Disasters – natural & man-made

Natural disasters may strike a people, but its impact depends upon the existing situation within society. In that sense, the fundamental causes of the resultant devastation have to be found within the functioning of society, government and institutions, and in social relations.

Rehabilitation is therefore essentially a process of awakening to the critical necessities for building a humane, just, and sustainable society. A natural disaster could serve to initiate a process to address long-neglected matters. Rehabilitation could act as a means for renewal of a moribund society.

Read the full essay here.

Photo: © Raghu Rai / Magnum Photos

A poem to commemorate new beginning

The Lifting of the Dread

(for Rama)

James Christopher Aboud

Here's to the lifting of the dread, to the ball of hair
choking us without strangulation
that is spat out suddenly without explanation;

Here's to the unnoticeable things that once noticed
unlock the doors that lead us back

that remind us that everything is temporary
including this day, this beautiful day,
this moment of lightness seeping through the heavy sky

O let us memorize this moment as a prayer is memorized.

Painting: New Beginning, by David Miller.

Uplift them before they rise in revolt!

The Statesman (Calcutta) recently carried an interview with the Vice President of India, Mr Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

Mr Shekhawat makes some strong comments. That he says this after long years of holding high public office - should make one think.

"A vast segment of our population, more than 26o million, are living below the poverty line. They constitute the fifth pillar of our democracy ~ rather the most important pillar of democracy. The other four pillars ~ legislature, executive, judiciary and media ~ cannot harm each other, but if the fifth pillar gets organised and rises in revolt due to protracted poverty and distress, then not only the four pillars but also the very foundations of our democratic system can be jeopardised."

"The stark reality is that about 26o million people are living below the poverty line, about 25 % men and 47 % women are still illiterate. Our country, which was self-reliant in the production of food grain till some time ago, is compelled to import food grain, pulses and oil seeds. Farmers commit suicide because of indebtedness. We have acknowledged primary education as a fundamental right, but about 30 % children are deprived of basic education even today. The drop-out rate before reaching 8th standard is 53 % and by 10th it is about 63 %. Can we deny the fact that despite having more than 300 universities and about 12,000 colleges, only about 8 % are able to get higher education? In many developing countries this figure is as high as 25 %. It is my firm opinion that we may secure high levels of GDP to whatever extent we want, we may add to our foreign exchange reserve as many millions of dollars we want, we may attain dominance in the fields of technical knowledge, industry and trade, but unless we improve the living standards of the fifth pillar of our society or provide them the right to live with dignity we cannot have all-inclusive development."

"Despite having higher education, children belonging to poor families attain a low level of employment with marginal salaries whereas children belonging to affluent families with similar educational attainment get lucrative employment opportunities with handsome salaries. Here comes the role of the state. We need to establish a system in which poverty should not be a hindrance to one’s development and everyone gets equal opportunities to ensure there’s no sense of dissatisfaction among poor children."

"While the edifice of democracy rests on its four estates, the key pillar of strength of democracy is people’s welfare. In my view, this pillar ~ the fifth pillar ~ needs to be nurtured and strengthened by everyone because the actual strength of democracy lies in it. Uplift them before they rise in revolt."

Read the full interview here.

Rights, like a dream

Childhood is like a dream.

Childhood, like a dream, is evanescent. Children grow up into adults. Dreams fade away when we awaken. But childhood does not end with a child’s growing up. Neither does dreaming end with one’s awakening. Childhood remains, to remind us of our humanity. We continue to dream too, and sometimes someone may try to turn a dream of a better world into reality.

Ensuring the human rights of children is like granting humanity the right to dream.

Do we have the right to dream?

Painting: Dream of my Childhood, by Lela Maharobeli.

The river

The river Hooghly flows between Calcutta and Howrah. There are regular ferry services connecting a number of points in Calcutta and Howrah. And there are two magnificent bridges connecting the two cities.

The river is near the end of her course here, before flowing into the Bay of Bengal (having begun her long journey in the snowy Himalayas and flowed through the huge north Indian plain). Hence it is highly silted, and the water is brown with clay. The Kolkata Port Trust studies the river course and when cargo ships enter the mouth of the river from the sea, they are steered by the expert Hooghly Pilots of the Port Trust.

To many people in Calcutta today, the fact that they live next to one of the major rivers of the world, or the sacred river of the Hindus – has nothing to do with their lives. But earlier, people used to want to live close to the river, so that they could walk down for their daily bath and ritual prayers. Today, for a large number of labouring people, the river and the river-side are one big public toilet and bath.

The river is very polluted, with industrial effluents and municipal sewage being discharged into it. Animal carcasses can be seen floating. In recent years, there has been an effort to control the pollution, with some success.

The river is home to the Ganges Dolphin, which can occasionally be seen leaping up from the water.

The river is also the principal source of drinking water for the metropolis, with water treatment plants making the water potable.

For me, the Ganges Dolphin is an icon of the city. It symbolises the child in the city, whose mythic protector it is. If environmental management in the metropolis is sound, the dolphin will flourish, as would the city's children. Now both are endangered.

Unintended city

‘Goats grazing on the Maidan.’ Thus began the essay “The unintended city” by Jai Sen, written in 1976.

In this essay, Sen argued that hidden within the commonly perceived ‘respectable’ city, of wealth, institutions, planned improvements, intellect and culture, was another city, an unintended one, of the laboring poor. This city was characterized by the survival struggles of its inhabitants. Every planned improvement for the ‘intended’ city also necessarily meant displacement and hardship for the unintended. It was the unintended who ensured that a range of services and products were available to the city; in a sense, they subsidised the quality of life of the citizens, through their own deprivation.

Sen called for a programme of empowerment of the unintended, through community-based action-planning initiatives. Such initiatives could become the basis for a holistic understanding of the city, and hence a planning intervention that sought to advocate the interests of the unintended and integrate such concerns with the formal planned developments. And thus lead to the transformation of such planned development itself, as well as of the cityscape and its social relations.

Sen started a social action group in 1977, called Unnayan to take up an ambitious, long-term programme in east Calcutta, which was just about to witness major infrastructure investments by the state government in middle-class housing, water supply, drainage, transportation and electrification. Unnnayan anticipated that the process of displacing development would again result, and sought to intervene in such a context - towards enabling a future for east Calcutta that would be more in keeping with the lives and aspirations of the marginalised laboring communities settled there.

Through Jai Sen and Unnayan, I was initiated into and apprenticed in public domain activism for the rights of Calcutta’s labouring poor. Our specific concern was housing, or a place to live, for the city’s squatter population.

In the 22 years since I first met Jai Sen – much has changed in Calcutta, and in Jai’s and my lives. But the situation experienced by the city’s labouring poor – has only worsened. Some small advances have been there – such as the acceptance by the state govt of the resettlement rights of the dwellers along the Eastern Railway rail-line near Lake Gardens in south Calcutta. Even there, the actual story is something that does not satisfy the basic guidelines for resettlement of agencies like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc.

But more fundamentally, life for the city’s labouring poor and low income sections has become grimmer, in terms of livelihood, housing, habitat, education, healthcare. Moreover, public activism on such matters is also hardly discernable, notwithstanding the proliferation of NGOs (and the uprising of professed concern for and solidarity with the “underprivileged”, especially by aspiring starlets, models etc). The whole physical, social and psychological landscape of the city I have lived in all my life is being rapidly transformed. The emerging new city – is something entirely alien to me. I don’t have much hope of being able to survive in that new city.

And what of the millions of people whose toehold on life is even more feeble than mine?