some studies to highlight the risk. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad conducted its survey during May-June 2006, focusing on the changing land use patterns and the impact of these changes on environment and people's lives, selecting a number of panchayats and municipal towns in all parts of the State. Though the survey was of a preliminary nature, its findings point to the massive tendency to fill up water-bodies and for demolishing hillocks which are known as the major sources of water storage, say its activists who were involved in the study.
C M Muralidharan, secretary of the KSSP during the period of the survey, said that it was conducted mainly with a view to identifying the land use patterns in Kerala in order to finalize a strategy for campaign on these issues. He said after the preliminary results were compiled, the organization had plans to go for a multi-disciplinary study involving government agencies like the Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS), Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (CWRDM), Kerala Land-use Board, etc, to assess scientifically how the changing patterns were going to impact the society in the long term. However, no such comprehensive study had been undertaken later even though the past few years have seen an intensification of the process.
The KSSP had conducted the survey in as many as eight districts out of the total 14 in the State and the district-wise data show that in comparison with the southern parts of the State, the north had witnessed a heavier assault on its land resources though the commercialization and industrialization has been much faster in the south. In fact the two districts which had witnessed the severest attacks were Kannur and Malappuram, both in the north. In Kannur, the survey had examined 33 gram panchayats and two municipal areas which had as many as 196 paddy fields and 163 hillocks. Of these paddy fields, 146 -- a whopping 81.6 per cent -- had already been filled up for either planting cash crops or commercial activities, building houses, etc. The study had included areas with a minimum of ten metres in height and 1390 hectares as base in the category of hillocks. Of the 163 such hillocks identified in the study, as many as 57.67 per cent (94) had been affected by excavation at various levels of progress. According to the study, 68 hillocks had lost as much as 25 per cent of the total area, while another 12 had been in the region of 25 to 50 per cent loss and 14 of them had lost more than 50 per cent.
P V Divakaran, a KSSP activist who was involved in the study, said that they had noticed 73 hillocks in the areas during the survey, without any damage. But since then, at least some of them had faced threat, he said. He said the eastern hill regions had experienced severe ecological damage because of the excavation of hills as proved by the fact that traditionally water rich areas like Iritty are facing water shortage these days. In this region, another ecological development causing concern is the frequent land slips that have destroyed property and lives. The instability created in the hills' landscape because of uncontrolled excavation has contributed to land slips, say local people. In a small village called Thillankkeri, which had six hillocks, all of them have been demolished giving the once leafy village a barren look.
Dr Achuthan, who had done extensive studies on the soil and water conversation patterns in the State, said the loss of hillocks in the north could prove to be a very serious hindrance for water safety in these regions as the laterite rich hillocks were the most important storage of water here. In fact, the rivers are fewer and far between in this region and even when they are full after rains, they take less than 48 hours to empty much of it into the sea. In Kasargode and parts of Kannur, a tradtional way to sourcing water is known as surangam, which is a unique way of collecting water dripping from the interiors of rocks and other laterite formations.
Compared to the north where the survey found loss of hillocks to the order of around 58 per cent, the actual loss in the south was much less, around 34 per cent, said K M Elias, convener of the environment sub-committee of the KSSP. They had surveyed 147 hills in Ernakulam district, one of the most industrialized areas in the State, and found that around 50 of them had been subjected to excavation, suffering moderate to heavy losses. Of them, 35 had suffered losses up to 25 percent; four had been in the region of 25 to 50 per cent damage; and 11 had been heavily damaged. However, majority of the hillocks, as many as 97, had not been as yet touched by the excavation lobby.
He said the situation was most likely to have changed since then, as new development projects in the area like the Vallarpadom Container Terminal, the Smart City project, etc, were now on full stream making construction booming. In fact as Dr Achuthan pointed out, recent data released by World Watch Institute point out that while the construction industry grows at five per cent globally and at nine per cent in India, it grows at 15 per cent in Kerala. Still one of the interesting facts borne out of the survey is the higher level of demolition of precious natural resources in the north. The reasons seem to be the comparative lack of public resistance and environment activism in the region, coupled with a higher level of poverty in villages, as most land owners have no option but to lease out their lands for construction purposes because of poor farm earnings. In fact, most of the farmer suicides were reported form the northern districts in Kerala in recent years compared to the southern parts.
The government action of preventing paddy field conversion with the recent bill providing for strict punitive provisions including jail term and hefty penalties as fine has been welcomed by a section of environmentalists, but many feel it could only aggravate the problems faced by farmers and land owners who are in distress. As the statistics on the damage to hillocks itself seem to suggest, the real issue behind this ecological disaster is not a lack of concern for environment, but the pressing problems of poverty and destitution.
(A version of this article is published at www.infochangeindia.org October 2008.)
Sadly, this is undergoing a fast transformation today. The growing commercialization of land, expanding urbanization and the consequent hectic activity of a booming construction industry has put a death knell for the hillocks. In the past ten to fifteen years, a substantial part of the hillocks in Kerala's countryside have been demolished and carried away for filling low-lying lands for the construction industry, say recent studies which highlight the threats posed by the massive excavation activity now on in various parts of the State. Recent micro-level studies conducted by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), a people's science movement with widespread network in the State, point to the alarming fact that since 1987, more than 50 per cent of the hillocks in the various panchayats and municipal towns that came under their survey, had been subjected to heavy excavation and removal of earth; among them 10 to 15 per cent had suffered extreme levels of losses, if not complete eradication.
The destruction of hillocks can have very serious and long-standing repercussions for the state's drinking water availability, says Dr A Achuthan, an eminent hydrologist and conservationist who was one of the pioneers of the Sastra Sahitya Parishad movement. He said in the next decade, the most important ecological problem the people of the State likely to face is the drinking water scarcity as the State's traditional water sources are now being upset and no new sources are identified. Already in recent years, every summer the scarcity of water in local wells has become such an acutely felt phenomenon in most parts and the gram panchayat, corporation and municipal authorities are hard-pressed to supply drinking water in container lorries in those places, he pointed out.
the problems of water scarcity now being experienced in most parts of the State, the demolition of hillocks and the filling up of low-lying lands, paddy fields and water-bodies are interconnected. The alarming nature of this problem has been recognized by the authorities and has led to adoption of harsh measures like the recent legislation like the Kerala Conservation of Paddy fields and Wetlands Bill, 2007 passed by the State Assembly in July 2008. The Bill seeks to protect the remaining paddy fields for cultivation of rice and other food articles, as according to the State Planning Board, in the period from 1980 to 2007, the State has lost as much as 500,000 hectares of wetland and paddy fields for construction and other commercial activities including conversion of lands for cash crops like rubber.
Much of the low-lying lands and water-bodies were filled up with earth made available from the demolished hillocks that were excavated making use of JCBs, the ubiquitous excavator that is seen in every village today. Village roads are full of earth-mover vehicles which cause frequent road accidents because of their reckless speed to avoid authorities. In a recent accident in Malappuram, an excavator itself was crushed under the crashing earth from above, killing two people instantly. (See picture.) Such accidents are now quite common and go without much comments in local newspapers.
The seriousness of the situation has not been formally assessed by any official agencies though the non-governmental sector has done some studies to highlight the risk. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad conducted its survey during May-June 2006, focusing on the changing land use patterns and the impact of these changes on environment and people's lives, selecting a number of panchayats and municipal towns in all parts of the State. Though the survey was of a preliminary nature, its findings point to the massive tendency to fill up water-bodies and for demolishing hillocks which are known as the major sources of water storage, say its activists who were involved in the study.
C M Muralidharan, secretary of the KSSP during the period of the survey, said that it was conducted mainly with a view to identifying the land use patterns in Kerala in order to finalize a strategy for campaign on these issues. He said after the preliminary results were compiled, the organization had plans to go for a multi-disciplinary study involving government agencies like the Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS), Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (CWRDM), Kerala Land-use Board, etc, to assess scientifically how the changing patterns were going to impact the society in the long term. However, no such comprehensive study had been undertaken later even though the past few years have seen an intensification of the process.
The KSSP had conducted the survey in as many as eight districts out of the total 14 in the State and the district-wise data show that in comparison with the southern parts of the State, the north had witnessed a heavier assault on its land resources though the commercialization and industrialization has been much faster in the south. In fact the two districts which had witnessed the severest attacks were Kannur and Malappuram, both in the north. In Kannur, the survey had examined 33 gram panchayats and two municipal areas which had as many as 196 paddy fields and 163 hillocks. Of these paddy fields, 146 -- a whopping 81.6 per cent -- had already been filled up for either planting cash crops or commercial activities, building houses, etc. The study had included areas with a minimum of ten metres in height and 1390 hectares as base in the category of hillocks. Of the 163 such hillocks identified in the study, as many as 57.67 per cent (94) had been affected by excavation at various levels of progress. According to the study, 68 hillocks had lost as much as 25 per cent of the total area, while another 12 had been in the region of 25 to 50 per cent loss and 14 of them had lost more than 50 per cent.
P V Divakaran, a KSSP activist who was involved in the study, said that they had noticed 73 hillocks in the areas during the survey, without any damage. But since then, at least some of them had faced threat, he said. He said the eastern hill regions had experienced severe ecological damage because of the excavation of hills as proved by the fact that traditionally water rich areas like Iritty are facing water shortage these days. In this region, another ecological development causing concern is the frequent land slips that have destroyed property and lives. The instability created in the hills' landscape because of uncontrolled excavation has contributed to land slips, say local people. In a small village called Thillankkeri, which had six hillocks, all of them have been demolished giving the once leafy village a barren look.
Dr Achuthan, who had done extensive studies on the soil and water conversation patterns in the State, said the loss of hillocks in the north could prove to be a very serious hindrance for water safety in these regions as the laterite rich hillocks were the most important storage of water here. In fact, the rivers are fewer and far between in this region and even when they are full after rains, they take less than 48 hours to empty much of it into the sea. In Kasargode and parts of Kannur, a tradtional way to sourcing water is known as surangam, which is a unique way of collecting water dripping from the interiors of rocks and other laterite formations.
