Showing posts from category India.
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Peter Gleick on Peak Water
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“The purpose of the whole debate about peak water is to help raise awareness about the nature of the world’s water problems and to help drive toward solutions,” says the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick. But Gleick asserts that in the same way certain countries have been contending with “peak oil” concerns in recent years, they may soon also have to deal with “peak water” as well.
Unlike oil, water is largely a renewable resource, but countries in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere are pumping groundwater faster than aquifers can replenish naturally. Gleick explains “there will be a peak of production in many of those places and eventually the food that we grow with that water or the widgets that we make from the factories that use that water will be nonsustainable and production will have to drop.”
The world’s surface and groundwater resources can be used sustainably even in the face of continued global population growth, says Gleick, but only “if we are careful about the ecological consequences and the efficiency with which we use it.” However, to date, he says, “those issues have not adequately been brought into the discussion about water policy.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
A Crucial Connection: India’s Natural Security
›January 5, 2011 // By Michael KugelmanExcerpted from the original op-ed, “A Crucial Connection,” by Michael Kugelman in The Times of India:
With India’s soaring growth and rising global clout hogging media headlines, it is easy to forget the nation is beset by security challenges. Naxalite insurgency rages across more than two-thirds of India’s states, while long-simmering tensions in Jammu and Kashmir exploded once again this summer. Meanwhile, two years post-Mumbai, Pakistan remains unwilling or unable to dismantle the anti-India militant groups on its soil. Finally, China’s military rise continues unabated. As Beijing increases its activities across the Himalayan and Indian Ocean regions, fears about Chinese encirclement are rife.
It is even easier to forget that these challenges are intertwined with natural resource issues. Policy makers in New Delhi often fail to make this connection, at their own peril. Twenty-five per cent of Indians lack access to clean drinking water; about 40 per cent have no electricity. These constraints intensify security problems.
India’s immense energy needs – household and commercial – have deepened its dependence on coal, its most heavily consumed energy source. But India’s main coal reserves are located in Naxalite bastions. With energy security at stake, New Delhi has a powerful incentive to flush out insurgents. It has done so with heavy-handed shows of force that often trigger civilian casualties. Additionally, intensive coal mining has displaced locals and created toxic living conditions for those who remain. All these outcomes boost support for the insurgency.
Meanwhile, the fruits of this heavy resource extraction elude local communities, fuelling grievances that Naxalites exploit. A similar dynamic plays out in Jammu and Kashmir, where electricity-deficient residents decry the paltry proportion of power they receive from central government-owned hydroelectric companies. In both cases, resource inequities are a spark for violent anti-government fervor.
Continue reading on The Times of India.
For more on India’s Naxalite rebellion and its natural resource drivers, see The New Security Beat’s “India’s Maoists: South Asia’s ‘Other’ Insurgency.”
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Photo Credit: “Mysore Coal Man,” courtesy of flickr user AdamCohn. -
The World’s Toilet Crisis
›Forty percent of the world’s population – 2.6 billion people – do not have access to toilets, and some in the international aid community are finally dispensing with the euphemisms and calling this sanitation crisis what it is: “shit.”
In “The World’s Toilet Crisis” (trailer above), Adam Yamaguchi sets off in an episode of Current TV’s Vanguard program to tell the story of “the deadliest killer in the world…something no one wants to talk about.” All around the developing world, thanks in part to rapid population growth and poor development and environmental standards, “people are literally eating their own shit,” he said.
His journey takes him to India, where more people own cell phones, than toilets. The 55 percent of Indians who practice open defecation have contributed to another grim statistic: an estimated 840,000 children under the age of five die in India each year from diarrheal diseases.
India’s water quality is especially affected by lack of sanitation. In the documentary, Yamaguchi visits the Yamuna River, which is Delhi’s primary source of drinking water, and has become a “giant toilet” literally bubbling with methane gas. This phenomenon is not unique to India. Approximately 80 percent of sewage in developing countries goes untreated, polluting local water resources.
