Urban India is willing to fight for its green lung

The challenge is structural and goes down to the foundational belief of the current paradigm that linear infrastructure is one of the key drivers of development and economic growth.

There appears to be a new awakening in urban India where city after city is fighting for its green spaces and its green lungs. Be it for the protection of the Aravali Biodiversity Park (ABP) in the national capital region (NCR), the Kasu Brahmananda Reddy (KBR) National Park in heart of Hyderabad, or the Aarey forests in Mumbai, the last few months have seen mobilisation of urban citizens, certainly a section of them, in defence of the environment. The citizens have been out on the streets, taken the matter to the courts, and also been actively mobilising the media and the political establishment in this fight.

There are at least two things that stand out in these particular efforts: the first is that these are about chunks of land with forest cover in the heart of these rapidly growing metropolises; and the second, that the threats to all of them come from linear infrastructure – roads in the case of Hyderabad and the NCR, and the metro in the case of Mumbai. It is also a fight that is led by a certain class of the populace, a kind of an urban environmentalism that is enthralling for its energy and dynamism, but also one that will also need a larger vision of the environment if it has to eventually succeed.

The challenge is structural and goes down to the foundational belief of the current paradigm that linear infrastructure is one of the key drivers of development and economic growth. This linear infrastructure is now the most significant cause of wild animal mortality across the country where thousands of reptiles, amphibians, birds and big and small mammals are dying in road and rail accidents or being electrocuted by high voltage power lines. The mobility imperative, of travelling further and deeper and faster, all of which originate (literally and conceptually) from the urban landscape, one might argue, has only come home to roost.

We, those who want to go on a long drive on an expressway to liven up a lazy Sunday morning; we, those who have benefitted from all the good roads, fast cars and the gleaming metros, are left fighting a situation that is of our own creation, indeed one that has benefitted us the most. We are complicit in the creation of the beast that we are now trying to get off mid-gallop! The Strategic Road Development Program in Hyderabad seeks to slice out parts of the last remaining forests of the city because road space is not enough any more just as the National Highway Authority of India wants to build a road through the green lung of Gurgaon to decongest the roads that connect it to Delhi.

This is also a structure that has always been hugely hostile to most other inhabitants of the urban space, be it centuries old trees that line our roads, the crumbling public transport system, the pedestrian and the cyclist who use the most environmental friendly modes of transport and yet constitute the biggest casualties in road accidents in our country or the cycle-rickshaw puller who seeks little but who is most marginalised in the hierarchy of urban transportation. The needs of these and many other such constituencies have to be accounted for, otherwise we will only be dealing with the symptoms of a malady that runs deep and wide.

One hopes that the current battles will be won, that the forests of Aarey will be saved, that the ABP in Gurgaon will continue to be oasis it is and the KBR national park will remain the jewel in Hyderabad’s crown. But, and it is important we don’t forget this, there will be many more such battles waiting ahead if the more fundamental issues, questions and challenges are not addressed. There is the bigger war lurking around the corner to ambush us. Perhaps it is upon us already!

Pankaj Sekhsaria is an environmental researcher and writer based in New Delhi and Hyderabad. His research interests lie at the intersection of science, society, technology and environment.

Source: Hindustan Times, 3/12/2018

Disability is not a defining feature

Characters with disabilities in Hindi cinema have come a long way from subjects to be pitied or laughed at

I loved the trailer of the movie Zero . It’s a Shah Rukh Khan movie that also features Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif. Mr. Khan plays a dwarf. Ms. Sharma plays a woman with cerebral palsy using a wheelchair. But it doesn’t seem to be a movie about disability in the traditional Indian sense. More on that later.

Disability that’s in your face

The first known movie to feature disability in a meaningful way in Hindi cinema was Jeevan Naiya (1936). In this movie, the lead character abandons his wife on learning that she belongs to a family of dancers. Later, he is blinded in an accident and is nursed by a woman who he eventually falls in love with. Of course that woman is his wife. Karma comes a full circle.

And that’s what continued in subsequent films: either karma and its lessons or pity. In Sholay (1975), Thakur, the police officer (Sanjeev Kumar) has his arms amputated by the infamous Gabbar (Amjad Khan). Thakur hires two mercenaries to avenge Gabbar and his gang. This leads to a final duel between Gabbar and Thakur. And what does Thakur do? He crushes Gabbar’s arms with spikes. Thakur probably thought that living with a disability is worse than dying.

Khamoshi (1996) was about deaf parents, their daughter and their inability to allow her to move on. Taare Zameen Par (2007) and Black (2005) focused on the schooling challenges of the dyslexic, and the deaf and blind, respectively. Two other big-ticket movies with disabled characters in the recent past have beenMargarita With a Straw (2015), which explored the sexuality of a woman with cerebral palsy, and Guzaarish (2010), which was the story of a paralysed magician-turned-radio jockey and his legal battle to end his life. What’s common in all these movies is that disability is in your face. It’s the overarching theme of the movie. I loved the storytelling in these films. However, disability is what defined them. And let’s admit it: disability is not the sexiest theme to bring in people to the theatres.

