Fight Against COVID-19 - Pourakarmika Personals [image by: Trinity Care Foundation]

We have not published in January, and for this I must take the blame. To some degree, this was due to Covid. Despite being double vaccinated I caught the virus at the beginning of the month. Since my birthday was at the end of December, I do not know if it was birthday gift or a New Year’s gift, but it was not a pleasant one, leaving me exhausted and unable to work, with recurring bouts of fatigue.

This is a key element of the future of health in India as the world continues to cook. I do not mean just the pandemic, although as we continue to eliminate habitats, zoonotic viruses are likely to become more common. Zoonotic diseases – those that jump from animals to humans – have always been a feature of the world. Bacteria and viruses are their own form of life, and to them we – whether human or other animal – are just a form of habitat.

In an earlier age, human interaction with animals, while common, was restricted to specific activities – primarily herding and hunting. More importantly, if a disease was transmitted from animal to a human, the human had comparatively few humans to pass it on to. Like other animals, the diseases were largely bound within their habitat – like kangaroos and other marsupials in Australia. The people – the habitat for the disease – adapted to them, developing antibodies (amongst the survivors) of the various plagues that came out of the wild. There were devastating outbreaks, including those that overspilled many national borders, but neither globalisation or colonialism had kicked in.

In the age of global colonialism things changed. The global bit of it requires little explanation – a disease now had the possibility to spread to almost all human populations in the planet – but the colonial bits needs a little clarification. Europe’s extra-territorial empires do not necessarily differ all that new in terms of conquest until one looks a little closer, and even then different empires had different approaches. British law, unlike Spanish law, as Prakash Kashwan explains in his book, Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico, did not recognise land ownership unless it was by Europeans, or acknowledged by them. Thus when globalisation and colonialism met in the Americas, both set off a new wave of diseases that local populations, but it is North America where this was done deliberately, with smallpox infected blankets given as “gifts” to native populations.

But there is, actually, a far more direct linkage to colonialism and environmental destruction. This is brought out very clearly in both Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, as well as Dane Huckelbridge’s fascinating, No Beast So Fierce, the True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History. Huckelbridge’s book is a retelling of the story that Jim Corbett wrote in Maneaters of Kumaon, about the first man-eating tiger he hunted, but it is also a deeper story of how – under British rule – a new form of development that aimed at monetising the earth (timber for railways, forest cleared for higher revenue cash crops, etc) combined with derision of earlier forms of a more harmonious relationship, led to both habitats and the animals that inhabited them being exterminated at an alarming rate.

This inevitably led to higher human-animal conflicts, and because the British limited control of arms in the native population, especially after 1857, they were able to paint themselves as the natural saviours of less civilised people against the viciousness of nature. (Huckelbridge takes pains to show how, despite being an intrinsic part of this milieu, Corbett was something of an exception, though not totally so.) What this fantasy of the White Man’s Burden hid, of course, is that neither was nature so vicious, or the native populations so vulnerable, had both not been under the heel of a particular type of empire.  

This inevitably circles back to our issue of zoonotic diseases. There is no realistic way to suggest that they are getting more vicious, but the death toll from Covid-19, and realistically India’s is by far the highest, ranging from 3 to 5 million dead. This would rival, or exceed, the greatest number of dead recorded in any one event in South Asia, the Bengal Famine of 1943. Nonetheless, this virus may be a one-off, the next ones being far less devastating.

The harder question is whether it was merely the disease that killed so many people. Was the lack of a large accessibly, cost-effective healthcare mechanism not also responsible? When people in metros could not get beds, how do we expect that people in poorer areas could have gotten adequate treatment? Did extreme poverty, one that weakens the body, leaves us far more vulnerable, not play a part? Were not some people, who had no choice except to go to work otherwise they could not eat, made far more vulnerable?

The question, in the end, is not so much of how many people died as how many died that we could have easily saved?

This applies very strongly to the future we see as climate change deepens. There will be more floods, there will be more droughts, there will be more heatwaves, there will – quite likely – be more vulnerability to diseases due to a host of factors. We know this now. This much of the future we can see. And this year’s budget ended up lowering the spending on healthcare.

Not the Interview

In this edition of the newsletter, we are not featuring an interview, but actually highlighting a discussion hosted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). Initially proposed by UNESCO, ICIMOD was set up in Nepal after the Nepalese government set aside land for it. It is an inter-governmental research organisation focussing on the mountain areas of the Hindu Kush Himalayas, with the participation of all either bordering countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

The people in the mountain areas of this region are, on the whole, poorer than the people living in the plains in the same countries (Bhutan, as a totally mountainous country, is an exception, although even there the richest provinces have traditionally been in the valleys). They are also people marked by the frontier wars of the colonial era, as well as tense borders post-independence. Old histories, though, also show paths to cooperation, to trade, to working on joint river basins, and the glaciers upon which a great deal of the drinking water of all the countries is dependent.

