Man-animal conflict: Just how many is too many

A zero-damage arrangement of co-existence is non-existent. But man-animal conflict will continue to get ugly as long as conservation is for conservationists’ sake

Tehelka, 30 November, 2012

As organisers of the 21^st international bear conference were busy receiving guests from 37 countries last weekend, news reached Delhi that villagers in Kashmir had set a bear ablaze earlier in the week. News TV showed the desperate animal climbing a tree and the crowd reaching for it with burning clothes tied to a pole. Its pelt on fire, the bear jumped off and fled the murderous mob.

Six years ago, another bear was not as lucky. Another lynch mob in a Srinagar village stoned, thrashed and burnt the animal alive. Last year, villagers in Uttarakhand poured kerosene on a trapped leopard in transit and charred it in the presence of top forest officials. Shocking footage of both attacks made it to the national media.

Though gruesome, such assaults on the wild, particularly carnivores, are not aberrations. Man-animal conflict has always been real and is getting progressively worse. Space crunch due to exponential growth and development of human population and resulting loss of wild habitat is the prime driver. Rapid colonisation of forests also brings settlers who are not used to living near wild animals. The result is frequent violation of the terms of coexistence resulting in casualties on both sides.

One dangerous outcome of such ignorance and intolerance is the policy of capturing and shifting so-called problem animals elsewhere. This ends up fuelling, even creating, conflict because the displaced carnivores, often traumatised after prolonged captivity, try to find their way home and run into people on their way.

Whatever the trigger, bear victims crowd hospitals across the Kashmir valley and elsewhere. In November alone, Mumbai lost a child and an elderly woman to leopards. This week’s first casualty, a woman, was from Odisha’s Ganjam district. Even tiger attacks are becoming routine. In 2012, the striped cat killed people in all corners of the country -- from Sunderbans to Ranthambhore and Pilibhit to Mysore.

Human casualties aside, majority of tigers in prey-deficient forests are cattle-lifters. The lions of Gujarat prefer buffaloes. At least half of the country’s leopard population possibly subsist only on non-forest prey in and around villages. Conflict also hurts productivity. Farmhands stay away when carnivores take shelter in fields and the damage can be significant for cash crop businesses.

So, retaliatory attacks on the wild have become pre-emptive and brutal. This is not some fad that most conservation NGOs and activists believe can be countered by awareness drives. While it is possible to imbibe tolerance to overlook financial damage, particularly when covered under a good compensation scheme, losing human lives or the fear of it is an emotion almost impossible to reason with.

More than 15 crore people live in and around India’s forests that host at least 10,000 carnivores. Each of these animals makes a kill every week. Annually, that works out to more than 5 lakh kills. We are too many and too easy to hunt down and yet the numbers of human casualties do not add up to even 200. Clearly, carnivores do not consider us food. If only the logic was comforting enough.

“Can you guaranty that no one in my family will ever be hurt if we allow leopards on this property?” shot back an estate manager I recently met in Assam. More than 80,000 die in road accidents in India every year. Drowning kills many more. That is the cost people pay for living close to highways or rivers for obvious benefits. The planter agreed but refused to discuss the benefits of having leopards around: “I don’t want my dog lifted. Liza is part of the family.”

When I shared this story, some conservationists frowned on me for giving up on that planter and tried to coach me on converting people. Unfortunately, the very basis of conflict resolution strategies offered in most campaigns is not only contradictory to the contemporary conservation goals but also naïvely misleading.

On and around World Environment Day this year, a proud conservation story appeared in the media. Kerala’s Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary recorded 80 tigers, mostly a transient population between Bandipur and Nagarhole. Though these are tigers merely passing through this 344.44 sq km patch, they were celebrated as the second largest population of big cats in south India.

Cattle-lifting has been an issue at Wayanad since mid-1990s, but the hype over tiger numbers alarmed the locals. So last month, villagers reacted violently when two tigers were spotted preying on livestock. They blocked the national highway, forced the authorities to set up trap cages, and went ballistic when a caged tiger was released back into the sanctuary.

Tiger experts and managers dubbed it a problem of plenty. Since the Bandipur-Nagarahole-Mudumulai-Wayanad landscape is saturated with tigers, they said, the surplus population is venturing out. Same is the story with Ranthambhore where conflict is escalating. Too many cubs here in the last few years has resulted in the spill over population moving out of the secure national park to the rest of the reserve and beyond.

The old school of conservation that swears by protected forest model feels that surplus populations are doomed in areas that harbour no wild prey. They also fear that these conflict-prone tigers will erode the goodwill conservation efforts need to protect key populations within reserves. So problem tigers outside forests, they concede, will have to be euthanized.

A younger generation of experts, however, believes that the future of conservation is outside the islands of protected forests that bottleneck populations of animals. For them, the ever-shrinking sanctuaries can at best serve as breeding grounds that maintain source populations of tigers (and other wildlife) but survival of wild species will depend on their acceptance among people in human-dominated landscapes.