Compared to the north where the survey found loss of hillocks to the order of around 58 per cent, the actual loss in the south was much less, around 34 per cent, said K M Elias, convener of the environment sub-committee of the KSSP. They had surveyed 147 hills in Ernakulam district, one of the most industrialized areas in the State, and found that around 50 of them had been subjected to excavation, suffering moderate to heavy losses. Of them, 35 had suffered losses up to 25 percent; four had been in the region of 25 to 50 per cent damage; and 11 had been heavily damaged. However, majority of the hillocks, as many as 97, had not been as yet touched by the excavation lobby.
He said the situation was most likely to have changed since then, as new development projects in the area like the Vallarpadom Container Terminal, the Smart City project, etc, were now on full stream making construction booming. In fact as Dr Achuthan pointed out, recent data released by World Watch Institute point out that while the construction industry grows at five per cent globally and at nine per cent in India, it grows at 15 per cent in Kerala. Still one of the interesting facts borne out of the survey is the higher level of demolition of precious natural resources in the north. The reasons seem to be the comparative lack of public resistance and environment activism in the region, coupled with a higher level of poverty in villages, as most land owners have no option but to lease out their lands for construction purposes because of poor farm earnings. In fact, most of the farmer suicides were reported form the northern districts in Kerala in recent years compared to the southern parts.
The government action of preventing paddy field conversion with the recent bill providing for strict punitive provisions including jail term and hefty penalties as fine has been welcomed by a section of environmentalists, but many feel it could only aggravate the problems faced by farmers and land owners who are in distress. As the statistics on the damage to hillocks itself seem to suggest, the real issue behind this ecological disaster is not a lack of concern for environment, but the pressing problems of poverty and destitution.
(A version of this article is published at www.infochangeindia.org October 2008.)
Thursday, September 4, 2008
When Politicians Run Businesses and Business Runs Politics
EARLIER THIS week came the news of the inauguration of the water theme park in Pappinissery in Kannur, launched by a business firm controlled by the CPM Kannur district committee. The corporate structure is of a unique model, with a cooperative society as the front organization which legally manages the park but actually it is micro-managed by a group of individuals within the party.
This is not a new experiment on the part of the Communist party in Kerala. In fact, its present organizational structure is built upon such a complex mechanism that has various levels of controls but actually the entire buck stops at the table of the state secretary of the party, who happens to be all powerful in this semi-corporate, semi mafia type of organization.
Kannur’s Dinesh Beedi Cooperative was the original model for this structure. Its success and recent decline are to be studied closely to see what are the possibilities and likely pitfalls for this model. Dinesh Beedi emerged as a strong cooperative movement to withstand the exploitation of workers by the Ganesh Beedi Co, which had control over the beedi market in north Malabar with Mangalore as its base. Then the emerging clashes between Sangh Parivar groups and Marxists got mixed up in this and when Dinesh Beedi Cooperative was formed, this political battle took an ideological veneer with the rival firms becoming the support base for warring groups.
Now the beedi industry is in decline, but the fratricidal battle it spewed continues unabated. In fact, this killing business itself has become more diversified, into a new kind of industry, with the professionals lending their services to various clients like blade companies, private banks, vehicle agents, revenge seekers, etc.
It is evident that the three-decade old murder politics in Kannur is closely linked to this business model of cooperatives/private firms controlled by political parties, controlled by vested groups with close links to business interests, mafia groups, land grabbers, and other operators in the shady economy. It has vitiated business and it has corrupted politics, across party lines. The politics in Kannur might take quite a while to recover itself and assert genuine people’s interests. Perhaps that is why V S Achuthanandan decided to keep away from the inaugural function of the water theme park. That must be why Vayalar Ravi, Congress leader, said political parties running businesses was harmful both to politics and business.
But the dominant section in the CPM seem to think otherwise: Yesterday came the news that a party-controlled cooperative in Kozhikode, would soon launch a star hotel in the heart of the city bringing this noxious business model to this city which had so far kept a decent divide between politics and business. Now this traditionally political city too is taking a new turn, definitely for the worse.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Capitalist Do-gooders and the People of Bhopal
THE CREATIVE Capitalist entering the social sector for the benefit of the poor in expectation of public recognition as a reward is a good idea.
Only if it works in the field.
The suggestion for effective checks and balances is to go for continuous evaluation, and publish reports for assessment in a transparent way.
Grand ideas indeed. Will ensure some good work for those experts too.
But let me try to give the example of a small project I had seen in a school in my home town: They were producing vegetables in the organic way and the students and teachers were involved in this humble project which ensured the school kitchen received good vegetables at affordable cost.
Then came the government into the scene: a minister landed with his entourage, news cameras and a big ceremony of digging, cutting ribbons, ceremonial planting of saplings, etc, was organized and the next day when the students went back to their garden what they saw was a place that looked as if it had been run over by a thousand elephants in heat...
I do not blame the minister who came with an army of hangers-on to the fragile garden. For him the public glow was the essential part of the show, because he thrived on it. And I do not blame a CC do-gooder doing the same, descending on a small project somehow being run by a small grassroots group with all their limitations, but also with some limited success and applauded only by those local people who are benefited out of it and without much media glare. But when a powerful international group enters the scene with its immense media control, money power and resources, and puts up such shows with an eye on the public glow, then it would be doom for those small grassroots level movements that are slowly seem to emerge in many parts of the world, caught in this whirlwind.
So what is the way out? I would suggest to identify ways how not to trample upon the small shoots, how to be careful and culturally sensitive; how to help local people do these things themselves. But can the global capitalist powerhouses be so sensitive? I am not sure, going by our past experience.
It is around 25 years since the people of Bhopal,India, were gassed by a global company but no one from this philanthropic, crocodile-tear-shedding giants in the West cared to teach a lesson to this particular company and stand up for those victims who suffered for so many years.
Only if it works in the field.
The suggestion for effective checks and balances is to go for continuous evaluation, and publish reports for assessment in a transparent way.
Grand ideas indeed. Will ensure some good work for those experts too.
But let me try to give the example of a small project I had seen in a school in my home town: They were producing vegetables in the organic way and the students and teachers were involved in this humble project which ensured the school kitchen received good vegetables at affordable cost.
Then came the government into the scene: a minister landed with his entourage, news cameras and a big ceremony of digging, cutting ribbons, ceremonial planting of saplings, etc, was organized and the next day when the students went back to their garden what they saw was a place that looked as if it had been run over by a thousand elephants in heat...
I do not blame the minister who came with an army of hangers-on to the fragile garden. For him the public glow was the essential part of the show, because he thrived on it. And I do not blame a CC do-gooder doing the same, descending on a small project somehow being run by a small grassroots group with all their limitations, but also with some limited success and applauded only by those local people who are benefited out of it and without much media glare. But when a powerful international group enters the scene with its immense media control, money power and resources, and puts up such shows with an eye on the public glow, then it would be doom for those small grassroots level movements that are slowly seem to emerge in many parts of the world, caught in this whirlwind.
So what is the way out? I would suggest to identify ways how not to trample upon the small shoots, how to be careful and culturally sensitive; how to help local people do these things themselves. But can the global capitalist powerhouses be so sensitive? I am not sure, going by our past experience.
It is around 25 years since the people of Bhopal,India, were gassed by a global company but no one from this philanthropic, crocodile-tear-shedding giants in the West cared to teach a lesson to this particular company and stand up for those victims who suffered for so many years.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Debt Relief Activities and Farmers: A Report from Kerala
THE ECONOMIC Review 2007, released during the budget session of the State legislature by the Kerala State Planning Board, makes the claim that the GSDP of the State in real terms increased by 8.1 per cent in 2006-07, which is marginally higher than 8 per cent of the previous year. The document says: “What was notable in Kerala during 2007 was that the high growth rate came together with reduced rural distress. The most significant reflection of this was that peasant suicides came to an end in the second half of 2007, Kerala being the first major suicide-affected state to have put and end to this tragic phenomenon.”
The review looks at the first year of the Left Democratic Front Government led by V S Achuthanandan, which came to power in May, 2006. In the previous years the State was reeling under a spate of peasant suicides and according to official figures there were as many as 179 cases reported from the tiny district of Wayanad alone during 2002 to 2006. Two other major districts affected were Palakkad and Kasargode. Hence the first priority of the Government as it took over, was to find a solution to the widespread farmer distress. One of the first steps taken by the Government was to set up a statutory Agricultural Debt Relief Commission, a six-member body with members drawn from peasant organizations, legislative assembly members, judicial officers, etc, empowered to look into the complaints and find redress with the resources made available in the State budget.
The Economic Review noted: Of greater significance is the setting up of a statutory Debt Relief Commission by the State Government, which, brought substantial hope to the distressed peasantry with its formation.
It is a fact that the commission did give rise to a lot of hope among the poor peasants who were reeling under a tremendous burden of mounting debts. In the first few months itself, it had received over 4.76 lakh complaints from peasants all over the State. But the claim that the Government was able to put an end to the suicides among farmers was far fetched, as even during the 2008 summer, a few suicides were reported from Kuttanadu, known as the rice bowl of Kerala. What is distressing about the Kuttanadu suicides is that while so far the suicides were confined to the hill regions, they were now spreading to new areas. (As I finalize this note, a report came from Kasargode that on July 25, 2008, two peasants committed suicide in the district as they were not able to get any support under the government sponsored schemes.)
With a view to keep a tab on the functioning of the Agricultural Debt Relief Commission, this correspondent and a friend, journalist K P Vijayakumar, spent a few weeks monitoring it, during November-December 2007, when the Commission was holding its first sittings. We also checked back with the rural situation, looking at specific cases in order to locate what went wrong in the life of those who were forced to appeal to the Commission. It was a sad spectacle that we witnessed, as the Commission struggled with its limited funds, few staff members and many hurdles of a technical and administrative nature, facing hundreds of highly strung poor peasants waiting for redress of their grievances everywhere they went. The Commission was empowered to write off 75 per cent of the loans amounting to Rs.50,000 taken from cooperative banks, which they had to compensate from funds promised through budgetary provisions. However, they had no authority to provide relief on loans availed from nationalized or private scheduled banks. A large part of the agricultural loans were from the commercial banks and private money-lenders, as the peasants had availed every possible loan from every source available.
Here are a few cases we have studied, watching the Commission’s proceedings, talking to the distressed peasants who came to present their grievances and visiting some of their homes and villages to examine the actual state of affairs that led them to the depths of penury and distress.
