Beyond the Margins

Multiple loans and a long summer ahead

2016-01-27T05:47:00.000-08:00

Sheela Rathod was the first to consume a bottle of weedicide in their home. An hour later, as she was being rushed to a government hospital, her husband Mohan, consumed the second bottle.

In a span of two hours on December 19, 2015, the husband and wife farmers of 4 acres in their mid-40s lay alongside battling for their lives in the Yavatmal hospital, their two shaken teenage-sons by their side. On December 22, Sheela lost the battle for life. Two days later, Mohan died.

“They were conscious all the time but the poison had spread in the body and could not be removed,” says their elder son, Santosh, wearing a cap to hide his tonsured head. The after-death rituals over, he is slowly coming to terms with the hollowness that, he says, suddenly surrounds him and his brother. Their immediate tension however is ‘debt’. “What do we do of the loans our parents took?” The list of debtors is long and includes of both formal (such as bank) and informal (money lenders) sources, he says.

It’s barely a fortnight since the two died, but Deonala, a village about 40 km from Yavatmal in Vidarbha’s cotton belt, is on the edge. Two others had committed suicide in October. They had mounting loans, and like that of the Rathods, rain-fed fields with failed crops: no soybean; no cotton; no lentils. For several years now, they say, they have not seen a good agriculture season that brought good monetary returns.

Almost every family in the village of 1500 people is reeling under debts that they can’t repay. Bad crops apart, there’s no work to be found. No cash in hands to meet exigencies. No source of money in sight. Most have no idea of how to sustain the next six-eight months until the next monsoon arrives and first shoots of a new crop show up. Deonala is staring at a long summer ahead, they know.

This is but a representational example of an unfolding new crisis that government and policy makers call scarcity – of water, crop, food and cash – that’s going to test both, the people and the government.

For, this might turn out to be the toughest drought in the recent history for the peasant-farmers of not just Vidarbha, but many other regions – Marathwada, Bundelkhand, north-Karnataka, Telangana, parts of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, western-central Odisha, stretches of Indo-Gangetic plains, and even Haryana. For some regions, this is an annual aberration. For others, it’s a continuation of drought.

More than 100,000 villages and several small towns are in acute crisis if one adds the tally of blocks and tehsils declared scarcity-hit by ten states after the revised or second crop assessment in November.

The severity is invisible at this stage; it’s the peak of winter and on fields in some parts the winter crop is yet to be harvested. In many parts, like Marathwada, Bundelkhand, or north-Karnataka, drinking water scarcity looms as artificial storages and the rivers run dry. And farm suicides are back with a vengeance in the areas under scarcity: local language newspapers are reporting three to four suicides every day.

About 300 km from Deonala, in village Dadham of Akola district, 15-year-old school boy Vishal Khule killed himself on the morning of November 22, a few days after Diwali, in his small home, while his mother cooked chapatis. When he collapsed, his parents noticed a white liquid oozing out of his mouth, and the emptied can of “poison” lying by his side. Vishal was a 9th class student of Maharanapratap Vidyalaya in Akola town. He would commute to his school and also help his 2-acre father Vishwanath on the farm when he was back. His elder brother Vaibhav, 18, has dropped out and works as a daily-wager wherever he finds work. In Diwali, Vishal worked with his brother, but could not earn enough to buy new clothes and some school books, his father said. The Khules belong to an Andh tribal community. The village has marginal farmers, who double up as farm labourers to make a living. But with their own fields lying empty and drought wrecking the farms of big farm owners, there’s no farm employment.

“This is the worst year and a continuation of drought for last three seasons,” Akola district collector, G Sreekanth, said. “We began preparing for the coming summer in September, last, even when monsoon was to officially end.” The administration sensed the impending crisis when rains failed completely.

Akola, like many districts in Maharashtra, received only 60 per cent of its average annual rainfall of 692 mm. “That’s around 500 mm rains, which may not sound all that bad, but we got 400 mm of that in two days, on August 4 and 5,” he said. After August 5, Akola recorded 41-day gap in rains – a very long dry spell, he said. “Every crop has failed: soybeans, cotton and tur (lentils),” he said. “People don’t have money in their hand and there’s going to be shortage of water,” he said.

It was the crop failure and lack of money that drove Bhimsagar Sonone, 39, and his wife Vrushali, 35, to attempt committing suicide on November 12, a day after Diwali, in a fit of rage, in their home in Pardi, about 80 km from Dadham in Akola district, but they miraculously survived. Like the Rathods did, they too consumed a bottle full of weedicide, meant for the crop of green gram on their two-acre farm. They were saved because they got medical aid in time.

“It was wrong of us to have done that,” they said at their Pardi home, still visibly depressed. The couple has three children, a daughter and twin-sons. A day after Diwali, the two fought with each other, just as any couple would. The reason for conflagration though, was there was no dime to buy new clothes and get their children some Diwali crackers, Vrushali said as she cried. The anger over distress spilled over. Farming in rain-fed conditions has become a never-ending drought, Bhimsagar says, nailing one of India’s biggest structural problems of poverty and growth bottlenecks. “Without water you can’t farm.”

They narrate the story that the Rathods would have, if they were alive: The farm yielded nothing; loans mounted; cash flow choked; tension and desperation built up; household expenses became difficult to be met; and no sustained work could be found. He had mortgaged all of Vrushali’s gold ornaments.

Multiple loans:

Back in Deonala, Sheela’s death has added to the burden of the 19 women of her age, members of a self-help-group. For, after her death, the remaining must repay her equated weekly installments of loans they took from different non-banking financial institutions that seem to have mushroomed in this part.

“Do something, these loans are giving us blood pressure,” pleads Pramila Rathod, a neighbor and one of the senior members of the group. “I am working overtime to mop up funds to repay the debts.”

Sheela like these women juggled multiple loans that add up to between Rs 75,000 and Rs 1 lakh, to be repaid over two or three years, on a weekly basis. “Everything else stops,” Pramila says, “not the loan installment.” Together, each woman must pay Rs 4000 or more every week or so – Rs 15-16000 a month depending upon the number of loans each one of them has taken from the micro-finance companies.

When most cotton growers in rain-fed conditions don’t make even Rs 10,000 in profits from their farms, juggling multiple loans several times their frugal income is a sign of a vicious debt cycle they have landed themselves in – it’s a ground similar to the one that triggered a spike in farm suicides from 2005 to 2008.

Pramila shows us the pass-books for each of her loans: there’s Equitas; Vaya Finserv Private Ltd. (which formerly was called Outreach Financial Service India Pvt Ltd); there’s Jan-Laxmi finance and there are a couple others whose passbooks the women could not show us. The group has to split within themselves the installments of Sheela and when they are struggling to repay their own, it is a Himalayan burden.

Each of these loans comes at 20 per cent or more interest rate, much higher than the ones salaried class pays on buying consumer goods. Most of them have willingly and knowingly opted for multiple loans for the lack of options. Pramila explained it: “Our bank loans are unpaid; we have not been able to pay our bills for inputs to the dealers; private hand loans remain unpaid too, so who would lend us?”

Enter the companies, ready to dish out small cash to a group without any collateral, and the families, desperate for money, latch it up – without thinking of the consequences. The money goes into farming and when farming fails, the loans trigger a vicious repayment cycle for which you must borrow more.

Deonala’s women have much of their gold mortgaged with private lenders or jewelers; pawns they are unable to free. Cattle prices have tanked as buyers shrink and a cow-slaughter ban hits the beef business in the state. Government aid would be far too less and come mostly in band aids, the villagers rue.

Babusha, Mohan Rathod’s elder brother, has loans; so have two other brothers, Baliram and Raju. Their wives, members of self-help-groups, are indebted too – to the same micro-finance institutions.

An agent of one of these companies said on the condition of anonymity that his company has a deep penetration of micro-loan business in Vidarbha and it is expanding fast. The loans look small but they yield big returns. Since there are no collaterals, it’s the easiest route to cash, but also an equally difficult cycle to come out of. The lenders know most borrowers use it for agriculture purpose and when nationalized banks refuse to lend more to the defaulting account holders, they lend at a high risk.

A fiercely hectic repayment schedule, very high penalties on default, and a collective pressure builds up tension, says Pramila, extremely worried about her next repayment. “The day Sheela died we repaid her installment,” she says. “If her sons find some work and earn some money, it will be good for us.”

In their last moments, Mohan and Sheela kept telling their sons, that they were sorry for them; that they must look after each-other; and that they should move out of the village if they could.

In their two-room hut with a mud-littered front-yard that has a thatched shade, there now hang framed photos of Mohan and Sheela who tilled their lands laboriously and raised their sons frugally.

Where do Santosh and his younger brother Sandeep go from here? “We are finding it very difficult to get work outside,” Santosh said. There are hundreds like them wanting work. Both had dropped out of school after the ninth class. “We can’t farm this land,” he said as he took us around an arid, stony, land at the foothills of a small hillock, a few km of walk from their home. It’s a ten-acre stretch, of poor soils, that Mohan tilled with his three elder brothers. This year though, in addition to his share of four acres, he had leased ten acres from a tribal farmer and invested in cotton and lentils, hoping for a better return, his sons said.

Mohan expected at least 40 quintals of cotton from 14 acres; he got three. Lentils are fetching a good price in the markets, but Santosh rued the fact that the plants have no pods.

This field and stretches as long as one can see are a spectre of doom and gloom – a dry anaemic land with cotton and lentil plants that have fallen lifeless.

Tiger Poaching II: 'Ganda hai par Dhanda hai yeh'

2016-01-25T05:14:00.001-08:00

They may have got quick money from it, but killing a full-grown tiger in the forests of Melghat around January-February 2013 was a tedious, frightening and a very risky affair, going by the statement of a 30-year-old Madhusingh Pardhi, convicted along with three others by an Amravati court in the case.

“We were very frightened, when we heard the roar of a tiger,” Madhusingh says in his confession before the court. The tiger had perhaps fallen into their snare after several days of their attempts but “we were not sure”, he says in his statement recorded in Hindi. So he and four of his accomplices waited for hours before they were absolutely certain that the wild cat had indeed been trapped. Since the snare was tied to a tree by a chain, the tiger could not break free. “A tired wild cat sat down, its leg in the snare.”

“That’s when we went there and hit the tiger with a sword-stick just before the fall of dusk, after which it fell down and began to bleed; we then stabbed it with sharp weapons,” he says in his statement.

This was the first time he killed a tiger, for quick money. But the man who had trained him and placed the order wasn’t new in the trade. That man named Ranjit worked for a supplier in the dubious wildlife trade and was part of an old syndicate whose kingpin actually sat in New Delhi, investigators say.

As the Maharashtra forest officials and the CBI have discovered in the last three years, several wild cats in Vidarbha nay the central Indian tiger habitats were killed by the gangs of organized poachers before many of their members got arrested in the ongoing investigations into some cases of tiger poaching.

The gangs work in a pyramid-like structure and perhaps with much better application of their traditional wisdom about tiger behavior and habitat than the educated guardians of this majestic animal.

Most of the suspected tiger poachers arrested in separate cases are third or fourth generation poachers, just out of their teens – and very ferocious killers, according to forest officials probing the cases.

Investigations and independent studies into India’s multifarious tiger poaching gangs and their recent history reveal their modus operandi – from mutual bonhomie to territorial rights to switching locations to being ruthless in killing their targets, among other things.

“Tiger poaching in India has always been a specialized job mostly led by family groups and individuals with traditional expertise,” says a comprehensive study published last August by executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) Belinda Wright, ecologist Koustubh Sharma, WPSI’s central India coordinator Nitin Desai and colleagues. The study published in the journal ‘Biological Conservation’ says the poachers prefer to operate in specific tiger habitats, mainly because of their familiarity with these areas and the trusted networks that individual poaching gangs have set up over several years. The illegal trafficking of tiger parts has two components, it says, that of poaching tigers and that of selling, buying and smuggling the parts out of the country to feed illegal global markets.

Forest officials in Nagpur engaged into the tiger poaching probe say the organized gangs deploy every tactic: from tracking tigers to chasing their targets long distances for days to monitoring the monitors (forest officials), to taking the wild cats off stealthily before one wonders where they’ve gone.

One of the arrested accused even told the investigators in the Melghat poaching case that they target the courting pairs during the mating season immediately post-monsoon when tigers are most vocal.

In other times, they target full grown males for their robust bones and skins.

Madhu Singh was the one who did the dirty job of killing a tiger on the field with his accomplices, but they were not the only ones doing that. Many others, who are now arrested in connection with the tiger poaching cases in Vidarbha, form part of the poachers’ gangs, who work separately in tiger habitats in the country yet completely linked with each-other, investigators say citing information that the accused have shared during their interrogation. They call their working area a ‘desh’ (or region), and each gang has an understanding that they would not violate each other’s areas of operation, investigations show.

“It looks like once a year, usually during the monsoon season, these gangs belonging to two nomadic tribe communities, one from Madhya Pradesh and the other from Haryana and Rajasthan, meet at an undisclosed location and divide the geographies among themselves,” Advocate Kartick Shukul, one of the prosecution lawyers, said. Each team roughly comprises 30 members, including women, he said, on the basis of the statements and information provided by some of the accused arrested in the cases.

The defence lawyers have argued that the prosecution has no evidence and that their allegations are concocted, but barring two persons, not a single person arrested in these cases has got a bail.

“The actual tiger poachers never had any direct links with international buyers,” Nitin Desai of the Wild-life Protection Society of India (WPSI) says. “The parts and skins always shift hands at several layers.”

Madhu or Chika-Mambru, or others belonged to the gang of Sarju Bagdi, a suspected poacher-trader who was trying to scale up to the level of another man called Suraj Pal alias Chacha. Now behind the bars, both Chacha and Sarju virtually ran the trade together in the post-Sansar Chand era; with former taking the contracts from abroad, and the latter placing the contracts in the field with his contacts.

Pal ran a grocery shop in New Delhi, but a CBI dossier on Sansar Chand around 2005 says he was a major player in the tiger parts and skin, though the agency did not have any evidence or case against him. It shows Chacha was allegedly active even then in tiger trade.

“Even after being active in this field for such a long time, he has never been arrested or involved in any case,” that dossier said of Chacha.

“His network with smugglers based in Majnu Ka Tila (a place in New Delhi) is possibly the biggest and strongest in this field. Even in terms of trading, he is supposed to be the best for supplies of Tiger skins.” Chacha’s main suppliers were poachers of the Bawaria community belonging to Rathdhana near Samalkha in Haryana’s Sonipat district. Of them was Sarju’s father.

In Dhakana case of Maharashtra, it came to be true. Sarju is from that place and has confessed that he would supply the wildlife items to Chacha. It was on Sarju’s statement that Chacha was finally arrested from his house in Delhi; the Delhi police, the wildlife crime control bureau and Maharashtra forest department recovered 18 kg tiger bones and over Rs 60 lakh in cash from him at the time of his arrest.

In his confession statement that is now before the local court, one of the main culprits in the ongoing tiger poaching cases, Sarju says his father worked for the notorious tiger poacher Sansar Chand.

Another accused, who’s now behind bars facing charges of killing a tiger in Dhakna area of the Malghat Tiger Reserve, Ranjit, says he has been coming on the trail of tigers for decades. Sarju’s grand-father too hunted the wild animals, though there is no evidence or knowledge if the trade was that commercial then as it is today.

History:

Suraj Pal alias Chacha began his career in poaching and trading in tiger skins and parts under Shabbir Hassan Qureshi, one of the biggest alleged tiger traders before the dawn of the new century. He died in 2012, after having given up on the trade sometime in early 2002. Shabbir’s reign, according to several experts of wildlife crime, preceded the emergence of Sansar Chand, but later both ran their networks parallel, at times even competing with each other in the same geographies for the same booty.

The recent history shows, Shabbir and Sansar Chand had their own network of poachers, mainly from the hunting communities. In South India, there was another player, who we are not naming, since he is now out of the trade since mid-2007. Shabbir got arrested around 1999 and confessed to killing virtually dozens of tigers all over India in the preceding decade. He came out of the custody and was re-arrested in Allahabad in December 2007 by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force probing another poaching crime and during his Narco-analysis test confessed to killing and selling something like 600 tigers, a figure that is still debatable. Shabbir died in 2012. After first arrest in 1999-2000, Sansar Chand emerged the biggest player and reigned supreme until his arrest in 2005, according to the CBI’s dossiers on him.

Suraj Pal, Chacha, was Sansar’s supplier. When Sansar Chand was arrested, Chacha was already on the radar of the CBI and other agencies. With Shabbir down, Sansar arrested, and other major players either old or maimed by the enforcement agencies, this tall and lanky man now in his mid-sixties and originally from Khaga in Fatehpur, became the numero uno in the tiger trade.

In mid-2014 Chacha was granted bail by an Additional Sessions Judge in Nagpur, but it was revoked by a Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court when the forest department went in appeal.

The High Court acknowledged in its observation that Chacha, who seems to have international links in the trade, had paid Rs 20 lakh to Sarju and Naresh as an advance sum for buying tiger skins, nails, bones and other vital organs from poachers in Maharashtra and the latter had already made some deliveries.

With Sansar Chand and two other big traders dead and a couple of others like Chacha in jail, there’s a vacuum at the top of this murky trade – but experts like Desai warn: “Someone may already be ready to play the new don.”

Silencing the roar, one cat at a time

2016-01-13T22:24:00.000-08:00

Around mid-2013, a full-grown striped tigress, a regular visitor to the central lake of Pench Tiger Reserve on Madhya Pradesh-Maharashtra border about 120 km from Nagpur, went missing.

The forest staff wondered about its sudden disappearance but kept an inexplicable silence.

In early 2014, they finally got the answer from the kitty of a poachers’ gang arrested by the CBI on Indo-Nepal border. One DNA in the many tiger part samples seized from them matched with that of the T-13, the same wild cat that was never to be seen again in the Pench reserve, confirming the fears of officials: it had been allegedly killed, cut into pieces, and most probably sold off separately as ‘skin’ and ‘parts’. It was a chance discovery, but not an isolated case of poaching from the protected tiger terrain. A string of cases – with one leading to another in central India mainly Vidarbha – is exposing an unabated, ugly, organized poaching racket that dents the country’s mammoth tiger conservation efforts.

Together, the magnitude of the cases is phenomenal: so far 19 primary offence reports (like FIRs) have been registered since the filing of the first case in March 2013; more than 50 alleged poachers arrested; about 80 are still wanted; four persons have been already convicted in the first case; and while officially less than ten tigers have been accounted for, the number of wild cats estimated killed and poached by the gangs in the last few years is feared many times more, the ongoing investigations are indicating.

“These are very important cases for us and something that’s unprecedented in a way,” the additional principle chief conservator of forests (APCCF), Maharashtra, Meyipokkim Aiyer, said. He is the head of a steering committee formed by the state forest department to monitor the cases. Last year, the state government handed over the three main offences to the CBI. “The interlinked gangs operate in many states with a clinical detail of each tiger habitat and with links abroad, which is why we thought an agency like the CBI is best suited to deal with those,” Aiyer said. The state government has just approved a proposal that seeks to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) comprising officials from several departments. To be headed by a senior CBI officer, it would rope in officials from forest, police and revenue departments in addition to the enforcement directorate. The SIT will take forward the investigations into the poaching cases, in what’s turning out one of the biggest investigations yet.

How it began:

It was a wintry day, December 3, 2012. Nitin Desai, a central India coordinator of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) and one of India’s foremost wildlife crime experts, recalls a text message beamed on his cell phone about a few suspected poachers camping near a place called Aamdi on a busy National Highway 7, about 60-70 km away north of Nagpur. He immediately passed that information to the forest officials and the Nagpur rural police. By the evening, a raid was conducted but the suspects fled the spot leaving behind some SIM cards. The information was correct, but the suspects got time to escape.

“In 2012-13, the poaching scene was very hot; we would receive information from everywhere that the gangs are on the prowl,” Desai recalls. The wait for a breakthrough ended only three months later.

March 3, 2013: The first tip off came from the Melghat Tiger Reserve, 250 km from Nagpur in Amravati district. Two local men were fighting over distribution of money made from tiger poaching. The WPSI’s local intelligence network alerted chief conservator of forest in Melghat, who in turn handed the task to a young Assistant Conservator of Forest (ACF), Vishal Mali, to work the tip off. The same evening, after having tracked their location, Mali and his team apprehended six men from the reserve’s core area – a core area is supposed to be an inviolate region with little or no human presence or interference.

Tucked away in the foothills of the Satpuda hills, village Sundban from where the suspects were caught was a ghetto of huts set up lately after felling and clearing patches of the forest, exposing the chinks in the monitoring of the massive reserve. The encroachments had sprung up in the tiger habitat.

The six suspects, mostly migrants belonging to a backward nomadic tribe, confessed to killing up a full grown tiger, as per the primary offence report (POR in wildlife crime parlance) registered the following day in Melghat. The scene of the crime was a beat called Dhakana, within the reserve; the wild cat had been killed, it’s skin traded, as per their confession statement, over a month before been arrested. Among the forest officials in Vidarbha, it’s popular as the ‘Dhakana case’.