Conflict resolution is the most important challenge before this co-existence model. Denial of food to wild carnivores — through proper disposal of waste, securing cattle and poultry in fortified pens and reducing the number of feral dogs and pigs — is a key strategy here. But while food scarcity does dissuade a population from breeding, nothing stops animals passing by.

When a surplus tiger struggles to find prey in a saturated reserve, it does not step out knowing there will be food. It simply wanders and chances upon cattle or feral dogs outside. If it does not find any, it will only look further. Likewise, more surplus tigers from forests may come checking. These transient animals are much more likely to be conflict-prone than a resident tiger familiar with the place.

True, conflict will come down over time if food is effectively and consistently denied to the wild across vast areas, but only because it will cause carnivores outside the forest to die of hunger. Clearly, a zero-damage arrangement of co-existence is non-existent.

The only way forward is to incentivise inevitable losses. The intricate eco-system services of wild carnivores may charm conservationists but the masses demand more tangible benefits. For all the chaos over tourism, conservation still enjoys more goodwill in Ranthambhore where tigers are killing people than in Wayanad where only livestock have been targeted so far.

Meanwhile, we must learn co-existence first as people. It may appear ridiculous that celebration over 80 tigers degenerated to persecution of the 81^st in less than six months. But before deciding how many is too many, let’s ask ourselves if the celebrators and persecutors were ever in it together.

Why the UPA’s cash transfer scheme will boost poverty

The government in election mode is hurrying what it believes are popular reforms. But by offering to transfer cash to 10 crore families while withdrawing subsidies that support double that population, the UPA may end up scoring a self-goal.

FirstPost, 26 November, 2012 

The Centre is ready with the nationwide cash transfer scheme that will take off next year and deposit Rs 3.2 lakh crore per year in the bank accounts of 10 crore poor families by 2014. On paper, the idea is to bypass the leaky subsidy channels. But the scheme is also the UPA’s best bet for a third consecutive term.

The government plans to cover the target BPL families before it is election time in 2014. If it succeeds, roughly 20 crore voters – considering every family on an average has two -- will benefit. If even half of them vote for the Congress and its partners, the alliance should be home again. In 2009 general elections, less than 12 crore votes ensured victory for the Congress. Its partners bagged another 2.43 crore.

But will cash transfer really help the UPA? The scheme is dubbed as fiscal-neutral. It will replace existing subsidies for PDS, fuel, fertilisers, wage schemes etc and will not burden the exchequer. The government’s bill on major subsidies towards food, fertiliser and petroleum in the current fiscal was pegged at Rs 1.8 lakh crore and has been climbing due to a falling rupee and the rising international crude price. Much of these subsidies go to people who are by no definition poor.

Poverty is debatable in India. The cash scheme targets 10 crore poor families or 45-50 crore people. The Sengupta, Saxena and Tendulkar committees, respectively, estimated 77, 50 and 37 per cent of our population as poor. That roughly works out to be 90, 60 and 45 crore Indians.  The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support put 65 crore as poor and another 20 crore as vulnerable to poverty.

Without getting into the relative merits of the different benchmarks used, it is safe to conclude that at least 85 crore Indians, or nearly 20 crore families, are impoverished. The majority of them are unquestionably poor. The rest is one illness or crop failure away from officially sinking below the fast-shifting line of poverty. All of them need help but, unfortunately, the government plans to hand out cash to only half of them while denying subsidies to all.

So, as 10 crore poor families get Rs3200 every month, which, by government’s own expectation, will increase spending and trigger inflation, the other 10 crore families, nearly as poor, will have to fend for themselves in a non-subsidised, inflationary market. They will soon become poorer than those who now qualify for the cash scheme. Clearly, it is not enough to support only the poorest 10 crore families while leaving out another 10 crore who need it as much.

In any case, the one size fits all approach – a flat cash subsidy of R3200 -- is unreasonable. There has been no clear word yet on linking it to inflation over time. Moreover, inflation and the price index itself is a regional phenomenon. Beyond the obvious urban-rural divide, prices vary widely between rural areas as well.

In such a scenario, R3200 may be just enough for subsistence in many parts of India. Worse, productivity will be hurt. For example, very few of the 85 crore poor will be able to afford, with or without the cash dole, fertilizer and diesel at market price. This will affect agricultural output which, in turn, will pinch the economy and push the poor further into poverty.

Even the primary purpose of cash transfer cannot be secured merely by the intent. Where cash is involved, the incentive for manipulation gets much stronger than, say, siphoning off low-quality PDS grains which have a limited market. The test of transparency begins with the selection of the eligible for the scheme. In the past, scores of bona fide candidates were left out while the landed pocketed BPL cards.

The other challenge will be to ensure possession and control of cash. Having a bank account does not warrant transparency as has been evident from several case studies under schemes such as NREGA where the village strongman took possession of all banking documents and controlled the money in collusion with local bank employees.

Anyway, the cash transfer scheme as envisaged now is only feasible when the government’s Aadhaar database covers the entire BPL population, as bank accounts will be opened on the basis of Aadhar’s unique identification number. In the last three years, Aadhar has covered only 25 crore people, mostly in urban areas.