The Debt Relief Commission had conducted a series of sittings at the Government Guest House, Kalpetta, headquarters of Wayanad, known as the district that has seen the largest number of peasant suicides during 2002--2007. These sittings were held in the last week of November and the first week of December, 2007.
Annamma Mathai, a 65-year-old woman from Pulpally panchayat in Wayanad, whose husband had died two years ago leaving her a land holding of 2.05 acres and a huge debt, had arrived in the town on the evening of November 29, as she had received a letter from the Commission to be present personally the next day. She was cultivating ginger and pepper in her small holding and as the products normally used to fetch reasonable returns, it was sufficient to keep the family going. Still, it left them nothing as savings because of seasonal fluctuations in prices. However, pepper vines were hit by a fast spreading disease wiping off all the plants. Her husband Mathai took a loan of Rs. 25,000 from the Nadavayal branch of South Malabar Gramin Bank to revive his farming operations. But he was unable to repay the loan and after his death, the total amount she owed to the bank had reached Rs. 42,000 leaving her no way to escape debt trap.
Annamma was the 52nd person in the queue and after a few hours’ waiting on an empty stomach --she had had no breakfast-- she was ushered into the presence of the Commission. Her files were examined and the Commission after consultations with bank officials, gave its verdict: The interest and penalty interest will be waived, she will have to pay the principal amount.
She was standing there thunder-struck, no words coming out of her mouth. Then after the lapse of a few moments, she managed to say through her tears: “Sir, where do I find the money, I have nothing…”
Moments later, she was seen moving out of the building, her head low and her frail figure swaying like a reed in the heavy Wayanad wind blowing outside.
A large number of peasants who came to the Commission were small-holding farmers whose small loans had become huge debts with penal interest as they were unable to repay the loans. But what kept them from repaying these small loans? Expert studies have been made by various agencies which came to the conclusion that non-remunerative agricultural practices, continuous price fluctuations in the market which left farmers with no savings, heavy debts owing to non-farming activities like expenses on weddings, widespread diseases of the plants, etc, as reasons.
We went to a few villages to see what actually took them to debt trap and such deep penury. One of the villages visited was Poozhithode, a small hamlet in the ward four of the eastern hill panchayat of Chakkittappara, in Kozhikode district. It is practically an inaccessible place as there are no roads; one has to walk three kilometres to reach the place. Here we met Vettappala Chinnamma, a 68-year-old woman, who lives in a dilapidated two storey building, with her sister. Chinnamma came almost fifty years ago to this remote village from Ranni in South Kerala as her family came to the north in search of a better livelihood. Land was cheap and plenty and her father had 5.5 acres of forest land converted into farm lands. They had planted areca-nut palms in the land.
Areca-nuts are spices used as an ingredient in many products and hence depend solely on global markets. There were times when it fetched very good prices, but recently there has been a major drop in prices and demand that left many farmers in distress and their plantations remained uncared for. Chinnamma’s was a two-member family with 5.5 acres of rich agricultural land, in which stood 3500 areca-nut palms, all of them headless wonders by then. When diseases hit, they had no resources to care for the palms and with no income from the land, they were almost starving. The areca-nut palms were all destroyed by the disease that had spread in the region making it a graveyard of areca-nut palms. These are long and lean plants which bear gold-colored areca-nuts with minimum care for the palms, but once the disease hits, the only way out is to replant them and for a plant to grew and bear nuts it takes a few years’ time and an infusion of heavy investment.
Chinnamma had the land but no resources to replant them. She was surviving only because of the Pubic Distribution System which is still widespread and quite effective in Kerala. Her ration card entries revealed the story of how misfortune came to take control of her life: Till May and June 2007, she was not lifting any rice from the PDS outlet. Then came the season of plant disease and ever since, from July to November, the time of our visit, the entries said she had received five kg of rice every month.
This village has many such cases of sudden misfortune hitting them like a bolt from the blue. Poovathumalil Kuttappan, an active CPM worker, has five acres of land with 3000 areca-nut palms, but the contagious disease destroyed his entire plantation. He made an effort to revive his fortunes, taking loans from various sources to replant and fight the disease. He had taken a loan of Rs. 15,160 from the Chakkittappara Service Cooperative Bank and another of Rs. 85,000 from the Union Bank of India, and was facing revenue recovery proceedings from both.
Poozhithode is classic case of an entire village going to dogs: It has an area of 88 hectares of land, and there were as many as 29 peasant families with small and medium holdings there. In the last week of November 2007, there were only six families remaining as all others had left the village looking for means for survival elsewhere. It was not lack of hard work, or physical resources or land that made their life miserable. It was the unpredictability of a peasants’ life, its total lack of any social security cover even as they solely depended on the vagaries of a global market and an equally unpredictable climate and spreading plant diseases that made them flee from the place they had lived for generations. Peasants complained that the diseases were now becoming more and more common and frequent, and many suspect it could be the impact of a changing climate patterns, irregular rainfall and excessive dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
While diseases and poor prices destroyed life in area-nut plantations, it was a global drop in prices that brought hardship to villages in Wayanad where coffee is grown. In the first week of December a visit to Kambalakkadu, a small town that smells of coffee and renowned for its coffee market, gave a picture of what went wrong with this global brand. It was here we met Sarojini, a worker in a coffee plantation at Kozhinjakkadu, in Kaniyampatta panchayat. She lives in a small hut with her two children; her husband had abandoned her two years ago. She had received Rs. 60 for a day’s work in the plantation besides four idlis, three of which she had saved three for her children.
The plantation was in bad days and there were no permanent workers any longer. Sarojini got work for three days a week. In a way, she was lucky compared to Adivasi women who got a pay of only Rs. 50 a day, if at all they had work.
The present economics of coffee production is hopeless for small and medium growers, says James, a small grower here. The coffee prices were falling and expenses for cultivation were growing. He had three acres of coffee but recently had to sell 35 cents of land to meet pressing burdens. His family of four survives on the coffee grown in the remaining 2.65 acres of land. Last year his total yield was 30 bags of coffee, each bag containing roughly 54 kg of beans. Processed, it would yield 30 kg of coffee kernel per bag, which fetches Rs. 70 per kg. Considering the expenses he incurred in maintaining the plants including the manual work, fertilizers, etc, he points out that it works out to a loss of around Rs. 60,000 per acre. At the same time, the Nescafe Classic coffee, a major brand, is sold at Rs. 68 per pouch of 50 grams in the retail outlets.
The Government policy of coffee procurement monopoly for the Coffee Board had done damage to the growers as the prices offered by the Board were quite low compared to open market. After a series of agitations, the growers were allowed to sell in the open market which, during the season of price hike, helped them. In fact in 1994-95, the local prices had touched a record of Rs. 120 per kg, but later on it fell sharply and during 2002-03, it touched the lowest benchmark of Rs.15. Last year it stood at Rs. 70, way below the boom period prices.
A third major crop that was examined during the study was pepper, an important spice grown widely in Wayanad. Pepper is historically known as black gold because of its vast demand in the world market even from the Roman times. Pulpally, known as the base of Pazhassi Raja who resisted the British East India Company in 18th century in a series of heroic battles, has been the centre of pepper trade and till a few years ago, when the plants were hit by a debilitating disease even as the prices started to crash, it was a prosperous area. In its best of times, there were as many as 540 Mahindra jeeps in this small village; one of the largest congregation of such vehicles in a small village in India. However, in the past five years this village had seen as many as 124 farmer suicides, the largest number in any Kerala village.
What brought a spate of misery here is a double tragedy: The crashing prices combined with a sudden spread of new diseases that destroyed not only the pepper vines but its supporting plants like murikku, a local variety of soft wood tree bearing bright red-colored flowers in summer. Pepper can be replanted easily but without the supporting plant, it just can’t survive. The effort by State and Central Government organizations and farm officials to revive the pepper cultivation in Pulpally is yet to take off as the entire village looks like a graveyard of pepper vines, the dried and withered supporting plants remaining like ghosts.
The sudden decline to penury and destitution has had a tremendous psychological impact on the village population, and local doctors say that there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of psychological problems and disorders. Many people have left the village, leaving behind their lands uncared for, in search of jobs in Karnataka, and women have left for the sweatshops in Tirupur and other places.
So what we saw in the villages in the last weeks of 2007 was something dramatically different from the picture described in the Economic Review report, 2007. The Government’s actions had indeed raised high hopes but the limitations imposed by the restricted operation of the Commission had put a brake on its effectiveness.
The Government in its efforts to bring some succour to distressed farmers, had decided to take over debts up to Rs. 100,000 in the case of peasants who committed suicide. It has helped a number of families who were left without any means of subsistence after their breadwinners had taken the easy way out. The Central Government package of taking over loans for agricultural purposes from nationalized and scheduled commercial banks, announced in the budget 2008, has also helped ease the situation to an extent. The Economic Review reveals that as many as 248 loans availed by the deceased farmers with liabilities up to Rs. 100,000 had been written off by commercial banks and the total amount was to the tune of Rs. 76.67 lakh. In addition, the cooperative banks had written off 487 loans of the deceased farmers, worth a total of Rs. 153.26 lakh by May 31, 2007. The total loans taken over in the both categories came to 885 involving a total amount of Rs. 2.30 core.
It is a fact that compared to the gloomiest days in recent past, things seem to be looking up now. There are many factors that helped ease the tensed situation. First, there is a minor revival of world market prices for a variety of cash crops raising hopes once again; secondly, the debt relief efforts by State and Central Government agencies seem to have arrested the trend of mass despair; third, there is a substantial increase in paddy procurement prices from Rs. 6.30 to Rs. 9 this year; and the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is somewhat effective in the poorest districts of the State, contributing to this trend.
But these are temporary and piecemeal measures whose effects could be wiped off once the prices dip again and the official aid programmes are withdrawn. What we need urgently to develop seem to be a long-term strategy that will ensue regular, remunerative prices for the farmers, a social security net for those who face sudden reversal of fortunes owing to the over-dependence on global markets, and an effective and farm-based science and technology development programme that would help address the widespread problems of diseases, erratic climate conditions, changing farming practices, etc.
(Courtesy:www.infochangeindia.org, August, 2008.)