But it is women who feel the effects of lack of access to clean water and toilets most keenly. In 72 percent of households around the world, women are the primary water collectors, often travelling long distances for drinkable water. They face shame and harassment when going to the bathroom, causing them to suppress their need until dark, causing negative health effects. Waiting until nightfall also means that when women openly defecate, they often face molestation, violence, and rape. Teenage girls also often drop out of school once they begin to menstruate because toilets are not private, unsafe, or are simply nonexistent.
Reflecting on his motivations for making the documentary, Yamaguchi said that in order to expose this “global public health crisis,” he needed to be as graphic, shocking, and disgusting as possible.If you’re not grossed out by, or incensed by the fact that there is shit everywhere, you’re not really moved to act or change your ways. And that’s ultimately what’s happened in many places in the world. It’s a normal fact of life. You see it everywhere, and you think nothing of it. There are causes out there that are deep sexy causes or marketable causes. Shit or toilets – not the most marketable thing in the world.
“The World’s Toilet Crisis” forms part of a broader trend among sanitation advocates to use crude language to address a problem the international health and development community has traditionally shied away from talking about directly.
Tales of shit: Community-Led Total Sanitation in Africa, published shortly before World Toilet Day by the International Institute for Environment and Development, takes an equally direct approach to sanitation.
Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is an approach begun with great success by Dr. Kamal Kar in Bangladesh that relies on “triggering” to change community behavior. The report, which is prefaced by a three-page “International Glossary of Shit” listing the words for shit in other languages, emphasizes the need to “explicitly [talk] about and [make] visible the shit that is normally hidden beneath taboos and polite language.” By almost literally thrusting people’s shit right under their noses, communities learn what they have been ignoring: that they are “eating each others’ shit.”
Traditional sanitation programs often fail because “a high proportion of latrines constructed with subsidies are never used as toilets, but as storage space, animal shelters, or prayer rooms – the buildings are too high quality to be wasted on toilets!” says the report. CLTS, on the other hand, focuses on changing behavior at the community, rather than the individual level to create sustainable change that responds and adapts to a community’s distinct culture and needs.
“The World’s Toilet Crisis” shows the promise CLTS has of meeting the needs of the billions without toilets. In East Java, Yamaguchi joins a community leader to collect a “specimen” from a well-traveled river bank near the town, which he proceeds to show to a group of women in the town who are, predictably, revolted. The community then takes collective action to become “open-defecation free” and invest in toilets.
“The World’s Toilet Crisis” is not easy to watch, nor was it easy to film – seven minutes in, Yamaguchi vomits on the banks of the polluted Yamuna River. Disgust, however, is central to raising awareness and affecting change on both the community and global levels. As Yamaguchi explains, “You’re going to get grossed out by seeing this piece, and that’s part of the point.”
Sources: Community-Led Total Sanitation, Current TV, Earth Times, IIED, Water.org, World Toilet Organization, WHO, United Nations University.
Video Credit: “The World’s Toilet Crisis – Vanguard Trailer,” courtesy of Current TV’s Vanguard. -
International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis
›December 6, 2010 // By Michael KugelmanExcerpt from the executive summary of the NOREF Policy Brief, via the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre:
Pakistan faces a multidimensional water crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The root causes of the crisis are twofold:- Circumstantial, which are linked to poor water-resource management policies (including water-wasting flood irrigation);
- Structural, tied to factors deeply ingrained in politics and society such as the obsession with India, inequitable rural land-ownership and endemic water misgovernance (for example, exploitation of the rotational irrigation system to the detriment of the poor).
However, international responses must be measured. They should actively target the circumstantial causes but, at the same time, recognize that their ability to take on the structural ones is limited. While the international community can help mitigate the effects of the underlying structural drivers, Pakistan itself must take the ultimate steps to eliminate them.
Circumstantial causes can be addressed through international aid provision and international exchanges. Aid provision must be generous enough to meet Pakistan’s prodigious needs but modest enough to respect the country’s limited absorptive capacities. It should emphasize the restoration of infrastructure and distribution systems, be more responsive to the needs of Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, and be channeled through both government agencies and civil society.