Therefore, it is unclear how the government has set the national deadline for cash transfer covering all 10 crore poor families before the 2014 elections when Aadhar itself does not target more than 50% of the population by the end of 2014. Worse, Aadhar’s penetration is very limited in some of the poorest states of India.

According to the multidimensional poverty index mentioned above, eight Indian states have a combined population of 42 crore poor. Out of these states, only Jharkhand (26.79%) comes close to the national average of population percentage covered under Aadhar. The rest -- Madhya Pradesh (17.55%), Rajasthan (14.04%), Orissa (9.42%), Bengal (5.53%), Uttar Pradesh (4.95%), Bihar (2.02%) and Chhattisgarh (1.23%) – have a lot of catching up to do.

The idea of direct cash subsidy has its merits. In Brazil, for example, put in the hands of the women in poor families, it made a difference. But it will not be easy to make it work at the gigantic scale that is India. Ideally, the government should work out regional benchmarks for minimum means of living and pay the deficit to families whose income falls short of that baseline. But that seems to be a near impossible task given how generic our poverty data is.

At the same time, cash transfer can perpetuate poverty among the poorest. These beneficiaries may not make any serious effort to better their lot lest a small increase in income disqualify them from receiving the monthly dole of R 3200. So, the scheme should have inbuilt incentives for families that invest in education or enterprise and breach the poverty barrier.

A desperate UPA is in too much of a rush to look into these issues or even care. Since the subsidies will not be immediately withdrawn, some money in some people’s hands may earn it some votes for now. But eventually its results, and the country, will be poorer.

Final checks, Mr Ramesh

The much debated land acquisition bill is likely to be placed before Parliament this session. A few worries

Tehelka, 22 November, 2012

The Right to Fair Compensation, Resettlement, Rehabilitation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Bill will reach the union cabinet next week. It has passed the scrutiny of a House panel and a Group of Ministers. Neither rural development minister Jairam Ramesh who shaped it nor GoM head Sharad Pawar who cleared it revealed the contours of the final consensus but it is learnt that the contentious consent clause is back to 80%.

While the industry is upset over what it calls unrealistic terms for consent and land cost, the weaknesses of this well-meaning Bill may lie elsewhere. In fact, the apparently inflated land value – two to four times the market price depending on the plot’s proximity to urban areas – may still be below the actual market price which is far above the government circle rates or registration values of similar plots in the recent past.

It is no secret that registrations are usually done at absurdly low prices to save on stamp duty and to keep the black money in circulation. So in urban areas, even after a 100% solatium, the land value for acquisition is likely to remain lower than the actual market price. If anything, the buyer can only crib about having to pay a near-market price entirely in white money.

Then again, the debate over consent – whether two-thirds or 80 per cent of landowners should agree to allow acquisition – misses a crucial point. As projects keep getting bigger, the number of project-affected often runs into several thousands and across many villages. Unless the proposed 80 (or 67) per cent consent is sought separately from every affected gram sabha or the smallest local democratic body, the very purpose of seeking consent may be defeated.

Consider the Posco project in Orissa. The proposed plant affects some 22,000 landowners in seven villages. Dhinkia, the centre of resistance where not even 10 per cent agree to acquisition, has a population of around 4000. Now, hypothetically, if the other six villages agree to trade their land, should villagers in Dhinkia be forced to give up theirs?

The compensation prescribed in the Bill is generous. But there is the danger of handing out too much at a time. Every family gets transport and rehabilitation allowance of Rs 1 lakh and another Rs 5 lakh if no job is offered. Another lump sum, presumably not less than Rs 3 lakh, will be handed out if no housing is provided. Added to the price of the land with solatium, that is a lot of money at one go and can easily destroy susceptible families.

The biggest security of rural or poor women – a wife, daughter, mother or sister -- is shelter. Rehab packages in the past are rife with instances where the men of the family splurged the compensation bounty or took off with it, abandoning the wife, children and dependents without home or livelihood. The Bill needs to make alternative housing compulsory and transfer the major cash components of the compensation to joint accounts of spouses. Widows are considered separate families. But when they are dependent on their adult sons, they should also be made party to such joint compensation accounts.

The other unspoken victim of such schemes is the unmarried adult woman, who is at the mercy of a father or brother. While unmarried adult men are deemed separate families eligible for compensation, the government’s rehabilitation policy, as in the case of voluntary relocation from critical forest areas, ignores the women, effectively leaving the most vulnerable out of the security net. The draft Bill put out for public scrutiny last year described every unmarried adult, male or female, as a separate family. The final Bill must make the clause explicit.

The provision for job for a member from each affected family is another clause the Bill should re-examine. It is arbitrary and does not link the buyer’s liability to the quantum of land acquired. Consider two companies acquiring 100 acres each. Depending on the nature of land holding, one may need to deal with 20 families while the other may have 50 on its hand. Clearly, projects dealing with numerous small-holders will have to provide more jobs.