The review looks at the first year of the Left Democratic Front Government led by V S Achuthanandan, which came to power in May, 2006. In the previous years the State was reeling under a spate of peasant suicides and according to official figures there were as many as 179 cases reported from the tiny district of Wayanad alone during 2002 to 2006. Two other major districts affected were Palakkad and Kasargode. Hence the first priority of the Government as it took over, was to find a solution to the widespread farmer distress. One of the first steps taken by the Government was to set up a statutory Agricultural Debt Relief Commission, a six-member body with members drawn from peasant organizations, legislative assembly members, judicial officers, etc, empowered to look into the complaints and find redress with the resources made available in the State budget.
The Economic Review noted: Of greater significance is the setting up of a statutory Debt Relief Commission by the State Government, which, brought substantial hope to the distressed peasantry with its formation.
It is a fact that the commission did give rise to a lot of hope among the poor peasants who were reeling under a tremendous burden of mounting debts. In the first few months itself, it had received over 4.76 lakh complaints from peasants all over the State. But the claim that the Government was able to put an end to the suicides among farmers was far fetched, as even during the 2008 summer, a few suicides were reported from Kuttanadu, known as the rice bowl of Kerala. What is distressing about the Kuttanadu suicides is that while so far the suicides were confined to the hill regions, they were now spreading to new areas. (As I finalize this note, a report came from Kasargode that on July 25, 2008, two peasants committed suicide in the district as they were not able to get any support under the government sponsored schemes.)
With a view to keep a tab on the functioning of the Agricultural Debt Relief Commission, this correspondent and a friend, journalist K P Vijayakumar, spent a few weeks monitoring it, during November-December 2007, when the Commission was holding its first sittings. We also checked back with the rural situation, looking at specific cases in order to locate what went wrong in the life of those who were forced to appeal to the Commission. It was a sad spectacle that we witnessed, as the Commission struggled with its limited funds, few staff members and many hurdles of a technical and administrative nature, facing hundreds of highly strung poor peasants waiting for redress of their grievances everywhere they went. The Commission was empowered to write off 75 per cent of the loans amounting to Rs.50,000 taken from cooperative banks, which they had to compensate from funds promised through budgetary provisions. However, they had no authority to provide relief on loans availed from nationalized or private scheduled banks. A large part of the agricultural loans were from the commercial banks and private money-lenders, as the peasants had availed every possible loan from every source available.
Here are a few cases we have studied, watching the Commission’s proceedings, talking to the distressed peasants who came to present their grievances and visiting some of their homes and villages to examine the actual state of affairs that led them to the depths of penury and distress.
The Debt Relief Commission had conducted a series of sittings at the Government Guest House, Kalpetta, headquarters of Wayanad, known as the district that has seen the largest number of peasant suicides during 2002--2007. These sittings were held in the last week of November and the first week of December, 2007.
Annamma Mathai, a 65-year-old woman from Pulpally panchayat in Wayanad, whose husband had died two years ago leaving her a land holding of 2.05 acres and a huge debt, had arrived in the town on the evening of November 29, as she had received a letter from the Commission to be present personally the next day. She was cultivating ginger and pepper in her small holding and as the products normally used to fetch reasonable returns, it was sufficient to keep the family going. Still, it left them nothing as savings because of seasonal fluctuations in prices. However, pepper vines were hit by a fast spreading disease wiping off all the plants. Her husband Mathai took a loan of Rs. 25,000 from the Nadavayal branch of South Malabar Gramin Bank to revive his farming operations. But he was unable to repay the loan and after his death, the total amount she owed to the bank had reached Rs. 42,000 leaving her no way to escape debt trap.
Annamma was the 52nd person in the queue and after a few hours’ waiting on an empty stomach --she had had no breakfast-- she was ushered into the presence of the Commission. Her files were examined and the Commission after consultations with bank officials, gave its verdict: The interest and penalty interest will be waived, she will have to pay the principal amount.
She was standing there thunder-struck, no words coming out of her mouth. Then after the lapse of a few moments, she managed to say through her tears: “Sir, where do I find the money, I have nothing…”
Moments later, she was seen moving out of the building, her head low and her frail figure swaying like a reed in the heavy Wayanad wind blowing outside.
A large number of peasants who came to the Commission were small-holding farmers whose small loans had become huge debts with penal interest as they were unable to repay the loans. But what kept them from repaying these small loans? Expert studies have been made by various agencies which came to the conclusion that non-remunerative agricultural practices, continuous price fluctuations in the market which left farmers with no savings, heavy debts owing to non-farming activities like expenses on weddings, widespread diseases of the plants, etc, as reasons.
We went to a few villages to see what actually took them to debt trap and such deep penury. One of the villages visited was Poozhithode, a small hamlet in the ward four of the eastern hill panchayat of Chakkittappara, in Kozhikode district. It is practically an inaccessible place as there are no roads; one has to walk three kilometres to reach the place. Here we met Vettappala Chinnamma, a 68-year-old woman, who lives in a dilapidated two storey building, with her sister. Chinnamma came almost fifty years ago to this remote village from Ranni in South Kerala as her family came to the north in search of a better livelihood. Land was cheap and plenty and her father had 5.5 acres of forest land converted into farm lands. They had planted areca-nut palms in the land.
Areca-nuts are spices used as an ingredient in many products and hence depend solely on global markets. There were times when it fetched very good prices, but recently there has been a major drop in prices and demand that left many farmers in distress and their plantations remained uncared for. Chinnamma’s was a two-member family with 5.5 acres of rich agricultural land, in which stood 3500 areca-nut palms, all of them headless wonders by then. When diseases hit, they had no resources to care for the palms and with no income from the land, they were almost starving. The areca-nut palms were all destroyed by the disease that had spread in the region making it a graveyard of areca-nut palms. These are long and lean plants which bear gold-colored areca-nuts with minimum care for the palms, but once the disease hits, the only way out is to replant them and for a plant to grew and bear nuts it takes a few years’ time and an infusion of heavy investment.
Chinnamma had the land but no resources to replant them. She was surviving only because of the Pubic Distribution System which is still widespread and quite effective in Kerala. Her ration card entries revealed the story of how misfortune came to take control of her life: Till May and June 2007, she was not lifting any rice from the PDS outlet. Then came the season of plant disease and ever since, from July to November, the time of our visit, the entries said she had received five kg of rice every month.
This village has many such cases of sudden misfortune hitting them like a bolt from the blue. Poovathumalil Kuttappan, an active CPM worker, has five acres of land with 3000 areca-nut palms, but the contagious disease destroyed his entire plantation. He made an effort to revive his fortunes, taking loans from various sources to replant and fight the disease. He had taken a loan of Rs. 15,160 from the Chakkittappara Service Cooperative Bank and another of Rs. 85,000 from the Union Bank of India, and was facing revenue recovery proceedings from both.
Poozhithode is classic case of an entire village going to dogs: It has an area of 88 hectares of land, and there were as many as 29 peasant families with small and medium holdings there. In the last week of November 2007, there were only six families remaining as all others had left the village looking for means for survival elsewhere. It was not lack of hard work, or physical resources or land that made their life miserable. It was the unpredictability of a peasants’ life, its total lack of any social security cover even as they solely depended on the vagaries of a global market and an equally unpredictable climate and spreading plant diseases that made them flee from the place they had lived for generations. Peasants complained that the diseases were now becoming more and more common and frequent, and many suspect it could be the impact of a changing climate patterns, irregular rainfall and excessive dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
While diseases and poor prices destroyed life in area-nut plantations, it was a global drop in prices that brought hardship to villages in Wayanad where coffee is grown. In the first week of December a visit to Kambalakkadu, a small town that smells of coffee and renowned for its coffee market, gave a picture of what went wrong with this global brand. It was here we met Sarojini, a worker in a coffee plantation at Kozhinjakkadu, in Kaniyampatta panchayat. She lives in a small hut with her two children; her husband had abandoned her two years ago. She had received Rs. 60 for a day’s work in the plantation besides four idlis, three of which she had saved three for her children.
The plantation was in bad days and there were no permanent workers any longer. Sarojini got work for three days a week. In a way, she was lucky compared to Adivasi women who got a pay of only Rs. 50 a day, if at all they had work.
The present economics of coffee production is hopeless for small and medium growers, says James, a small grower here. The coffee prices were falling and expenses for cultivation were growing. He had three acres of coffee but recently had to sell 35 cents of land to meet pressing burdens. His family of four survives on the coffee grown in the remaining 2.65 acres of land. Last year his total yield was 30 bags of coffee, each bag containing roughly 54 kg of beans. Processed, it would yield 30 kg of coffee kernel per bag, which fetches Rs. 70 per kg. Considering the expenses he incurred in maintaining the plants including the manual work, fertilizers, etc, he points out that it works out to a loss of around Rs. 60,000 per acre. At the same time, the Nescafe Classic coffee, a major brand, is sold at Rs. 68 per pouch of 50 grams in the retail outlets.
The Government policy of coffee procurement monopoly for the Coffee Board had done damage to the growers as the prices offered by the Board were quite low compared to open market. After a series of agitations, the growers were allowed to sell in the open market which, during the season of price hike, helped them. In fact in 1994-95, the local prices had touched a record of Rs. 120 per kg, but later on it fell sharply and during 2002-03, it touched the lowest benchmark of Rs.15. Last year it stood at Rs. 70, way below the boom period prices.
A third major crop that was examined during the study was pepper, an important spice grown widely in Wayanad. Pepper is historically known as black gold because of its vast demand in the world market even from the Roman times. Pulpally, known as the base of Pazhassi Raja who resisted the British East India Company in 18th century in a series of heroic battles, has been the centre of pepper trade and till a few years ago, when the plants were hit by a debilitating disease even as the prices started to crash, it was a prosperous area. In its best of times, there were as many as 540 Mahindra jeeps in this small village; one of the largest congregation of such vehicles in a small village in India. However, in the past five years this village had seen as many as 124 farmer suicides, the largest number in any Kerala village.
What brought a spate of misery here is a double tragedy: The crashing prices combined with a sudden spread of new diseases that destroyed not only the pepper vines but its supporting plants like murikku, a local variety of soft wood tree bearing bright red-colored flowers in summer. Pepper can be replanted easily but without the supporting plant, it just can’t survive. The effort by State and Central Government organizations and farm officials to revive the pepper cultivation in Pulpally is yet to take off as the entire village looks like a graveyard of pepper vines, the dried and withered supporting plants remaining like ghosts.