“All the suspects agreed to reconstruct the crime and hand over a snare used in trapping the tiger,” the principle investigator of this case, Mali, said. “They led us to the exact spot; narrated how they did it; and gave graphic details of the crime,” he said. The suspects had killed and sold the tiger’s skin, bones, nail and some vital organs to a trader. “We got highly decomposed meat, blood stains, and hair there.”

Investigators collected and sent 18 samples to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, for DNA sampling etc. Among the samples were finger-nails of the accused.

“Only two samples tested positive but it was enough to establish the link between the arrested poachers and the tiger suspected to have been killed,” Mali said. The soil sample with blood stains confirmed it to be of a tiger; and the fingernail samples of the poachers arrested by them carried the same DNA as that of the tiger in the soil sample. “Since we did not have the carcass of the killed tiger as evidence,” he said, “the matched DNA sample was crucial supportive evidence in the case.”

The Dhakana probe revealed that a person from Punjab named Ranjit (now arrested) came to Melghat, placed the contract; local men killed a tiger, and handed the skin and parts to him in Madhya Pradesh.

Next: The officials had to do a manual check of the call detail records (CDR) of the suspects’ cell phones. They found that one of the six accused, Madhu Singh (convicted and sent to rigorous imprisonment for five years with three others in mid-2014 by an Amravati court) was in touch on his cell phone with some people all over India: from as far away as Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, to even Gujarat. Officials wondered what this man had got to do with people across India.

Of the 2000 numbers scanned by them manually and later electronically, investigators segregated some numbers to whom Madhu frequently called; they suspected them to be couriers or tiger part traders.

Case widens; hunt begins

Then the hunt for the suspects began which has not yet stopped.

June 6, 2013: Based on the call records being tracked, the Nagpur police and some independent wildlife investigators zeroed in on two numbers believed to be of suspects and got a tip-off that a consignment of tiger parts was to be handed over to a buyer from north India at a dhaba around the same spot where officials had missed the targets just seven months ago: along the National Highway 7.

It was the culmination of a very tedious operation, which relied heavily on the call details and location of cell phone in real time.

“That day we arrested two persons named Chika and Mambru, really young men who in the first looks appeared famished and from poor background,” an Assistant Conservator of Forest (ACF)-level officer in Nagpur recalls, asking not be named. “We thought this was it – the end of our investigations.” It wasn’t. It was the beginning. As Chika and Mambru spilled the beans, officials say, murky tales surfaced.

“The two were actually the bridge between buyers in north India and the gangs of field poachers who were scattered all over Vidarbha – someone in Melghat, others in Tadoba or in Umred; still others in Gondia-Bhandara, or on the other side of the border in Madhya Pradesh,” the ACF said. They were not on their own, investigators say; the two worked for someone.

If you draw a circle with a radius of 300 km around Nagpur, you can see some pristine tiger habitats and corridors with bustling wild cat population within the protected areas and even more outside them.

In fact, as Desai explains: The huge expanse of central India forest landscape starting from Panna Tiger Reserve in the north to Nagarjun Sagar Tiger Reserve in the south and from Melghat Tiger Reserve in the west to Indravati Tiger Reserve in the east, the 15-odd tiger reserves in this region act as sources where some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers breed and roam freely and disperse into the territorial or unprotected areas. For the poaching gangs, it’s a region replete with big ticket targets and quick money.

Most of the central India forests are dry deciduous forests; tigers from these areas have historically been in greater demand for two reasons: one, they are easy to locate for poaching and two, their pelts (skins) are preferred by customers abroad, explains Desai, one of India’s frontline experts in wildlife crime.

Chika and Mambru’s arrest followed tip offs given by the accused in the Dhakana case. A Vodafone number of the north kept popping up in the CDRs of the suspects arrested in March 2013 and the two in June 2013. Who was this man? He was moving all over, another investigating officer said. In the month before Chika-Mambru’s arrest, that cell phone – which officials had strongly suspected to be of a big fish in the trade – showed up its location in Umred, 50 km south-east of Nagpur; days later it showed up in Mansar, 100 km north of Nagpur; and again a few days later, it was in Sonipat, Haryana.

With Dhakana investigations on and several phone numbers under the radar, Chika-Mambru disclosed to interrogators that they had taken off 11 tigers from March to June 2013 from all over central India.

The officials told a local court in Nagpur that after registering a primary offence report against them, the two led the Nagpur forest officials to a place called Ghatang in the Melghat tiger reserve, confessing that they had killed a tiger there. But having reached there officials realized the two had also killed a sloth bear, two leopards and a barking deer – evidence of which lay scattered over the spot, in addition to the one tiger they had said in their statement they had trapped and killed. Officials then registered another offence in Ghatang against the two, in addition to the one for the alleged killing of a tiger.

Ghatang is just outside the core of the Melghat tiger reserve. From the place they were arrested near Mansar, it would be roughly 250 km in the same line west-ward.

Post the 2012 monsoon, there were reports and intelligence inputs that the gangs of organized poachers were surreptitiously working in Vidarbha to kill tigers. A year later, the reports were coming true.

More shock was still in store. The officials collected samples of blood stains from soil and traps used in the crime and sent it to CCMB in Hyderabad. “The CCMB told us it was not one but four full grown tigers – the report confirmed the presence of four wild cats in the DNA of the samples,” the officer engaged with this particular case, which is now with the CBI, says. The CCMB report is evidence before the court against Chika-Mambru and the subsequently arrested persons in this and other connected cases.

Within a week of their arrest, Chika-Mambru had told officials they had actually taken off some 15 tigers from around Vidarbha within a span of three months.

“To us, that was sheer unnerving,” recalls Desai, who has closely tracked each of this case independently and as part of the WPSI mandate. “I have never seen so many tigers killed in such short span; when each tiger is like a percentage population in a country with less than 2000 remaining, this was sad news.”

Kingpin in custody; more arrests follow

By mid-2013, Maharashtra forest department was mighty nervous. What next? But officials like Mali, who were now part of an action team specifically tasked to crack the network, were determined.

The window would open with more arrests, but particularly of two men who are at the center of the tiger killings in the recent past: Suraj Bhan alias Sarju Bagdi and an alleged kingpin Suraj Pal, alias Chacha (68). Sarju was arrested along with his accomplice Naresh from Sonipat, Haryana, on September 8, 2013, and on his information, the same day, Chacha was rounded up from his New Delhi home.

“Surajpal has been in this business for more than 20 years; he is known to have contacts with about 50 to 60 families of Rathdhana in Sonipat and other villages, who kill animals for him,” the Delhi Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav was quoted by the media as saying immediately after his arrest. Sarju was on his way to meet and deliver tiger skins and parts to Chacha, who ran a grocery store and small real estate business in the national capital as a front for his alleged illegal trade. All of them are now in Nagpur central prison, with courts rejecting their bails.

Their arrest, Aiyer said, helped arrange the pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle.

One, the officials were able to establish a chain of tiger trade. Investigators learnt that the Vodafone cell number that had perplexed them was of Sarju, an alleged third-generation poacher and a member of a tribe from Haryana that’s known to be involved in wildlife poaching as a tradition. Sarju was allegedly a major supplier working for Chacha, once a key associate of notorious tiger poacher-trader Sansar Chand who died in 2012 after remaining in prison since been arrested in 2005. Field poachers of another tribe from Madhya Pradesh killed tigers; people like Chika-Mambru helped as couriers; Sarju bought the skin and parts and finally supplied it to Chacha. Who did Chacha sell it to? The CBI is now probing that.

Once Sarju fell in their custody the forest officials began to crack a network of organized poachers; with it surfaced also the fact that so many tigers were killed and poached from all over Vidarbha.

Since the first arrests in March 2013, forest officials and CBI teams have conducted over four dozen raids and nabbed the alleged culprits from all over India.

Ranjit (a Dhakana case accused and one of Chacha’s suppliers like Sarju), who had twice slipped out of the CBI hands previously, was arrested in Vizianagaram; Ajit, a younger brother of a notorious poacher-trader Keru (also wanted in these cases) was nailed in Tirupati; two brothers Yarlen and Barsul (now out on bail) were arrested in Jabalpur; Sarju, Naresh and Dalbir, the trio that is alleged to be working for Chacha, were picked up from Sonipath in Haryana; Chacha himself was arrested from New Delhi with cash and tiger parts in his custody. The raids continue. The latest to be arrested by the CBI was Raslal from Satara in western Maharashtra and another major player in the trade named Kuttu Chhiyalal Rajgond from Katni in Madhya Pradesh in March this year. On their information, the CBI also arrested two brothers, Baini and Jhallu, from a village in Rajnandgaon district of Chhattisgarh. Baini and Jhallu were wanted in connection with the killing of three tigers in Gondia-Bhandara forests and have known to have killed many tigers in and around the Kanha Tiger Reserve, over the last decade or so.

During his interrogation, Kuttu also confessed to killing three men and the CBI has now asked the MP police to register separate offences in those murders. He was wanted in the killing of two tigers in Khumari near the Mansinghdeo Wildlife Sanctuary near Nagpur and one in Gondia’s Tumsar forests.

As the arrested accused began to reveal their network and the names of the associates by the end of 2013 a full-blown racket of organized poachers of tiger and other wildlife began to surface. In 2013 itself the Maharashtra Forest Department formed an Action Team to lead the cases, but when their expanse grew out of bounds, the state government decided to hand over three main cases to the CBI in 2014. With every arrest came the clue to their new associates and their old crimes, Aiyer said.

The poachers’ modus operandi is simple: they camp 20-25 km way from the forest, kill the animal, and hide the parts somewhere close to the forest area and then strike a deal with the buyers.

In one case, a poacher nabbed in 2013 in a town of Paratwada, close to Melghat, told the police that they would use train route to smuggle out tiger skins and body parts.

With huge pressure mounting on their network in Vidarbha, these gangs are now focusing on Karnataka and Goa, says an officer with the Melghat Cyber Cell, which came up in the aftermath of these cases as one of the institutional responses to the wildlife crime. It monitors the mobile data in connection with wildlife crime and is believed to be closely tracking movements of about a hundred active gangs.

Yet questions remain: While so many tigers were being killed and poached, what was India’s vast tiger conservation apparatus doing? If a tiger goes missing from your beat, it’s virtually impossible a forest guard or a ranger won’t know. Here, several tigers that were presumably monitored by authorities went missing from protected areas, but no one raised an alarm even within their institutional set up.

“The beauty of these intertwined cases is that it’s the poachers not the foresters who told us how many tigers they had killed and sold off,” Desai laments. “It’s a slap on our face – poachers killed these many wild cats while all of us, the so-called guardians, were sleeping or glossing over the gaps.”

“It’s as if India conserves tigers for poachers,” says Desai sarcastically. “We conserve, they kill.”

Driving through the default

2016-01-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

In April 2015, the Siddhi Vinayak Logistics Limited (SVLL), a Surat-based transport firm, entered the ‘Limca Book of Records’ as a company maintaining ‘largest’ fleet of heavy and medium commercial vehicles in India with ‘6,737 vehicles’ on the last count and a unique corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative that marked September 17 every year as the ‘Drivers Day’ – ‘Chalak Diwas’, in Hindi.

Around the same time, in the Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) board at its Pune headquarters and among 10-11 other public sector banks (PSBs) that had lent money to the company, panic had set in.

By March 2015 end, while it was trumpeting its success, the SVLL had become the single big-value defaulter of the BoM with unpaid dues standing at Rs 839 crore, loans that the bank was to discover later were granted from September 2012 to March 2014 against forged documents, zero collateral and in violation of rules.

Together, the SVLL had borrowed heavily for its expansion and defaulted on the loans of all PSBs running close to Rs 2000 crore. First a red-flagged-account, then an NPA, and lately a fraud: the SVLL story with the BoM and other PSBs shows that big loopholes exist in the banking sector.

The BoM’s single bad loan, the SVLL fraud, is multiple times its annual net profit of Rs 127 crore in 2014-15 fiscal – a somber state for a bank that has peasants and working classes as its main customers in Maharashtra. It’s perhaps the only PSB that came up in the 1940s from hard-earned money of the working classes and still has deep rural penetration. The reason for panic was obvious: SVLL was given loans in violation to rules.

Not only that, the BoM’s higher authorities in Pune neglected an alert sounded by its own branch manager in Surat in March 2014, cautioning the bank not to lend more money to SVLL since its credibility was in doubt, a set of confidential reports, bank’s internal communication, and other documents about this company that this writer is in possession of, show. What’s more, when all its efforts to persuade the firm to repay the money failed, a top source in the bank said, the BoM board comprising top officials wanted to quietly write off the SVLL’s unpaid dues as NPAs, but reported lack of consensus within and an RBI stricture prompted the management to suspend its three officials, tag the SVLL as a ‘willful’ high-value defaulter (its account had been branded NPA in December 2014) and lodge a CBI complaint given the quantum of money involved.

Around mid-August, the CBI raided several SVLL offices and BoM’s branches in Pune and Surat from where the loans were disbursed. No further detail is forthcoming from the agency on investigations.

Inside sources say the SVLL case is murkier than it seems.

In one of his letters to the bank explaining the delay in payments last year, one document reads, the firm’s founder director Roopchand Baid – apparently to flaunt his political connections – annexed a letter Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the firm lauding its driver’s day initiative (in September 2014); he even flaunts his picture with Modi on the company’s website, and in one of his communications around the same time to the bank explaining the delays in repayment of loans cites, as one of the reasons, his pre-occupation in Modi’s 3-D campaigning on the specialized vehicles during the 2014 general elections.

Growing NPAs, willful defaults and stressed assets:

As 2015 comes to end, the BoM like all other public sector banks (PSBs) of India forays into a new year with more such frauds coming to the fore.

The PSB’s bad debts crossed Rs 3 lakh crore by June 2015; up almost nine to ten times it was in 2008 at Rs 39,000 crore. Cumulatively, their stressed assets are hovering around Rs 7.7 lakh crore, a staggering 11 per cent of total advances of Rs 70,00,000 crore. If one adds that between 2001 and 2015, the PSBs wrote off nearly 2.5-3 lakh crore worth of NPAs of the handful of defaulters, according to the statements by the ministers in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and a comprehensive booklet on NPAs published by the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) last year, the story turns scandalous.

The RBI governor Raghuram Rajan is clearly worried. On December 23, he raised concern once again “over the rising stressed assets of big business groups and their impact on financial system.” Credit to top 100 large borrowers (in terms of funded amount outstanding) made up for 27.6 per cent of the credit to all the large borrowers and 17.8 per cent of the credit of all commercial banks, Rajan said in the latest financial stability report (FSR) in yet another indication of the banks’ precarious situation with regard to loan defaults.

Of the total NPAs today, there is no clarity on willful default cases, but in the last one year, the banks have filed cases in which the dues recoverable from the defaulters amount to over Rs 44,000 crore, going by the data on the suit-filed cases with the credit rating agencies like Crisil and the other official sources.

Other than this, the banks have sold their bad loans worth Rs 1.89 lakh crore to the asset restructuring companies (ARCs) for a mere Rs 62,551 crore, accruing a loss of over Rs 1.26 lakh crore.

As of June 2015, the BoM’s stressed assets (NPAs and red-flagged accounts) stood at Rs 13,636 crore – or 13.48 % of gross advances of Rs 101,210 by March 2015, the bank’s annual statement shows.

Of that, the gross NPAs stood at Rs 6402 crore, or 6.33 per cent of its total advances. Top 50 NPAs account for Rs 3104.75 crore (for comparison, it’s equivalent to the annual crop loan in the entire region of Vidarbha with 35 lakh farming families), and NPA amount involved in Rs 1 crore and above total Rs 5177.88 crore. The BoM had restructured bad loans totaling Rs 7234 crore by March 2013; they fall in stressed assets zone.

The government’s repeated answers to questions on NPAs in the Parliament cites recessionary trends as an important reason for the rising graph of stressed assets, but the suit-filed cases show a different story – one that needs a thorough inquiry. On December 10, in New Delhi, the former AAP founders Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav sought a comprehensive white paper from the central government and PSBs on all the stressed accounts, the NPAs written off by the banks so far, and a list of willful defaulters. They circulated a note explaining how the banks are dealing with stressed assets in three different heads: willful default; NPAs, and stressed assets that were restructured under the corporate debt restructuring (CDR) scheme but show no signs of repayment thereby again becoming as non-performing assets (NPAs) with higher outstanding dues.

The question is: what has happened of the Rs 10-11 lakh crore worth of money, either already written off, or converted into stressed assets? With that sort of money, India could build 2 lakh km of four-lane highways (at an official finance rate of Rs 5 crore/km); foot MGNREGA bills for at least two decades; give loan waivers to the country’s beleaguered peasantry; gift a toilet and a tank to every citizen to achieve the PM’s dream of ‘Swachh Bharat’, or build ten bullet trains like the one planned between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

By the end of 2015 fiscal, the BoM had filed 541 cases of willful defaults running into recoverable dues of Rs 1427 crore, following the RBI’s mounting pressure on banks to crack down on high-value defaulters. The instances of fraud registered an increase by 309.12% from 348.8 crore in March 2014. In the 2014-15 fiscal, the bank reported 56 new cases of fraud. The SVLL’s loan default of Rs 839.1 crore is one of them.

On September 28, 2015, a forensic audit of the SVLL accounts and its group companies ordered by the bank’s board confirmed that the company had mis-utilized the funds. It bared the SVLL’s much-touted CSR scheme – also main focus of the bank’s complaint with the CBI. The initiative in fact was a ploy to transfer its corporate debt on to individual drivers with the alleged complicity of some top bank officials, according to BoM’s top source. So much so, that even the drivers were unaware of the loans taken in their names by SVLL until the bank, in desperate measure, last year sent notices to more than 2000 such individual drivers. This writer is in possession of a seven-page note meant for the Board’s audit committee that enumerates the forensic report’s gist. This note and other documents such as the bank’s inspection summary of the large borrower accounts and minutes of the joint lenders association (JLA) with regard to the SVLL credit exposure, one question goes unanswered: How could the BoM lend big loans to SVLL without basic checks (such as its credit worthiness), when it doesn’t grant such a leeway to ordinary citizens seeking small loans?

Forensic audit findings:

A forensic audit is an examination and evaluation of a firm's or individual's financial information for use as evidence in court, according to one definition, and can be conducted in order to prosecute a party for fraud, embezzlement or other financial claims. Accordingly, a chartered accountant firm tasked to carry out the SVLL’s forensic audit gave its final report on September 28, 2015, having given its initial tracking and interim draft report in May and June, 2015, respectively. The report mentions of severe lack of data and information from other banks and official sources to fully confirm and trace the company’s money trail.

That’s perhaps now for the CBI to investigate.

The forensic audit shows the money trail and explains how the SVLL – which claims to have a pan-India presence in the heavy transport segment – allegedly routed the funds through its sister firms, put as collateral the same vehicles against loans from different banks, and used new loans to pay off part old loans or as margin money to buy new trucks, but defaulted on its loan repayments.

In 2012-2013, the BoM had through its three different branches (one in Surat and two in Pune) released loans worth Rs 933.25 crore to the SVLL for six different purposes – 1) a loan of Rs 35 crore as working capital; 2) a loan of Rs 99.85 crore as the loans to SVLL drivers to buy old trucks under its ‘Chalak se Malak’ scheme; 3) Rs 70 crore as term loan for the purchase of new trucks; 4) a term loan of Rs 90 crore for purchase of new trucks; 5) Rs 239.44 crore as loans to SVLL drivers to buy old trucks under its ‘Chalak se Malak’ scheme; 6) and Rs 398.96 crore as loans to drivers to buy new trucks. Of that, the company repaid Rs 77.38 crore to the Model colony branch from the loan taken from the Deccan Gymkhana branch a little later, the report shows. The remaining loans with principle and interest overdue are outstanding dues on the SVLL accounts.

The SVLL is yet to respond to the queries mailed by this Reporter, but as per the bank documents, the firm in one of its replies to the BoM pegged its valuation at over Rs 6000 crore while assuring that it was trying to raise funds by a stake-sale or pledging its shares to raise corporate loans. The company urges the bank in one letter not to initiate any action that would damage its reputation and affect the livelihood of 9000 families.

Concurrently, even the other principle lenders such the Corporation Bank and Oriental Bank of Commerce began to get worried on the SVLL’s increasing NPAs and the company’s failure to stick to its promises.

It was during that 2012 fiscal that it transferred part of its debt burden on to the drivers under what it claimed was a CSR activity: a scheme christened ‘Chalak Se Malak’. The garb was generous. The company said it was making its drivers owners of vehicles, or equity shareholders. In reality, it was transferring its debts to the drivers and re-routing the individual loan money into its group accounts, with the banks completely unaware of such transactions. In doing so, it was converting high-interest commercial loans into low-interest small and mid-segment, cheating the bank by hypothecating same vehicles against different loans, and later defaulting on the payment of both, the term loans and the individual loans on old trucks, the forensic audit shows.

The same fiscal year, the SVLL shot into limelight by placing an order to Tata Motors of 1300 plus trucks, the value of this order was reported at that time to be around Rs 225 crore.

The company in its proposal to the BoM said it would sell its used trucks to the drivers as a reward of their loyalty under the CSR initiative at a mutually agreed price. The drivers would operate the vehicles as their own but continue to deploy them with the SVLL as sub-contractors. The SVLL would deduct the equated monthly instalments for loans from the bills payable to the drivers-cum-owners. Once the repayment was done, the truck would be transferred in the drivers’ name; until then it would be hypothecated to the BoM. But the proposal also mentioned that the loans availed by the SVLL from other lenders would continue.

