Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  Despite the rather belligerent tone of the current government, they do have a point and it’s a “scary point” as a campaigner for climate change in Delhi acknowledges. Even with India’s projected population growth together with the dramatic growth in emissions from coal consumption by 2030, per capita carbon emissions in India will be 4 tonnes. By contrast it is 14 tonnes in China and the US. Yes – developing countries are increasing their carbon footprints, including India. But even with their projected increase in carbon emissions in the decades ahead, the major culprits remain the developed economies of the West. While their media continue to blame the likes of China and India as the ‘baddies’ for the climate change crisis, the current British government in 2015 set about ripping up most of their promises and financial commitments towards green energy as soon as they had won office.

  And yet, and yet and yet? This same BJP government has quintupled the 2020 targets for non-fossil energy set by the previous government – almost six times the current level.

  Maybe this is all huff and puff. We’ll see, but clearly global emissions are everyone’s problem and concern, and those countries having the highest carbon emissions – the Western economies – can make an important contribution. Per capita usage rather than usage per country significantly alters the debates and indicates that the West should be cutting emissions by 10% or more as soon as possible.

  As mentioned above, it was the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 which brought to the world’s attention India’s energy plans and environmental concerns. Agreed by nearly 200 countries and operational from November 2016, the agreement commits these countries to keep global warming below 2°C. Despite President Trump’s announcement in 2017 that the USA would be withdrawing from this Agreement, a long-term goal for zero carbon emissions, effectively phasing out fossil fuel, was agreed. Angry debate about the agreement continues to feature in the international media. As George Monbiot concluded, “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” A key focus in these debates was India and its ambitious plans for future energy production. When portrayed as the guilty partner in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the country’s politicians respond by citing the Western economies’ historical responsibility for the current disastrous environmental situation. Figures are reeled out indicating that India is not a great consumer of energy-sapping goods – ownership of refrigerators and air conditioning is small compared to the Western economies. On a per capita basis, carbon dioxide emissions of the Indian population will remain well below those of Western economies, even in 2030. And the Modi government has surprised many doubters by its actions and plans for non-fossil energy. In the case of solar energy for example, production will rise from around 3GW to 100GW in seven years. As the journalist David Rose notes, “No country has ever built solar at anything approaching this pace, and it would leave India with three times as much solar capacity as Germany.” Germany incidentally is Europe’s leading producer of solar energy (at 38GW) – twice as much as in America. These are not figures to be sniffed at – India sees 15–20% of its energy needs coming from solar sources “in the very near future”. Alongside the growing importance of solar energy is a recognition that the catastrophic pollution associated with earlier mining and power generation is unacceptable. Legal challenges and local campaigning groups are having some impact. Levies on mining royalties and payable to state governments are to be given to local communities, which could transform the well-being of those living in these districts. New pollution standards for coal plant technology – as strict as those anywhere – are in force, although with a worrying lack of enforcement.

  As always though, any good news needs to be balanced with what is happening elsewhere. In an alarming development for India’s environmentalists, the government in 2014 gave the go-ahead for a huge hydropower plant in a remote and pristine part of the country’s north-east. 4,000 hectares of forest will be cleared in an area rich in biodiversity. The huge Dibang plant is one of hundreds of projects initially rejected in the past but now approved since the new government came to office. “The floodgates are open,” warned an environmental researcher from Delhi. And then there was the ‘Coalgate’ corruption scandal. After it was discovered that every coal mining license allocated by the government between 1993 and 2009 had been granted in an “illegal and arbitrary” manner, the Modi government wants 46 of these mines to continue. Despite an estimated loss to the country of some $31 billion, development needs override all other considerations it seems.

  And there are other worries. There are more than 17,000 glaciers in the Indus basin, that north-western area shared between Pakistan and India. 8,000 of these glaciers are in India, Jammu and Kashmir alone. The glaciers provide a natural reservoir for freshwater supplies to the Indus and its tributaries. The rich and fertile region – shaped by the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Beas, Ravi and Sutlej rivers – relies on melt water yet ‘water stress’ is increasingly a problem. Climate change “if the trend continues” will result “in an acute water shortage in the Indus basin in the coming decades,” argue researchers monitoring the changes. The Indus Waters Treaty, agreed by Pakistan and India in 1960, today looks under threat as Prime Minister Modi claims that, “the waters in these rivers belong to India and our farmers.” Climate change and water shortages provide a convenient basis for nationalist demands.

  Massive water restructuring is not only a north-western concern. The country has begun work in 2016 on a huge river diversion programme that will channel water away from the north and west to drought-prone areas in the east and south. The project requires rerouting water from major rivers such as the Ganges and Brahmaputra and creating canals links to rivers in the south and east. This plan, argue environmentalists, could be a disaster for the local ecology. In addition, 100 million Bangladeshi people who live downstream of the rivers and rely on the rivers for their livelihoods are worried.

  India is key to the future of global climate change. Together with China and the United States, the three countries are responsible for some 40% of global carbon emissions. Agreements and actions already made suggest some progress. India as the world’s third largest emitter is again at one of those pivotal historical moments which will not only shape its own future but also our own.