The sudden decline to penury and destitution has had a tremendous psychological impact on the village population, and local doctors say that there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of psychological problems and disorders. Many people have left the village, leaving behind their lands uncared for, in search of jobs in Karnataka, and women have left for the sweatshops in Tirupur and other places.
So what we saw in the villages in the last weeks of 2007 was something dramatically different from the picture described in the Economic Review report, 2007. The Government’s actions had indeed raised high hopes but the limitations imposed by the restricted operation of the Commission had put a brake on its effectiveness.
The Government in its efforts to bring some succour to distressed farmers, had decided to take over debts up to Rs. 100,000 in the case of peasants who committed suicide. It has helped a number of families who were left without any means of subsistence after their breadwinners had taken the easy way out. The Central Government package of taking over loans for agricultural purposes from nationalized and scheduled commercial banks, announced in the budget 2008, has also helped ease the situation to an extent. The Economic Review reveals that as many as 248 loans availed by the deceased farmers with liabilities up to Rs. 100,000 had been written off by commercial banks and the total amount was to the tune of Rs. 76.67 lakh. In addition, the cooperative banks had written off 487 loans of the deceased farmers, worth a total of Rs. 153.26 lakh by May 31, 2007. The total loans taken over in the both categories came to 885 involving a total amount of Rs. 2.30 core.
It is a fact that compared to the gloomiest days in recent past, things seem to be looking up now. There are many factors that helped ease the tensed situation. First, there is a minor revival of world market prices for a variety of cash crops raising hopes once again; secondly, the debt relief efforts by State and Central Government agencies seem to have arrested the trend of mass despair; third, there is a substantial increase in paddy procurement prices from Rs. 6.30 to Rs. 9 this year; and the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is somewhat effective in the poorest districts of the State, contributing to this trend.
But these are temporary and piecemeal measures whose effects could be wiped off once the prices dip again and the official aid programmes are withdrawn. What we need urgently to develop seem to be a long-term strategy that will ensue regular, remunerative prices for the farmers, a social security net for those who face sudden reversal of fortunes owing to the over-dependence on global markets, and an effective and farm-based science and technology development programme that would help address the widespread problems of diseases, erratic climate conditions, changing farming practices, etc.
(Courtesy:www.infochangeindia.org, August, 2008.)
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Capitalism& the Poor World: A Response to Jagdish Bbhagwati, Abhijit Banerjee and others
EMINENT ECONOMIST from Colombia University, Dr Jagdish Bhagwati writes: Typically, the rich in Ahmedabad spent moneys on people's education, on health, and (believe it or not) even on agricultural extension and dry farming experiments.
I am not sure whether Dr Bhagwati visits his home town oftener these days. But I find things are slightly different at the grassroots from the rosy picture he paints.
I don't deny the rich Gujaratis did spend money on philanthropic efforts. They did and they even supported the Indian national movement even when their business interests went against their nationalist sentiments.
But these days how do the rich Gujarati's spend their money?
It is a fact that the anti-minority pogroms that made Gujarat notorious in recent past were funded and supported by these same sections who have plenty of money to spare and they nourished the politics of hooliganism with their riches. Now all over the world the Gujarati diaspora speak of a new Gujarat and this Gujarat is something terribly different from the one the old Rajkot-wallah, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, lived in and died for. It is a place where the other, the poor Muslim who lives in the slums of Ahmedabad and Baroda, has no place.
This is the experience all over the country. As a journalist, I find that the rich NRIs are the major supporters and financiers of a highly virulent kind of nationalism -- a nationalism that is more likely to divide this country again -- that promotes bigotry, hatred and jingoism. They are the people who, from their safe havens in the west, want India to make N-bomb and possibly send its neighbors to the stone age. Read their blogs and comments in newspapers and you are flooded with such sentiments, expressed quite openly and unabashedly.
So perhaps we need to rethink what money can do to a person and a nation. Uncontrolled riches can play havoc too.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 21, 2008
Dr Abhijit Banerjee gives a few examples from India, and most of them about the way the country failed to make any mark in beneficial social interventions.
But I had occasion to see the agency of the government actually at work, in a beneficial way. He speaks about the recent budget provision of Rs. 75,000 for the assistance of farmers in distress (to which many economists were not enthusiastic,) following the large number of farmer suicides in various parts of the country, from Vidharbha in Maharashtra to Wayanad in Kerala.
I visited a few villages in Wayanad hit by farmer suicides in the recent past and found that two major steps taken by the state and federal governments, the debt relief commission set up by the Kerala Government and the debt write-off program announced by the Federal Government, did help ease the situation on the ground. During 2002-2007 there were regular reports of farmer suicides from all parts of rural India, but in the past few months they are rare, though not fully subsided.
Wayanad gave me an example of how it works. The debt relief commission, which had received over four lakh petitions in the first three months, had held a few sittings there and I saw many people, most of them with small amounts of loans from various sources, had approached it for help and they were able to provide them in most cases.
The Kerala state's Economic Review 2007, released by the Planning Board headed by Dr Prabhat Patnaik, an eminent economist, reported that by the end of 2007 the state was able to put an end to the widespread farmer suicides in the region.
As a journalist working in this region, I know that this is not 100 per cent true, but to a large extent this claim is factual. The suicides have markedly come down and the government efforts did play a major role in this gain.
In fact, Kerala can be considered a model for the public intervention ensuring a better and even equitable social order: Its human development indexes are almost comparable to the first world, and recent studies seem to say that even the economic growth, which was extremely poor in the past, is now picking up as shown by the experience of recent years.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 22, 2008
In response to Eric Werker:
Elsewhere Prof Abhijit Banerjee has expressed reservation about the concept of a weak state, what does exactly it mean. Any lack of a proper understanding or a definition of what is a weak state could be problematic, since there are talks about pressuring, funding and even making use of 'economic smart bombs' to keep them in line.
Being a person from the South which the new 'socially responsible corporates' are determined to reform and revive, I am extremely worried and concerned of what goes on here. I do not say there is any kind of conspiracy here to subdue the poor South making use of new concepts, new ideas and the monopoly over economic and intellectual resources and technological advances the West still enjoys, as many others in the South do believe, but let me point out that the muddled understanding about the people who are not known to those policy-makers can really do much harm.
I am not going into the details about what were our experiences with the World Bank and IMF in the past but in the countries of South, say in my own country India, there has been a great debate on it for a long time. Looking back, it is clear that there was a not-so-subtle element of putting pressure, arms twisting in most of their policy dictates/formulations with regard to many countries in our part of the world.
So let us try to understand what is a weak state? Is the United States a 'strong state' perhaps? Is it the yardstick for the whole world to emulate? Then I think many would not think of anything but 'shock and awe', something too mean for any civilized nation to speak about. So let us drop the use of terms that eerily remind about military tactics, often applied in the past, and in many cases eve now in operation and for some others, still in the pipeline.
Or are we talking about the United States a model strong state in economic terms? I don't deny that the US still has an advantage in science, technology,trade, etc, but is it in the same dominant position as it used to be, say just a few years ago? What is going to be its position in another ten years, after this Iraq war accounts are due to be settled and possibly another from Iran too comes in for payments? It does not look rosy at all and as Fareed Zachariah seems to argue, the US is not declining but that the others are also rising. Well, it's a matter of speculation and I feel when others are rising fast and the US is unable to rise to balance or even out, then what we will see is the decline of the empire.
Here I would agree with the author that may be this new sudden urge to help out without properly looking at the world we are going to reform could do more harm than good. It is not only the dictators or commission agents who i am talking about. They are only an ephemeral phenomenon as people in those countries can take care of them in due course of time. What worries me is that any misguided and impatient approach could harm the nascent, slowly evolving democratic institutions in many parts of these countries that are trying to cope with difficulties, learn to walk, to solve their problems in their own unique ways.
Perhaps what they require from the West is simply a proper hearing, a respectful understanding and may be some little help here and there in making themselves useful; both to themselves and to the world.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 24, 2008
I am not sure whether Dr Bhagwati visits his home town oftener these days. But I find things are slightly different at the grassroots from the rosy picture he paints.
I don't deny the rich Gujaratis did spend money on philanthropic efforts. They did and they even supported the Indian national movement even when their business interests went against their nationalist sentiments.
But these days how do the rich Gujarati's spend their money?
It is a fact that the anti-minority pogroms that made Gujarat notorious in recent past were funded and supported by these same sections who have plenty of money to spare and they nourished the politics of hooliganism with their riches. Now all over the world the Gujarati diaspora speak of a new Gujarat and this Gujarat is something terribly different from the one the old Rajkot-wallah, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, lived in and died for. It is a place where the other, the poor Muslim who lives in the slums of Ahmedabad and Baroda, has no place.
This is the experience all over the country. As a journalist, I find that the rich NRIs are the major supporters and financiers of a highly virulent kind of nationalism -- a nationalism that is more likely to divide this country again -- that promotes bigotry, hatred and jingoism. They are the people who, from their safe havens in the west, want India to make N-bomb and possibly send its neighbors to the stone age. Read their blogs and comments in newspapers and you are flooded with such sentiments, expressed quite openly and unabashedly.
So perhaps we need to rethink what money can do to a person and a nation. Uncontrolled riches can play havoc too.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 21, 2008
Dr Abhijit Banerjee gives a few examples from India, and most of them about the way the country failed to make any mark in beneficial social interventions.
But I had occasion to see the agency of the government actually at work, in a beneficial way. He speaks about the recent budget provision of Rs. 75,000 for the assistance of farmers in distress (to which many economists were not enthusiastic,) following the large number of farmer suicides in various parts of the country, from Vidharbha in Maharashtra to Wayanad in Kerala.
I visited a few villages in Wayanad hit by farmer suicides in the recent past and found that two major steps taken by the state and federal governments, the debt relief commission set up by the Kerala Government and the debt write-off program announced by the Federal Government, did help ease the situation on the ground. During 2002-2007 there were regular reports of farmer suicides from all parts of rural India, but in the past few months they are rare, though not fully subsided.
Wayanad gave me an example of how it works. The debt relief commission, which had received over four lakh petitions in the first three months, had held a few sittings there and I saw many people, most of them with small amounts of loans from various sources, had approached it for help and they were able to provide them in most cases.