The company had its accounts mainly in the Corporation Bank and the Oriental Bank in Surat, according to the bank’s recent internal investigations. What it did in this case was to convert its corporate loans into the individual loans, and non-priority portfolio into priority one. The BoM’s Pune branches played a major role. The officials formulated a pattern on the lines of the scheme for financing Small Road Transport Operator (SRTOs) and issued loans at concessions, such as a concession of 0.5 per cent in the processing fee, deviation in age limit of the truck to be considered on a case-to-case basis. The bank officials assured its management that all advances would be classified under priority sector (about Rs 100 crore) and around 20 per cent of the advances may be classified under weaker sector with an assured repayment through SVLL linkage. But nothing as such happened. In 2015, bank officials were struggling to get the money back from SVLL.

The forensic audit found the SVLL did not transfer the trucks in the drivers’ names and that a vast majority of the vehicles were already hypothecated to its other lenders, a fact that BoM’s Surat branch manager had in his March 2014 communication to his head office mentioned while red-flagging the SVLL proposals.

The bank’s zonal authorities apparently did not take consent from their head office while sanctioning the SVLL loans, a gross violation of the bank’s credit policy and RBI guidelines. It was on this account that the BoM finally suspended its three officials when the alleged default came out of the closet.

In the case registered against the SVLL, its directors and BoM officials, the CBI says the BoM was induced into sanctioning and disbursing 2804 vehicle loans to the said firm and its drivers under the ‘Chalak se Malak’ scheme on the basis of false assurances and tampered/forged vehicle registration documents, to avail the credit facility aggregating to Rs 651.17 crore in the form of loans; term loans of Rs 160 crore; and cash credit limit of Rs 35 crore. In the complaint the bank alleged that having taken the loans, the SVLL Directors did not transfer the ownership of vehicles to drivers. In many instances, the vehicles were and continue to remain hypothecated to the other lenders and were not transferred to the drivers. The SVLL had a direct exposure of Rs 259 crore and an indirect exposure through the SRTO of Rs 645 crore. A major part of loan – over Rs 400 core – meant to purchase new trucks and transfer of old vehicles to drivers was diverted to other purposes.

The bank in its complaint to CBI said the total outstanding dues from the SVLL stand at Rs 839 crore, NPAs as of March 2015.

The forensic audit says there were significant fund transfer transactions between SVLL and group companies, with the bank loans finally being routed or re-routed back to the main company.

Take just one example for instance: The BoM’s Deccan Gymkhana branch in Pune disbursed Rs 130.66 crore as part of financing the purchase of 1150 new vehicles to a company called Addplus Distributors Pvt Ltd; the trucks were to be purchased from Ashok Leyland. The audit report found that though the Ashok Leyland had issued a letter of intent to Addplus it was never appointed an authorized dealer. After getting the money from the bank, Addplus transferred the entire sum to the SVLL and its group companies through four transactions.

The report’s gist observes that the loans were released without adequate supporting documents even for the financing of new trucks; the vehicles already hypothecated to other creditors were offered as collateral against the term or individual loans under the ‘Chalak se Malak’ scheme; loan disbursement from Deccan Gymkhana branch was used for the part payment of loan taken from the Model Colony branch and a part of loan for old trucks was used as margin money for financing new trucks as vendor payment.

The forensic audit could not go beyond the BoM loans because it could not get the statements of account from the other 10 banks from where the SVLL borrowed money, the report says. Also, the tax invoices submitted by the SVLL suppliers did not contain information such as VAT number or contact details of the suppliers, which raises question mark on the suppliers too. In February 2015, the BoM’s credit monitoring department in its confidential report found the SVLL had term loans running into approximately Rs 2000 crore from 10-11 PSBs with balance of Rs 1500 crore and principle and interest overdue of Rs 80 crore.

A letter from Tokyo: Bye, Bye, Pacifism

2015-09-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

The overcast sky over the elegantly lit Diet building – Japan’s Parliament in central Tokyo’s western-style Hibiya district, was a perfect contrast to a simmering scene on the ground.

As the working day neared an end in one the world’s most-happening cities last Monday, a steady trickle of men and women, old and young, emerged with placards and fluorescent red and yellow sticks in their hands out of the busy sub-way stations onto the noisy roads leading to the parliament building.

For a moment, the square opposite the ash-white structure resembled the scenes so very familiar at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi or on Calcutta streets – venues for the political protests back in India.

An old woman, about 5-feet tall, in her late seventies was shouting the slogans in the Japanese joining in the rapturous chorus. She was asking for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation. Tae Ko, the woman, came to take part in the protests the way she had, she said, on several occasions for about a month now. On and off, she’s been taking part in the protests with her friends of the same age and many of Japan’s commoners.

“No more war,” read one of the many placards waved by the enraged demonstrators, some of whom have been regular to the protests opposite the Diet. “Scrap the bills,” read another, held by an old woman. "Peace!" screamed yet another.

Central Tokyo has been witnessing acerbic protests – very, very rare in Japan, since June this year when the Shinzo Abe administration began moving fast to clear a set of contentious security-related bills that critics say would radically alter the country’s pacifist policy and ease its military restrictions.

A large section of the Japanese people is vehemently opposed to it as it would herald Japan into a new avatar that for many rekindles the memory of the World War-II. In July, as the lower house of the Diet passed it, it apparently triggered wide-spread public demonstrations, perhaps largest since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. On August 30, more than a lakh people reportedly converged at the Diet choking the roads to make their views heard by the lawmakers. Over this past week, as the bills came up for a vote in the upper house, thousands turned up for demonstrations, notwithstanding persistent rains.

On Friday, before a three-day vacation began, the upper house finally passed the bills despite a week of chaotic scenes inside the parliament and an aggressive resistance from the opposition bloc.

Critics of the bills said Japan had finally bid goodbye to Pacifism.

The ruling alliance consists of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and the Buddhist-backed Komeito. It has the support on these bills from two or three minor opposition groups. The opposition is led by the Democratic Party of Japan, the Japanese Communist Party and Ishin no To (Japan Innovation Party). The opposition couldn’t stop the bills’ passage due to weak numerical strength, but as the Japan Times reported, it put up resistance with an eye on the next summer’s election for the Upper House.

On Thursday, the Japanese media played up the story of the chaotic scenes inside the Diet a day earlier as some of the opposition members tried to physically stop the chairman of a special committee from completing the procedure to pass two of the contentious bills, almost in same vein as the scenes witnessed in the Indian parliament during the monsoon session.

The bills passed by the Diet actually sought seek to re-interpret the country’s Pacifist Constitution and ease Japan’s tight restrictions on the use of military to intervene overseas first time since the WW-II.

Abe's ruling coalition calls them the Peace and Security Preservation Legislation and says they would be a deterrent to the aggressors and help his nation defend its allies in the eventuality of a war.

The 1947 Constitution’s Article 9 reads that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

Since the end of WW-II, Japan has not permitted its self-defence forces to take part in overseas combat, even in support of its key ally, the United States. The new set of legislation would substantially expand the powers of Japan's military, in a major departure from its foreign policy for seven decades.

Now, going by the reports in the national dailies in Japan, the law allows the country to exercise its right to self-defence in response to an attack on its ally under three conditions: One, such an attack poses threat to Japan; two, no other appropriate means (including the diplomatic) are available; and three, the use of force is limited to the minimum necessary.

In his speeches in the Diet and outside, Abe has acknowledged the opposition to the bills but says it was necessary to pass the law in Japan’s interests. He has said on several occasions that the Japanese troops would not be sent to fight in foreign territory, or in conflicts involving multiple nations, but it would take an active part in protecting its economic and security interests.

China and north Korea, as expected, reacted immediately criticizing Japan's move, saying the new laws would create instability in the region. The United States welcomed the move, even as reports indicated that Abe administration was now moving rapidly to tap into the resources to arm the nation's security forces, a natural corollary to the passage of bills.

Outside the parliament though, the everyday protests grew louder. The demonstrations may continue in the days to come.

“For me it’s more of a personal story,” said a woman in her mid-sixties who had come to the protest site last Monday with her friend. Some of her relatives, she went on to say, were the Kamikaze pilots (who flew suicide missions into the enemy territories) during the Second World War and her father, a soldier, had suffered a bullet wound in his leg. He still suffers from the haunting memories of the war, she said. “We had failed to raise our voice then; we can’t commit the same mistake today,” she said.

Many of the protestors had similar personal stories from the war, said a University of Tokyo professor, who was among the protestors shouting for the scrapping of the bills. “I don’t want my students to be part of any violence in future,” she said of her decision to participate in the mass protests.

A vast section of Japanese, however, seems to back Abe’s move. They feel that Japan can’t keep its eyes closed to the rising military might of China; Beijing’s alleged misadventures in the South and East China seas; and North Korea’s build-up of nuclear arsenal. It’s a view that highlights a changing Japan.

The opponents say in that case the Abe administration should simply amend the Constitution instead of misinterpreting it, while pointing out that the section 9 of the Constitution should be dropped if Japan wants to flex its military muscles overseas, whatever be its premise.

According to a poll published last Monday by the daily Asahi Shimbun, 29 per cent of the Japan’s voters supported the bills while, 54 per cent opposed them; the intelligentsia called the bills unconstitutional.

It began as a political movement of the left parties in Japan. But over a period of time, it has drawn the students, retired judges, scholars, film makers, and common people on to the streets.

Aki Okuda, founder of the group Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, was quoted by an evening newspaper Nikkan Gendai as saying that they feared the bills would be forced into law and that they – the students – won't give up their opposition. This is first time in four decades that the students have taken to street protests in Japan. The last time the youth took to streets was in the late 1960s over the revision of the Japan-US security assistance pact, when the US became Japan’s military protector.

Ohayoo Gozaimasu!

2015-09-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

I am in Japan; landed in Tokyo yesterday. Leave aside its tech part, what's more striking is a near-noiseless ambiance. Tokyo is as crowded as any other town back in India is, but sans noise and clutter! I can't fathom how much sound we make everyday - it's almost surreal to be in a noise-less world. I can't stop wondering how so many people in Tokyo manage not to be noisy, keep their city clean, and yet work more than most of us do! I have no doubt, we are about 99 per cent noise and just one percent work. Next two months, while I exchange notes with fellows from all over Asia in the Asia Leadership Fellow Program (ALFP), I will also be trying to pick Japanese words (the title of this blog means Good Morning); learn a bit of Sushi; and of course drink Sake.

Between, here's the view outside my small little room - of the gardens at the International House of Japan (IHJ), where I am staying.

A hail storm; a storm of worries

2015-05-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

Sone-Sangvi, Kej, Beed (Maharashtra):

The breeze that began to flow around noon on April 6 had by the evening grown into a heavy storm. Then the hails, the size of mangoes, came pelting down, with rain that lasted until the following evening. When the weather finally calmed down, 55-year-old Chandrakant Ikhe began to count his losses.

“I had no heart to see my farm after this event,” recounts Ikhe, a progressive farmer still to reconcile to his unprecedented loss in those two days. Football size water-melons lay damaged on 16 acres, mauled by the rain of hail, he remembers, countless melons, unfit for consumption, still strewn all over.

“See this?” Ikhe says in frustration, lifting a big melon showing cracks and marks, “it’s all a waste.”

Ikhe’s mental anguish is quite stark: There are long pauses between his sentences; he stares desolately at his forlorn farm with rotting ‘sugar-babies’ (sugar-baby is the melon variety he grew) as far as you can see. His crop worth at least Rs 20-25 lakh went to dumps overnight. “You are seeing 350-400 ton (MT) of melons,” he says of the destroyed crop. In a fortnight, it’d have fetched him Rs 5-6000 per MT.

Some melons escaped the nature’s fury, he says, but they would fetch paltry price. Ikhe will manage to earn barely Rs 1.5 lakh, or less than ten per cent of his estimated returns. That, he adds, is not even his investment costs. It was for the first time he cultivated melons on a big stretch, he says.

From his returns he planned to renovate his house, marry off his only daughter this year, and invest in a new farm technology. “Now the priority is to fix loans,” he says. The plans, alas, are on the hold.

Farming is a risky profession, but Ikhe’s just learnt it’s also a gamble. “Had it rained a week later, I may not have suffered such a big.”

He’s is among a hundred melon growers who suffered big losses in recent hailstorm in this village of Kej Tehsil in Marathwada’s drought-prone Beed district, their loss accentuated by extreme weather events that are occurring at such regularity that farmers like him have no idea how to cope.

Several climate studies point to a sharp rise in extreme weather events in central India, and warn the farmers would be at the receiving end. On the one hand, Marathwada region, of which Beed is a part, is experiencing a continuation of meteorological drought leading to severe water stress; and on the other, sudden climate events like hailstorm in March-April is wrecking irreparable damages to crops.

Sone-Sangvi farmers are not atypical sustenance small or marginal farmers. Most of them grow high-end crops with cutting edge technologies. Their stakes are high, their risks higher.

A few km from Ikhe’s village near Kej town, Waseem Inamdar, 32, is broke too. He shows us around his farm – a picture of devastation. This week, the farm, in the midst of barren land, would have harvested bananas, pomegranates, Kesar mangoes and grapes that had come to harvest, clocking him profits of around Rs 50 lakh, by conservative estimates. Like Ikhe, he too can’t recover his input costs. He spent Rs 20 lakh this year – or almost 40 times the average annual investment that a dry-land cotton farmer of 2-ha land would usually spend on his cotton field in this region to earn Rs 10-20,000/acre. That was mostly on drip sets, digging a few bore-wells, and fertilisers and other inputs. Inamdar’s investment and losses like that of Sone-Sangvi farmers would make a small farmer in Marathwada mighty nervous.

“It was the third and final blow,” Inamdar says showing a banana tree that caved in with the bunch of green bananas that now look like rotting. The first bout of incessant rain came in March first week; then in March end, but the third one on April 6 and 7 came with such strong winds and hails that nothing was left to be salvaged. “Last year too I had suffered damages, but this year’s losses are irrecoverable.”

Inamdar runs a brick kiln and agriculture implements shop. From the profits he made in that business, he bought 53 acres of arid farmland near Kej and developed it into a horticulture farm by putting in big money, in five years. He first developed a banana orchard; then grapes; on a plot of five acres stand the mango plants of exportable Kesar variety, and there are pomegranates too over a six acre plot.

What happened to Ikhe or Inamdar is symbolic of wide-spread damages to crops just before the harvest. In Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, the incessant rains wrecked standing wheat and paddy; in states like Madhya Pradesh; Maharashtra; Telangana, it flattened coarse cereals, oilseeds, potatoes and fruits such as mangoes, bananas and melons. Neither farmers nor government has an idea how to prepare for such a risk. The crop insurance schemes help companies, not farmers, says Ashok Gite, a retired agriculture assistant in Beed’s Salegaon village, seven km from Ikhe’s village. “We need a good insurance policy.”

The climatic aberrations are also threatening economies of regions. Kej Taluka, which derives its name from Kejdi River, provides a green contrast to the large swathes of an arid and dreary Beed, among the driest districts in Maharashtra and part of what is called the rain-shadow zone. That’s because of a dam that came up at the confluence of Manjra and Kejdi rivers, where Sone-Sangvi village once breathed.

In the mid-80s villagers were removed to a new place. Many migrated to Mumbai, Pune or Aurangabad for work. Those like Ikhe, who stayed put, slowly transformed their new farm-lands. The once dry-land farmers switched to growing sugarcane following on the footsteps of their prosperous counterparts in western Maharashtra when sugar mills proliferated around the dam.

Empirical data shows, average annual rainfall in Beed district is less than 600 mm and the number of rainy days, much less than most other regions. In last five years the district has received less than 50 per cent of its annual average rains. Yet (and here’s the root of the problem), Beed grows millions of tonnes of water-guzzling sugarcane to feed about 20 roaring sugar-mills that formed the late Gopinath Munde and late Vilasrao Deshmukh’s political and business empires. The mills are now staring at closure as the acute water-scarcity has begun to finally hit sugarcane cultivation. Neighbouring Osmanabad and Latur districts are also facing drought this year deepening the water crisis to unprecedented levels.

“If I recollect my childhood, I only remember poverty,” remarks Babruvan Kanse, a progressive farmer in Sone-Sangvi who leads a collective of about a hundred horticulturists including Ikhe.

Kanse was first in his village to actually experiment with watermelon cultivation on his farm in 2004 and motivate others to switch to this short-duration fruit from the otherwise water-guzzling sugarcane.

Lack of water, stemming from years of poor monsoon, had already prompted the peasants to look for viable alternatives to sugarcane. Kanse grew water-melons on drip – it required less water and traders came to doorsteps to buy the produce. Melon is a short duration crop. You sow the seeds on the rows of soil beds (some use mulching paper sheets to hold moisture and reduce water use) in January and reap the harvest by mid-April. The yield per acre here stands at 25 MT. At an average Rs 5-6000 per MT (Rs 5-6 a kg), the per-acre returns could be an average Rs 1.25 lakh over just three-four months.

“You make a one-time capital investment on drip sets and a recurring production expenses on seeds and fertilisers and chemicals, and yet you can make good money from this crop,” Kanse explains.

So the shift was swift. Where this village had 150 hectares under sugarcane in the 2001-2002 season it now grows soybeans and pulses in kharif and water-melons in winter. They adopted new technologies – like automated and semi-automated drip sets; mulching papers to increase water efficiency; in-situ water conservation tanks; some have built expensive green poly-houses to grow high-end vegetables such as capsicum – by pledging huge investments from whatever profits they made every year.

“Weather is a new problem,” Kanse says. It barely rains during the monsoon, affecting kharif; then in February-April, sudden hailstorm events wreck the Rabi crop. Water brought him economic prosperity, Kanse says, his new problems are driven by the lack of it.

Ikhe’s 16-acre farm is in the belly of Manjra dam reservoir; sans water this time. This used to be his farm that got ceded for the dam. Some Sone-Sangvi villagers farm in the catchment when water recedes. Many have dug bore-wells in the belly and laid pipes from far away water-sources, desperate for water. If it rained, this area would be under water, Ikhe says. For many years now, it has not rained and the dam never got filled to its capacity even once this past decade. It’s a common refrain in this part.

Ikhe says he dug an open well and several bore-wells on his 16-acre farm in the catchment of the dam when the reservoir dried up. If you stretch his drip pipes end to end, he calculates, they would run 8 km long. Place a water melon every foot, he says, and you will end up counting hundreds. That’s how many have gone waste, he laments. On his five-acre near his new village, there’s nothing growing. Until last year, he grew vegetables, potatoes, sugarcane and even water-melons there – by way of drip-irrigation. He has, like many other farmers in this belt, a semi-automated drip-set. “You set the time and quantity of water to be used; different for different crops and you can single-handedly operate the entire 50-acre stretch with this machine,” Ikhe says.

“We can adopt any technology,” Ikhe says, staring at his melon farm, “how do we conquer weather?”

Read some of my stories on Marathwada crisis here, here, here, and here.

Some water crisis stories are here, here and here.

Land of 'ineligible' suicides

2015-05-03T04:34:00.000-07:00

The year was 1997. The month December. Ramdas Amberwar, a lanky 48-year-old farmer in Telang Takli village in Vidarbha's cotton bowl of Yavatmal, consumed a bottle of pesticide and killed himself.

He left a note: the loans are becoming a burden; crop's failing consistently; I can't continue seeing my family in penury.

The last paragraph said: "I wish the government paid attention to our woes."

That week, like Amberwar, three more farmers killed themselves, drawing attention to the "Vidarbha suicides". Until then, the Maharashtra government had said farmer suicides were taking place in Andhra Pradesh, not in the western state.

The circumstances that led to Gajendra Singh Rajput's death at Jantar Mantar are yet to be established conclusively although his letter mentioned "my crop has been destroyed".

Between 1997 and 2013, at least 60,000 farmers are suspected to have committed suicide in Maharashtra. Across India, more than 300,000 farmers - one of the biggest waves of peasant suicides post-Independence - have taken their lives, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) annual reports.

The rural peasantry has been moving to small towns or shanties in metros in distress: on average, 2,000 farmers are quitting farming every day, going by the two census reports from 1991.

As many as 15 million farmers (mainly cultivators) have quit agriculture since 1991 - which, in itself, is not undesirable. But where are they heading? Nowhere.

The census reports show that the number of landless workers has grown phenomenally across the country.

Nothing can be more sickening, however, than the jugglery with suicides data and the interpretation. Each year, every state reports suicides by different professionals. Some have done away with the "persons engaged in agriculture" category.

For instance, the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra says only three farmers took their lives in Maharashtra this year, according to Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh's disclosure in the Lok Sabha on Monday.

But reports collated from various newspapers suggest at least 1,000 farmers have killed themselves in three months alone.

So, why did the government report three? Because those are the ones linked to distress, as found by a committee of the district collector, the superintendent of police and the superintending agriculture officer.

Usually, in Maharashtra, a tehsildar goes to the bereaved family, asks about 30 questions (from land ownership to debt) and concludes if it's a "genuine or non-genuine" suicide.