  Shit everywhere

  When I was interviewing my group of ‘frequent travellers’ to India regarding their views and experiences about everyday life in India in their travels around the country as tourists, they often raised interrelated issues that suggested they had quite a broad and wide understanding of the problems. ‘Being poor’ for example, was about more than so many dollars a day, important though that was. It was also a cultural identity – caste – religious thing. Food and being able to eat was obviously the bottom line; everything starts from this fact of life. But there were other concerns too. As Sany put it colourfully, “What shocks me the most is pretending to be animists and then there is this shit everywhere. It’s a big paradox in India. It’s OK for people to see shit and plastic bags everywhere and it doesn’t shock them. They spend their time watching television and they don’t see it is clean everywhere – soap operas, Bollywood movies? Don’t they see it is clean?”

  Jeff too highlights the rubbish. “It does wind me up a little. There seems to be a lack of concern about the environment. The plastic bag only came to India around 1994. I think before that everything must have been recycled bags. I was on the Rajasthani Express and I gave the young attendant some rubbish. I asked him if he could get rid of it as there were no bins on the train. And he just opened the train door and threw it outside.” Things were not getting better, continued Jeff. “The smog in the cities is getting worse. In Bangalore, it is really bad.”

  Open defecating is but one dramatic, visible and measurable feature of the life in India. It is a complex issue that touches on issues of gender, well-being, poverty, the environment, and also health and hygiene. In a way
it epitomises the ‘new’ and ‘old’ India, the differences between the rich and the poor and the caste inequalities that ravage the country.

  Many things are invisible to us tourists. Other things are very visible and we wish they weren’t. It is rare for example to be on a train leaving a city especially in the early morning and not see the hundreds of people defecating alongside the rail lines. It is easy to imagine the humiliation and vulnerability of those forced into such behaviour. A staggering 70% of Indians living in villages – or some 550 million people – defecate in the open. This is also true for 13% of urban households. As the filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar put it graphically a few years ago, in Bombay “half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and half million kilos of shit each morning.”

  Nearly one in two people in other words defecate in the open in India. And yet, more people in India have access to or own a mobile phone connected to the mobile network. Despite having the highest numbers of people without access to toilets in the world, a United Nations report in 2014 also indicates that India is doing little to nothing to remedy the problem. As Gouri Choudhury from the NGO Action India wrote, “It’s a question of belief in humanity [and] dignity, which somewhere along the line we seem to have lost.” India’s Southeast Asian neighbours such as Bangladesh and Vietnam have reduced open defecation to single percentages. Progress and big progress is possible. The report also notes that the countries with the highest open defecation figures have the highest number of deaths of children under the age of five, as well as high levels of undernutrition, high levels of poverty and large disparities between the rich and poor. Evidence again of Dréze and Sen’s “interlocking and reinforcing levels of inequality and disempowerment.” The absence of toilet facilities throughout the country, however, appears to be moving into mainstream policy agendas from its embarrassed invisibility. One of the reasons was the outcry over the horrific gang-rape and hanging from a tree of two young girls in a remote village in Uttar Pradesh in early 2014. Inter-caste tensions, patriarchal and misogynist attitudes underpinned the atrocity. The NPR website reported that lacking a toilet at home “on the night they were killed, the two teens did what hundreds of millions of women do across India each day. Under the cloak of darkness before sunrise or after sunset, they set out for an open field to relieve themselves.” Women usually go out in pairs to avoid harassment. Guddo Devi a cousin of the two murdered girls said, “When we step out of the house we are scared. And we have to go in the mornings, in the evenings, and when we cannot stop ourselves, at times we go out in the afternoons as well… And there are no bathrooms. We don’t have any sort of facility. We have to go out.” Unfortunately, this horrific case is not unusual but the Uttar Pradesh incident provoked national anger.

  Low cost, two pit designed toilets on a raised platform with swing doors, however, are available. Using very little water, these toilets biodegrade the waste for use as a fertiliser. Some entrepreneurs have paid to introduce these toilets to a number of villages but not in the numbers that seriously address the problems. Studies have found that there are cultural problems associated with using a toilet – linked to complex assumptions around purity and pollution. Learning needs to go hand in hand with new facilities.

  A second reason for optimism is the recent pledge by Prime Minister Modi, as “one of the keystone efforts of his government”, to expand sanitation in India and end open defecation. For Modi, elevating sanitation standards is part of the formula for tackling poverty and promoting outside investment. Open defecation is not good for business. By 2019, Modi plans to have a toilet in every household and school. The ‘World Toilet Day’ celebrations in November 2014 with its 700-kilogram cake shaped like a toilet, charity walks and pledges marked an encouraging start to eradicating a problem that, says the World Bank, could be costing India some $54 billion in health and medical costs.