With climate science and social research as its base, ICIMOD tries to highlight the common concerns, often with the active cooperation of all the governments involved, however fraught their relationship, as happened in November 2020.

The workshop

This month ICIMOD hosted a workshop titled Two Punjabs, One Atmosphere, at which I hosted one session. There will be a longer report that ICIMOD will release on the subject, but I wanted to highlight the comments by two of the experts in particular, as well as some of the discussion the ICIMOD team had with me before the workshop.

In one of the slides in his presentation, Zulfiqar Ali, an Associate Professor at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, highlighted how air pollution led to a cycle of misery for poor labour. These are people who are often unable to afford basic precautions (masks, etc) to deal with the air pollution that they are exposed. This poverty leads them to be more vulnerable to the health impacts. Since they are more vulnerable there is higher likelihood of them falling sick, which means missing work and getting poorer or falling into debt. This, in turn, leads them with fewer resources to deal with the air pollution. A cycle of poverty and ill-health is locked into place, with no realistic hope to overcome it.

Debajit Palit, Director, Rural Energy and Livelihoods at The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI), who we have interviewed earlier for this newsletter, had another insight to add. He asked whether we are approaching the problem at the wrong direction, trying to change the direction by pulling on its tail, so to speak. His suggestion was that air pollution was endpoint outcome, but what needed to be done, had to be done at the starting point (planting the right crops in the right places, sourcing energy needs – particularly for cooking at home which places a great burden on women). Looking at the endpoint leads to a blame game, within countries and across countries, rather than cooperation, and makes things harder to achieve. It is also a negative thing. People see pollution, they do not see clean air, and thus it is hard to get the kind of social and political attention to getting things done if a politician has nothing (no pollution) to show at the end of a great deal of money and manpower invested.

By far the most insightful discussion, though, was by one member of the ICIMOD team, both during the workshop and before it during the planning. Her question was that with something like air pollution, people aren’t so much living with it as dying of it.

How can we realistically talk of adaptation when what is happening is a massive asthma crisis, compromised lungs, and a future of ill health?

Her intervention highlighted how the very positive sounding words of “mitigation” and “adaptation” hide the grim reality of what is happening. You do not adapt to a disaster, and if you are poor, then every little crisis has the potential to be a disaster. It is way past time we started to address the future of our vulnerable population accordingly.

Critical Reading

1. Climate Change Makes the Hard Life Of India's Invisible Women Farmers Harder : Death by suicide among women farmers in India is substantially underreported, as the labour of women on farms is often invisible even to their own communities. One in every three women who dies by suicide globally is an Indian woman, according to a 2018 Lancet study, yet the NCRB data reflects only 7% of individuals in the farming sector who died by suicide in 2020 are women. “Even in death they are invisibilized and we don’t really see them accounted (for),” said a member of MAKAAM, a national coalition of women farmers advocating for women farmers’ rights. In Article 14’s interviews in Maharashtra, women farmers discussed the reasons driving them to contemplate taking a drastic step. Hemmed in by absent policy measures to tackle their unique experience of agrarian distress and more frequent crop failures caused by extreme weather events or unpredictable rainfall patterns, the women faced challenges at every stage of cultivating the land. From gaining control over family-owned land to accessing credit, repaying loans after a failed crop, negotiating rural social mores, finding work as labourers — the gendered impact of the climate crisis was felt acutely.

2. Betel Cultivators in Odisha Up Against the State-Capital Nexus: Ongoing events in Dhinkia Chaaridesh, in Odisha on the eastern coast, reflect a militarized state apparatus working at the behest of corporate capital to erode a cyclone-ravaged coastline for an integrated steel plant. The insidious appropriation of agricultural land and village commons is being resisted bravely once again by villagers of Dhinkia in collective barricading from the clutches of state-supported Jindal Steel Works Utkal Limited. The stand-off between the people – most of whom are small farmers and wage labourers in betel cultivation – and the district administration saw terror and intimidation at the hands of the police, including destruction of betel vine plots and a violent police crackdown. Events in Dhinkia of the Odisha government rushing to hand over village land to Jindal Steel, are highly instructive in what has become standard operating procedure for land acquisition.