The other issue is with the “job” itself. The Bill fails to specify the buyer’s liability in terms of employment worth a certain wage or salary per acre land acquired. Besides, it will be difficult to gainfully employ unskilled labour and even if trained, those legally entitled for jobs are unlikely to have any incentive to be productive.

To avoid such a scenario, the package can offer stakes in the project instead – worth Rs 5 lakh which is the one-time compensation presently prescribed in lieu of a job -- in the project for which land is acquired. This will ensure long-term financial benefit to the affected families. The buyers will not be forced to hire what they may consider unproductive staff. The sellers will not have to be saddled with jobs they may resent.

The brouhaha over the details notwithstanding, the rehabilitation mechanism still depends to a great extent on the state’s discretion. The Bill now allows states to decide on the minimum size of acquisition that will have to follow the new rehab formula. The states also get to decide if and how they mark up land price in rural areas and what percentage of agricultural land in a district will be up for acquisition. Land being a state subject, states deserve such powers. But given that a number of states have a history of aggressive land acquisition, the Bill should specify the limits to which its provisions can be diluted.

Finally, two key areas need a rethink. It may be too late for the Bill to redefine “public purpose” but the soft language – “infrastructure, industrialization and urbanization projects…where benefits largely accrue to the general public” -- keeps, perhaps deliberately, the possibilities of manipulation alive.

And then, Ramesh and his colleagues in the GoM have made the district collector the sole authority to determine the price of land. That is one office which figured with alarming regularity at the centre of all that has been disgraceful – from forging gram sabha consent to ordering police brutality -- about land acquisition. In the same spirit, the chief secretary has been named the ex-officio head of the state compensation and rehabilitation committee.

What the Bill owes us instead are independent authorities at the centre and state level to assess if a project is indeed in public interest, confirm the price of land, monitor the acquisition process, and watch over the bureaucracy that has only been too eager to take orders from its political masters and big money. In its present form, this much-needed legislation leaves a lot to convenience of interpretation which is the recipe for unrest, litigation and delay.

FDI noise vs NIB silence: How politics reflects our class bias

Most politicians belong and relate to the broad range of the middle-class FDI in retail will affect. The potential victims of the NIB are the faceless, voiceless poor of the hinterland.

FirstPost, 19 November, 2012

In death, as in life, Bal Thackeray overshadowed all political agendas this weekend. But, homage paid and eulogies sung, political parties are back to playing their pressure games in the build-up to the Winter Session beginning on November 22. The opposition has already dared the government to implement the latter’s decision to allow FDI in retail and a no-confidence motion is apparently in the works.

Consider the concerns of the political parties that are opposed to FDI in retail. First, investors with deep pockets will elbow domestic players, mostly small retailers, out of business. Second, direct procurement will throw middlemen out of the equation. Third, the price benefit of such eliminations will not reach farmers. Fourth, the influx of cheap foreign products will harm the domestic manufacturing sector.

So, the opposition has threatened a cautiously smug government that yet another Parliamentary session may just go down the drain unless the issue is put to vote in the House. This shrill face-off has dominated media listings since September and is now threatening to monopolise the news space for weeks to come.

The concerns of the opposition, of course, are no less real than the arguments of the government. FDI in retail deserves a heated, loud debate. But so does the National Investment Board (NIB) to be set up by the PMO in the next couple of weeks. If you do not know much about this brainchild of the union finance minister, it is because the NIB has not made news except briefly when a “ministerial turf war broke out” over it. No opposition leader has considered the NIB worth commenting on or protesting against.

The NIB was conceived by P Chidambaram as a super committee under his ministry to ensure blanket clearances for projects involving investment of R1000 crore or more. Following Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan’s protestations that the NIB’s mandate infringed on the powers of her ministry, it is now being set up as a cabinet committee under the PMO. While a cabinet committee prevails over individual ministries, it is unclear how it will override authorities such as the Forest Advisory Committee or National Board for Wildlife, constituted by Acts of Parliament.

The reforms machinery of the government is alarmed that 26 mega projects worth nearly R1.25 lakh crore are stuck due to delayed or denied clearances and shortage of coal. An investment report prepared by a private bank this April quantified the investment grounded chiefly due to environmental roadblocks as more than R 7 lakh crore. So, the PMO wants the Environment ministry to allow coal mines to increase production by 25% and renew their licences without asking for fresh green clearances or conducting public hearings.

Not everyone in favour of FDI in retail, one assumes, is likely to back the idea of doing away with environmental scrutiny or bulldozing landowners’ rights for infrastructure development. But those who claim to be against the government on FDI have to be, by the same logic, opposed to the NIB too. It is not difficult to see why. 

If FDI in retail leads to loss of livelihood, mass displacement of people for mega projects backed by the NIB will inflict much more misery. Forget the human and environmental costs for a moment, the massive loss caused to the economy by plundering of grossly undervalued non-renewable resources such as minerals will far outweigh the damage FDI can cause to the manufacturing sector.

If it is about big money -- as the Left never tires of screaming -- further lining its own pockets, remember that even the most optimist consultancy firms, such as Tecnova, do not expect FDI of more than R11,000-17000 crore (USD 2-3 billion) in retail in the first two years. The NIB is about looking after investment of lakhs of crores.