Despite the challenges the international community faces in addressing the structural causes, opportunities do abound. These include embarking on back-channel diplomacy to bring Pakistan and India closer together and cooperative projects with Pakistanis to make water distribution more equitable. To be effective, international responses must target all affected parties and be sensitive to ground realities. They should also be mindful of indigenous success stories and the factors that bring about that success.
The full report, “International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges,” is available through the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Image Credit: Adapted from “USG Humanitarian Assistance to Pakistan for Floods in FY 2010 and FY 2011 (as of 30 Nov 2010),” courtesy of USAID and ReliefWeb. -
Joydeep Gupta, ChinaDialogue
Nervous Neighbors: China-India Water Relations
›December 3, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpted from the original article, “Nervous Neighbors,” on ChinaDialogue.net:
Only five rivers in the world carry more water than the Yarlung Zangbo, or Brahmaputra, as it is known when it reaches India. Only one carries more silt. Rising at a height of 5,300 meters in the Kailash range of the Middle Himalayas – an area holy to both Hindus and Buddhists – the river flows east through Tibet for 1,625 kilometers before taking a horseshoe bend, changing its name and flowing as the Brahmaputra into north-eastern India.
There, for 918 kilometers, it is both a lifeline, due to the water it carries, and a scourge, because of the floods it causes almost every year. It then takes a southward turn and flows into Bangladesh for 363 kilometers before it merges with the Ganges, together forming South Asia’s largest river, the Meghna, and flowing into the Bay of Bengal. This huge river, with its 25 large tributaries in Tibet and 105 in India, drains much of the eastern Himalayas.
As the world’s youngest mountain range, the Himalayas are particularly unstable – and so is the river. It has changed its course significantly at least once in the last 200 years, following a major earthquake. Smaller changes in course are common, wiping out farms and homes on one bank while depositing fertile silt on the other. Now humans are changing the course of this river: Chinese engineers have started to build the Zangmu hydroelectric power station in Lhoka prefecture, 325 kilometers from Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. The development has led to serious expressions of concern, particularly in India but also in China.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.net.
Joydeep Gupta is the project director (South Asia) of ChinaDialogue’s Third Pole Project.
Map Credit: Google Maps. -
India’s Threat From Within
›Once a modest pro-peasant movement, India’s Maoist (or Naxalite) insurgency has become what New Delhi describes as the nation’s biggest internal security threat. The insurgency has spread to 20 of India’s 29 states, and across more than a third of the country’s 626 districts, most of them in the impoverished east. Earlier this summer, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, with assistance from the Environmental Change and Security Program, hosted, “The ‘Gravest Threat’ to Internal Security: India’s Maoist Insurgency,” to examine the insurgency’s main drivers, identify its prime tactics and strategies, and consider the best ways to respond.
Same Insurgency, Different Motivations
P.V. Ramana, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, discussed the motivations that draw people to the insurgency. Some people are aggrieved by the resource exploitations they witness in their villages. Others join the Maoist cause because of the “high-handedness” of Indian security forces. Still others do so because family members are already in the movement.
Ramana underscored a “serious disconnect” at play — people have such varied reasons for joining the insurgency, yet top Maoist leaders are inspired by one sole motivation: capturing political power. Ramana also highlighted the “increasing militarization” of the insurgency. Maoists have amassed an immense arsenal of weaponry, from “crude” tools to more sophisticated weapons such as rocket launchers and landmines. Their attacks increasingly target not only government security forces, but also national infrastructure such as power lines and railways.
Andhra Pradesh: Leading By Example
K. Srinivas Reddy, a Hyderabad-based deputy editor for The Hindu, offered a case study of the insurgency in his home state, Andhra Pradesh (AP), in southeastern India. He noted that New Delhi’s response to the insurgency in AP is often cited as a success story. This response, according to Reddy, can be attributed to an “attitudinal change” within the security ranks. From the 1970s through the mid-1990s — a period of mass Maoist recruitment and escalating insurgent violence — New Delhi’s counterinsurgency measures had been “panicky,” haphazard, and reactive, Reddy said. The “turning point” came in 1996, when a new “unity of thought” emerged within the government that emphasized better training of security forces, stronger intelligence, and greater attention to economic development. Later in the 1990s, security forces further softened their strategies and tactics, emphasizing “problem-solving rather than hunting Naxals.” As a result, in the early 2000s, popular support for Maoists in AP began to wane.