In the past five years, more and more cases are being reported as "non-genuine" or "ineligible". That means, the suicide is genuine but its cause is not linked to agrarian distress. Which further means the case is not fit for the Rs 1 lakh compensation the state awards the family of an "eligible suicide victim".

Many families don't report suicides, fearing a social backlash. If a family has a daughter of marriageable age, chances are that the father's suicide won't be reported: the marriage could be affected.

Some state governments have found the best way to deal with the problem: just don't report farmer suicides. Many states, like Bengal and Chhattisgarh, have not been reporting the statistics to the NCRB in the past few years, saying there are no farmer suicides.

The crisis is one of rural recession in many parts, particularly in rain-fed agriculture regions like Vidarbha, Telangana or Bundelkhand and now Marathwada, leading to depression.

Sujay Patil, a psychiatrist in Akola city, told this reporter in 2006: "There's a wave of depression sweeping the countryside, and the reasons for suicides are rooted in sudden economic shocks."

Patil began to treat clinically depressed farmers free of cost, only to realise a year later that he simply could not deal with the flood of patients at his hospital.

Across India, rural depression is now assuming alarming proportions. Some psychologists equate it with a public health epidemic.

This year's rural distress is somewhat unique on two counts: there is no price and there is no crop. Prices of cash crops have fallen because of global trends and poor quality following unseasonal rain. Foodgrain prices have been ruling low and the government has not raised the minimum support price too much for fear of stoking inflation and hurting the rest of the population.

But, with peasant movements withering away and most leaders moving to urban or semi-urban playing fields, the rural populace has no one else but the government to turn to.

Hundreds of farmers left behind chilling suicide notes, many of them directing their anger and questions at the executive leadership of states. "How long will it take you to act on our problems?" wrote a farmer in December 2004 in a suicide note directed at the chief minister of Maharashtra.

"Sorry," another telling suicide note left behind by a young farmer in Yavatmal for his widow read. "Please get remarried; but not again to a farmer."

Poet-farmer Shrikrisna Kalamb wrote his elegy two days before hanging himself in a village in Vidarbha's Akola district in March 2008, leaving behind his five daughters and wife.

" Me aagala vegala, mahi nyarich jindagani, mahe maran bhi ahe jase avakali paani (I am unusual, just as my life has been; and like the incessant rain, my death too will be like a sudden event)."

Kalamb's poems - now set to be published as a compendium - reflect the life and times of a farmer.

In a poem in Marathi's Warhadi dialect, Kalamb wrote of a farmer caught in the vortex of woes: "If, at times, the nature spares him, the markets don't."

The story originally here.

Paddy, what price?

2015-04-25T06:16:00.001-07:00

Recently in Durg, Raipur and Rajnandgaon (Chhattisgarh):

Jagdish Ram Nishad’s winter paddy crop is about to be harvested. On his three-acre farm, a few km from his home, green paddy strands stand along the neat rows of cabbage that are now in full bloom.

In the last ten years, the 38-year-old farmer in Kopedih village, about 30 km from Rajnandgaon town off the four-lane National Highway 6, assiduously transformed his rain-fed single crop land into an irrigated lush-green multi-crop farm. He improved his land’s productivity by ploughing back part of his profits to create assets like a bore-well which, he says, in turn helped him diversify into growing vegetables.

A paddy procurement guarantee and a bonus amount over the support prices gave him more cash that he could reinvest in his farm. In return Nishad voted for Raman Singh, who became popular across rural Chhattisgarh as ‘Chaur (rice) Wale Baba’ for his paddy procurement and rice distribution programmes.

Nishad is, however, concerned today if the returns from paddy would remain steady. The Raman Singh government, mired in a multi-crore food distribution scam that is threatening to dent its image, didn’t buy his entire paddy crop in the season that just ended the way it did this past decade. Plus, it has not paid him the bonus amount that it has been giving from its treasury by the season end.

This is the first year in a decade that Nishad says his returns actually declined as compared with his last year’s income. “Nuksaan to bahut hua, dhaan bhi pura nahi liya aur bonus bhi nahi diya (my loss is big; the government did not fully procure my paddy, nor gave me the bonus amount),” Nishad says. He’s not the only one sulking. In Chhattisgarh, paddy growers suddenly look unhappy with the chief minister.

More than a million paddy growers in Chhattisgarh are agitated over Raman government’s sudden shift in procurement policy and an inexplicable scrapping of bonus. They felt it was a breach of their trust. In the run up to December 2013 assembly elections, the BJP promised in its manifesto that if voted back to power, its government would procure “every grain of paddy produced” and hike the bonus to Rs 300 per quintal.

The state’s decision is actually driven by a paradigm shift in the Centre’s procurement policy.

In June last year, immediately after coming to power, the Modi-government asked all states to scrap bonus payment to wheat and paddy growers saying it “distorts markets and keeps private players out of the food business”. If they continued to pay bonus, the Centre warned in a letter to the states, Central agencies would restrict procurement leaving the states to bear the burden for surplus grain. The move was aimed apparently at tackling the rising food prices by keeping the surplus grain in the market.

So while the UPA government supported him in subsidizing his state’s paddy economy, the Modi-government is hitting the ‘Chaur-wale Baba’ where it hurts the most. It is in a way forcing Chhattisgarh to cut its paddy procurement, scrap the bonus and ultimately alter its much-touted public distribution system (PDS) by bringing in direct cash transfers. But the policy shift is hurting small farmers like Nishad when rural economy is in tatters, even some of the Chhattisgarh ministers admit privately.

“It’s like Jor ka jhatka dhire se lage,” remarked the food and trade policy analyst Devinder Sharma. The Centre is slowly dismantling two drivers of green revolution: the Food Corporation of India (FCI), which is the backbone of food procurement, storage, transportation and distribution, and price guarantee.”

In the last week of March 2015, Professor M S Swaminathan, regarded as the father of India’s green revolution, urged the Modi government to implement recommendations of the Farmers' Commission he had chaired. Citing a need to safeguard interests of small farmers in the face of growing risks in agriculture due to climate change, he suggested the formulae for support price for commodities should be production cost plus 50 per cent. “Our green revolution has been sustained only because of public procurement of wheat and rice at a fairly reasonable MSP,” he said. “There is no other profession that has such low return”, he said adding that farming is the riskiest profession in the world due to uncertain weather conditions arising from climate change. “The future will belong to nations with grains and not guns.”

Chhattisgarh began procuring paddy from growers immediately after its creation in 2001 at a premium of Rs 50 over the then prevailing support prices, mainly because farmers sold their produce in distress in open markets controlled by private traders and rice millers then. The state marketing federation procured paddy from farmers through cooperative societies, each catering to a cluster of 15-20 villages. The FCI bought the surplus rice after the state met its PDS requirement of about 2 MMT. The burden of bonus was borne by the state; the Centre paid for procurement, distribution, handling and storage.

This system may now be dumped if the Centre accepts the recommendations of a high-level committee led by BJP MP Shanta Kumar on the FCI restructuring. The committee gave its report in January 2015.

In 2014-15, Chhattisgarh’s paddy farmers earned, by a modest estimate, Rs 2,500 crore less on account of non-payment of bonus and part-sale of their produce to private traders at lower rates, a former Chhattisgarh minister who did not want to be named admitted.

Not just the growers but also about 1350 village cooperative societies, which work as sub-agents for the Chhattisgarh state marketing federation, a nodal agency for paddy procurement, face uncertainty, said Raviprakash Tamrakar, a farmer and chairman of the Vruttakar Sahkari Society, Nankatti. “We are being taken back to the previous system where millers and traders will exploit producers,” he feared.

Tamrakar, who leads a United Farmers’ front in Chhattisgarh, said the procurement system has several flaws that need to be rectified, but it’d be a disaster for farmers if the government scraps the policy. “A farmer has a guarantee that his produce would be procured at a support price and he would get bonus as an incentive to produce the grain; it stabilizes his economy and helps him meet his expenses.”

The high level committee in its report thought otherwise. In an 80-page exhaustive report, it explains how the current food-procurement system and FCI functioning is obsolete and hence must be changed. The committee has said the FCI should leave the procurement to state agencies and private players in the states where such a system is fully developed and move to eastern states like West Bengal where procurement is weak and where through private participation it could help build a robust system.

As regards the bonus, the committee recommends a per hectare crop-neutral cash subsidy to the tune of Rs 7000 but a total decontrol of fertilizer prices.

Modi had begun to speak of his idea about unbundling of the FCI into three separate arms even before he became the Prime Minister. A section of economists feel the Union government needs to tide over a “wasteful expenditure” on food subsidies that include of paying a high price to wheat and rice growers, while growers say the support prices still don’t meet their every-burgeoning production costs. While Raman Singh, who’s on a sticky turf over the multi-crore PDS scam, has not yet made any open remarks against this shift, people close to him say he is concerned.

The CM wrote to the PM last October months after the June diktat. Highlighting the plight of his state’s paddy growers, he urged Modi to reconsider his directive to stop bonus on paddy procurement.

In 2013-14, his government gave Rs 2,400 crore in bonus payments to farmers on 8 MMT of paddy it procured – it came to Rs 270 per quintal. The principle paddy procurement price cost Rs 13,000 crore at Rs 1360 a quintal. In his letter to the PM, the CM said withdrawal of bonus would “reduce buffer stock” and “adversely impact the overall food security of the country.” He said since the bonus is paid by the state, it should be left alone to decide about it.

Chhattisgarh’s promise of Rs 300/quintal as bonus for the 2014-15 was the highest in the country. To the PM, the CM said bonus payment is “the most important decision” of his government to improve farmers’ condition in his state. It was a promise made by the BJP in November 2013 assembly polls, he reminded. The CM said in his letter that 8 MMT of paddy would give about 5.4 MMT of rice and since the state needs only 2.4 MMT rice for its public distribution system, it would be left with a “surplus of 3 MMT” should the Centre not procure this rice in central pool. Chhattisgarh is the third largest contributor of rice to central pool with a significant share in the food subsidy bill.

A former minister in the Raman government said: “People are unhappy; I hope good sense prevails on the Prime Minister.”

The Centre has not taken a call on the HLC report, but has accepted some recommendations. Last Wednesday, the Centre asked the FCI not to purchase food-grains in Punjab and Haryana. While the latter has reportedly toed the diktat, the former has pleaded for a phased-withdrawal. “It (the policy change) will have a strong impact on Chhattisgarh’s economy,” TS Singhdeo, the leader of opposition in Chhattisgarh Legislative Assembly, said. “The BJP did not keep its promise to farmers,” he said. “We want the government to restore bonus.”

In the last decade, Chhattisgarh emerged as the largest exporter of non-Basmati rice in the country – a success largely credited to its policy of price incentive and procurement.

Last year, the state procured about 8 MMT of paddy; this year (2014-15), it initially said it would restrict procurement to 10 quintal an acre, but later raised it to 15 quintals in view of ensuing local body polls.

But the damage had been done. The CM, who called for a ‘Congress-Mukt Chhattisgarh’, instead saw swathes of rural Chhattisgarh getting BJP-Mukt. In his home district of Rajnandgaon, his party could win the municipal corporation, but was wiped it out in the Zilla Panchayat on the issue of paddy price. Out of 24 seats, the Congress in that panchayat won 18 seats, while the BJP won the remaining six.

The ruling party’s defeat was spread across the state – it lost in the tribal belt of Surguja and Bastar, central plains, rural centres as well as Raipur, the biggest urban body.

By the end of the procurement season in February, Chhattisgarh government bought 6.3 MMT of paddy, nearly 1.7 MMT less compared to last year, when actual production has reportedly increased.

As Tamrakar, the farmers’ leader explained: “Farmers are angry; to dissuade them from selling their paddy to a society the government imposed so many conditions that small farmers felt it’s better to sell their paddy to private traders event at a loss.” Oblivious of the top-down policy changes, farmers like Nishad are wondering if Modi and Raman Singh have turned their backs to the promise of placing more money in the hands of rural peasantry.

Take his own case: On an acre, he earned at least Rs 7,000 less this year, Nishad says. He explains: He got 20 quintals of paddy on an acre, about 60 quintals overall in Kharif. If the government procured his entire crop, he would get Rs 1360 (MSP) a quintal. If you take Rs 270 bonus that it gave on a quintal last year, his income would stand at Rs 97,800. Exclude the input and production cost, he would make a profit of Rs 45,000, at least. But here’s how much he actually made this year. He sold 25 quintals to private traders at Rs 1100/quintal. He sold 35 quintals to the government at Rs 1360.

In all he earned Rs 75,100, or Rs 22,700 less than what he would have made had the government stuck to its promise of procuring his produce and giving him a bonus like it did last year.

Nishad says he would usually use the bonus amount to buy inputs for the next season. “Bonus payment usually comes this time when we begin the next season’s preparation,” he says.

“Will the state procurement system stay?” Nishad wonders. It’s not clear if Modi has made up his mind.

Across Chhattisgarh, the withdrawal of bonus and a drop in state procurement of paddy meant a drop in the income of farmers. Nishad is better off than other farmers, since he is among 20 per cent who have irrigation facilities. Someone like Kunjlal Tandon, a dalit farmer of two acres in Bodegaon village of Durg district, is not only unhappy; he’s mighty worried. For the next season he has no money, he says. Even a small bonus was his big support from March to June. Now, he says, he’ll either sell or lease out his land.

Two suicides and end of a promise

2015-03-29T01:33:00.002-07:00

Recently in Wardha and Yavatmal (Vidarbha, Maharashtra):

Moreshwar Chaudhary was 32; Suraj Bhoyar, 29. On a wintry December 8, last, the two cotton growers consumed Monocrotophous, a commonly used pesticide, distraught by failed crops, falling income and mounting loans.

Moreshwar was uneducated and married; he left a year-old a son and wife in the middle of her second pregnancy. Suraj had a vocational diploma and was a bachelor. They had never met each other. But their short lives ran parallel and ended on the same note. They died within a span of few hours.

In a dingy mortuary of government hospital in Ghatanji town of Yavatmal district, that day, Suraj’s body was being taken in for post-mortem while Moreshwar’s was moved out. It became an unlikely meeting place for the two families joined in grief that stemmed from a common thread: cotton.

Rains came after the crops had failed. And when the abysmal yields began to flock the markets around November, prices had tanked.

"This year," Suraj’s elder brother Swapnil says, “There is no crop, no price.”

Vidarbha, a region in Maharashtra notorious for farm suicides, has seen such coincidences before. Except this time they are glaring. As it turns out, the months since their suicides have seen more farmers take their lives in the region. The neighbouring Marathwada, which faces water stress, is also reporting a spurt in farmer suicides. Put together, roughly 400 farmers, mostly young, have taken their lives in past three months in these two regions. And suicides are just one symptom of a deepening crisis. Reports of distress sales of land and cattle have begun. So have migrations of people, who need work.

“This is a negative farm growth year,” says Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan-Andolan Samiti (VJAS), a fact borne out by the Maharashtra Economic Survey 2014-15 published on March 17. It says state’s agriculture growth rate was in the negative owing to bad monsoon and failed crops. Barring sugaracane, all other crops have suffered a steep decline in yields ranging from 20-60 per cent. “Vidarbha and Marathwada are like volcanoes,” he says. “That's because the entire rural economy is belted.”

By an official estimate, about 24,000 or over half of Maharashtra’s villages are facing drought-like conditions, a metaphor for drop in crop yields (indicated by a gauge called anewari) by over 50 per cent. That means roughly 10 million rural households – or two-thirds of the state’s peasantry is in trouble. Most of these are scattered all over the state, but worst affected ones are in Vidarbha and Marathwada.

It’s a deadly cocktail: erratic monsoon, crop failure, falling prices, growing indebtedness. As if this was not enough, a spell of hailstorm that accompanied incessant rains last week irreparably destroyed Rabi crops such as wheat and gram wherever they had been planted and were about to be harvested.

This is the first major test of the BJP governments in the state and Centre. The Fadnavis-government has announced an aid of Rs 2000 crore for drought-hit Maharashtra farmers; the Modi-government matched it with the same amount but details of how the money would be used are still sketchy.

Vijay Jawandhia, farmers’ leader and activist in Wardha, says: “Every year there are climatic aberrations and market volatilities; but the new government hasn’t stepped in to support farmers.” Maharashtra’s aid is paltry, he says. “The Centre hasn’t ensured better prices through market intervention.”

India’s domestic cotton consumption has been stagnant despite a jump in cotton acreage to a record 130 lakh hectares in 2014-15. That coincided with sluggish international prices and global demand.

At the beginning of current cotton cycle in June-2014, the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), a global think tank, said that with 1.8 million tons of surplus cotton and changes in China’s cotton policy, prices were unlikely to rise to the historic 2012-13 levels. That year a quintal of cotton fetched about Rs 6000 in local markets – perhaps the highest price in a decade or so.

In 2013-14 Moreshwar and Suraj fetched Rs 5000 or more per quintal of cotton and the yields were better (4 quintals per acre). This time the prices are hovering around Rs 3900-4000 and yields are two quintals an acre at best. So for the cotton growers of the region it came like a staggering pay cut.

China curbed its imports this year as it gave a greater incentive to its growers to improve yield and quality, as a result of which Xinjiang, the largest cotton-producing region in that country where the trial subsidy is being implemented, yielded a bigger harvest than last season, an ICAC release said last month. While China imported much of India’s cotton last three seasons, it did not in the 2014-2015 season.

In domestic markets, it meant a glut despite fall in cotton yields in states like Maharashtra. For, overall acreage and production has gone up. This should have prompted the government of India to intervene in the markets by proactively asking the Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) to step up its procurement in different parts of the country like it does every year so that the prices did not fall below the minimum support price threshold, Jawandhia explains. But the CCI has been reluctant to procure cotton given the poor demand and lack of counter-guarantee from the Centre to bear the burden if it incurred losses.

For sugar, Modi-government announced an export subsidy of Rs 4000 per tonne last month to tide over the industry losses; but refused to support cotton farmers the same way, Jawandhia points out.

Even Maharashtra’s cotton marketing federation, an agency that once ran the monopoly procurement programme for cotton from 1970s until the 2002 season, did not procure much, leaving the farmers at the mercy of private traders, who won’t offer higher price since neither cotton exports would pick up, nor the domestic demand. So the falling yields and prices came as a double whammy for the farmers, already beleaguered by a long depressing negative growth in agriculture and sagging incomes.

It was around 2 pm that day Suraj called his elder brother, Swapnil, 33, on his cell phone. It was to be their last conversation. “He told me to take care of our parents and then hung up,” Swapnil recalls at his village Anji. Suraj had minutes earlier left for home from Ghatanji cotton yard, distraught by the fact that their abysmal yields coupled with poor prices would not help them repay this year’s loans. Swapnil was still at the market when the call came. “Though I am older, Suraj looked after the farm as he was better educated,” he says. When he cut the call and could not be reached, Swapnil left his cotton-laden cart at the market and rushed home on a friend’s bike. Anji is five km from the town. Suraj, his mother told him, had left for the farm after touching her feet; he did not have his lunch.

“My fears came true when I reached our farm,” Swapnil recounts. Suraj lay unconscious in the midst of his cotton plants, some of them are wilting today and without any bolls. By the time he could be taken to Ghatanji hospital, Suraj had slid into a state of coma. Minutes later, Swapnil recalls, he died.

Around 4 pm his body was taken to the mortuary. That was when the Bhoyars realized that another young farmer’s body was being moved out. That was Moreshwar Chaudhary of Daheli village.

“It was very heart-wrenching,” Anji sarpanch and a distant relative of the Bhoyars, Gajanan Bhoyar, recounts.

That morning Moreshwar went to his farm worried how to repay loans, his mother Gangabai recalls. Around 11 am, she was informed that her son had consumed pesticide and needed to be taken to a hospital. His friends put him in an auto and took him to Ghatanji hospital where doctors pronounced him “brought dead”. Moreshwar had consumed half-a-litre of pesticide, his neighbor Aakash Dambhare says. Tragedy had come calling back again on Gangabai exactly a decade after her husband Bharatrao committed suicide due to mounting indebtedness. She had lost her only son too.

On his 3-acre land that he began to till after his father’s demise, Moreshwar got 3 quintals of cotton this year when he should’ve got at least 15. A week before he took his life, he sold it for Rs 11,000. It would not help him repay loans. A look at his records shows Moreshwar was juggling multiple loans to meet his expenses. In his mother’s name he borrowed from two micro-finance institutions a sum of Rs 26,000. On that Moreshwar paid a weekly instalment of Rs 605. It was in addition to the crop loan from a bank and hand loans from relatives – together amounting to over Rs 1 lakh. He had also mortgaged his mother and wife’s gold ornaments.

Moreshwar had to borrow more than he could repay; he had no sources of income other than his farm.

Ten km away from Daheli, in Anji, the Bhoyars who own eight acres are yet to recover from the shock. Their story is no different. Loans now outweigh their income. Swapnil says they would need to sell off a portion of land to repay debt.

Suraj, an ITI diploma holder, lost his job five years ago after which he took to farming with his brother. “We could’ve sold our land; repaid our debts – what was the need to kill himself, we could have done something,” his bereaved father says. When rural youths get married at 24-25, Suraj kept postponing his wedding due to financial crunch, Swapnil says. "He was more of a friend to me."

Moreshwar got married three years ago. He had a year-old son, Kanhaiyya. His young widow, Yogita, is in the eighth month of her second pregnancy. Putting up a brave-face, she says holding Kanhaiyya close to her: “He just deserted us."