But the constituencies, so to say, affected by mega projects are neither vocal nor visible. Nobody quantifies the water guzzled by factories till the rivers and aquifers actually run dry. The decimation of forests does not register till drought becomes routine. Few people, and certainly fewer politicians, even understand what biodiversity is to factor its loss. But let’s avoid the environmental rant for now.

As the provider of blanket clearances to projects worth lakhs of crores, the NIB will also claim thousands and lakhs of human victims across the vast hinterland of India. These are people who have been fighting for and losing land, livelihood and often lives over many centuries. Today, the sacrifice is in the name of growth and reforms. So why doesn’t the opposition take up their fight against the NIB while opposing FID in retail tooth and nail?

They do not because even the human victims of the NIB are invisible. They are not educated enough to be retailers in towns. They certainly don’t qualify for jobs in the manufacturing sector. They do not even know the privileges of a middleman because no agent ever bought any of their vegetables. Most of them walk miles to the nearest market to sell so little that they can usually carry it on their heads.

Unlike the potential victims of FDI in retail, the proposed NIB’s casualties are not middle-class, not even rural middle-class. They are the poor, mostly tribals, whom few urban, educated Indians have ever met unless as tourists. They do have votes but are easily taken for granted and cheaply bought off before elections. In between, they are nowhere in the reckoning even when parties seek out excuses for political posturing.

When the principal opposition party that had promised FDI in retail in its 2004 election manifesto and the principal ruling party that had resisted the same when in opposition opt for role reversals, they need a convenient theatre. The broad range of the middle-class most politicians belong and relate to has always been their best audience. For them, the NIB is somebody else’s problem.

The Age of Endlings

We can only imagine the loneliness of the last of a species. But can we be immune to the consequence of the loss?

Tehelka, 16 November, 2012

Remember Uncas in The Last of The Mohicans? His death marked the end of a tribe on which James Cooper developed his theme of great loss. The Mohicans was an imaginary tribe based on the Mohegans and Mahicans who still survive in two autonomous reservations of USA. But dozens of plant and animal species go extinct every day. Few are recorded, even noticed. The last of a species – the endling – is identified in still fewer cases.

Much has been written about Truganini, the last surviving Tasmanian Aboriginal whose tribe was exterminated by the Europeans who colonised Australia at the end of the 18^th century. Truganini became an endling in 1874, three years before her lonely death. Around the same time, another nameless endling passed away thousands of miles away. But if you never heard of the Quagga, it is not your fault.

Imagine a half-zebra with the stripes in the front fading in the middle to disappear into a plain brown coat in the rear. Once abundant in the grassland of South Africa, the Quagga was hunted to extinction for its hide and meat nearly 130 years ago. By the 1870s, the wild stock disappeared and zoo specimens became rare. The Quagga endling died at Amsterdam’s Artis zoo in 1883.

Martha the pigeon and Incas the parakeet died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914 and 1918 respectively. Martha’s death marked the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, a species that crowded the continent in billions till the new world was discovered. Incas was the last Carolina Parakeet, North America’s only parrot species. The Heath Hen, a majestic grouse and a variant of the Greater Prairie Chicken, was nearly extirpated due to poaching by the end of the 19^th century. The endling – named Booming Ben -- lived alone for four years in a small Massachusetts island called Martha’s Vineyard till a forest fire killed it in 1932.

The kangaroo had a cousin that resembled a wolf. The Tasmanian tiger, the largest marsupial (animals who keep the new born in a pouch) carnivore of our time, was killed as a vermin and vanished from the wild by 1930. Benjamin, the endling of undermined sex, died in the Hobart zoo in 1936. The latest in the list of known endlings was Lonesome George, a male Pinta Island tortoise. Rescued to the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galápagos, the giant spent four lonely decades in captivity before dying this June. While endlings of less-evolved life forms may not feel as much, did Benjamin or George realise they hadn’t seen anything quite like them for a really long time?

Boa knew that absolute loneliness. And she sang to herself to dispel it in a language that had no more speakers left in the Bo people, one of the 10 Great Andamanese tribes. With Boa, died her language and the tribe in 2010. A few months earlier, another ancient language of the archipelago – Khora – had died with Boa’s neighbour Boro. In line are the 50-odd remaining members of the other Great Andamanese clans and only two surviving languages.

Boa’s story was written by linguist Anvita Abbi who knew the octogenarian in her final years. The only endling I came across may not qualify as one but she suffered the same fate. Rajasthan’s Bharatpur did not have any tiger since the last one was shot in 1962. But in 1999, a barely-adult Ranthambhore tigress wandered out, followed the course of the Gambhir river and landed up in the famous wetlands of Ghana.

The tigress settled down among ample prey in the grassland and, thanks to then Conservator of Bharatpur Shruti Sharma, was protected from poachers who would soon butcher the big cats of Sariska and Ranthambhore. Unusually reclusive, she was in her prime when her remains were found in the summer of 2005. For six long years, she did not have a partner or a competitor. She still sprayed to mark her territory.

