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Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Missing the wetlands for the water

Wetlands need to be reinforced as more than just open sources of water. How they are identified and conserved requires a rethink

The government is all set to change the rules on wetlands. The Draft Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2016, which will replace the Wetland (Conservation and Management) Rules of 2010, seek to give power to the States to decide what they must do with their wetlands. This includes deciding which wetlands should be protected and what activities should be allowed or regulated, while making affable calls for ‘sustainability’ and ‘ecosystem services’.
On the face of it, this appears to favour decentralisation and federalism. But the peculiar reality of wetlands shows that local pulls and pressures are not the best determinants for their protection. Both water in liquid form and wetlands in the form of ‘land’ are hotly contested, making wetlands the most imperilled natural ecosystem worldwide. It is imperative that the Draft Wetlands Rules, 2016 (comments for which close today) be looked at with a hard, if not cynical, eye. Three issues are of immediate concern. First, the draft does away with the Central Wetlands Regulatory Authority, which hadsuo moto cognisance of wetlands and their protection. Second, the draft rules contain no ecological criteria for recognising wetlands, such as biodiversity, reefs, mangroves, and wetland complexes. And finally it has deleted sections on the protection of wetlands, and interpretation of harmful activities which require regulation, which found reference in the 2010 rules.
Experiments with water systems

One of the biggest ironies around water is that it comes from rivers and wetlands, yet it is seen as divorced from them. While water is used as a resource or good, public policy does not always grasp that it is part of a natural ecosystem. Efforts at engineering water systems are thus efforts at augmenting water supply rather than strengthening the capacities of ecological systems. There have been many recent attempts at this sort of engineering — Karnataka had dredged its rivers, for instance; other States may follow suit. The Ken and Betwa rivers in Madhya Pradesh are to be interlinked, and we have a history of building dams and barrages to store water. Parliament has already passed a Waterways Act, which will make navigation channels of 111 rivers, by straightening, dredging, and creating barrages.
While these projects require serious ecological consideration, they are usually informed only by the need to ‘use’ water. For instance, river dredging may increase the capacity of a river channel, but can also interfere with underground reservoirs. Over-dredging can destroy these reservoirs. River interlinking changes hydrology and can benefit certain areas from a purely anthropocentric perspective, but does nothing to augment water supply to other non-target districts. Constructions of barrages have impacts on ecosystems and economies: the commercially important hilsa fish are no longer found in the Padma river after the construction of the Farraka barrage across the Ganges.
In the case of wetlands like ponds, lakes and lagoons, the contestations are more fierce. Who owns the wetland is a common quandary — and what happens to the wetland also depends on this. Asia’s largest freshwater oxbow lake, the Kanwar lake in Bihar, has shrunk to one-third of its size due to encroachment, much like Jammu and Kashmir’s Dal lake. Water sources like streams, which go into lakes, also get cut off, as is the case of lakes in Bengaluru and streams in the Delhi Ridge. The political pressure to usurp water and wetlands as land is high — and for this reason, States have failed to secure perimeters and catchment areas or notify wetlands.
Why then do the Draft Wetland Rules award full authority to the States? The particularly complex case of wetlands warrants more checks and balances. In the proposed scenario, with an absence of scientific criteria for identifying wetlands, it is imperative to have a second independent functioning authority.
What comprises a wetland is an important question that the Draft Rules leave unanswered. Historically, as wetlands did not earn revenue, they were marked as ‘wastelands’. While the Wetland Atlas of India says the country has 1,88,470 inland wetlands, the actual number may be much more: U.P. itself has more than one lakh wetlands, mostly unidentified by the government.
Significantly, the 2010 rules outline criteria for wetland identification including genetic diversity, outstanding natural beauty, wildlife habitats, corals, coral reefs, mangroves, heritage areas, and so on. These criteria would refer to wetlands like Pulicat in Andhra Pradesh which have nearly 200 varieties of fish.
The Ramsar Convention rules are the loftiest form of wetland identification that the world follows. Ramsar has specific criteria for choosing a wetland as a Ramsar site, which distinguishes it as possessing ‘international importance’. An important distinguishing marker is that Ramsar wetlands should support significant populations of birds, fish, or other non-avian animals. This means that it is ecological functioning which distinguishes a wetland from, say, a tank, which is just a source of water. However, man-made tanks or sources of water can also evolve into wetlands. For instance, Kaliveli tank in Tamil Nadu, an important bird area, is fed by a system of tanks and man-made channels forming a large and vibrant landscape. A wetland is more than a source of water, or a means for water storage, though it is often reduced to only that. By removing ecological and other criteria for wetland identification and protection, and the examples of activities that could hamper this physical functioning, the new draft underlines the same malaise which misses the wetlands for the water.
Use and non-use