Every time he gets up from his sleep the toddler searches for his father, Yogita says. Then his grandmother shows him Moreshwar's framed photograph. As the young-one smiles looking at the picture, the grand-ma cries.

Everybody loves a good drought in Maharashtra

2012-09-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

When Kevalram Kale urged the Maharashtra chief minister Prithiviraj Chavan to declare wet-drought in his constituency August 22, his plea stood in contrast with the story in rest of the state.

The same afternoon, Chavan had chaired a cabinet meeting to declare drought in 123 tehsils (blocks); with rains eluding large swathes of the central western parts for the second year in succession.

Now here was a legislator complaining about too much rain, not the lack of it. Melghat, a hilly forested area infamous for high incidence of child malnutrition deaths, was reeling under unabated rains.

Standing crops were inundated, roads snapped and people hungry as ration couldn’t reach the scattered hamlets, he pleaded with the CM, and submitted a memorandum demanding Rs 30 crore: to lay new roads, repair bridges and public buildings. No mention of work or ration or healthcare for the tribals.

Since drought was a reigning political issue, Kale like all other legislators fancied his chances to get funds as special assistance from the state bosses. After all, the state itself was vying for a central aid.

The tribal MLA’s bid to get projects under the garb of drought is in keeping with the trend in the state and perhaps other states too where rains have been poor.

While the ground situation remains distressing, the push is for big ticket projects rather than immediate relief. “Drought is being used by the states to make huge demands from the Centre,” Jairam Ramesh, the union rural development minister, told reporters in New Delhi early last month.

Kale’s demands now await the nod of Mantralaya where drought is the season’s theme. Marathwada, the central region of the state, and parts in western Maharashtra in the union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar’s home turf are suffering from acute water-fodder scarcity.

All reservoirs without exception have tanked to dead-storage-level in Marathwada region with a year to go until next monsoon. Tough times lie ahead if it doesn’t rain in the remaining season.

Over 2000 tankers are supplying water to about 1500 villages and 6000 hamlets. Food crop acreage has dropped by 25-lakh-hectare, according to the agriculture commissioner’s office in Pune, crops in many other places are wilting, big reservoirs have tanked to dead-storage levels and distress cattle sales have begun. Rains revived partially in August but it was a case of too little too late too. The farmers are now looking toward the state to provide compensation that could offset some of their crop losses. In many areas, brisk migrations of people from drought-hit areas toward the nearest town or cities have begun.

With the Kharif crop hit, agriculture officials are pinning their hopes on Rabi (winter) crop, prospects of which will solely depend on these areas getting rains from a receding monsoon in September.

Yet the way in which Chavan-government declared drought was quite strange. This was the first time in decades that a drought was declared even before monsoon officially ended and crop surveys done.

“Technically, the declaration means nothing,” says a senior bureaucrat in Mantralaya; “it has only added to confusion.” First with the connotation: do we call it drought or scarcity? The cabinet calls it drought in its August 22 decision when the state has long banished its use. With food shortages long removed, the government uses the description, ‘conditions akin to scarcity’.

And here’s the statutory procedure: The state government’s three separate departments – the revenue, the agriculture, and the relief and rehabilitation – get preliminary crop surveys done after September 15. By December 15, the actual crop cutting surveys of Kharif and winter Rabi crop arrive, and the government knows the actual crop-water scenario to make an assessment of the scarcity, if any, of drinking water and fodder, at village-level.

The government then classifies a village (not the entire block) as scarcity-hit if a) the rainfall and b) sowing or yields drop below 50 per cent of annual average. The help – in terms of per-hectare compensation or ex-gratia or any other – to an individual farmer is extended the following year. Last year’s relief aid to farmers is still being disbursed.

By declaring drought, the government binds itself to a drought code and huge cost burden (it must forgo land revenue, among many other things); scarcity means lesser responsibility and burden on the kitty.

How did the government arrive on the list of drought-affected blocks this year? A cabinet minister told The Telegraph on the condition of anonymity that it was a political decision to address the home constituencies, based on the rainfall data that day.

The 123rd block – on that list which actually started with 115, soared to 122, before settling on it – was that of Laxman Dhobale, Maharashtra’s water supply minister. The list throws up blocks of powerful ministers: Baramati of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar; Shrigonda of tribal welfare minister Baban Pachpute; Sangamner of agriculture minister Balasaheb Thorat; Tasgaon of home minister RR Patil; Kadegaon-Palus of forest minister Patangrao Kadam; even Madha in Solapur, union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar’s new Lok Sabha constituency finds a mention in that list.

In a sense the cabinet declared drought in its own constituencies, many of them with no scarcity.

Between August 22, when the cabinet announced drought, and now, rains have made up some deficit. Rainfall data from June 1 to September 1, 2012, shows 42 blocks mostly in Marathwada had registered below 50 per cent of their long-term average annual rainfall, two of them below 25 per cent; 105 blocks received 50-75 per cent rains; 135 blocks 75-100, and 73 blocks recorded above average. Even if rainfall has improved, the damage done to crops by lack of rains in June and July is irreparable, officials say.

Just as it seemed this would be a bad drought year, rains have revived in central western Maharashtra to put the government in a fix. The met department today issued a warning of heavy rains in these parts. So, if the actual village-level scenario wasn’t known, what made the government pronounce a drought?

Two days after declaring drought in 123 blocks, the CM on August 24 led a delegation of his ministers to New Delhi, seeking special assistance to mitigate drought in the state, for short and long term projects.

This was the second time in three months that Maharashtra was seeking aid for drought-relief; in June, the Centre had released Rs 578 crore to mitigate acute water and fodder shortages in parts of western Maharashtra that fall in the rain-shadow area, and where rainfall had been abysmal last season.

The latest demand followed a visit by three-member central ministerial team headed by Sharad Pawar early August that toured Gujarat, Karnataka, and Rajasthan as well to assess the drought-situation.

In its latest demand, Maharashtra pitched for about Rs 3750 crore for drought-mitigation measures that includes of spending on local sector irrigation and Rs 2200 crore to complete big pending projects, this – when the DF government’s track record with the irrigation projects has been mired in controversy.

In the last decade, Mahrashtra spent Rs 42,000 crore and could bring only 0.01 per cent of land under irrigation, according to the state economic survey of 2011-12. The money sought for projects are to be used on last mile works of lift irrigation schemes in western Maharashtra in the NCP’s citadel.

Similarly, in the name of drought-mitigation, Karnataka has sought an assistance of Rs 11,488.96 crore, Rajasthan Rs 7,424.13 crore, and Gujarat Rs 18,673.37 crore, according to the agriculture ministry.

Not convinced by Maharashtra proposal, which suffered from a major deficiency to fit the criteria for the national disaster relief fund, the Centre asked the CM to come back with a reworked proposal once a clearer picture of the situation emerges after the end of monsoon. In short, it asked the state to come after its own surveys are done and submit a sector-wise concrete proposal to the planning commission.

The centre would then send its own teams to do a swat analysis before taking a final decision on the aid as part of its routine procedure. This usually takes time, Chavan said after returning from New Delhi, but the state government will continue to fund drought relief measures from its own kitty.

A reworked proposal would be submitted to the Centre after September 15. A village, not block, will be the providing with relief doles after September 15, he told reporters on August 26.

The state’s hurriedly-taken political decision lay exposed. The opposition BJP called the ministerial delegation’s visit to Delhi a farce. The NCP joined the BJP in criticizing the government with its guns trained on the CM in particular for presenting a proposal with technical deficiency.

Maharashtra is among the four states to have declared drought, together in 390 blocks. Central teams will visit Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan to assess the situation.

Both Chavan and Pawar realize that the crisis in rural areas must be managed now; or the government should at least be seen managing the crisis. For, its effects will spill over in 2013, a year before elections. The CM-led delegation’s visit to Delhi is being seen by the political circles in that light.

Pawar has been constantly reviewing drought situation in his home ground. In September, at least five times, he assured the people that the central government would extend best possible help to the people affected by drought.

Sr. Pawar's concern is understandable: Milk and sugar sectors will be hit hard this year and its ripples can be heard now. With the cane yield estimated to be down at least 40 per cent, sugar crushing season which usually commences September 1 has been pushed to mid-November and may end by March. That will affect the production and naturally the revenue of sugar factories. And fodder shortage, which has hit the dairy sector, has seen a drop in milk production by over three million litres a day ringing big and long-term losses for dairy farmers. The massive corruption in irrigation sector coupled with the prevailing distress may fuel resentment in the electorate against the ruling alliance.

Pawar has asked the state government – in which his own party holds the water resources portfolio – to prepare a list of ongoing irrigation projects, which could be completed within a year.

Such projects may come up for discussion in the forthcoming meeting of Empowered Group of Ministers chaired by him, he told the state government. The NCP leadership is desperate to generate funds to complete some projects in the Krishna river valley, projects that have consumed Rs 28,000 crore in the last decades and still need as much for completion.

More than Rs 600 crore of last year’s central drought relief assistance to Maharashtra is lying unspent, according to the government’s own admission. So it’s not relief that the political leadership covets but money for big ticket items; drought is just incidental.

(This was the situation early September; by now, rains have given some respite to western Maharashtra, reservoirs have been replenished, but situation in Marathwada remains grim. Across the state, as people bid good bye to lord Ganesha, drought is a forgotten story.)

Small town's big coal rush

2012-09-30T06:20:00.002-07:00

One firm commercially sold the coal; the other its captive mine; still another sold itself to a big player, lock, stock and barrel. They did not extract any coal, but a few companies still made a fortune.

Nagpur throws up but a few samples of how some firms actually traded their captive coal mines without digging an inch or setting up an industry for which they were allotted the blocks.

In the end nothing got set up on mine pitheads. No power plant. No steel or sponge iron either. Riding their new net-worth spurred by mining leases, the promoters sold their firms for a fortune.

While the Manoj Jayaswal-promoted Abhijeet Group of Companies came into limelight due to its sudden rise and association with Congress MP Vijay Darda, whose companies have been booked by CBI earlier this month, a consortium of small players in this town went almost unnoticed. As coal ministry begins to de-allocate captive blocks now, some of these obscure firms, which together got a number of coal blocks when they had no wherewithal or money to get into the mining affair, are falling under scanner.

The coal ministry last week approved de-allocation of five coal blocks out of a total seven recommended by the Inter-Ministerial Group (IMG), which is reportedly scrutinising 29 blocks awarded to private firms out of the total 58 that were served show cause notices for delays in the development of these mines.

On September 13, the government de-allocated Bramhadih Block in Jharkhand allocated to Castron Mining Ltd in 1996, Chinora and Warora (southern part) blocks in Maharashtra given to Fieldmining and Ispat Ltd in 2003, Lalgarh (North) block in Jharkhand allotted to DOMCO Smokeless Fuels Pvt Ltd in 2005.

It also accepted the IMG recommendation to seize the Bank Guarantee (BG) in case of Marki Mangli-II, III and IV Blocks in Maharashtra. The blocks were allocated to Veerangana Steel Ltd. The ministry also asked the Monnet Ispat & Energy to submit its BG for Utkal B2 Block in Odisha allocated it.

A few more blocks are expected to be delisted in the days to come. But would the ministry action now be able to undo the wrong? Local industry sources say action came when the party is over.

“It’s not a child’s play to open a mine,” explains a retired director of the Western Coalfields Limited, on the condition of anonymity. “You need at least Rs 300-350 crore to go down for coal; anybody working in the sector will vouch for that.” You need technical know-how and the machinery for a mine, and you need to go for over 70 different statutory clearances before you could lay a boundary around the mine. “It may take roughly 7-12 years before you can actually start mining,” he says. You need patience and deep pockets for that, he says. The ministry, he says, gave coal mine to “any Tom, Dick and Harry.”

Govind Daga was no Tom, Dick or a Harry though. A scion of the late Diwan Bahadur Kasturchand Daga, a banker and trader of his time who owned vast stretches of land in this region, he owns the Central Cables Limited that manufactures power cables for a steady clientele. His family lost their coal mines when coal was nationalized in 1973.

So in 1998, post-liberalisation, Daga began his pursuit to foray into power sector. He floated the Central Colliery Company Limited and successfully got a captive mine near Bhadrawati in Chandrapur district to set up a power plant. That was the first block allotted to a private company in coal-rich Vidarbha.

Then, he floated another company called BS Ispat with his friend and colleague in the Vidarbha Industries Association (VIA), Mohan Agrawal. Both Daga and Agrawal are former presidents of VIA and staunch votaries of separate statehood to Vidarbha. Their new venture was to set up a sponge iron plant in the region. Agrawal owned one of the region’s biggest sponge iron firms, Veerangana Steel Private Limited, for which he had separately applied for captive coal mines and got three in Yavatmal district.

There was more. Govind Daga’s brother Ashok started Gondwana Ispat and bagged one block to set up a sponge iron plant. Meanwhile, Daga and Agrawal joined another businessman Anil Taneja, a Nagpur-based dealer in the earth moving equipment, in his newly-floated company Fieldmining and Ispat Limited. This company bagged two coal blocks with 38 MT of coal reserves to set up a sponge iron plant.

Then, in November 2003, Daga backed a leading Nagpur-based Ayurveda firm, Shri Baidyanath Ayurved Bhavan Private Limited, to diversify into power. They applied for a block in partnership and got one.

Between him and his partners, Daga held about nine captive coal blocks with total geological reserves of around 170 MT. What’s the current status of these coal blocks and the companies? Here’s what:

The coal ministry sent show cause notices to BS Ispat and Veerangana earlier this year that their blocks would be cancelled since they had not made any progress on opening them.

The ministry said in its ultimatum issued on May 31 to Veerangana and BS Ispat that “the allotment of coal blocks is for captive purpose; not for profiteering. The commercial use of coal was not allowed. The sale of shareholding for profit defeated the purpose of such allocation.”

Last week their coal allotments were cancelled following the recommendation of the Inter-Ministerial Group, but the original beneficiaries have already sold the companies.

According to the findings of the ministry, Veerangana, which was allotted three coal blocks in Yavatmal, in 2005, no longer existed. Agrawal actually sold it to Topworth Urja and Metals Ltd, which in turn later merged itself with the Crest Steel and Power Ltd, a Chhattisgarh-based steel trading firm.

Ashok Daga’s Gondwana Ispat was, meanwhile, taken over by Nandkishor Sarda, a close friend of Daga-Agrawal duo, and later merged into BS Ispat. After executing complex changes of ownership and equity, Daga, Agrawal and Sarda exited from BS Ispat and reportedly sold the company to the OCL Iron and Steel. Industry sources say the deal was signed for, a cool over Rs 200 crore.

Baidyanath’s coal block was de-allocated long back. It could not make any progress. Another Nagpur-based company whose block has been de-allocated is the Fieldmining and Ispal limited. When Taneja tried selling his firm to the KSK Energy ltd, he ran into a legal tangle with his partners, Daga and Agrawal, and the deal reportedly fizzled out. The battle is on before the company law board.

The company neither mined its block, nor set up a steel unit.

Daga mined the first coal block allotted for his Central Colliery Company and sold coal in the open market in violation of the captive coal mine allotment policy. Intriguingly, Maharashtra government ex-parte permitted Daga to sell it in open market. The captive coal mines were in the Centre’s purview; the state governments had no locus standi on the issue except for giving mine leases for the allotted block.

Daga did not set up a power plant himself so selling coal from the captive block to any other power plant was a violation of the law. When the union coal ministry noticed it, they cancelled his allotment, a move that was upheld by the Delhi High Court last year. It is not yet known if the coal ministry would slap any financial penalties on him to recover the money he made by selling whatever amount of coal he did.

Daga and Agrawal refused to answer calls and requests for an interview for almost a fortnight.

The CBI raids, on the establishments of Darda and Manoj Jayaswal, have created a flutter. Darda’s JLD Yavatmal Energy Limited, JAS power and infrastructure limited (registered in Kolkata but part of Abhijeet Group of Companies, Nagpur) and AMR Steel and Power Limited (part of Jayaswal Neco group) have already been booked by the CBI. With CBI on the prowl, the orange city’s industrialist-coteries have gone into silence, hoping for the storm to settle down.

Daga had admitted to a section of local press some time back that they had sold the stakes in BS Ispat to OCL. His argument then was that since they had failed to secure an iron ore block, essential for a steel or sponge iron unit, they could not come up with their plant, so best was to exit and pay their debts. The transaction was legal. The coal blocks are still with BS Ispat. Only, its owners had changed.

In another case, the ministry found that another Nagpur-based firm, Sunflag Iron and Steel Company, which was allotted Belgaon block in Wardha, Maharashtra, and has been producing coal from it since December 2007, could be diverting excess fuel. The Coal Controller’s Organisation (CCO), sources say, has informed the ministry that between December 2008 and November 2009, the firm produced 1.2 lakh tonnes, and was supposed to use it all for its 15 MW captive power plant in Bhandara.

In 2006, coal was among the hotly discussed issue among the business and industrial circles of Nagpur.

“Everybody was encouraging everyone else to go for coal blocks,” says an industry insider associated with the Vidarbha Economic Development Council, a Nagpur-based voluntary organization. “Some of us had no idea what the push factor was.”

The rush began around 2000, when Maharashtra’s power crisis started assuming alarming proportions. Local players smelled an opportunity; there was money to be made.

Notorious for its ongoing spate of farmers’ suicides and a deepening agrarian crisis, Vidarbha had coal; it had ample water; cheap land and labour too – all what was needed was the capital.

The state government was willing to back private investments if someone went with a proposal. The backward region of Vidarbha suddenly became a talking point: over 80 new private power projects lined up (they still are on the list), several steel units too; MoUs got stamped, and small-time traders looked to build their profile as industrialists, and industrialists aspired to become corporate honchos.

Lands were acquired and water from dams got reserved for power plants by the state government defying farmers’ protests. For a decade, as the coal ministry slept over the developments shrouding the captive coal mines, the promoters of lessee companies made merry violating the commitments.

Once they got the blocks, life styles of the company promoters changed; some of them were new page-3 celebrities. In the case of Abhijeet Group, its owner Manoj Jayaswal even bought a private aircraft for an estimated Rs 150 crore, when his companies had yet to start making anything out of coal or iron ore.

Daga and Agrawal were not the only ones to have traded their blocks. But they certainly set the tone in Nagpur. A few others too managed to sell their blocks or their equity in their companies.

One company, for instance, the Grace Industries Limited owned by a local, Mukesh Gupta, actually floated an advertisement in newspapers announcing its intention to sell its captive coal block of Lohara (east) in Chandrapur’s pristine forest. His company has been booked by CBI in the second FIR registered on Saturday in its ongoing investigations into the coalgate.

The mine was sold to Sanvijay rolling Industry, owned by steel trader Sanjay Agrawal, about three years ago, but the deal ran into a legal problem. The case is now before the Company Law Board.

The Grace Industries had got that block jointly with another firm in Nagpur, Murli Industries, for their captive consumption. The block has meanwhile been de-allocated by the coal ministry.

A few other examples: Chaman Metallics sold to MSP Steel; Navbharat Mines sold to Solar Industries; and the Dhariwal Infrastructure Limited came up with a thermal power plant in Chandrapur’s industrial area on their captive coal mine near Nagpur and then reportedly sold the venture to RP Goenka group.

Cotton crisis goes much beyond Bt and those two villages

2012-09-27T23:30:00.001-07:00

This one’s not to argue, but debate (which is significantly different a notion than argument) Mr Milind Murugkar’s observations in his piece published in the Economic Times of September 27, 2012.

First, the two villages Mr Murugkar quotes in his piece – Bhambraja and Antargaon (in Yavatmal district of Vidarbha) – are torn between the Bt cotton-seed producing companies and a section of Bt-cotton critics; more due to the former lobby's insistence that GM cotton has helped farmers reap a harvest of gold!

They have been the showcase villages for Monsanto in a sense that some journalists and writers have been taken by the company in the past to visit them as a successful project. For local journalists (including me) covering Vidarbha for over a decade, it’s a matter of great astonishment of how these companies successfully manage to co-opt a section of influential writers. The two villages are used as models to make out a more generalized case in favour of Bt, or genetically modified, cotton, never mind though that the facts fly in the face of those claims.

Mr Murugkar is the latest to join the party! He argues that the “critics’ concern about monopolies is understandable, but this should not prevent recognition of the popularity of Bt cotton varieties.” But much through his piece he doesn't furnish any data to push his claims, barring quoting a few recent studies that have not been peer-reviewed. The piece seems like one to defend those PR stories in the newspaper than even defending Bt-cotton.

That he travels to the same two villages that have been at the epicenter of a paid-news controversy is intriguing. Economic Times in which the piece appears is a paper from the same stable that found itself embroiled in the controversy. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture has earlier this year mentioned how it found in the very two villages a different story, contrary to what the ToI full-page Monsanto-sponsored feature on the success of Bt stated. Mr Murugkar’s piece now contrasts Standing Committee’s findings in the two villages (I had attended meetings in both the villages). The debate therefore is again wide open.