Tigers continue to flourish in many pocket reserves.  The Asiatic cheetah, though, went extinct in India with the last three gunned down by a maharaja one night in 1947 under the glare of his royal vehicle that blinded the animals. While experts plot to fly in the African variety, the population of several other species -- the great Indian bustard, Jerdon’s courser, gharial, hangul, Nilgiri tahr, river dolphin, dugong and numerous amphibians -- have dwindled below the critical level since.

The most imminent threat of extinction, however, is facing the Asiatic wild buffalo of which a handful remain in the wild. While the official count stands at 2900, more than 98 per cent of the population is confined to the North-East where they routinely breed with the domestic ones. The only other population is in central India where their numbers may not add up to 40. In the absence of a rigorous genetic verification, there is no certainty how many of them are purebred.

The small populations in Indravati and Pamed remain unprotected as the administration has little access to the insurgency-ridden forests. Chhattisgarh’s Udanti now has eight animals after Asha, the lone, diminutive female, gave birth to a calf in 2009 in captivity. While she is encumbered again, the bulls in the wild have no option but to woo the domestic females on the outskirts of the sanctuary.

Once dead, species cannot be recovered. Theoretically, breeding back is possible by proper selection if a very closely related species is found. Since 1987, the Quagga project has been trying to recreate the species from the plains zebra but so far has succeeded in partially retrieving only the genes responsible for the unique stripe pattern. In India, repeated claims of cloning the extinct cheetah have remained on paper since 2000.

The wild buffalo is the ancestor of the domestic variety and its survival is the only insurance against fatal weakening of the domestic gene. The government, the court and NGOs have repeatedly committed to saving this majestic species that weighs 900-1500 kg with horns spreading up to 2 metres. But the executing agency, the forest department, is not even confident about the identity of the species.

The eight wild buffaloes of Udanti are routinely referred to as bison (or gaur) by the forest staff. In Karnataka, when the government decided to set up a breeding centre for the infinitely less-endangered bison last month, top zoo and forest officials told the media that the facility was meant for wild buffaloes, a species absent in the state. 

Once she became an endling, Truganini had a prophecy. “I know that when I die the Museum wants my body,” she told a priest. After her burial, Truganini’s body was exhumed and put on public display at the Tasmanian Museum during 1904-47. But having accelerated the natural extinction rate at least by a 1000 times, we may have already run out of space in that gallery. 

Anyway, there will be no one to preserve the endling species of earth.

Why those deathly crackers in the festival of light?

FirstPost, 11 November, 2012

The stench of gunpowder did not accompany a triumphant Rama when he returned to Ayodhya after vanquishing Ravana. Firearms were not part of Krishna’s arsenal when he killed Narakasura. The divinity of Kali simply required a machete to take down whatever came her way. The goddess of wealth would be really inconvenienced by fireworks that startle and daze her steed, the owl. Whatever one’s reason for observing Deepavali or Diwali, the festival of light was always about earthen lamps, and later candles and coloured matches.

Even in modern India, few saw fireworks till the rich started importing sparklers from Europe. Fire mud pots (aanar) were manufactured in the 19^th century Bengal but desi manufacturers truly stepped in when imports were affected due to World War Two. From three in 1942, the number of factories rose to 189 by 1980. Today there are more than 500, mostly concentrated in Sivakasi. Nearly all of them pride themselves in their noisy, noxious crackers.

Firecrackers, in all likelihood, are a Chinese invention. More than two millennia ago, it was accidental bursting of green bamboo chunks thrown into fire. By the beginning of the last millennium, gunpowder was added to bamboo for a bigger bang. The advancement in pyrotechnics was rapid in China and Marco Polo took the unique art of fireworks to Italy in 1292.

Today, the firecrackers (indeed all fireworks and much of it made in China) flooding our markets follow the formula perfected many centuries ago: 75 % saltpetre (potassium nitrate), 15% carbon and 10% sulphur. When lighted, these chemicals burn with atmospheric oxygen. The combination generates poisonous oxides of carbon, sulphur and nitrogen. Heavy metals such as cadmium and lead are also released.

Studies claim that during Diwali, the levels of these oxides rise more than 100 per cent. Exposure to chemicals is a threat even while storing or carrying firecrackers. Thousands of children and women toil for long hours in the sweatshops where these are manufactured. Records across India show that every Diwali presence of suspended particles in the air shoots up by 90-150 per cent, reducing visibility and suffocating us. The noise, well beyond the threshold of human tolerance, traumatises the young, old, sick and pets alike.

Our air quality is already so bad that any trigger can lead to lethal smog. Lack of wind speed and burning of millions of tonnes of wheat husk by Punjab farmers (though incinerating agricultural waste is illegal) created a stubborn blanket that hung over much of north India for the past two weeks. The smog threatened to trip the northern grid that powers 28 per cent of India’s population in nine states.

Smog moistens transmission lines which soon become caked with deposits of airborne pollution. If unchecked, this leads to short circuits and eventual tripping. Polymer insulators can protect the wires but only few states have it in place. The entire northern grid suffered due to smog and fog in 2008 and 2009. A major collapse in 2001 took more than 12 hours to restore.