Is the Government Also to Blame?
Nandini Sundar, a professor of sociology at Delhi University, focused on the human impact of both the insurgency and the government’s response. Much of her presentation centered around Bastar, a sparsely populated, heavily forested, mineral-rich district of Chhattisgarh state — one of the areas hardest-hit by the insurgency. Maoist “entrenchment” is strong, she argued, because locals are treated so dreadfully by the government. “Very poor people are jailed” for committing minor forestry transgressions, Sundar explained, while “powerful people” get away with large-scale offenses. Additionally, the police are deeply unpopular and “a source of repression.” They also regularly rape women and extort money, she said.
Sundar identified and condemned a raft of repressive government policies — from throwing locals off their land to commandeering schools — and insisted that such repression constitutes the prime reason for recruitment to the insurgency. “Injustice more than inequality” explains why people join the Maoists, she said.
The panel was far from sanguine about the future. Ramana contended that immediate prospects for peace talks between the government and the Maoists are slim, and that civil society has been “quiet” and has offered little assistance. While he predicted that some sort of resolution could be reached in “7 to 10 years,” Sundar countered that the harsh nature of New Delhi’s response means that 7 to 10 years “could finish off” not just the Maoists, but also village populations.
Compounding the challenge is what Sundar described as “official contempt” toward the culture of the Adivasi, the tribal peoples of India whose homeland comprises the insurgency’s epicenter. Dehumanizing, anti-adivasi language from the government enables New Delhi to justify the waging of forceful counterinsurgency, Sundar argued.
Glimmers of Hope
Several speakers, however, gave reasons to be guardedly optimistic about the Maoist issue. Pointing to Maoist strategies in Andhra Pradesh, Reddy suggested that the insurgency’s poor policies could spell its demise. Maoists in this state chose to escalate violence, but their inability to spread their ideology along with this violence has cost them public support, particularly in urban areas. (A recent survey by The Times of India actually found that 58 percent of those in AP think Naxalism has been good for the area – a devastating poll for those in the government who thought they were winning there – Ed.)
Sundar, meanwhile, noted that much good would come out of simply implementing long-dormant constitutional protections for the rural poor in Maoist-affected areas. This, she concluded, would reflect rights-based development, which is necessary for success — as opposed to development based on “hand-outs” by the elite, which is destined to fail.
Michael Kugelman is a program associate with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program.
For more on the resource conflict aspect of the insurgency see The New Security Beat’s, “India’s Maoists: South Asia’s ‘Other’ Insurgency.”
Sources: BBC, Foreign Policy, Times of India.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “CPI Flag (Andhra Pradesh),” courtesy of flickr user Shreyans Bhansali. -
GMHC 2010: Lessons Learned & Recommendations
›Over the last three days, 700 technical experts have provided solutions to decrease maternal mortality. In the last year, governments have committed billions of dollars to implement such solutions. Yet, we’ve been here before, reminded Sigrun Mogedal of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the final plenary session of the Global Maternal Health Conference. “Just look at ICPD, Beijing, and CEDAW. Obviously, there must be something wrong with accountability,” she said, since 15 years later women continue to die every minute giving birth.
Wrapping up the conference with a discussion of accountability makes sense – we need to learn from the past and close the gap between commitments made and real action on the ground. So what does today’s buzzword, “accountability,” mean, and how do we enforce the realization of commitments made…or lack thereof?
“Accountability is power, and includes transparency, answerability, and enforceability,” said Lynn Freedman of Columbia University. Through international law, budget transparency, and grassroots mobilization it is possible to ensure that policies make a difference to improve women’s lives.
A review of the Ministry of Finance’s allocation for health can tell us a lot about the government’s real commitment to eradicating maternal mortality. As the overarching instrument of policy the “budget is inextricably linked to development and exists for those who have less,” said Helena Hofbauer of the International Budget Project. “If there were greater transparency of government spending, we could have done more to push for change five years ago,” said Hofbauer. This is indeed true; however, it is also true that if governments simply followed through on the international agreements they are signatories to, women would be better protected.