Nevertheless, as a reporter who’s covered Vidarbha for a decade, I offer a few points, which to me are crucial to the debate. I shall come to the technology later; the central point is that the rain-fed marginal ‘cotton’ farmer of Vidarbha (perhaps that of the entire country) is in crisis, an acknowledgement to which lies in a 2003-04 door-to-door study of the state government. That study pointed out that over 13 lakh of the 18 lakh cotton farming households in this western Vidarbha region are in crisis, nearly a third in acute crisis. It identified a multiple reasons for the crisis: declining farm incomes, growing indebtedness (70 per cent of Vidarbha farmers are out of formal credit network, according to the Planning Commission’s Adarsh Mishra-fact finding committee report), and increasing living expenditure in a highly inflationary economy in which the government takes out money from rural India but subsidizes the urban living. Successive studies vindicated that study more or less. The crisis goes beyond suicides and Bt cotton.

Mr Srijit Misra of the IGIDR led one such study commissioned by the then Vilasrao Deshmukh-government in Maharashtra. His findings have underlined the faultlines and were in line with that of many other studies, including that of TISS.

Suicides to me are but one symptom; migration and shift away from agriculture (not as an option or choice but desperation) are far more serious problems than farm suicides per se.

Antargaon and Bhambraja – quoted by Mr Murugkar to clinch his point – have both, suicides and migrations. Last year, vast stretches of land in the two villages were kept fallow. So much for the success of Bt. It meant less losses.

Where had the farmers gone? To work in sugar mills in Satara! They still do. Why? Working there is financially more rewarding than growing cotton (Bt or otherwise) in a volatile economy even if it meant keeping the land fallow. In both villages, farmers don’t cultivate cotton alone. Nearly half of them sow soybeans, despite an overwhelming presence of Bt cotton.

Vidarbha farmers depend solely on one crop (as in one crop season, no winter crop), with no allied agriculture income to add to the family finances. It was against the backdrop of a raging crisis, drop in incomes, increase in the production costs and generally a bad agriculture scenario that the government allowed introduction of the Bt cotton technology. That was in 2002. What were the other coinciding policy steps taken? The following season, 2003 that is, Maharashtra suspended its monopoly cotton procurement scheme (and with the advance bonus system) and allowed private buyers to buy cotton.

Those were the NDA years in the Centre. Between 1998 and 2004 we imported around 8 million bales of cheap and subsidized cotton from global markets flooding Indian cotton markets resulting in a glut and subsequent crash in prices. Check for data, those were the best years for Indian textile mills: cheap and subsidized cotton at their command, they made a killing.

The NDA also, in order to keep inflation in tact, devalued the rupee, handed over liquidity to government employees through fifth pay scale and opened up IT revolution.

From then until 2004, the NDA successively withdrew money from rural economy (several economists have pointed that out) and put that into the urban and service sectors.

In 2001, Indian cotton acreage stood around 8.5 million hectares (nearly 70 per cent of it was hybrid cotton). Bt cotton was introduced the following year. That year the Vidarbha acreage was close to 1.8 million hectares. The following two years: 2003 and 2004, the acreage of cotton countrywide actually dropped below the long term average of 8 million hectares; in Vidarbha soybean came in. This, when the much-hyped pest-resistant Bt cotton that promises high productivity and income, entered the fray. Farm suicides picked up in the region after 2003. Not just because of Bt, fair enough. There were larger policies at play. But the Bt gets introduced as a soothing panacea. I have witnessed their campaign every single year with astonishment. Some years the Bt cotton propaganda has even dwarfed poll campaigns.

What was the promise? In one advertisement in which Nana Patekar arguably posed as a model (only to withdraw a year later when he realized “his mistake” of “misleading the farmers”): Sow this and you get double your yields and incomes. The state government pushed Bt through its own systems too. Between 2002 and 2008, Bt cotton hybrids had well-ensconced itself in Vidarbha, nay across the country, from some 7 per cent first year to over 85 % of the total seeds. In those very years, India lost its straight line varieties and companies stopped producing non-Bt Hybrids. Shops did not display those even if farmers went begging for non-Bt hybrids. In any case, since companies did not insist on keeping buffer, who will sow non-Bt if your neighbourers are all Bt? It’s a technical issue, but experts have explained to us over the years, that neither the state agriculture department nor companies ever educated farmers to keep a buffer between Bt cotton crops. That was not ignorance. That was deliberate. Now for a farmer to make a fair choice, he needs Bt, non-Bt hybrids, and straight line varieties. And cotton varieties of all staple lengths. Where was the choice? And who decides what farmers will grow: short staple or long ones?

Anyway, the first three years, yields shot up, and then, as a region-wide data (available with three agencies, agriculture department, Maharashtra state cooperative cotton growers’ marketing federation, and the seed producing companies) show, declined steeply. Not only that, the BG-I hybrids became pest tolerant. That’s when the companies prepared for the introduction of BG-II.

Between 2006 and 09, they sell both I and II, and now it’s predominantly II; we understand BG-III is on the anvil and round-up ready weedicide is already in the market.

Between 2001 and 2010, how much has been the increase in cotton acreage and coinciding yield?

If one is to believe Murugkar’s ‘poor’ farmer (Pankaj Shinde), his yields doubled. He’s indeed a rare exception. Because Vidarbha-wide data shows that it hovers between 250 and 300 kg of lint per hectare – that’s about 5-7 quintals per hectare or 2-3 quintals per acre, on the higher side. In 2001, it was between 140 and 200 kg/ha (depending upon soil and water conditions; Vidarbha has mostly shallow medium soils). What’s the country-wide data (available on Cotton Corporation of India website and collated from various papers of the CICR scientists)?

In 2001, from 80.95 lakh hectares, India produced 152 lakh bales (309 Kg lint/ha); In 2007, it peaked with 567 kg lint/ha (introduction of Bg-II which consumes 56 per cent of the Bt acreage) and produced 315 lakh bales from 95 lakh acres.

In Vidarbha, cotton acreage stood around 12-13 lakh hectares, much below the long –term average. 2011, the national cotton productivity stood at 496 kg/ha while the cotton acreage hit an all-time high of 120 lakh hectares and India produced 356 lakh bales.

This was when Bt cotton consumed 92 per cent of total cotton acreage. It could not get any better from here. In Vidarbha the current productivity, according to Mr Sharad Pawar’s reply to a parliamentary question last year, stands around 300 What was the productivity in 2004? It stood 463 kg/ha, and Bt cotton acreage then was roughly six per cent. In Haryana, Punjab, and large swathes of Gujarat’s newly watered areas, Bt was yet to reign.

So, from 2004 the country’s cotton productivity went up and down sharply – as if it were a green revolution squeezed in five-year-period – and the companies begin to switch to BG-II.

Productivity has meanwhile plateaued causing enough worries for the establishment, a reason why even agriculture minister Mr Sharad Pawar agreed for a three-member committee to travel to Brazil earlier this year to find out what they had done to take their productivity ahead of China and all other countries.

India, with all its BT success stories, stands abysmally low in productivity than 15 other countries that don’t plant Bt hybrids, including Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso. Mind you, Brazil did not allow Bt cotton, or for that matter any other GM crop. It has cautiously looked at field trials to see the results before saying that their systems were probably better than the GM crop technology. Brazil grows cotton in high density planting system (HDPS). Agreed, it has different agro-climatic features than that of India, but still...

If researchers were to spend little more time in Vidarbha and interact with old farmers, they will know that they grew cotton in high density planting system till mid-70s. Vidarbha farmers grew cotton plants that had less leaves, less bolls. (What prompted for cropping pattern changes is a matter of another article). Brazil’s HDPS is better and so the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR) has insisted upon Pawar (and to its surprise has even got a favorable response) that it’s time to look for alternatives beyond Bt cotton.

If we have to move forward and bail farmers out of this crisis, HDPS might be a better option, the CICR has said. Field trials have begun across the country. Scientists are eagerly awaiting the results.

For a fair choice, farmers don’t just need a variety of good quality seeds – hybrids, straight-line, Bt or even non-Bt hybrids – but they need a choice for technology as well: a range from organic to natural to chemical. Give him a fair choice, a farmer will take a call on what suits best to him. Policies and markets have ensured you get the same burger in different brand-stores.

Murugkar says, and I quote: “The recent issue of Nature, a prestigious international weekly journal on science, has reported significant benefits of Bt cotton to Indian farmers. Citing a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it says that data collected from 533 farm households during 2002-08 shows that Bt cotton raised the yield by 24 per cent. This translated to a 50 per cent increase in profits, and during 2006-08, families that adopted Bt cotton spent 18 per cent more money than conventional farming households, suggesting an increase in living standards.”

Indeed preceding June, there was a flush of new reports arguing that the Bt yields have resulted in big income gains for farmers. That an important bill was before the Parliament – one that would open GM trials in other crops without much regulation – was just a coincidence!

Let’s take the time span though: 2002-2008, the first two-three years were not entirely Bt cotton years. Yet if one believes that yields were up by 24% cumulatively it’s not entirely due to the magic of Bt. See a comprehensive study done by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US corn. It’s on their website. The notion that Bt cotton has led to huge rises in productivity doesn’t not match up. Indeed, while there is a significant increase in productivity in the pre-Bt hybrid era, there is actually a decline in the latter half of the Bt period, a decline which continues. Let us not take a one-off single year for the data. Let us take two equivalent five-year-periods: i.e. 2001-2005 and 2006 to 2010 (the whole of the last decade) for which final official figures are available.

It is only from 2006 that Bt cotton begins to account for significant acreage of cotton under cultivation. Even as late as 2005, it accounts for less than 12 per cent. For the five year-period from 2001-2005, it accounts on average for 3.73 per cent of cotton acreage under cultivation. Or, at best 4.67 per cent if we exclude 2001 when Bt did not exist at all.

Yet, in this period cotton productivity rose from 309 kg per hectare in 2001 to 467 kg/hectare in 2005. That is an increase of 51.13 per cent.

In the period 2006-2010, when Bt accounts for over 72 per cent of cotton acreage, the per hectare yield drops from 519 kg to 495 kg, That is a decline of 4.62 per cent. Also note that the yield in 2006 (519 kg) and in 2007 (567 kg / Ha) - when Bt still accounts for just 42 % and 67 per cent of acreage, is much higher than that of 2009 (486 Kg/Ha) and 2010 (495 kg/Ha) when Bt accounts for 82% and 91 % of cotton acreage respectively! As Bt acreage goes, up, productivity in fact slides. The trend is also one of decline: there is an initial burst which sees yields of 519 and 567 kg and then it is a decline.

Indeed, the 2010 and 2011 (provisional figures) bring it back to pre-Bt hybrid yield figures - and the decline has only begun. Secondly, to bring us to the same level or range of yield after five years, input costs have doubled and trebled. Third, the 2001-05 figure is a steady climb. The 2006-2010 are a volatile roller coaster that now seems unable to hit a high again. Fourth: there are reasons beyond seed that also affect productivity in any period. Including monsoons, irrigation, pest etc., Note that in Vidarbha, for instance, irrigation from 2006 went up to around 8-10 per cent from the earlier 3 %. The Agriculture Commissioner of the period clearly stated that 97 per cent of Vidarbha’s cotton cultivation is rain-fed. Which means the benefit of expanded irrigation came in the Bt-dominance period and some of the initial productivity would have to be credited to that plus two or three good monsoons.

The data are damning. The pre-Bt hybrids were raising productivity at a fraction of the cost. Bt’s five year period has seen no comparable increase. A pre-Bt hybrid packet of seed (450gms) cost Rs. 350 to 425, as against Bt’s cost of Rs. 925 for a packet of the same size, a price abut to be raised again.

The point is, if there were gains, how come some of the major relief packages and loan waivers to farmers had to be given during this very period. It was also a period when farm suicide rate went up steeply in cotton producing regions where Bt cotton had been introduced as a panacea to crisis.

Farmers are spending more money, some studies point out, but on what? And what is the source of income? These two questions need a deeper inquiry. The NSSO data shows the money is being spent more on health now than even on food. And indebtedness is limping back on farmers since the 2008-9 waiver; as the public sector banks said earlier this year.

In Wardha, where a comprehensive study by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation is available, over 17 per cent land is now kept fallow by the farmers; indeed fallowisation process is deepening and it needs an immediate attention of the public-policy makers.

Ultimately, who are we growing cotton for? Where's the end-user? Over the past thirty years, Vidarbha has lost its textile mills to other regions. So what farmers grow here is of little use. They lose the money to be made in its high-end value-chain.

Another moot question is: Does Bt improve yields? It doesn't. The technology is geared to take care of boll-worm, not productivity. Two, it doesn't take care of sucking pests, which is now a bigger pest-management problem in the region.

Lastly, the more significant issue is the question of price. Cotton prices, both the market price and the minimum support price, went up in 2008, just before the 2009 Parliamentary elections. That’s when you see a shift of farmers even in non-cotton areas (ex: northern Maharashtra) towards cotton. That the steep rise in production could be offset with that rise in prices is well-established. If you note the rise and fall in the prices, you see the rise and fall in the cotton acreage. This year cotton acreage has stayed stagnant. That was because prices held on to their levels toward the end of the last season after declining sharply in the first half.

If the prices remain robust this year, as the indications and predictions are they will, expect the acreage to go up next year.

If the choice is soybean or cotton, what will a farmer grow? Even in Antargaon or Bhambraja, it depends on relative prices of the two crops and a farmer’s judgment about them in the context of resources, money and labourers, available to him, Bt or non-Bt. Since non-Bt is not to be seen anywhere on the shelves, the obvious choice is for a Bt-hybrid: We have over 3000 hybrids of them now: from Bt-Mallika to Bt-Bipasha!

Reducing the issue of a skewed choice to the issue of popularity presents a wrong picture of a more complex market dynamic. If it were indeed a paying option, Vidarbha farmers would be enjoying cotton yields, not killing themselves on its hay or giving up farming, as they do, at an alarming rate.

Traveling beyond Antargaon and Bhambraja tells us that.

(Correction: I stand corrected on Brazil. That country has about a million hectare land under GM crops, but it has adopted a cautious approach since and has restricted the spread of GM crops following its experiences so far. Meanwhile, Russia has banned use and import of Monsanto GM corn following a recent French study.)

RIP Talent! Hail the mediocrity!

2012-08-14T09:50:00.005-07:00

First a big self-congratulatory note: We bettered ourselves by a fraction in London. Beijing was okay. 2012 has been much, much better. A lot of us have reasons to feel exulted, if not overtly happy. After all two Silver and four Bronze medals from a contingent of 80-plus that gave us the 53rd position in the medals tally isn’t exactly a reason to feel either too good or too bad. Let’s see where we did well. Clearly, in the games where individuals – rather individuality – mattered! It tells us about the character of our society. A few individuals are a freak success. Much of our ado came from girls, who we, as a society, prefer – notwithstanding our self-innuendo with digital prowess – dumping in the garbage bins no sooner they take shape in the wombs. Forget medals, Saina and Mary’s successes far outshine the glitter of gold for the same reason that they are girls in a chauvinist society. Their success has nothing to do with the country; it’s about an individual genius and resilience. The rest of the world won’t understand; you need to be born here for that. How did we fare in team events? Television channels – who play on our big egos – won’t show us that. It will be better if we consign those games to history. Let’s stick to IPL; sip Pepsi (or Coke if you will), sit back and relax. Someone will win an IPL, and the winner will always every time be an Indian. Happy! Let’s stop playing hockey. Even Belguim is stripping us naked in that game that gave us a Dhyanchand! It looks odd to see the Indian blue struggling in an array of other colours on a hockey turf. And no Poonam Pandey will risk stripping for those losing dudes. Thank lord we haven’t yet started with foot-ball. Forget bicycling or decathlon. Or 50 km marathon! It’s all too much of hard work without any commissions. Better stop going to Olympics. Let’s give it a pass; save money and the face. No Olympics, no Kalmadis! In any case we are doing exactly that in our schools – killing the sport all through the KG-to-PG system of education. No play, only rot-learning so that our industries get first class clerks for mass production. A survey in Karnataka last year showed over 50 per cent schools had no play-ground in that state. Safe to presume it fits the country’s state of schools. May be we’ll get a gold for largest number of schools with no playgrounds. We are gifting Aakash tablets to the school-kids (great to see an Indian innovation and business), but bizarre, we won’t think of giving them good playgrounds. Even if we create those, we have more than 50 per cent of our children malnourished! What do we do with malnourished bodies? There’s a problem with the Indian brain; frail bodies probably come later. We allow millions of tons of our food-grain to rot in open yards while those desperate for it may be starving nearby. Among the starving millions may lie our budding talents. Playground problem doesn’t stop at the schools not having them. The only available ones in your town may get trampled by political rallies; now increasingly Annas and Babas also hold their highly-publicised fast-against-corruption, while kids starve for a good ground for a hearty game. India is losing not just a fierce global competition; it’s losing itself – it’s becoming one huge collective of mediocres, who don’t know how to swim, how to laugh, and how to be sporting. One Sushil Kumar; one Saina Nehwal; one Mary Kom – it’s great to have them, but what a pity! A nation of 120 billion has no sporting culture, no hunger to compete or excel on the global stage. When you see a limbless man compete on his artificial legs with the world’s best, you feel ashamed of a country where boundless possibilities are strapped by an array of discriminatory threads, waiting to breathe free. One Gopi Chand sets up an academy out of his sheer obsession to do something for his sport and our world of badminton training ends there. One state of Haryana produces wrestlers and that’s the end of it. The academies or training centres in Delhi won’t bring us medals; India needs to learn to play right from the schooldays, not only for a competitive big stage, but also for harnessing a sporting culture. And she needs to discover sportsmen and athletes in the hinterland. For that she must first discover her hinterland, decentralize power centres, and look beyond the obvious. The Olympian medal winners in other countries came from unusual quarters from those respective countries - some of them scaled the pinnacle of endurance, others were an outcome of meticulous and scientific training, years and years of sheer hard work. Every Olympic leaves one lesson: A sport can't run on privileges. It comes through a sustained culture and search for the unsung and hidden talent. Alas! We are a society where discrimination is a writ and the privileged few are the revered demigods - RIP Talent!