  Rubbish and environmental issues in India are issues that figure as media concerns when judged by newspaper and television coverage. Defecation is generally not one of them. However, deforestation together with noise, air and water pollution stories can be found in the press. For most tourists, however, it is solid waste pollution – plain old rubbish – that is usually commented upon, with good reason. It is not uncommon to monitor kilometre after kilometre trails of plastic debris along the rail lines, the denser the closer you are to urban centres. Thousands of torn plastic bags snagged in the thorn bushes provide an unwanted form of rural graffiti visible from speeding trains. In the towns and cities, large black crows squabble over rubbish piles often seen on the streets and pavements. Rivers and canals appear to be unofficial rubbish dumps. Given the fast-growing population densities of Indian cities, solid waste disposal is a massive problem. It is estimated that Indian cities generate around 100 million tonnes of solid waste a year. New Delhi alone throws away 10,000 tons a day and it is predicted to double in ten years. The municipal authorities are responsible for managing this rubbish, and modern rubbish trucks are not an uncommon site around cities. Since 2000 it has been a legal requirement for local authorities to have waste management programmes, recycling programmes and composting plans. Similar to many other countries, however, the problem is not plans, programmes or intentions. Rather it is a problem of implementation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that up to 40% of municipal waste in India is simply not collected. There are new initiatives underway to deal with these problems. A few Indian cities, New Delhi for example, are establishing waste-to-energy projects, hoping to generate electricity from the collected rubbish. Privatisation of local solid waste programmes and of the employees have begun in a number of cities – always a sign of panic and absence of strategic solutions. Small, incremental signs of improvement though are visible. Rail stations in the big cities today are much cleaner than a few years ago with a noticeable absence of plastic bottles. Overall though I get the impression that solid waste pollution is a problem that threatens not only to grow rapidly throughout the country in the near future, but also to overwhelm local capacities and initiatives to deal with it.

  It’s not just tourists in the country that focus on the rubbish. Unfortunately, reports from around the world comment on the problem. Under the heading “‘Incredible India’ is getting incredibly trashed”, there is an article from December 2013 in British daily newspaper the Independent which does nothing for the India tourist industry. “I was taking a photograph in a side street in the French quarter of Pondicherry,” begins the article. “Elegant walls, balustrades, blue sky, all the colonial charm you’ve heard about. Snap. Then I moved the lens down a bit and to the left. Piles of debris. Newspapers, plastic bags, indeterminable food remains, rags, two stray dogs. The camera went snap – back in the bag.” Most damaging of all is the conclusion: “After 10 or 12 visits to what the tourist board calls – and which often is – Incredible India, I am, for the first time, getting discouraged from going again.”

  ‘So, how is India?’

  ‘How is India?’ is a question often asked by North American friends to Professor Ananya Mukherjee. In short, her answer is, that “by and large, people continue to struggle, negotiate and survive as best they can, often winning victories that defy textbook understandings of agency and politics.” Underlying any dominant narrative about ‘India today’ is “a deeply exclusionary and unequal material reality. Some 200 million are chronically hungry,” she continues, “90% of the workforce have no option but informal work with abysmal wages and no security; 80% live under $2 a day; 70% depend on agriculture for their livelihood; 182,936 farmers have committed suicide and so on.”

  In August 2017, Indians celebrated their 70th year of Independence. Amidst the celebratory discussions was the enormous pride attached to the country’s economic prowess. In terms of purchasing power, India is today the third largest economy, overtaking Japan. It is closing the gap on China
, but perhaps more importantly for local consumption is eight times larger than that of Pakistan. It is looked upon enviously by most other countries from around the world given its very favourable demographic profile (lots of young people), a valuable technology-related services sector, plentiful natural resources, an open information economy and a desire for trade partnerships from around the world. A number of international agencies and commentaries expect the economic successes to continue in the decades ahead. Moreover, the large and wealthy international diaspora of around 25–30 million Indians not only seem to be enthusiastically Modi BJP supporters but, more importantly, are responsible for considerable remittances each year – around $70 billion per year. Rapid urbanisation coupled with uninterrupted democracy and peaceful transitions of power add to this optimism. Few other countries can rival this combination of assets and circumstances. No world leader worth his or her salt has not been seen beating a pathway to Modi’s India. Although there has been no economic ‘big bang’ moment under Modi, the global consensus seems to be that his first few years have been sensible, well-planned infrastructural reforms aimed at building the economy. These same commentators together with majority opinion in India itself are listing their priorities for the next few years and they include the usual suspects. First, further bouts of privatisation, especially in public service provision such as education which remains restricted to private investment. Second, cut back strongly on the subsidies for food, fertilisers and fuels. ‘Very inefficient’ and a drain on fiscal resources, it is argued. Third, sort out the Employment Guarantee Scheme. Fourth, increase foreign investment. Fifth, sort out the country’s archaic, inflexible labour laws. In sum, “India has the strong fundamentals necessary for continued macroeconomic success” if it tackles some of these “structural blockages.” The creation of special economic zones is seen as a good way forward where the bureaucracy can be bypassed, and new laws and rules implemented that illustrate the irresistibility of change. Another dose of the neoliberal medicine, in other words.