While the new draft calls for sustainability, this is a difficult concept to enforce, particularly with regard to water. Regulation of activities on a wetland and their “thresholds” are to be left entirely to local or State functionaries. There are insufficient safeguards for the same, with the lack of any law-based scientific criteria or guidance. For instance, it is telling that regulation of activities in the draft rules do not make any obvious connection with existing groundwater legislations because these two aspects are still seen as separate.
The 2016 Draft Wetland Rules also call for wise use of wetlands. ‘Wise use’ is a concept used by the Ramsar Convention, and is open to interpretation. It could mean optimum use of resources for human purpose. It could mean not using a wetland so that we eventually strengthen future water security. It could also mean just leaving the wetland and its catchment area as is for flood control, carbon sequestration, and water recharge functions.
Finally, in a country which is both water-starved as well as seasonally water-rich, it is not just politics and use that should dictate how wetlands are treated. Sustainability cannot be reached without ecology. Towards this end, our wetland rules need to reinforce wetlands as more than open sources of water, and we need to revise how wetlands should be identified and conserved.
Neha Sinha is with the Bombay Natural History Society. Views expressed are personal.
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Of Solitude and Silence
CHITRANJAN SAWANT


Our sojourn in Gulmarg and Sonamarg was indeed pleasant. It was a quiet holiday , away from the daily grind. I asked my two-and-a-half-year-old son how he liked the quiet hills, away from the bustling metropolis. “Meetha“ (sweet), was his prompt reply . The sweetness of solitude, or ekant, enhanced by the lofty hills and beautiful dales gave spiritual calm to adults and children alike.The fresh, unpolluted air made our spirits soar. We tended to be spiritualistic and sat closer to our Maker. We were at peace, with ourselves and the world.On high hills and mountains, in deep valleys and pathless banks, the ambience is such that we can whisper to ourselves and our Maker. The whisper is audible to the internal ears alone. It is a state of soundlessness. There is a feeling of fullness. Or a nothingness that is a state of non-being.
Solitude and silence played a pivotal role in achieving emotional balance in the Vedic social order. The four ashrams made up the cornerstone for a happy life. Social homogeneity was as important as solitude in a gurukul where children and adolescents learnt lessons of life at the feet of their gurus.
We find that even in a military establishment like the National Defence Academy , Khadakwasla, observance of a quiet period is mandatory for cadets to enable them to recharge their batteries to cope with the onerous training schedule. Silence is energy-giving. A period of quiet helps us to organise thoughts, reflect and introspect, helping one to get rejuvenated with a fresh perspective.

Source: Economic Times, 7-06-2016
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Six-hour work days can increase productivity'
Rebecca Greenfield
BLOOMBERG


Study Shows Employees Get Sick Less, Work Harder
For about a year, nurses at the Svartedalens retirement ho me have worked six-hour days on an eight-hour salary. They're part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see if a shorter workday can increase productivity . The conclusion? It does.As with any cultural shift in the workplace, the six-hour day has to prove itself more than just humane. For any employer, in Sweden or elsewhere, an abridged workweek can't damage productivity if it's going to have a chance. A year's worth of data from the project, which compares staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility , showed that 68 nurses who worked six hour days took half as much sick time as those in the control group. And they were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period, said Bengt Lorentzon, a researcher on the project.
“If the nurses are at work more time and are more healthy , this means that the continuity at the residence has increased,“ Lorentzon said. “That means higher quality (care).“ Less surprising was that the nurses were 20% happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This allowed them to do 64% more activities.
Svartedalens is part of a small but growing movement in Europe.Sweden has dabbled with shorter workdays before: From 1989 to 2005, home-care-services workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour work day , but it was abolished due to a lack of data proving its worth. The Svartedalens experiment is designed to avoid that problem: “This trial is very , very clean because it's just one homogenous group of workers,“ said Lorentzon. In Sweden's private sector, the practice is taking root in places such as Toyota service centers in Gothenburg. In the UK, a marketing agency adopted a staggered schedule to allow for re duced work hours while ensuring coverage; a survey last month found that six out of 10 bosses in that country agreed that cutting hours would improve productivity .
The key result --that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked--eliminates a major stumbling block to globalising the shorter work day .
While the Svartedalens experiment offers evidence that shorter hours improve productivity , nursing as an occupation may be more analogous to that of medical residents, rather than a desk job. The study equates productivity with quality of care, which doesn't necessarily translate to white-collar work.