ESCAPE FROM THE RED ZONE

2012-04-15T22:22:00.002-07:00

Orccha; Narayanpur:
Be a guerilla to beat the guerillas.
It was this simple strategy that inspired Paaklu Ram Mandavi to escape from the Maoist clutches in the uncharted swathes of Abujh-Maadh right in the heart of Bastar.
For almost two days and two nights, hungry and thirsty, the 17-year-old primitive Maadia tribal trudged through a hilly and forested terrain unknown to the outside world to come out unscathed after being picked up by the rebels.
But for the risk he took, Paaklu would be dead.
“The choice,” he recounts sharing his little-known escape story, “was between sure death and a possibility.”
If he were to be produced before a kangaroo court (people’s court) by Maoists, he thought he would be executed. But if he tried escaping, it was a risk worth a try.
“I would be killed anyway,” he says. He chose the latter option and, succeeded.
***
It’s a hot summer evening and Paaklu, a shy but confident teenager, is just back home from his newly-found menial labour job in a non-descript corner of this highly-sensitive district.
He’s clad in a yellow T-shirt and a track, his volley-ball dress. About six feet tall he’s a potential national player in the making. Last year, he says, he played for his school at the state and national events.
He’s just appeared for his SSC and wants to continue his studies – something that his teacher Kamlu Ram Wadada would have wanted, he says. “But I want to make a career in sports.”
Not many here know his escape saga yet. The police have advised him to lie low. The danger still lurks. Once a target, he says, always a target. The Maoists never pardon their targets.
“For him it’s not a big deal,” says the Narayanpur superintendent of police Mayank Shrivastava. But in the season of abductions (of the two Italians and an MLA in Odisha) and killings (of the civilians and local political leaders all over the red zone), his escape saga is a rare exception.
“I haven’t heard of any such escape before,” says Irfan Khan, a local Hindi journalist.
Maadh, a living puzzle, an un-surveyed swathe of over 5,000 square km in southern Narayanpur, is said to be a liberated zone of the Maoists where their diktat reigns. There are no roads or lights. For the first time in the history of independent India, about 4000 security troops last month ventured there in a coordinated operation, with a lot of technological and logistical support, and after months of planning.
And yet they could not yet fully decipher the ‘Unknown’.
***
“I wanted to see my mother,” Paaklu says.
He hadn’t been home in Mathbeda village in Maadh ever since he shifted to Narayanpur for studies in May 2010, after completing his eighth class.
On March 26, the Monday, he wrote his final SSC examination paper and left for Orccha, a tiny block headquarter at the foothills of ‘Maadh’ with inconsequential but some official State presence. In the rest of the hills, the State has virtually no stamp. People from all over ‘Maadh’ unfailingly come to the weekly market of Orccha every Wednesday, to collect their rations and buy the essentials.
Paaklu was sure his mother would come too, so he could see her there on March 28. He’s the only child of theirs to be in school. Two of his brothers died of snake bite in the village. The oldest sibling lives with his wife in Mathbeda. “I thought I will meet my mother and return to my school campus the same day.”
What he didn’t anticipate was that he was on the Maoists’ radar.
***
Tuesday, March 27, 11 pm: Paaklu and his friend Jailal Kowachi were preparing to go to bed at one of his uncle’s houses, a small but beautiful hut adjacent to the cremation ground in Orccha, when 25-30 male and female Maoists, a few of them armed, suddenly barged in and ordered the two to follow them.
They came from the forests behind the hut, when the town had fallen asleep. Three-four of them had rifles hung on to their shoulders; all of them were in plainclothes – none in the olive green fatigue.
“I was nervous,” he recounts. “It looked like the end of life.”
They had to leave in a hurry in whatever clothes they were wearing. There was no light anywhere, but he gauged they were heading westward – into the ‘Maadh’. “When the rebels felt they were at a safe distance in the forest, they enquired about my friend,” he says. “I told them he is my school-mate and had come with me to meet my mother; they left him unharmed and let him go.”
Kowachi returned and conveyed the news of Paaklu’s abduction to his uncle. The same night, the Orccha police lodged a complaint – but it was now a wait and watch game for his relatives.
“Once my friend had left,” Paaklu remembers, “we began our walk through the forests.” No word was spoken. They seemed to know the pathways. “I kept thinking I am going to die.”
For, he knew of how the rebels executed those who were perceived as “traitors”. At some point, he says, he thought his best chance to live was to escape. He must escape quickly, before the dawn.
After about two hours of walking his abductors decided to cook their dinner and halt there that night. It was, he recollects, a small rocky plateau with an open sky.
“That was the first time they asked me why I spied for the police,” he says. “I pleaded it’s not true; I am studying in Narayanpur; came here to see my mother after my exams.”
They wouldn’t believe. How could the police not utilize the services of a native youth who knows Maadh all too well? “They chained my legs and locked it with a wire,” he says. They had already folded his hands behind his back and tied them with a rope above the elbows, when they picked him from Orccha.
One of the female cadres told him that he would be taken to the higher-ups the next day and produced before a people’s court for his punishment. “It could be death,” he says.
After dinner, they gave him a blanket to cover himself from the cold. The days are very hot but nights on Maadh are mighty cold, even in summers, Paaklu informs.
Two rebels took turns to stand guard with their rifles while others slept, he recounts. On a piece of paper, he draws a sketch to show us how and in which position the Maoists slept surrounding him.
“I was here, in the middle,” he says, pointing a dot in the middle of a circle that represented the rebels. The guerillas were probably among the village-level militia groups that knew him well, he feels. “They would flash torch-light on my face from time to time to keep a check on me.”
In his mind though, Paaklu began to plot his escape. “I managed to untie myself.” First he loosened the knot to free his hands. “Since I was under the blanket they could not see it.”
Then, he quietly unraveled the chain from his legs. “They had not locked it; it was tied with a small wire that I could easily break.” His legs and hands were free, so now he could run.
“I heard a girl cadre say to her comrade that it’s about 4 am and that in some time they will move again before it dawns; that was when I decided to take the risk,” Paaklu says. He held his nerve, mustered all his courage, remembered his mother, and began to count in mind: “One, two, and three…”
The armed guards kept vigil on the other side. He removed the blanket, deftly got up, jumped over the cadres sleeping behind him, and vanished into the forest, even before his abductors could react.
“I ran as fast as possible,” he says. “I was being chased by them but I did not look behind.”
While running he removed his white half-trouser and T-shirt so that they could not see him and then ran and ran until he saw the first rays of Sun, he recollects. “I was heading west but I needed to turn around so that I go back east to Orccha.” For some time he sensed the rebels chasing him; after a while he knew he had left them far behind. That was the dawn of March 28, the day he ought to have met his mother.
***
Paaklu took shelter in a rocky cave overseeing the valley. “I was feeling the pain in my stomach.” But his mind hovered on his next move. First, he must assess where in Maadh he was.
“I think I must have been about 30-35 km from Orccha to its south west,” he says. He decided to move up the higher ridges, and walk against the sun’s direction east-ward. “Going up was safer.”
He needed to make sure no one saw him. So he used his innate primitive instinct: hide in the light, walk in the dark. He climbed up the hills and hid himself by sunset in a small rocky burrow he’d located.
When it was dark, he began his descent with stars and the moon keeping him the company.
Perched atop a hill earlier, he had sighted a structure in the valley with tin shade. He realized it was the school of Mandali, a hamlet near Orccha. If he reached there, he could hit a forest way to Orccha.
“I walked several hours; it was cold, and I had no clothes on.” As the luck would have it, he saw a forest fire (usually the villagers set forest floor on fire during the Tendu plucking season). “I stayed close to it to keep myself warm,” he says. March 28 was about to end. It had been over 24 hours that he had given the Maoists a slip. He was thirsty – and hungry. But he was not yet safe.
“I had to hide myself until I would cross Mandali,” Paaklu says. He began his trek, this time much slower, at the crack of the dawn. When the sun was overhead on March 29, he says, he could see Mandali. “It has a water pond; I was thirsty, but did not drink water,” he recounts. “I feared being seen.”
Paaklu hid himself beneath a wooden structure near the water pond; to escape from the day’s heat and waited for the evening to set in, telling himself that his ordeal would soon end.
When the second day’s dusk fell he gathered his energy, he says, for the last leg of his escape.
Paaklu crossed Mandali, and hit the pathway that would take him to Orccha. The distance between the two villages is five-six km. After a walk for an hour, he saw a hand-pump – he was almost there.
When he saw the first hut, he went there, and took a towel to cover himself. “The woman gave me rice gruel – I had had something for the first time in two days,” he says.
He rushed to the police station, which is fortified with barbed wire and armed troops keep vigil round the clock. An armed constable couldn’t identify him when he knocked the gate.
“I had turned black; dust and mud was all over my body,” he says. “I am Paaklu, I told the constable; he was surprised. He helped me inside. I was tired; but totally relieved.” He stayed there for two days. The district police airlifted him to Narayanpur on March 31, where he reunited with his school friends.
***
On April 8, Maoists issued a pamphlet, branding Paaklu as a police informer, like his mentor Kamlu Ram Wadada, a teacher who they had killed in late 2010 on suspicion.
Shrivastava, the Narayanpur SP, insists neither Kamlu was an informer, nor Paaklu is.
Kamlu was Paaklu’s mentor in the Durbeda tribal residential school, one of the few primary and middle schools in ‘Maadh’ that is functioning. It was he who helped the boy secure admission in a government school in Narayanpur to do his SSC. That was the transition from one world to the other, Paaklu says.
Leaving ‘Maadh’ for higher studies in a town is a breach of trust in the eyes of the rebels. So he is now a la comprador for them. He can’t return home; in fact he’s to be on the guard forever.
“Once here, we can’t go back,” says Paaklu’s uncle. “Those who try usually fear execution.”
He’s sad that he could not meet his mother – perhaps he never will be able to see her. Paaklu says it is a reality he must accept. “I am in a different world,” he says. “Maadh is now behind me.”

Are US and Pak fooling us?

2011-05-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

I am not a foreign policy analyst or an expert in military issues, but what is now being claimed as a stealth raid by the US navy seals to kill Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, bang inside the Pakistani territory, leaves more questions than answers.
That Indian foreign policy and military analysts within the State and in the 24X7 media haven't raised questions regarding the many missing links surrounding the facts of the raid is not only baffling. It is in worrisome.
First: I find it indigestible to accept that the Pakistani defense establishment had no idea of the US raid on a compound that hosted Osama in their sovereign territory - and that too in a town like Abbottabad where the entire Army training is based. Four choppers flew in to carry out the raids; circled around the town for hours, as one of the tweeters put it, and one of them actually crashed near the compound, and no one even knew it? Rubbish. A crashing chopper, in flames, could hardly be kept a secret.
I find it even more of a fiction that four stealth choppers fly in, in the middle of the night, over this compound with no ground directions, right in the heart of Pakistan?
From where did the American stealth helicopters fly? I believe from the nearest base somewhere in Afghanistan.
Is it possible to navigate their way into the territory right in the heart of Pakistan without any ground communication? I believe, from whatever I've read, it isn't.
Indian defense experts - I believe - are taking a closer look at the theories doing the round, and I'm sure they are concerned at the fact that the US and Pakistan are fooling the world with their common lies about this raid. For, if the US and Pakistani establishment are hand in glove, it obviously is a concern for India. It's happening next door.
The US meanwhile has launched more attacks inside Pakistan, and the premier is still on a foreign tour.
Who are the militants getting killed, including Osama? Not a single one is a Pakistani national. And I believe, it is significant. Osama was an arab. Others being neutralised are either Afghans or Arabs. Are any of the militants of Al Qaeda being killed, Pakistani nationals? I see no terrorist born and bred in Pakistan getting killed or neutralised by the US forces. The killings appear selective, and pretty much with the knowledge and complicity of Pakistan. Is it some part of a bigger deal? We shall - and must - know over the next few days or, may be, years.
Osama was sick. Abbottabad is not known to have private hospitals, at least from the information available on the internet. It has a military hospital though. It is virtually impossible that the Pakistani military and establishment had no knowledge of his presence. Even the Pakistani journalists are refusing to accept their establishment's view that they had no idea of Osama's presence. Some of them actually are hinting that Osama might have lived his utility for the shrewd Pakistani military establishment.

"Be prepared for trade-offs"

2011-01-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

Rather than facing the mirage of bringing a third of our country under forest cover, the union minister for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, Monday saw the need to shift the public policy mindset on maintaining the quality of forests, in the light of growing conflicts on the common property resources.
“From quantity of the forests, we need to change our focus on its quality,” the minister told a gathering of academics, practitioners, and policy makers,while inaugurating the 13th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) in Hyderabad. Sustaining quality forests over a certain area of land, he explained, could do the same amount of carbon sequestration than degraded forests scattered over the vast stretches of land. He said it might also reduce the potential conflicts.
The minister’s remarks are significant in the face of growing demand to open up some forest areas for the mining sector. He said the current legal regime will have to be looked into in the context of multiple pressures on the natural and common resources, and developmental and conservation imperatives.
While India argues for equitable access to sustainable living at the climate change talks, we can’t be oblivious to the skewed domestic distribution, the minister said.
The minister also disclosed that come April, the central government would be putting a 2.5% weight in the annual resource allocation as an incentive to the states managing their environment better, in what may bring environment as a subject on the planning and policy agenda. Ramesh was speaking after the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Professor Elinor Ostrom’s plenary address in which she explicitly vouched for the need to free commons from the institutional monoculture and to evolve a diversity of institutional to deal with the complexities of CPR management. She built up on the empirical studies and field data to support the notion that communities might actually manage their commons efficiently and sustainably. “When the subjects in the laboratory experiments made their decisions anonymously with no communication, they tend of over harvest, but face to face communication enables them to increase cooperation,” she said. Resources in good condition, she said, have users with long term interests, who in turn invest in monitoring of resources and building trust among themselves in polycentric approaches.
Collective action theory at the core of the social sciences and policy is the underlying part of Ostrom’s work in the areas of development economics. Access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation, she said, were five identified community rights in the practice.
Ramesh categorically admitted that conventional mindsets and institutional monoculture was a hurdle in management of CPRs such as forests in India. He actually saw four factors in poor implementation of policies and laws in India. “Development dynamics; institutional monoculture; split responsibilities; and old policy mindsets,” he reiterated, stood as hurdles in the way of implementation of law.
More than 700 delegates from all parts of the world and from diverse backgrounds are attending the conference – the first to be held in South East Asia – that would culminate on January 14. The theme is ‘Sustaining Commons: Sustaining our Future’. Within the broad thematic categories, the participants will be deliberating on sub-themes dealing with new and evolving commons: such digital and knowledge.
In the light of increasing conflicts among different stakeholders, the Foundation of Ecological Security (FES), the co-partners of the conference and local hosts, intend to derive pointed recommendations for the 12th plan from this conference. Commons, they expect, could be brought in the planning agenda.
Ramesh said it was time for the country to acknowledge that to sustain a nine percent growth trajectory, there would be an ecological trade off.
“In some cases you can reconcile both: growth and conservation,” he said elaborating on the complex dynamic of development that has led to conflicts over commons. “In a few cases, you can say ‘yes, but there will be conditions’, but there are cases when you have to make a clear choice, and you’ve to say no,” he said. There are occasions where trade-offs are inevitable, he said in the context of increasing conflict between the growth imperatives and conservation urgencies.
Ramesh said the institutional monoculture – and the notion that only the state could manage commons efficiently – need to be done away with. “We need multiplicity of models to manage our CPRs,” he said. That would include of the market driven models that, he said, are still an anathema to many. “CPRs do need regulations, but do they need regulators, who become a part of the problem?” The entire legal, he said, will have to be relooked to deal with the new issues in the changing contexts. Elucidating the issue of river basin management, he said, maintaining a minimum environment flow of rivers amid multiple pressures on water use is becoming a potential conflagration point in public policy debate.
Taking a relook of the current legal regime, he said, had now become necessary.
The minister said the global commons debate, particularly on the climate change, suffers from a total lack of communication between the academics and the climate negotiators. Devising sets of rules to define the equitable access to sustainable development was the biggest challenge before the academic world. “We need a diversity of solutions,” he said, “and a variety of options.”

Supreme Court strictures against Vilasrao a blot on the Govt

2010-12-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court’s strictures against Vilasrao Deshmukh for interfering in the enforcement of a law that regulates private money lending while he was the chief minister of Maharashtra are not only a blot on the DF government in the state, but also a reminder of an unabated exploitation of the peasantry.

The strongly worded verdict that imposes a fine of Rs 10 lakh on the state government also comes as a major embarrassment to an already troubled UPA government, and particularly the Congress party, as Deshmukh is currently a union minister (for heavy industries) in the Manmohan Singh-cabinet.

The case, which highlights a victim peasant’s indomitable grit to take on the powers-that-be despite risk to his life, also brings to fore the political patronage private usurers enjoy, maiming the debt-trapped peasantry. The development is bound to raise a storm in the ongoing winter session of the legislature in Nagpur, though no immediate reaction was forthcoming on Tuesday from the Sena-BJP opposition.

It all began in 2006 with a letter that Shangdhar Singh Chavan, a 54 year-old victim peasant, wrote to the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court on behalf of the 55 debt-ridden farmers.

The beleaguered farmers said in the letter that neither the Buldana Superintendent of Police nor the collector was paying any heed to their complaints against Gulabchand Sananda, the usurer father of the Congress MLA from Khamgaon (Buldana district), Dilip Sananda. The farmers had alleged in their complaint that the Sanandas had usurped their farmland against the money they borrowed.

The high court suo motto converted the farmer’s letter into a writ petition. In March 2009, delivering its verdict, the high court flayed the then chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, for “the gross abuse of power” and directed the state government to pay Rs 25,000 to the petitioners as the cost of petition.

Deshmukh's then personal secretary had asked the police not to register a FIR on the complaint of the farmers, an instruction that got recorded in the police diary. Subsequently, he had instructed the district collector that he’d personally look into the matter before any action was taken against the Sanandas.

Chavan’s letter to the high court actually epitomized hundreds of farmers’ grievances against the private usurers across the crisis-ridden Vidarbha, particularly the ones indebted to the Sanandas. The Congress MLA’s family is alleged to be big moneylenders in Khamgaon, with a reign of terror in the region.

Elated by the SC verdict Chavan told DNA from Khamgaon over telephone, the government must help complainant-farmers get back the land from the clutches of the Sanandas. He said he lost 14-and-a-half acres of land in his native village Hingnakadegaon, near Khamgaon, to the Sanandas against the loans he took from them in 1993 and subsequently in 1995. He’s managed to keep three acres in his possession.

While the government reckons it needs to bring in stringent laws to reign in the private money lenders the amendment to the existing legislation has been pending. The government essentially wants to bring in 12 rules to monitor the private usury violating the laws and give relief to the trapped peasants. There are stricter punitive clauses, the draft Bill that has been referred to a joint select committee suggests.

The number of farmers who sought recourse to private lenders despite the loan waiver package rose to 574,046 (2008-09) in Maharashtra compared to 423,213, the previous year.

“It’s a political conspiracy against me,” a defiant Dilip Sananda told reporters in Khamgaon. “There is no mention of my name in the police records, and there was never any pressure from me or the then CM,” he maintained. He refused to comment on the Supreme Court verdict, saying “I am yet to read it.”

“The chief minister had no business to interfere in the functioning of the 1946 Act to regulate money lending in the state,” the Supreme Court said while dismissing the Maharashtra government's appeal challenging the Bombay High Court order and enhancing the cost of petition to Rs 10 lakh.

“This is historic decision,” Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a farmers’ movement, said in a statement, urging the prime minister to sack Vilasrao and take legal action against the legislator.

The 1K-crore aid is peanuts

2010-12-06T00:54:00.000-08:00

Nagpur, December 5:

There are many ways to read into any government bonanza.

Look, for instance, at the thousand crore aid that the Maharashtra government announced on Saturday for farmers, hit by the untimely rains.

Plain arithmetic shows that the aid would come to roughly Rs 20,000 a hectare, since the preliminary estimates are of losses over 5.4 lakh hectares.

Weigh it with past figures, and one thinks the government has really been more liberal in helping the peasants than the previous years. As the new chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, and his deputy, Ajit Pawar, put it: The compensation has been increased three-fold over the average assistance of Rs 350 crore the government has been giving every year to the losses-torn farmers of the state since 2004.

But when demystified, the huge amount looks more of a pain than relief to the peasants, whose losses this year stand anywhere around Rs 10,000 crore.

Given this year’s phenomenal increase in the production cost, particularly for the rain-dependent farms of the state, the loss of harvest due to an extended 60-day post-monsoon period comes as a rude shock, since the peasant’s farming risks have risen manifold with cash crops, price volatility, and natural calamities.

So how do the Rs 1000 crore get distributed?

The amount includes of the burden of interest on grape growers’ loans that the government has decided to bear for the next two years. This, when desegregated, will include of three components, top officials say: this year’s losses, interests on commercial loans and the loans taken under the National Horticulture Mission.

Together it amounts to about Rs 250 crore, and since the interest waiver is for two years, the benefit to the grape growers in Nashik and Pune would eat into almost half the package amount. The government has made it clear that it would bear the entire interest burden (without upper limit or land size restriction) so that the grape growers, whose losses are unprecedented, rebuild their vineyards.

The losses borne by other traditional agriculture crops: paddy, soybeans, pulses, cotton, and sugarcane, would get compensated from the remaining amount, and within the ambit of the existing norms: that is compensation up to two hectares, unless the government decides to treat 2010 as a special case. In any case each of the beneficiaries, reliable sources say, won’t get more than Rs 5000, or Rs 1000 per acre. The details would be anyway available by December 14-15.

That, for the kind of losses paddy, soybean, sugarcane and cotton farmers have borne this year, is peanuts, according to the agriculture experts and peasants.
The other promise of restoration of power supply to agriculture pumps favuors the irrigated farms, and ignores majority rain-dependent peasants.

More tragic is the flaw the government continues to persist with since 1997 in its policy to compensate the peasants for losses due to nature’s vagaries.

The Panchanamas, or the spot verification, is intended to compensate individuals and not the entire village. Which is strange. If untimely rains cause losses on one field in a village, how can other fields be left untouched by their impact!

The 5.4 lakh hectare agriculture land where crop losses are more than 50 per cent would be eligible for the compensation doles. This area is scattered over 33 districts. On the ground, the actual acre of farmland wrecked by untimely rains is no short of a million hectares. May be more.

Who will the Rs 1K crore provide relief to and in what way is therefore a million dollar question.

Rumblings after Ashok-Parva

2010-11-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

By Jaideep Hardikar

The ‘Ashok Parva’ is over. Its aftershocks aren’t.

Here’s another trouble brewing up for the axed chief minister Ashok Chavan, and this one might actually be worse than the Adarsh society scam that saw him lose his throne.

While the Prithviraj Chavan cabinet is likely to take oath, the former CM would on Friday be defending his 2009 election to the legislative assembly when the Election Commission of India (EC) holds the next and what is likely to be the final hearing of a petition that seeks his disqualification for allegedly fudging his poll expenses, including the unaccounted spending on what has come to be known as paid news.

The Ex-CM is defending a notice served on him earlier this year by the EC to explain why he should not be disqualified under the relevant sections of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, this – after his rival Madhav Kinhalar petitioned the EC following a series of reports that embroiled Chavhan in the paid news controversy. More than a dozen newspapers, some of them leading ones in the state, had in the run up to the polls published several pages in Chavan’s praise. The petitioner’s argument has been that one, the published content (dozens of pages virtually praising Chavhan) qualifies as “paid news” and, if accounted for, they would have cost crores of rupees breaching the Rs 10 lakh poll expenditure limit. In his official submission to the retuning officer of his Bhokar constituency, Nanded, Chavhan showed his expenditure to be Rs 7 lakh on his entire campaign, and a mere Rs 5,379 on newspaper advertisements.

That included of Rs 4400 he spent on the rally where Bollywood star Salman Khan was an attraction. And a meager Rs 200 on the pandal, Rs 1000 on setting up of the stage, Rs 40 for the cloth to cover it, and Rs 200 on the sofa-rentals. The rent of the meeting venue, added to the expenditure sheet later: Rs 500.

Kinhalkar holds that the very fact that EC sent notices to Chavan means that it is convinced that there’s prima facie a case against him and that there’s some violation. In his submissions before the EC, Chavan has denied any wrongdoing. Senior Congress leader, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, is said to be his counsel.

The BJP’s Kirit Somaiyya, who is intervener/petitioner on the issue, would also get an hour to plead his point of view before the EC, through his counsel and Rajya Sabha member, Ram Jethmalani.