The Kerala state's Economic Review 2007, released by the Planning Board headed by Dr Prabhat Patnaik, an eminent economist, reported that by the end of 2007 the state was able to put an end to the widespread farmer suicides in the region.
As a journalist working in this region, I know that this is not 100 per cent true, but to a large extent this claim is factual. The suicides have markedly come down and the government efforts did play a major role in this gain.
In fact, Kerala can be considered a model for the public intervention ensuring a better and even equitable social order: Its human development indexes are almost comparable to the first world, and recent studies seem to say that even the economic growth, which was extremely poor in the past, is now picking up as shown by the experience of recent years.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 22, 2008
In response to Eric Werker:
Elsewhere Prof Abhijit Banerjee has expressed reservation about the concept of a weak state, what does exactly it mean. Any lack of a proper understanding or a definition of what is a weak state could be problematic, since there are talks about pressuring, funding and even making use of 'economic smart bombs' to keep them in line.
Being a person from the South which the new 'socially responsible corporates' are determined to reform and revive, I am extremely worried and concerned of what goes on here. I do not say there is any kind of conspiracy here to subdue the poor South making use of new concepts, new ideas and the monopoly over economic and intellectual resources and technological advances the West still enjoys, as many others in the South do believe, but let me point out that the muddled understanding about the people who are not known to those policy-makers can really do much harm.
I am not going into the details about what were our experiences with the World Bank and IMF in the past but in the countries of South, say in my own country India, there has been a great debate on it for a long time. Looking back, it is clear that there was a not-so-subtle element of putting pressure, arms twisting in most of their policy dictates/formulations with regard to many countries in our part of the world.
So let us try to understand what is a weak state? Is the United States a 'strong state' perhaps? Is it the yardstick for the whole world to emulate? Then I think many would not think of anything but 'shock and awe', something too mean for any civilized nation to speak about. So let us drop the use of terms that eerily remind about military tactics, often applied in the past, and in many cases eve now in operation and for some others, still in the pipeline.
Or are we talking about the United States a model strong state in economic terms? I don't deny that the US still has an advantage in science, technology,trade, etc, but is it in the same dominant position as it used to be, say just a few years ago? What is going to be its position in another ten years, after this Iraq war accounts are due to be settled and possibly another from Iran too comes in for payments? It does not look rosy at all and as Fareed Zachariah seems to argue, the US is not declining but that the others are also rising. Well, it's a matter of speculation and I feel when others are rising fast and the US is unable to rise to balance or even out, then what we will see is the decline of the empire.
Here I would agree with the author that may be this new sudden urge to help out without properly looking at the world we are going to reform could do more harm than good. It is not only the dictators or commission agents who i am talking about. They are only an ephemeral phenomenon as people in those countries can take care of them in due course of time. What worries me is that any misguided and impatient approach could harm the nascent, slowly evolving democratic institutions in many parts of these countries that are trying to cope with difficulties, learn to walk, to solve their problems in their own unique ways.
Perhaps what they require from the West is simply a proper hearing, a respectful understanding and may be some little help here and there in making themselves useful; both to themselves and to the world.
Posted by:n p chekkutty | July 24, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Will Global Giants in Search of Public Glow will Trample us Underfoot?
This is in continuation of the debates on the idea of creative capitalism gaining ground, after the Bill Gates speech at Davos:
THE CREATIVE Capitalist entering the social sector for the benefit of the poor in expectation of public recognition as a reward is a good idea.
Only if it works in the field.
The suggestion for effective checks and balances is to go for continuous evaluation, and publish reports for assessment in a transparent way.
Grand ideas indeed. Will ensure some good work for those experts too.
But let me try to give the example of a small project I had seen in a school in my home town: They were producing vegetables in the organic way and the students and teachers were involved in this humble project which ensured the school kitchen received good vegetables at affordable cost.
Then came the government into the scene: a minister landed with his entourage, news cameras and a big ceremony of digging, cutting ribbons, ceremonial planting of saplings, etc, was organized and the next day when the students went back to their garden what they saw was a place that looked as if it had been run over by a thousand elephants in heat...
I do not blame the minister who came with an army of hangers-on to the fragile garden. For him the public glow was the essential part of the show, because he thrived on it. And I do not blame a CC do-gooder doing the same, descending on a small project somehow being run by a small grassroots group with all their limitations, but also with some limited success and applauded only by those local people who are benefited out of it and without much media glare. But when a powerful international group enters the scene with its immense media control, money power and resources, and puts up such shows with an eye on the public glow, then it would be doom for those small grassroots level movements that are slowly seem to emerge in many parts of the world, caught in this whirlwind.
So what is the way out? I would suggest to identify ways how not to trample upon the small shoots, how to be careful and culturally sensitive; how to help local people do these things themselves. But can the global capitalist powerhouses be so sensitive? I am not sure, going by our past experience.
It is around 25 years since the people of Bhopal,India, were gassed by a global company but no one from this philanthropic, crocodile-tear-shedding giants in the West cared to teach a lesson to this particular company and stand up for those victims who suffered for so many years.
THE CREATIVE Capitalist entering the social sector for the benefit of the poor in expectation of public recognition as a reward is a good idea.
Only if it works in the field.
The suggestion for effective checks and balances is to go for continuous evaluation, and publish reports for assessment in a transparent way.
Grand ideas indeed. Will ensure some good work for those experts too.
But let me try to give the example of a small project I had seen in a school in my home town: They were producing vegetables in the organic way and the students and teachers were involved in this humble project which ensured the school kitchen received good vegetables at affordable cost.
Then came the government into the scene: a minister landed with his entourage, news cameras and a big ceremony of digging, cutting ribbons, ceremonial planting of saplings, etc, was organized and the next day when the students went back to their garden what they saw was a place that looked as if it had been run over by a thousand elephants in heat...
I do not blame the minister who came with an army of hangers-on to the fragile garden. For him the public glow was the essential part of the show, because he thrived on it. And I do not blame a CC do-gooder doing the same, descending on a small project somehow being run by a small grassroots group with all their limitations, but also with some limited success and applauded only by those local people who are benefited out of it and without much media glare. But when a powerful international group enters the scene with its immense media control, money power and resources, and puts up such shows with an eye on the public glow, then it would be doom for those small grassroots level movements that are slowly seem to emerge in many parts of the world, caught in this whirlwind.
So what is the way out? I would suggest to identify ways how not to trample upon the small shoots, how to be careful and culturally sensitive; how to help local people do these things themselves. But can the global capitalist powerhouses be so sensitive? I am not sure, going by our past experience.
It is around 25 years since the people of Bhopal,India, were gassed by a global company but no one from this philanthropic, crocodile-tear-shedding giants in the West cared to teach a lesson to this particular company and stand up for those victims who suffered for so many years.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Social Engineering in the Media?
Thejas was a newspaper being launched by a Muslim organization dubbed extremist by the mainstream press and there had to be a keen and clear understanding of what was going to be its political and ideological standpoint. N P CHEKKUTTY chronicles his efforts to shape an editorial team drawn from among the backward castes, dalits, and Muslim women.
MEDIA SCHOLAR James Mutti’s article on the Challenges before Indian media, at the SAJA Forum, has once again brought into sharp focus the issue of media and its social role in a developing society like India. One thing that has been missing in most of these debates, often initiated and carried out by the urban centric media pundits both in India and the west, is the changing reality of the Indian countryside and the small towns, which are now emerging as major media centres with the fast growth of literacy, economic development and social and political empowerment. For the first time in Indian history, rural masses are coming into the media picture, not only as clichéd figures in some human interest stories but as actual players with substantial stake as readers, advertisers and as a class of consumers targeted by the advertisers.
James Mutti’s article and Ramachandra Guha’s column based on it in Telegraph, has set off a wide debate on Indian media, as the large number of responses in the SAJA Forum blog makes it amply clear. But surprisingly, most of the debates were focused on the metro-centric Indian press, and the rising Indian regional press got very little attention. One reason, I believe, is that most of the media commentators are familiar with only the urban scene and tend to ignore what goes on in the Indian countryside and small towns, where a media revolution is now taking place. As media critic Sevanti Ninan pointed out, “throughout the rural areas there is an emerging rural middle class which is able to afford newspapers but which is still far removed from popular notions of middle class consumption.”
What goes on in the non-metro regions is quite exciting, to anyone who watches the Indian rural scene and keeps a tab on the media growth in those places. Here I would like to write about a particular media experiment I was involved in, during the past three years and how it has developed, despite heavy odds empowering a cross section of the most disadvantaged sections of our society.
Three years ago, while working in Delhi, I was invited back to my home town, Kozhikode in Kerala, where I was asked to help develop a new newspaper that would cater to the Muslims, the backward castes and the Dalits who were the most disadvantaged sections of Malayali population. These three sections combined with certain sections in the Latin Catholic community and the tribal people constitute the most disadvantaged sections in Kerala society.
But addressing all of them was not easy or practical. For one thing, a newspaper that is launched from the northern part of Kerala, which in itself is the backward part of the State, could not easily reach out to the predominantly fisher people of the Latin Catholics in the south while the tribal people in the hills are practically out of bounds for any newspaper, mainly because most of them are still far from a position to buy or read a daily newspaper.
So we had to accept this limitation and focus on the Muslims, the backward Hindus and Dalits, to start with. As for the Muslims, a dominant community in Kerala though most of them are economically and socially backward, there were already four newspapers coming from Kozhikode itself, catering to this reading segment. The most important among them, Madhyamam, launched by a Jamaat e Islami-controlled trust two decades ago, had already reached a good circulation base with editions from various cities in Kerala and also from the Gulf, competing for the third position in circulation after Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi.
It was indeed a saturated market in Kerala, with newspapers like Mathrubhumi and Malayala Manorama with strong financial base and access to each and every segment of the Malayali reading public dominating it, and dozens of other smaller players like Kerala Kaumudi, Mangalam, Madhyamam, Deshabhimani, Chandrika, Siraj, Varthamanam, etc, catering to specific caste, community and political segments.