Source: Times of India, 7-06-2016
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Monday, June 06, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents


Vol. 51, Issue No. 23, 04 Jun, 2016

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Death of a river is the death of an ecosystem


Do we really need to be told the obvious, by Leonardo da Vinci, no less, that “Water is the driving force in Nature”? “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water,” said the twentieth century English poet WH Auden, which may be closer to the bone. Indeed, we can go for longer without food than without water. Plans to protect air, water, women and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man. All these fights are one fight. All their solutions are interlinked. The death of a river is the death of an ecosystem.
In human terms the death of a river or a lake or a sea is as though somebody important in the family, somebody central to its well-being, has suddenly died. The absence of this key person pushes the remainder of the family below the poverty line – the line of loss and deprivation. If a parent dies, the children and remaining spouse must start all over again from minus. They have lost their advantages in several ways, if they had them to start with – they have lost their emotional confidence, their physical nurture, perhaps their financial security and certainly they have lost out on their overall well-being. That is the impact of a river dying, as if your father or mother suddenly died when you were very young, leaving you deprived forever. That is why our culture still mourns the disappearance of the Saraswati in ancient times. That is why we must fight for our rivers now, many of whom are half-dead. The pity and terror of it is they are being killed by our own indifference and greed or worse, by our inability to see that water is the pillar of our family and not an impersonal ‘substance’. Water contains us. As E.E. Cummings wrote, “For whatever we lose (of a you or a me)/Something of ourselves we find in the sea.”
Moreover, respecting water has everything to do with believing in God. If we believe in a Creator, then by abusing water, which is not only what most of our world is made but is also what we ourselves are mostly made of, we are guilty of a sin against Creation.
Respecting water also has everything to do with not believing in God. If we think we do not need a Mr or Ms Fixit God person but are absolute and ‘scientific’ masters of our destiny, we are guilty, by not respecting water, of destroying mankind. “Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it,” as Margaret Atwood writes in The Penelopiad.
One of the most powerful invocations of water was by Martin Luther King Jr in his fight for civil rights: “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Water not only sustains our physical life and its context, it also sustains our spiritual life. Some of the most deeply moving experiences of a person’s life are with water from a holy river or spring. The water from these places symbolises our spiritual healing while rain pouring down from the sky is considered the master healer, the well-spring of life and the antidote to poison. But in the end, it will not matter who said what. It’s when the well or the tap is dry that we realise the worth of water.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4-06-2016
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NGOs: An extension of the government, not an adversary

Those who question the government’s policies are targeted. It is a pattern,” said lawyer Indira Jaising after her NGO — Lawyers’ Collective — was barred from receiving foreign funds for six months and its licence suspended for alleged violation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) by the government last week. Ms Jaising is not the only one who thinks that the government is using the FCRA as a tool to silence dissenting voices; there are many others. In this case and several earlier cases — Greenpeace being a well-known one — the government’s timing of issuing strictures and its targets have been injudicious, to say the least. In the case of Greenpeace, the NGO’s employee was going to Britain to speak on tribal rights and mining; and in the Jaising case, she had just returned from a release function of a book on the 2002 Gujarat riots. The timing and choice of targets have led to the criticism that the Centre cannot stomach dissent. While no one holds any brief for corrupt NGOs, in both these cases, the motives are less than benign.
In fact, the Centre’s run-in with foreign-funded NGOs started in 2014. Last year, it proposed new rules that would require banks to report every transaction made by these organisations within 48 hours. Additionally, the NGOs will have to pledge that the money won’t be used for activities that go against national, public, security, strategic, scientific or economic interests — with the government retaining the right to interpret what these are.

Last week, Union Minister for Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, and Parliamentary Affairs Venkaiah Naidu wrote a piece in a national daily describing what kind of ‘activism’ the government will accept from NGOs. Saying that the government respects dissent and freedom of speech and expression but they are not absolute and are subject to reasonable restrictions, the minister said that NGOs must practise “evidence-based advocacy”. The minister, more than anyone else, knows that in many cases, especially when it comes to the rights of the people, “evidence-based advocacy” is not always possible. In Bastar, getting people to speak against the high-handedness of the security forces and government can be a challenge. Should NGOs not raise issues because there is no evidence, at least the type the government wants.

The Centre must realise that raising uncomfortable questions has its value. Moreover, NGOs can work as an extension of the government and help it in implementing social schemes effectively. Looking at them as adversaries will only lead to more tension and criticism.
Source: Hindustan Times, 5-06-2016

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The Virtues of Solitude
HUMRA QURAISHI


There's something about solitude... something so very special that can't really be described. You have to experience it, to realise what it is all about, which can only be felt and which can never really be described graphically .No words can describe the potential in solitude. Religious scriptures and philosophers hint at the benefits of spending time all by yourself, even setting aside a few days for `retreat'.Yet, in today's fast-paced world, all that -like taking time off for retreat and reflection -is not taken seriously enough.Actually , it boils down to the need to be left alone, to get wrapped up in your own thoughts and flow of emotions.
Solitude sets you in an introspective mood. It enables seeing and sensing aspects of life with a more dispassionate outlook. For, when you are alone, only then do you see a certain special perspective. For, in your aloneness your constant companion, that inner voice, takes charge. And like other supposed companions, it doesn't let you down nor does it let go of you. Just give importance to that inner voice and see the way it guides you, nudges you, enriches you.... Yes, you've got to be far away .Even if you can't move physically away -that is, seek refuge in remote places or sit all alone -then do so at the mental level. It's all in the mind. It can take you away from the daily disappointments and hurt into a world where there's less friction and turmoil. Savour Solitude. It might help you find answers... and be at peace within and without.


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