Experts fear that the smog, and with it the risk of a blackout, will intensify after the Diwali extravaganza which coincides with a likely western disturbance. Even after the apparent clearing of smog over the last two days, the air quality index that peaked to 920 earlier in the week – almost double the “critical” or “very unhealthy” mark of 500 – still hovers around 350 or “very poor” level in the capital.

The Delhi Chief Minister has already appealed to citizens to avoid fireworks. The union Environment ministry has taken up the issue of burning agricultural waste with the Punjab government. Even the Supreme Court has stepped in with a bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir promising to deal with the rising pollution.

The threat is not just about long blackouts and disruption of essential services. The Great Smog of 1952 proved fatal for 12,000 Londoners in the months that followed. More than 25,000 were affected due to aggravation or development of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments. Every year, doctors all over India report a surge in these cases on or after Diwali.

Suspended particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) directly enters the alveoli of the lung. In hazy Beijing, the lung cancer rate has increased by 60 per cent in the past decade though the smoking rate has remained mostly static. Chinese experts feel that smog with high PM2.5 may soon replace smoking tobacco as the top risk factor for lung cancer.

In the recent years, a lot has been invested in awareness campaigns and in putting legal restrictions in place to discourage firecrackers. Yet, Sivakasi alone sells R 900 crore worth fireworks, mostly firecrackers, every year though a state like Punjab cannot raise R 400 crore for polymer insulation to safeguard the northern grid against polluting smog.

Worse, while we splurge over R 1000 crore in a noisy celebration spewing toxic fumes, the annual budget (2011-12) for the National Pollution Control Board to clean up that mess and more stands at a mere R 40 crore. The academic debates over who – the Indian, the Chinese or the Arab – actually invented gunpowder will continue. But we surely don’t have to be in a race to choke on it.

Is Congress attempting what the BJP failed at in 2004?

FirstPost, 4 November, 2012

The hour has come. Congress heavyweights from across the country rally behind the FDI in the Capital today. On the rope having taken one blow after another on corruption, the party is apparently going all out to shift the stage in the hope that the next elections can be fought on economic grounds.

Advocates of reforms (and the party) are relieved. Even the officially non-affiliated among them, most eloquently represented by columnist Shekhar Gupta, have cheered the Congress for finally shedding its hypocrisy of socialism with this “coming out party for its new economics”.

For quite some time, the Congress has been ridiculed by well-wishing experts for apparently believing that the UPA was re-elected in 2009 not because of the economic growth it achieved during its first term but in spite of it. These pundits seek to make a case by pointing out how the party, after a string of so-called socialist measures such as NREGA, performed poorly in the states where majority of India’s poor live but fared well in upwardly mobile regions. The conclusion, thereby, is that the party must unleash no-holds-barred reforms to retain its constituency of the prosperous India, if it still entertains any hope of making a comeback in 2014.

It is always good for politics to be ideologically upfront. But hoping that a certain ideology will reap electoral dividends just because it is upfront is naïve. It is also stupid to assume that a party’s hypothetical acceptance among the prosperous Indians can keep it in power. That amounts to claiming that the prosperous outnumber the poor in India. Worse, a variation of this strategy was tried out by the BJP to disastrous effect in 2004. India was not shining eight years ago. It still isn’t.

Surely, the Congress strategists in and outside the party know better than to ignore a lesson still fresh in history? What they mean instead, one guesses, is that uplifting a good number of poor in the upwardly mobile category will help them in 2014 and the means to achieve that miracle is more reforms.

Unfortunately, there is just not enough time before the 2014 polls for even a miraculous spurt of growth to percolate and ease poverty. What is alarming though, given the experience of reforms over the last two decades, is the possibility that this desperate rush for growth will push still more Indians to poverty and a bigger number of poor to destitution.

If this sounds like frog-in-the-well paranoia, let me clarify that India has no room for the anachronistic Left which includes the rabid environmentalist. Wealth generation depends on individual skill and risk appetite. But the demand for a level playing field, a prerequisite to free market in theory, is mysteriously dubbed as socialist obstructionism. Even school kids know that nothing comes out of nothing. Natural assets have to be harvested for growth. But demanding optimal utilisation — which includes ensuring maximum return — is as much good economics as environmentalism.

Liberalisation was a promise of freedom from bureaucratic red tape. It was supposed to unleash entrepreneurship and limit corruption. It has made possible, the emergence of globally respected Indian IT brands. But the end of the licence-permit raj did not stem corruption, only the excuses for it.

Corruption is natural in an economic culture that thrives on wanton exploitation of natural resources. In the early 1990s, a bankrupt economy desperate for survival had to pawn the so-called family silver and gold. But two decades on, should we still need to sell our minerals and water and land dirt cheap to ensure growth?

The fact that we have failed to move beyond a subsistence economy and that we still depend on distress selling of non-renewable resources, underlines the policy deficit in the North Block and Yojana Bhavan. It is either bad economics over two decades or an artificial and unrealistic growth target that has belied the promises of liberalisation.