So right from the beginning, when we started our planning in June 2005, we had to devise new methods to attract readership and find a niche to survive. We also had to contend with a negative campaign as the prime movers behind the new media initiative was National Development Front (NDF), a Muslim organization which was widely described as an extremist group, by their detractors. Hence we had to prove our credentials as equal and responsible players in a democratic polity, speaking up for those sections which were not truly and genuinely represented in the dominant media.
During my 15 years in Indian Express, as a senior journalist in Kerala and outside, I had noticed how few journalists from these backward sections were there in the mainstream media, even in a most literate and progressive state like Kerala. Most of the journalists came from the upper caste segments, and as a result though the subaltern issues were generally given sufficient space in the media, what was conspicuous by its absence was any serious and concerted follow-up taking these issues to a logical conclusion. (In some cases, such reports on abuse of lower castes were relegated to local editions, thus effectively burying those stories.)
That was an area we thought we could make an impact. Right from the beginning, we made a serious search for journalists who could join us from the backward castes and Dalit communities, and we were successful in developing a few new journalists even from the Dalits while even today there are no Dalit journalists in most major Malayalam newspapers. Today we have a few Dalit journalists with us, including a girl in the desk, who are able to make a mark just like any others in the profession.
A second area that was left to us to explore was women journalists. Kerala’s Muslim community is generally very conservative and women are not encouraged to take part in public life and they are not encouraged to take up jobs too. As a result, though there were a large number of Muslim journalists and editors in Kerala, there were not many women among them. (The only Muslim woman journalist in Kerala at that time, to my knowledge, was Shabna Ziyad who worked with veteran journalist Leela Menon in an evening daily in Kochi.)
Thus at the time of recruiting, as executive editor, my main focus was to tap the resources left unexplored by the mainstream. And I was not wrong because there were lots of Muslim girls who were eager to join this new profession that was closed to them till then. Not many of them were fit to be in the desk or in bureaus, but we were able to find a few like Shabna Ziyad (now a district level reporter at Idukky), Jasmine (presently with Indiavision TV, Malappuram) and Khadeeja, an abandoned wife and mother of grown up children who was making a determined effort to find a new life. (Later on, she emerged as one of the most effective food columnists with her keen eye for the exotic Muslim cuisine, not explored by the well known food writers.)
I still remember with a sense of pride and happiness those days in mid 2005 when I was engaged in a search for new faces to run a newspaper that spoke to the subaltern sections in our society. We were able to fish out many good talents, and one of the girls who later developed herself into a good sub-editor and page-maker well versed on the latest version of Quark Xpress, was the daughter of an unemployed person who had smuggled himself to a Gulf country hiding in the lower desk of an uru, a small sea-faring vessel, as an illegal migrant. At the time she came for the interview, she was employed as a salesgirl in a textile shop in the city. Another boy came from Manjeri in Malappuram whose father was an assistant to a butcher in the local meat market. Today this Muslim boy is one of the best reporters with the paper.
It was not an easy task. We had very limited resources, and hence were not able to rope in the best and the well known in the media market. We decided to take the opposite path, recruiting from the lowest sections, training with the most advanced technological and professional systems and helping them develop skills necessary to run a newspaper on their own. We set up an intensive training programme that consisted of two months duration, in which we trained them in technical skills like Malayalam typesetting, page-making, etc; professional skills like reporting, editing and proof reading and translating agency copy that came in English. Besides this we gave them a world view, discussing how as a newspaper we would be able to serve the society we lived in. Veteran human rights activist and journalist Mukundan C Menon who was with us those days played a key role in this, and I remember with a heavy heart that he died during this period, collapsing in the class room one morning.
These class room debates and discussions had to tackle another serious problem, of an ideological and political nature. Thejas was a newspaper being launched by a group of people and organizations dubbed extremist by the mainstream press and there had to be a keen and clear understanding of what was going to be its political and ideological standpoint. Most of the new recruits represented a cross section of Kerala society, and it was a serious task to find a common cohesive ideological standpoint.
We thought we would evolve as and when we went on with our work, so that we could discuss such matters as they emerged. So a practice was evolved in which everyday the desk and editors would together debate the stories we did, the mistake we committed and how we would have done it better or differently. It was mainly a desk consisting of inexperienced people, except for only a very few, and so right from the beginning we knew we would make mistakes and hence one of the first decisions was to keep a column for corrections, which we did and meticulously followed through ever since.
But we were a newspaper that proclaimed to be a part of the victims at the social, political and economic spheres. So we had to be wary of the pitfalls of copying the international and national news agencies who generally toed the official line, which often proved to be quite misleading or plainly anti-Muslim or anti-Dalit or anti-backward as the case may be. So one crucial decision was to avoid use of the word “terrorist”, which was not value neutral. We decided that whenever people are fighting for a cause and engaged in militant struggles against armed forces of the state, we would describe them as fighters.
Here there was another serious question: How to describe those people who targeted civilians? In such circumstances, the best and apt word to describe those perpetrators of such violent acts against innocents was to use the words extremist or militant.
It was on January 26, 2006 that Thejas, a new daily from Kozhikode, was first launched after six-month long preparations. It was a success, going by the response of the readers and the market. We were expecting a very limited circulation, but when the first issue was printed we had printed three times than what we had initially expected. Then came a period of fast growth with editions in Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi in the next few months and recently, in May 2008, the fourth edition was launched from Kannur in the northern part of Kerala.
When I look back, I think what made us click was the fact that we made a conscious effort to chart out a new course, in both media business and journalistic practice. We were able to discern our weaknesses and our shortfalls and then we made an effort to convert them into our strength, our core competency. We saw that as a newspaper that spoke mainly to the Muslim community in a world where ‘Islamophobia’ was dominant, it was necessary to give as much global news as possible from the view point of the victims of the aggression. We dedicated a full page to international news, with a daily cartoon strip called Cartoon World. It was the first time a Malayalam newspaper giving a full page in a 12-page broadsheet to international news. Then we changed the whole outlook on Edit Page, giving shorter and sharper editorials instead of the long and dry edits that filled two columns, that was the order of the day in mainstream Malayalam press. Our first edit focused on political, social and economic concerns of the day while the second, a small write-up of 120 words, was written in a witty way on developments in science, technology, religion, literature, etc. We also found space for an editorial cartoon on the same page, that lampooned rather than tickled. At a time when readers’ responses were getting a short shrift in most dailies, we ensured that one third of the space is given to readers’ letters and on Sundays the two column space for editorials was dedicated to readers, for the new column, Readers Editorial.
Now it is time to assess how far such an unconventional media approach has had any impact on the society and the media practice. It is for the media analysts and social critics to make this assessment. But there are some very clear trends now visible: Even most of the mainstream newspapers are now wary of using the term “terrorist” indiscriminately as they used to in the past. As Mukundan C. Menon used to tell us, when Abdunnasar Madani, a Muslim leader of fiery speeches, was arrested nine years ago, all newspapers described him as a terrorist because that is what the police said. After nine years when he came out of the jail as the court threw out all the cases against him, he came as a reminder of how media could be misled by vested interests. Perhaps this rethinking about how to look at media and its vital role is a key contribution that we were able to make to Kerala society in the past three years.
Courtesy:www.thehoot.org, posted Saturday, Jun 28, 2008.
(N P Chekkutty, executive editor of Thejas Daily, earlier worked as chief reporter, Indian Express, Kozhikode, director, news & current affairs, Kairali TV, Kochi, and bureau chief, Madhyamam, New Delhi.)
MEDIA SCHOLAR James Mutti’s article on the Challenges before Indian media, at the SAJA Forum, has once again brought into sharp focus the issue of media and its social role in a developing society like India. One thing that has been missing in most of these debates, often initiated and carried out by the urban centric media pundits both in India and the west, is the changing reality of the Indian countryside and the small towns, which are now emerging as major media centres with the fast growth of literacy, economic development and social and political empowerment. For the first time in Indian history, rural masses are coming into the media picture, not only as clichéd figures in some human interest stories but as actual players with substantial stake as readers, advertisers and as a class of consumers targeted by the advertisers.
James Mutti’s article and Ramachandra Guha’s column based on it in Telegraph, has set off a wide debate on Indian media, as the large number of responses in the SAJA Forum blog makes it amply clear. But surprisingly, most of the debates were focused on the metro-centric Indian press, and the rising Indian regional press got very little attention. One reason, I believe, is that most of the media commentators are familiar with only the urban scene and tend to ignore what goes on in the Indian countryside and small towns, where a media revolution is now taking place. As media critic Sevanti Ninan pointed out, “throughout the rural areas there is an emerging rural middle class which is able to afford newspapers but which is still far removed from popular notions of middle class consumption.”
What goes on in the non-metro regions is quite exciting, to anyone who watches the Indian rural scene and keeps a tab on the media growth in those places. Here I would like to write about a particular media experiment I was involved in, during the past three years and how it has developed, despite heavy odds empowering a cross section of the most disadvantaged sections of our society.
Three years ago, while working in Delhi, I was invited back to my home town, Kozhikode in Kerala, where I was asked to help develop a new newspaper that would cater to the Muslims, the backward castes and the Dalits who were the most disadvantaged sections of Malayali population. These three sections combined with certain sections in the Latin Catholic community and the tribal people constitute the most disadvantaged sections in Kerala society.
But addressing all of them was not easy or practical. For one thing, a newspaper that is launched from the northern part of Kerala, which in itself is the backward part of the State, could not easily reach out to the predominantly fisher people of the Latin Catholics in the south while the tribal people in the hills are practically out of bounds for any newspaper, mainly because most of them are still far from a position to buy or read a daily newspaper.
So we had to accept this limitation and focus on the Muslims, the backward Hindus and Dalits, to start with. As for the Muslims, a dominant community in Kerala though most of them are economically and socially backward, there were already four newspapers coming from Kozhikode itself, catering to this reading segment. The most important among them, Madhyamam, launched by a Jamaat e Islami-controlled trust two decades ago, had already reached a good circulation base with editions from various cities in Kerala and also from the Gulf, competing for the third position in circulation after Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi.
It was indeed a saturated market in Kerala, with newspapers like Mathrubhumi and Malayala Manorama with strong financial base and access to each and every segment of the Malayali reading public dominating it, and dozens of other smaller players like Kerala Kaumudi, Mangalam, Madhyamam, Deshabhimani, Chandrika, Siraj, Varthamanam, etc, catering to specific caste, community and political segments.