Accountability through the legal system is possible and Nancy Northrup of the Center for Reproductive Rights demonstrated how international law has overhauled programs and sparked governments into action. For example, in India, the high court recently ruled that the government must execute audits and report back on the steps taken to align programs with policies that ensure a woman’s right to skilled birth attendance.
In order to bring about such judicial interventions a social movement must first be in place to build awareness and demand accountability. Building such a movement starts at the grassroots level and Aparajita Gogoi of CEDPA presented strategies for empowering local communities with a global voice. By providing a safe space for dialogue, communities are given the opportunity to share concerns and demand action from local health facilitators and government officials.
Increasing opportunities for dialogue allows for bottom up solutions and ensures that contextual variables are taken into consideration. “We need arenas for brokering diverse groups to compare notes and streamline synergies, ” said Mogedal. I am energized by the lessons learned today and eager to apply these key messages next week in Washington, DC during the seventh meeting of the Advancing Policy Dialogue for Maternal Health at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that will further address “Monitoring, Transparency, and Accountability for Maternal Health.”
Originally posted on the Medscape blog Global Mamma, by Calyn Ostrowski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Coordinator of the Maternal Health Dialogue Series in partnership with the Maternal Health Task Force and UNFPA.
Photo Credit: “Mothers and children waiting at the Bolemba healt centre” courtesy of flickr user hdptcar. -
GMHC 2010: Maternal Health Realities: Accountability and Behavior Change
›Four days ago a young woman died giving birth in a bustling marketplace in New Delhi. Just steps away from Parliament, this woman was left to die and no emergency care was sent to her – no midwives, nurses, or doctors; just people walking around her accepting the situation as normal and an uncontrollable way of life. But this is Delhi…not a remote tribal village where the nearest health clinic is hours away (on foot).
This juxtaposition lingers on in me as I sit in the plenary session of day two at the Global Maternal Health Conference and listen to Syeda Hameed, member of the Indian Parliament Planning Commission, discuss her recent visit to a remote village where every house has 10 children living in filth, flies, and emptiness.
Although I have been working on such development issues for the last five years I do not work in the field, nor do I visit the developing world on a regular basis. Hearing these stories, coupled with my firsthand experience of witnessing poverty here in Delhi reminds me of the daily reality of those 342,900 women who die every year. This is their way of life and I think it’s poignant that today’s sessions emphasize community based care, family planning, accountability, behavior change, and culture.
“Context, context, context,” said Wendy Graham of IMMPACT at yesterday’s plenary session. I agree, the context of social and cultural norms is an underlying factor that must be taken into consideration when implementing maternal and child health (MNCH) programs. With a background in psychology, I appreciated when Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, of Aga Khan University, recognized the toll of poverty on the imagination and the mentality of fatalism.
That is why it is so essential to “ask the people how they feel and bring their voices into the forums where policy decisions are made,” said Hameed. It is also important to hold key players accountable and include men in MNCH activities.
During the side session Male Involvement in Reproductive and Maternal and Newborn Health six field experts (in which half the panelists and audience members were men!) discussed effective methods for increasing male participation in family planning, vasectomies, gender equality, and hospital care.
The key findings from this discussion include:- Targeted interventions that educate men about danger signs and pregnancy complications correlates with behavior change and increased facility births.
- Many young married men feel pressured to prove their fertility. A sample of men was evaluated and those who had increased education and income were more likely to delay first pregnancy.
- Vasectomy is not something men want to talk about with family planning fieldworkers; however, official recognition of the vasectomy benefits by the government did increase referrals.
- Puppet and theater shows that demonstrate gender equity behaviors provide an opportunity for dialogue. Women in this study reported increased gender equity in family planning decision-making.
Originally posted at Maternal Health Task Force, by Calyn Ostrowski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Coordinator of the Maternal Health Dialogue Series in partnership with the Maternal Health Task Force and UNFPA.
Photo Credit: “Parliament Street” courtesy of flickr user ~FreeBirD®~.