That is why we need a second set of reforms that does not require ‘pre-subsiding’ investment (foreign or domestic) by doling out natural resources. That is not free economy which, on paper, honours ownership of assets and eschews coercion. Our markets need money but money also needs to multiply. We don’t need to be on the top of the global sellout chart to coax investment. That is a corruption of policies from which all corruption flows.

Then there is the question of equitability. Socialism maybe passé but every time we fawn over a rags-to-riches story as a sterling example of enterprise, we should ask ourselves a few questions. The poor farmer’s son who reached Harvard through an IIT did not go to a private school. His village had none and his father anyway could not have afforded it, just like he could not have taken the son to a private hospital each time he fell ill.

While there is much room for debating the best delivery system, expenditure on rural employment, health and education are not subsidies but investment in a country that prides itself on its human resources and where at least one-third of the population are poorer than the poorest of the world. They live in the most resource-rich areas of the country. It is one thing to keep selling one’s family silver to buy a good life; quite another to rob others in the name of growth.

The lot of the upwardly mobile is not exactly rosy either. The recent events at the Manesar car plant exposed the pathetic working conditions and incentives of industrial labourers. The call-centre boom has created a generation stuck with a job profile for life without any professional growth. And farmers are committing suicide even in Punjab, the cradle of the green revolution.

Of course, there is one little India that enjoys the benefits of a free market but a general election cannot be decided by those few prosperous Indians who anyway hate to queue up and vote. Perhaps the government should look elsewhere for hope. More Indians have mobile phones than those with access to safe drinking water or toilet. That is one majority the Congress can bank on while ringing in reforms.

An unholy tradition

Environmentalism was the toast of several Puja pandals in Kolkata this time. But at the end of the festival, thousands of idols still lined up for immersion in rivers and lakes

Tehelka, 1 November, 2012

Every Durga Puja in Bengal, organisers and artisans and craftsmen aspire to be at their creative best. Temporary pandals, their decoration and even idols convey carefully chosen messages. From victimisation of Saurav Ganguly to the evils of US foreign policy, the themes have ranged from parochial to international in the past. This year, at least two dozen Kolkata pujas were built on green ideas.

The plight of the Bengal tiger has inspired puja organisers in the past. This time, puja themes went the whole hog, from the dangers of human cloning to ocean pollution in Goa, water conservation, impact of global warming on insects, butterfly conservation and, not surprisingly, scarcity of Hilsa. More than half a dozen pujas showcased tribal culture and ethos while others vowed to save the earth and plant trees. At least two highlighted the plight of the Ganga.

Yet, once the puja was over, thousands of idols were taken to the river and a few designated lakes and ponds in the city and hundreds across the state. In Delhi, organisers complained that enough water was not released in the Yamuna and the idols had to be dumped on the mud. In Kolkata, massive infrastructure has been put in place in the recent years to lift the idols with cranes immediately after immersion to keep the river clean. But it is impossible to recover every chunk of clay and straw painted in leaden colours that floats away and starves the water systems of oxygen.

To be fair, a few organisers opted for metallic or fibre glass idols that became collector’s items after the festival. Others used organic colours. But these have been exceptions. One guilt-stricken organiser who strived to create awareness about pollution in the Ganga admitted that their idols, too, were immersed in a local south Kolkata lake designated by the administration. “Our huge Shiva structure has not been immersed. We will ask the fire brigade to dismantle it. The rest of the idols had to be drowned. We didn’t have a choice because that is the religious tradition,” he explained uncomfortably.

Religion though does not demand immersion of idols in rivers and lakes. Priests agree that the custom of tarpan -- where hymns are chanted while the idol’s face is reflected in water held in a saucer – completes the immersion process. There is no bar on using the same set of idols for subsequent pujas. Yet, there are few takers for non-clay idols for long-term use or doing away with the tradition of physical dumping of the paraphernalia in natural waters.

Instead, ineffectual solutions such as barricading parts of the river and other water bodies with concrete walls to demarcate permanent immersion zones are being discussed. Blocking a river in its course or further eating into fast depleting lakes and ponds is too high a cost for continuing with such an outdated and dispensable custom.

Be it Ganapati in Mumbai or Durga in Kolkata, the immersion of idols today merely serve as a social excuse for extended celebration at the end of the festival routine. Environment-friendly alternatives, such as “dissolving” the idols with water jets in concrete tanks to prevent leaching of chemicals into natural water systems, are not likely to compromise that fun.

Oriental religious traditions have always worshipped nature. The Prithvi Sukta (earth hymn) in the Atharva Veda is possibly the most ancient expression of environmentalism.  With changing times, soulless customs have replaced those values. Today, we make monsters of monkeys by feeding them to compensate for our sin. We trample over and litter our best forests on pilgrimages. We parade elephants, sacrifice goats and dump everything – from mortal remains to daily puja flowers – in rivers.

But if sprinkling a few drops of Ganga water is believed to have the purifying effect of a dip in the river, why do we need more than a saucerful for the ritual of immersion?