So right from the beginning, when we started our planning in June 2005, we had to devise new methods to attract readership and find a niche to survive. We also had to contend with a negative campaign as the prime movers behind the new media initiative was National Development Front (NDF), a Muslim organization which was widely described as an extremist group, by their detractors. Hence we had to prove our credentials as equal and responsible players in a democratic polity, speaking up for those sections which were not truly and genuinely represented in the dominant media.
During my 15 years in Indian Express, as a senior journalist in Kerala and outside, I had noticed how few journalists from these backward sections were there in the mainstream media, even in a most literate and progressive state like Kerala. Most of the journalists came from the upper caste segments, and as a result though the subaltern issues were generally given sufficient space in the media, what was conspicuous by its absence was any serious and concerted follow-up taking these issues to a logical conclusion. (In some cases, such reports on abuse of lower castes were relegated to local editions, thus effectively burying those stories.)
That was an area we thought we could make an impact. Right from the beginning, we made a serious search for journalists who could join us from the backward castes and Dalit communities, and we were successful in developing a few new journalists even from the Dalits while even today there are no Dalit journalists in most major Malayalam newspapers. Today we have a few Dalit journalists with us, including a girl in the desk, who are able to make a mark just like any others in the profession.
A second area that was left to us to explore was women journalists. Kerala’s Muslim community is generally very conservative and women are not encouraged to take part in public life and they are not encouraged to take up jobs too. As a result, though there were a large number of Muslim journalists and editors in Kerala, there were not many women among them. (The only Muslim woman journalist in Kerala at that time, to my knowledge, was Shabna Ziyad who worked with veteran journalist Leela Menon in an evening daily in Kochi.)
Thus at the time of recruiting, as executive editor, my main focus was to tap the resources left unexplored by the mainstream. And I was not wrong because there were lots of Muslim girls who were eager to join this new profession that was closed to them till then. Not many of them were fit to be in the desk or in bureaus, but we were able to find a few like Shabna Ziyad (now a district level reporter at Idukky), Jasmine (presently with Indiavision TV, Malappuram) and Khadeeja, an abandoned wife and mother of grown up children who was making a determined effort to find a new life. (Later on, she emerged as one of the most effective food columnists with her keen eye for the exotic Muslim cuisine, not explored by the well known food writers.)
I still remember with a sense of pride and happiness those days in mid 2005 when I was engaged in a search for new faces to run a newspaper that spoke to the subaltern sections in our society. We were able to fish out many good talents, and one of the girls who later developed herself into a good sub-editor and page-maker well versed on the latest version of Quark Xpress, was the daughter of an unemployed person who had smuggled himself to a Gulf country hiding in the lower desk of an uru, a small sea-faring vessel, as an illegal migrant. At the time she came for the interview, she was employed as a salesgirl in a textile shop in the city. Another boy came from Manjeri in Malappuram whose father was an assistant to a butcher in the local meat market. Today this Muslim boy is one of the best reporters with the paper.
It was not an easy task. We had very limited resources, and hence were not able to rope in the best and the well known in the media market. We decided to take the opposite path, recruiting from the lowest sections, training with the most advanced technological and professional systems and helping them develop skills necessary to run a newspaper on their own. We set up an intensive training programme that consisted of two months duration, in which we trained them in technical skills like Malayalam typesetting, page-making, etc; professional skills like reporting, editing and proof reading and translating agency copy that came in English. Besides this we gave them a world view, discussing how as a newspaper we would be able to serve the society we lived in. Veteran human rights activist and journalist Mukundan C Menon who was with us those days played a key role in this, and I remember with a heavy heart that he died during this period, collapsing in the class room one morning.
These class room debates and discussions had to tackle another serious problem, of an ideological and political nature. Thejas was a newspaper being launched by a group of people and organizations dubbed extremist by the mainstream press and there had to be a keen and clear understanding of what was going to be its political and ideological standpoint. Most of the new recruits represented a cross section of Kerala society, and it was a serious task to find a common cohesive ideological standpoint.
We thought we would evolve as and when we went on with our work, so that we could discuss such matters as they emerged. So a practice was evolved in which everyday the desk and editors would together debate the stories we did, the mistake we committed and how we would have done it better or differently. It was mainly a desk consisting of inexperienced people, except for only a very few, and so right from the beginning we knew we would make mistakes and hence one of the first decisions was to keep a column for corrections, which we did and meticulously followed through ever since.
But we were a newspaper that proclaimed to be a part of the victims at the social, political and economic spheres. So we had to be wary of the pitfalls of copying the international and national news agencies who generally toed the official line, which often proved to be quite misleading or plainly anti-Muslim or anti-Dalit or anti-backward as the case may be. So one crucial decision was to avoid use of the word “terrorist”, which was not value neutral. We decided that whenever people are fighting for a cause and engaged in militant struggles against armed forces of the state, we would describe them as fighters.
Here there was another serious question: How to describe those people who targeted civilians? In such circumstances, the best and apt word to describe those perpetrators of such violent acts against innocents was to use the words extremist or militant.
It was on January 26, 2006 that Thejas, a new daily from Kozhikode, was first launched after six-month long preparations. It was a success, going by the response of the readers and the market. We were expecting a very limited circulation, but when the first issue was printed we had printed three times than what we had initially expected. Then came a period of fast growth with editions in Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi in the next few months and recently, in May 2008, the fourth edition was launched from Kannur in the northern part of Kerala.
When I look back, I think what made us click was the fact that we made a conscious effort to chart out a new course, in both media business and journalistic practice. We were able to discern our weaknesses and our shortfalls and then we made an effort to convert them into our strength, our core competency. We saw that as a newspaper that spoke mainly to the Muslim community in a world where ‘Islamophobia’ was dominant, it was necessary to give as much global news as possible from the view point of the victims of the aggression. We dedicated a full page to international news, with a daily cartoon strip called Cartoon World. It was the first time a Malayalam newspaper giving a full page in a 12-page broadsheet to international news. Then we changed the whole outlook on Edit Page, giving shorter and sharper editorials instead of the long and dry edits that filled two columns, that was the order of the day in mainstream Malayalam press. Our first edit focused on political, social and economic concerns of the day while the second, a small write-up of 120 words, was written in a witty way on developments in science, technology, religion, literature, etc. We also found space for an editorial cartoon on the same page, that lampooned rather than tickled. At a time when readers’ responses were getting a short shrift in most dailies, we ensured that one third of the space is given to readers’ letters and on Sundays the two column space for editorials was dedicated to readers, for the new column, Readers Editorial.
Now it is time to assess how far such an unconventional media approach has had any impact on the society and the media practice. It is for the media analysts and social critics to make this assessment. But there are some very clear trends now visible: Even most of the mainstream newspapers are now wary of using the term “terrorist” indiscriminately as they used to in the past. As Mukundan C. Menon used to tell us, when Abdunnasar Madani, a Muslim leader of fiery speeches, was arrested nine years ago, all newspapers described him as a terrorist because that is what the police said. After nine years when he came out of the jail as the court threw out all the cases against him, he came as a reminder of how media could be misled by vested interests. Perhaps this rethinking about how to look at media and its vital role is a key contribution that we were able to make to Kerala society in the past three years.
Courtesy:www.thehoot.org, posted Saturday, Jun 28, 2008.
(N P Chekkutty, executive editor of Thejas Daily, earlier worked as chief reporter, Indian Express, Kozhikode, director, news & current affairs, Kairali TV, Kochi, and bureau chief, Madhyamam, New Delhi.)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Will Nano Put Dear Old Rickshaws to Rest?
Ratan Tata’s dream project, the Rs.1-lakh Nano car, is likely to give a much needed rest to our dear old auto-rickshaws and cycle rickshaws that crowd Indian cities.
That would mean a revolution on Indian roads. Elsewhere in the word, the rickshaws are seen only in automobile museums but here even on Rajpath in Delhi and Kolkata’s and Hyderabad’s crowded streets they are a live presence. It was Buddhadev Bhattacharya, West Bengal’s chief minister, who recently decided that enough is enough and told the cycle rickshaws to keep off the roads.
It was a sad thing to see: A frail old man, his ribs jutting out, struggling to pull his rickshaw with a fat lady or a big family happily sitting behind. The auto-rickshaws are much more respectable, as drivers in front maneuver these three-wheelers often violating all possible traffic rules in busy streets giving jitters to the passerby and other vehicle owners.
Now that the Nano is coming to the Indian streets, it is most likely to be the favored vehicle for quick and short-distance travels, replacing the rickshaws. They are fuel efficient, can hold up to five persons and can move about even in small alleys as our rickshaws do.
And they are sure to compete with the auto-rickshaws in prices too. The Bajaj and Piaggio auto-rickshaws that ply in the Indian roads cost almost as much as a Nano. Thus with some prodding from the government and easy finance from the banks, it is likely that the rickshaw drivers may opt for Nano taxis that would bring them more money, more passengers and more prestige.
That means the fears expressed by western analysts like Andrew C Revkin of New York Times, who wrote in his blog, Dot Earth, that Nano would be India’s contribution to the vehicle explosion on world’s roads, are misplaced. Revkin says that by 2020, the world’s roads would be full with over a billion cars, most of them coming from the new economies like India, China, Mexico and other developing countries. That, as he says, would mean disaster for the environment.
He quotes his colleague Tom Friedman who wrote after his visit to Bangalore about the Indian way of development: No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us, he screams as India and others are revving up their engines.
No one claims that the new vehicles coming to the streets of developing countries would not pollute. They would, as any other vehicle using fossil fuels anywhere in the world. But what is the solution? Return to vanaprastha as suggested by ancient Indian rishis and heartily recommended by post-modern western analysts like Revkin and Friedman? But even the rishis advised to take up vanaprastha and sanyasa only after enjoying the life and the world in grihasthasrama, or the life of the person with a family.
That goes true with young economies too. Let the United States and other rich countries enter vanaprastha as they have had enough of the worldly goods. The developing south needs its own grihasthasrama now.
That apart, it is also wrong to say that these new cars would only add to global pollution. In fact, when they conquer the roads and displace the highly polluting, less fuel efficient
Ones like our auto-rickshaws, they would actually be helping to reduce pollution.
(Cartoon courtesy: Sudheernath, New Delhi.)
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