3. Budget 2022 Is Bad News for India's Climate Action: While the green elements of the budget were evidently developed against the backdrop of the Glasgow Climate talks, Union budget 2022 has allocated only Rs 30 crore towards the Climate Change Action Plan and Rs 60 crore towards National Adaptation Fund, with no increase from last year. But climate action cannot be an isolated exercise of installing solar panels or driving electric vehicles – with the limits to our growth experiment becoming abundantly clear over the past decade, our response to climate change has to pivot around resilience and adaptation rather than just mitigation. Meanwhile, river linking has made a comeback – not only with an allocation of Rs 44,605 crore for the controversial Ken-Betwa Link project, but also another five river link projects are in the pipeline – even though numerous experts and communities have argued that river-linking would be the most disastrous infrastructure undertaking that will sound a death knell for India’s already ailing rivers, and add to mass displacement and massive climate-induced migration in the country.

4. The state of India's forests: Losing forests, gaining plantations: The Indian government has recently released the India State of Forest Report (ISFR) 2021 which claims a marginal increase in the country’s total forest and tree cover. It, however, reveals that the biodiversity-rich forests of its northeastern region are consistently recording a loss of forest cover since 2009. The claim of an increase in forest cover, which was celebrated by the government, was disputed by sector experts as they highlighted discrepancies in the methodology noting that the report is counting plantations on the road, rubber, coffee or tea plantations and even patches of trees as forest cover. The report estimated that in less than 10 years, 45-64 percent of India’s forest cover will be covered under climate change hotspots and by 2050 it will extend to the entire Indian forest cover.

5. Protests Over Land Mount Against Ahmedabad-Dholera Expressway: Unwilling to part with their land, landowning peasants in 22 villages in Gujarat have forged an alliance against the Dholera Special Investment Region project. The project region covers 920 sq. km – 340 sq. km falls under the coastal regulation zone, and the remaining project area is home to a predominantly agrarian population. The NHAI has claimed that the Special Investment Region authority legally transferred the land to it, and the authority has claimed it has released public notices to this effect. Locals have said however that the authority didn’t enumerate any survey numbers and land title changes and that the village revenue records still show their names. Moreover, the blackbucks of Velavadar, bird species depending on the coastal zone, cattle reared by local pastoralists, land, soil, water and their several conjoined affordances, including the estuaries and marshes of the region, indicate the stakes are more than human.

6. India's beach tourism plan raises a red flag: The environment ministry’s ambitious plan to get 100 beaches across India the Blue Flag certificate, the ecotourism label accorded by the Copenhagen-based Foundation for Environmental Education that promotes tourism and recreation in harmony with nature, may have had good intentions but caused the opposite effect. The eight beaches that received this recognition in late 2020 underwent tourism infrastructure development work that damaged local ecology. For example, environmental lawyer Sreeja Chakraborty says of the Padubidri End Point beach in Udupi, Karnataka, “Due to river reclamation and dredging of the creek, the mouth of the estuary has gotten narrower. The municipal waste of the Padubidri village, which is released in the Kamini river untreated, previously used to flow into the sea unabated but now, due to reduction in the width of the creek, the polluted water is getting stagnated and leading to accumulation of organic load and death of fishes”. In several other areas, Blue Flag-related infrastructure development was met with strident opposition from fishermen and local residents, on grounds of taking over their land and potential threat to privacy and cleanliness of the beach. 

7. Jharkhand Villagers Protest Adani's New Coal Venture, Refuse to Allow Land Acquisition Surveys: People of Gondalpura, Jharkhand continue to resist a proposed mining project by Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL), the flagship entity of the multi-billion-dollar Indian conglomerate. The villagers stand to lose prime agricultural land and about 4,029 people – a conservative estimate based on the 2011 census – are likely to be displaced if the project is implemented. Probable pollution from the mine will also lose them the river they depend upon for bathing, agriculture and watering their animals. And just as bad, it appears to the people of Gondalpura that the government, having promised the coal industry at the time of the coal auction that it would expedite the clearances required to make mines operational, may be about to dilute certain environmental rules that had previously held back other mining companies from starting operations in the block.

8. Purulia pumped storage project shows why pumped hydropower may not be clean: The Purulia Pumped Storage Project (PPSP) in West Bengal is among six operational pumped hydro projects in India. The government claims the project to be a success story in clean energy generation and wants to establish three more such projects in the state, but locals claim the project ravaged dense forests, engulfed elephant habitat and impacted the livelihoods of those dependent on forests. According to experts, since the other three pumped storage projects planned in the Ajodhya Hills are located in densely forested areas, their environmental costs will likely outstrip benefits by a huge margin, as in the case of the PPSP. They describe pumped storage projects as being pushed through across the country without exploring alternatives like demand management, utilisation of existing hydropower projects as peak load stations, and storage batteries.