The voluminous material evidence and other advertisements that were not accounted for in Chavhan’s election expenditure statement now form part of the EC hearings on the complaint.

The complaint against Chavhan and successive hearings over it hold significance, given that the EC, keen to clean up the malaise of paid news, has now set up a special cell, just before the Bihar assembly polls, to generally keep tab on paid news that favour some candidates and black out others in elections. The EC, sources in the know said, has this year issued circulars describing what according to it would qualify as paid news – content that is paid for but published under the garb of news.

In the previous hearing on November 12, the petitioner completed his arguments. The EC set November 19 as the date for next hearing, when Chavhan would get to explain his side of the story.

Dancing to the Official Tune

2010-11-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

Pendhri, Gadchiroli:

The shadow of gun was inescapable, the contrast sharp.

As a motley group of adivasis danced to the enigmatic rhythm of the traditional ‘Rela’ drum-beat in the heat and dust, Pendhri village felt the tension and unease.

Tens of eyes stared at each other, as the armed troops in the olive green fatigues manned every nook and corner of this small village on Thursday, 75 km from the district headquarters of Gadchiroli in the thickly forested tribal hinterland, about 250 km away from the bustling urban trappings of Nagpur.

But when the police are holding a Jan-Jagaran Melawa, or the public awareness rally, in the strong Maoist-reigned area, the contrast is only natural if somewhat ironic.

This rally, the police said, was held against the backdrop of a strong Maoist threat. Only days ahead of the event, the armed rebels had threatened to foil it, warning the tribal villagers to desist from going to the venue. But as the crowds poured in, either under the police duress or on their own volition, officials smiled with a sense of relief. Holding it looked like a statement. What did it achieve, hardly mattered.

Originally designed to be the police propaganda and later converted into all-department information fair for the villagers, the ‘Jan-Jagaran Mewalas’ in naxal-prone Gadchiroli are resuming after a long lull.

The previous one was held in the month of March in hinterland of Laheri, where Maoists had killed 19 policemen in October, last. But the police said that one was a much-subdued event.

“Idea is to reach out to the people,” district superintendent of police S Veeresh Prabhu said. “It’s like breaking the ice with the people, and saying we are here for you.”

Several stalls put up by the various government departments meant that the district administration got a chance to meet the tribal people they are supposed to serve.

The stalls displayed information in Marathi, the volunteers explained the government schemes to the visitors, but the belying message was: shun supporting the Maoists if you want progress in your area. The stall that drew most attention was once where the police had on display the names and pictures of the top Maoist leaders and the list of violent incidents in the district over the past decade.

It’s an area where people hardly ever speak for fear of retribution, said an intelligence officer. “There is obviously some pressure from the police to attend the rally,” he said. “But it is for their good.”

Maoists don’t believe it. They describe the Jan-Jagran rallies as a “propaganda” ploy against them.

The state government though has persisted with the rallies as a means to hold dialogue with the people, in the absence of any political process. “We know it won’t yield immediate results,” said an officer, “but it is important that we engage with the people and reach the benefits of the government programmes.”

Gadchiroli Zilla Parishad CEO Amit Saini told the gathering: “Unless you participate in the Gram Sabha, how will you know where and how the government funds are being spent by your representatives.” He asked the villagers to ask their panchayat representatives how they were spending the village funds.

The rally also provides a rare opportunity to the villagers to get their work done on the spot: whether it is related to the revenue or agriculture or tribal welfare department.

An aging Chamaru Bai Atla came from an interior village to apply for the Sanjay Gandhi Niradhar Yojana, seeking the old age pension at Pendhri rally. Many others quietly glanced through the schemes offered by the agriculture, animal husbandry, tribal welfare or health departments.

Holding a Jan-Jagaran Melawa in the Maoist territory isn’t easy though.

“We postponed the event twice last month due to the Maoist threat,” the SP said. “It took us some time to re-plan it.” For a month, he said, his men undertook the area domination exercises to keep the rebels at bay and convince the villagers to attend the rally. On Thursday, tens of armed commandoes and CRPF jawans guarded the road that led to Pendhri through the thickly forested belt of Chatgaon.

Yet, the outcome may not always be as desired.

“It’s hard not only to convince people to come to the fair since they fear retribution from the Maoists,” said a police officer on the condition of anonymity, “but also the administration and other offices.”

Among the most backward districts in the country, Gadchiroli is also among the lowest in the human development index, with high infant mortality and hunger. It’s also a district where both the police and the government officials refuse to serve. Many a post lie vacant in the police and other departments.

The district police say they look to hold such rallies regularly now – at least once every two months. “This will allow the district administration to have a dialogue with the people living cut off from the world in the interior,” Prabhu said.

Pendhri was closed for all other activities though. The weekly market was shut for the afternoon, shops closed, and the armed troops kept an eye on incomers. As the poor adivasis poured in at the venue, been forced, prodded, or coerced by the police, the day long rally served one purpose: That a strong Maoist threat did not deter them to hold the event, seen as an important government initiative.

Despite a stern warning from the Maoists, the turnout was good, given that the fair coincided with the weekly market where villagers from the neigbouring 40-odd hamlets come to buy their groceries. It provides them with a reason to come to the rally; otherwise they face the wrath of the naxalites, one officer said.

Cultural dances, a discourse by Nilkanth Maharaj on the government schemes and the development issues, and a group skit on the Maoist-problem, marked the event.

What do the tribals gain out of such an exercise? As a tribal youth, Anil Usendi, of the neighbouring village put it diplomatically: “Those who can make a sense of it will know. It really depends on the individual.”

Farm widows protest Obama's visit

2010-11-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

On the eve of US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated three-day visit to India, in a non-descript village of Vidarbha’s cotton bowl, farm widows on Friday staged a quiet candle light protest, saying that the American agriculture policies and huge subsidies were among the main reasons for their grave conditions.
Coinciding with the occasion of Laxmi Puja during the festivities of Diwali, the symbolic protest of the widows held under the aegis of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti at village Hiwra Barsa in south Yavatmal, sought to draw Obama’s attention to the plight of farmers, who, they said, bore the brunt of huge US farm subsidies.
“We do not want to spoil Obama’s visit or hurt the government’s feelings,” the VJAS convenor Kishor Tiwari said in a statement. “But when our government talks agriculture with Obama, the farmers and their families who face the outcome of their policies should not be lost sight of.” The US subsidies, he said, are killing the farmers in India.
Reports are that high on Obama’s agenda is the demand for India to open up the FDI in retail and food processing, push for the GM seeds’ adoption, reinvigorate the Indo-US knowledge initiative started in 2006 during the former president George Bush’ visit, open the market access further to the US agribusiness corporations through further cuts in the import tariffs on commodities, and push for settlement of WTO talks by the next year.
A farm widow from the village, Babytai Bais, lit a candle and led a collective prayer that was attended by the widows of the farmers who took their own lives in the region. India has seen more than 200,000 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2008. Maharashtra saw over 40,000 farmers’ suicides during that period, with Vidarbha being the worst hit.
In roughly the same period between 1995 and 2009, the US government paid a quarter of a trillion dollars or a staggering Rs1250000 crore in farm subsidies to its farmers.
According to the report on US federal subsidy published earlier this year by the Washington-based research organization, the Environment Working Group (EWG), the American tax payers shelled out $245.2 billion in farm subsidies during 1995-2009, which works out to an average of $15 billion or Rs75000 crore per year.

Fever, fear, plague Amravati--II

2010-09-27T00:15:00.001-07:00

Fifty-year-old Nirmala Pawar is fatigued, anemic, and tired of sickness over the last fortnight. “For a week,” she says, “I am unable to work on farms.” Which in turn means her husband has to work extra or hire a hand for Rs 120 daily, given this year’s un-abating rains. “For three months, it’s been work, work and work.”

In Surali village of Amravati’s Warud tehsil, Nirmalabai is taking a typhoid dose intra-venous at a private clinic run in his home by Dr Rajesh Fate. Alongside is a 60-year-old Ramkisan Kadu, who, like her, looks tired, and wrought in tension.

“It’s a double blow,” Kadu, a farmer from the neighbouring Kurali village with suspected typhoid, says. Farm expenses shot up three fold this year. Now come the health expenses. He says the families like him are mortgaging gold and silver to buy health care. He has done it. “I am old, but can’ stop working,” he says.

By the evening, both of them will return home, to come here the next morning to take another dose of medicines.

“What to do!” he doctor says. “There is no room at the rural hospital at Warud.”
The 30-bed hospital in the tehsil town is overflowing with patients; waiting list is growing with every passing day; and the daily OPD (out patient department) has swollen to 500. Private hospitals in this small town are choc a bloc with patients.

Rural Amravati, the home district of President Pratibha Patil, is exploding with a deadly combination of viral infections and influenza. Rains have taken a break, but humid weather has unleashed a wave of health exigencies unseen before. At least 45 patients from a cluster of 15 villages in the orange county of Warud have died in a month, even as the rural hospital and the primary health centers lacked medicines.

Now, after the damage is done, the health machinery has woken up.

At least ten of these deaths were due to swine flu, health officials say. In Warud, a separate 10-bed ward has been set for the suspected swine flu (H1N1) patients. As reported by DNA earlier, medicine paucity only aggravated the problem – a fact admitted by health minister Suresh Shetty on his visit here last Saturday. On the night before his visit, Warud rural hospital got two trucks load of medicines, enough to see through the next several months, when infections will have died.

Tens of patients queue up for medicines at the rural hospital’s pharmacy. Some of them are waiting to be admitted, but there’s no space.

But why small infections are proving fatal? The health machinery is still studying the cases and the pattern of flu. Rural doctors say poor nutrition and a declining immunity is turning peasants and labourers vulnerable to viral fever.

“Most patients have poor nutrition standards,” says Dr Poddar. “Viral fever can’t be so deadly, but if the patients’ immune system is weak it could become fatal.” This year, he says, many of those who fell sick worked in double shifts. Demand for farm hands spiraled with pest and weed infestations due to incessant rains.

What has foxed the health machinery is that all 45 deaths are of adults. Children along with pregnant women are among the risk groups.

Neither the government hospitals nor the private ones record patients’ weight, a key to calculate the body mass index that could give significant insight into their nutrition standards. But as Dr Poddar suggests rural adults are eating lesser.

In Surali, Dr Fate agrees. “I see a constant decline in nutrition standards among the villagers, particularly women,” he says. “I have never seen such an outbreak in this part in the 20 years of my practice,” he says. “Most patients come late to us,” he says. They’ll try home remedies; then take analgesics, and when nothing works, come to them, he says. “Most of them pay no heed to their fever because their farms need more attention.” Like Nirmalabai, who says, she had fever for a fortnight, but she had no time to see a doctor, until she collapsed two days ago.

Fever, fear, plague Amravati

2010-09-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

September 17:

An outbreak of viral fever, including the swine flu, has claimed in a month about 35 lives at Warud, an orange producing belt hundred km from here in Amravati district.

Seven of these deaths have occurred in 24 hours, rattling the sluggish rural health system grappling with a heavy rush of patients and acute medicine shortage rooted in recent policy changes.

At least eight deaths, health officials confirm, are due to Type A-H1N1 virus or swine flu, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says is in its post-pandemic period. Significantly most of the deceased are adults.

“There is always a brisk flow of patients during this season,” Dr Pramod Poddar, who heads the Warud rural hospital, said. “But this year due to a combination of factors, the mortality has shot up.”

The 30-bed rural hospital is thrown out of gear, with a sudden increase in its Out Patient Department. “We are operating a daily OPD of 400-500 patients,” Dr Poddar said. The scene at the private clinics is no different. Late diagnosis in some cases, where patients came late to the hospital in the advance stage of fever with adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), resulted in some deaths, he said.

Heavy rains this year have triggered outbreaks of viral fever and water-borne illnesses across Vidarbha. More than 25 patients admitted from various parts of the central India, including neighbouring districts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the government medical college and hospital (GMCH) at Nagpur have died of swine flu since the beginning of monsoon, authorities said. But Warud is the latest hotspot.

The outbreak of viral fever is compounded by a severe paucity of medicines, local MLA Dr Anil Bonde, an MD in Medicine himself, said. “The situation was avoidable,” he said.

The medicine crunch reported at the rural hospitals and primary health centers in at least 14 districts in Maharashtra has arisen out of the changes in drug purchase rules earlier this year.

The government terminated its earlier decentralized purchase policy citing corruption, but did not place orders for procurement of the essential drugs in the past four months, pushing the PHCs and rural hospitals into a state of coma.

“The rural hospital did not have even Paracetamol (the commonly available anti-pyretic analgesic,” Dr Bonde said. “We had to provide all the essential drugs from the funds we raised,” he said.

Officials said they had been begging for medicine supply in view of the steady increase in the number of patients this year particularly due to heavy rains. “In some cases, paucity of medicines was fatal.”

The health minister, Suresh Shetty, had reportedly instructed the chief surgeon of Amravati to go for local procurement of medicines. The chief surgeon denies having any written orders for local purchase. The district collector was instructed to release Rs 20 lakh from the district plan for the health exigency. But sources in the know at Amravati said it took him a month to get the technical clearance.

Even as the rural patients continued to pour in, the union of Warud journalists ran a campaign to raise collections and self-contributed to that fund. A few days ago, the district guardian minister Rajendra Darda, who holds the industries portfolio in the Ashok Chavan-cabinet, visited Warud and promised help but the structural problems have not yet been fixed, health authorities said.

The medicines to the rural hospital are being bought from the Rs 3.5 lakh collected from the people of Warud and public representatives, local MLA, Dr Anil Bonde, said. An MD in medicine himself, Dr Bonde said the fund is also supporting the ambulance service.

Birth of a new American farmer

2010-08-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

(Last year, I wrote this story at the end of my six months of Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship program during which I worked at the Sun Sentinel newspaper in South Florida. The piece remains unpublished, but I thought it makes a good blog post. For, a year on, that trend is fast catching up with a lot of urban Americans, who are re-discovering their roots in the soil)

Grow nothing that you can’t eat.
Andre and Sharon Fletcher last year learned their first basic lesson in farming, when their ornamental fish business tanked with economy. “We switched to edible fish,” said the Jamaican-born couple in rural Homestead area of South Florida. “It worked.”
The couple, who took to fish farming barely three years ago without any background or knowledge, discovered Tilapias had a big market right in their neighborhoods. Soon the revenues picked up. There was no looking back.
Self-learning though was fraught with problems and losses.
Once, they over-medicated fish in the tank and saw it die one by one. “It was not a good sight,” said Andre, tall, well-built former U.S. Navy employee.
Until three years ago, Andre, 51, and Sharon, 46, were typical urban Americans. They knew only one thing about fish. “It tasted great.”
Then, as the economy nosedived his small construction business hit rock bottom. And she got laid off last year after working 21 years with a cruise line company.
The two-acre farm that also houses their home helped them overcome recession worries and pay off debts.
Today, Andre and Sharon can pretty much educate aspiring fish farmers. On their small fish farm – their primary occupation today – they are scripting a success story.
The Fletchers are South Florida’s emerging neo-farmers, part of a U.S.-wide movement that shows urban Americans – cutting across all ages, professions and strata – are falling back on the world’s oldest vocation: farming.
More than 300 new small farms started operation in Homestead between 2002 and 2007 agriculture census, said David Paynes, county extension director with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences (UF-IFAS). “They come from diverse professional background, and are the first-time farmers,” he said.
More than 60 per cent of the 300-plus respondents in the first ever survey of small farms in Florida were first-generation farmers, said Bob Hochmuth, small farms coordinator with IFAS and someone who’s followed the sector for six years.
Take for instance, Hani Khouri, a 55-year-old Lebanese American. An MBA in international business with a rich professional experience, he switched to goat farming five years ago and is member of an organic farmers’ group.
Every weekend, Khouri could be seen at the Homestead farmers market selling goat-cheese. “I am,” he said, “also a certified organic cook.”
Take another, Darrin and Jodi Swank, a couple in its early forties, who took to farming six years ago and run a successful commercial operation in South Florida. “I never saw myself doing this,” said Jodi, who gave up her career as a travel consultant to join her husband’s dream of farming hydroponically – in a shade-net shade, without soil.
Tens of thousands of young and middle-aged urban Americans want to farm and spend rest of their lives in typical rural setting.
“We,” said Andre, “wanted to reconnect with our roots.”
A vast majority of people are going back to farms as a hobby or lifestyle, Hochmuth said. “But at least a third of them are in with a serious commitment.”
One of their major problems is training. With farm extension services in peril like that in India and university research being taken over by food corporate, the new farmers are finding it hard to self-train themselves in the vocation that demands some skills.
So in some states, like Iowa in mid-west, a new trend is unfolding: it’s called farm matchmaking. A young enthusiast is tied up with ageing traditional farmer in a way that the former helps the latter in farming in return for hands-on training.
This is farm matchmaking, a down payment on the future of rural America.
The idea is being tried as farmers are getting older and working longer: The average age rose to 57 (from 55) and the ranks of the 75-and-up set increased by 20 percent from 2002 to 2007; the number of farmers, younger than 25, dropped by a third.
With problems at both ends, the matchmaking program pairs the two generations. Aspiring young farmers then don’t have to go into deep debt to launch their farm careers and can hook up with a farmer in his 50s, 60s, or 70s.
Lawyers, factory workers, insurance adjusters, even accountants and dentists have applied to a special Iowa program that tries to link aspiring farmers with seasoned landowners looking to retire. The young aspirants, mostly in their 20s and 30s, all have their reasons: a love of the outdoors, a yearning for independence or fond memories of riding a tractor with a grandfather long ago. Recession too is playing a part.
Contrast this with Indian scenario: The past two decades have seen a massive exodus of farmers from agriculture as rural economy suffered a neglect. A biting agrarian crisis has pushed thousands of farmers to the brink of penury and even suicide.
Rural and agriculture employment rate in India, studies show, is decelerating. More than 50 per cent farmers, a National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) survey in 2006-07 showed, wanted to give up farming if they had an option.
The new small American farmer stands a wealthy paradox to India’s distraught small and marginal farmers. However, within the context of American farming, the policies are heavily against the small farm operations.
“Stiff regulatory climate drive us out of the game,” said Margie Pikarsky, who heads a loose cooperative of organic farmers in Homestead. “We want the government to change some of the regulatory climate.” Consumers too want that.
India is following American model – high-cost, high-energy intensive and mechanized farming. Here, things are beginning to reverse for a low-cost sustainable model.
“It’s happening one person at a time,” according to John Ikerd, author of ‘Sustainable Capitalism’ and Professor Emeritus, Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri.
“Our industrial and corporate agriculture is energy-intensive, heavily subsidized and highly unsustainable,” said Ikerd, a leading expert. “This model is not to be emulated”.
Monopoly of seed, farms and food markets is fundamentally flawed, he said. “It will have to change.” The pace of change will be slow. “But new farmers, many of whom are women, will bring about this change over the next three to four decades,” Ikerd said.
America has a little over 2.2 million farms – a fraction of India’s farms and dependent population. About 125,000 farms in big acreages control 80 percent of sales value, while the remaining small and mid-size operations together account for 20 percent sales.
The 2007 Agriculture census found a 4 per cent rise in the number of farms in America, first time since the World War II. That’s because the definition of farms includes of any venture that sells produce worth $1000. The census shows a rise in the small backyard farm operations and concentration of large and corporate farms. Actually, more than 45,000 mid-sized family farms (an average 400 acres) perished between 2002 and 2007.
Yet new very, very small farms were born in the same period – in significant numbers. A good one third of them are women operators or owners.
The face of a new farmer – better educated, net-savvy, enterprising and innovative – is beginning to surface all over the United States to the extent that there is a general acknowledgement of this trend even at the federal level.
“Small farms are bouncing back,” said an emphatic Florida agriculture commissioner Charles Bronson at the inaugural Florida small farms and enterprises conference in August. “Small operations are going to importance once again.”
The new farms are building alliances – among themselves, directly with consumers or restaurants and hotels. They are demanding changes in regulatory climate.
“The current game is heavily lopsided in favour of big corporations – subsidies, market, seeds, inputs, government support, and processing rules, everything,” said Gabrielle Marewski, owner of a five-acre certified organic farm in South Florida. “Together we can seek some changes at local, state and federal level,” she said.
Policies, said Ikerd, will have to change eventually in favour of sustainable farming. “It has a bearing on the health of people,” he said. “We have to change.”
Ikerd said these new farms will “re-invigorate our local food system”. “In 2050, today’s time will seem like a historic period that witnessed historic processes.”
“You will see more of such farms popping up,” said Andre, who’s adding lobsters and a couple of other fish varieties to his product range. “People in his country now want to eat fresh food and not something that is transported from miles away.”
His customers drive miles to pick their weekly quota of fresh fish. Every month, Andre cleans his fish tanks to keep the fish happy, and growing.
The fish farm is really a chain of small and big circular tanks, with fresh water being pumped through the pipes round the clock. He’s switching to solar power to operate his farm to save on the energy costs. The U.S. government has recently introduced a program that supports small farms to make transition to renewable energy.
“All I do is to keep the fish alive and then they keep us alive,” said Andre, cleaning a fish tank he just emptied.” It’s a lot of work, he said, but also a lot of fun.