Of course there is another category too, where disabled characters provide comic respite at the cost of their disability. However, I shall refrain from commenting on it to not give these highly offensive movies any undue attention.

So why am I so excited about Zero ? Going by the trailer, Mr. Khan, who plays a dwarf, is shown the photo of a girl played by Ms. Sharma. He’s immediately smitten and decides to attend an event where she’s speaking. Only on seeing her in person does he realise that she has cerebral palsy and, as a result, is on a wheelchair. He’s sad but nevertheless continues to pursue her and eventually succeeds.

He confesses to having a safe, stable life if he marries her. The trailer up to this point looks like the quintessential Bollywood movie. Dwarf meets wheelchair, they fall in love and live happily ever after. Except we live in the 21st century. This isn’t the Raju (Raj Kapoor) from Mera Naam Joker being a circus clown collecting a bunch of heartbreaks in the process. Mr. Khan doesn’t want to just live life. He wants to live it king size. He wants adventure. Maybe he even wants to be a moron. Not satisfied with cerebral palsy-stricken Ms. Sharma, he pursues Ms. Kaif who seems to be playing a silver screen actor with millions of fans. They meet and they kiss (perhaps the Indian Censor Board didn’t let them take things further). And when things go wrong, she calls him “Zero” and he presumably runs back to Ms. Sharma — but she is no helpless, egoless wheelchair-user waiting to have him back in her life. She seems angry and wants her revenge. “The relationship is now on an equal footing,” she says, glaring into the camera.

The characters are no ‘divine’ individuals seeking sympathy. The government might have called the disabled “ divyang ” (divine individuals), but Mr. Khan might truly be playing a divyang moron in the movie. The characters here are human beings with hopes and aspirations, shades of black and white, and happen to have disabilities. It doesn’t seem to be a movie on disability. It seems to be a love triangle with characters with disabilities.

Responding to criticism

And that is why I was so saddened to read criticism about this movie from some pockets of the disabled community. The movie was questioned for not having actors with disabilities play these roles. I do believe that the first challenge is to get people to the theatres to watch movies related to disability. Having stars of course helps. Secondly, and more importantly, these stars inadvertently become brand ambassadors of the cause. These are important issues considering that I come across middle-aged government engineers, police officers and bureaucrats who claim to have never come across a person with a disability even today. If big stars will get them to the theatres, so be it.

Besides, I do find the idea that only actors with disabilities can portray characters with disabilities bizarre. We didn’t complain that Dangal didn’t have wrestlers playing wrestlers, or that Sanju didn’t have Sanjay Dutt playing Sanjay Dutt, or that an alien didn’t star in PK. What we need is for actors to be properly sensitised to the role they’re signing up for. Daniel Day-Lewis got into the skin of his character, Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy in My Left Foot . He did this not just by interacting with people with the disability but by actually refusing to leave his wheelchair through the shoot of the film. He had to be carried around by crew members and insisted on being spoon-fed. The movie was critically acclaimed and he won an Oscar for it.

Breaking barriers

Persons with disabilities in India are breaking barriers. The next generation wants no sympathy. Varun Khullar was paralysed waist down after an accident in Manali in 2014. The accident forced him to start using a wheelchair but didn’t stop him from accomplishing his dreams. He studied music and started deejaying at parties. He is the resident DJ at a club in New Delhi. Divyanshu Ganatra was just 19 when glaucoma claimed his eyesight. He runs an adventure sport company. Nidhi Goyal was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disorder at the age of 15. She converted her subsequent dating misadventures into an internationally acclaimed stand-up comedy sketch.

I am glad that Hindi cinema is learning from society and going beyond looking at characters with disabilities as either subjects to be pitied or laughed at.

Nipun Malhotra is a wheelchair user. He’s founder, Wheels For Life (www.wheelsforlife.in) and CEO, Nipman Foundation. Twitter: @nipunmalhotra. Email: nipun@nipunmalhotra.com

Source: The Hindu, 3/12/2018

Digital dungeons & dragons

It is high time we held Zuckerberg and other digital dungeon masters to higher standards.

I often liken my research to that of a medieval mapmaker. My research teams and I are charting the “digital planet”. This is a landscape whose contours are being shaped by many actors — by the titans of Silicon Valley and their counterparts elsewhere, by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, by regulators desperately attempting to keep pace, by half the world’s population that now has access to the internet and by many in the remaining half dying to be let into the club. In its early stages, mapmaking is an imprecise art. One cannot definitively fill in all the land masses or bodies of water. Our medieval predecessors closed such gaps with dire warnings, such as “Here there be dragons” or resorted to images of serpents, elephants with gigantic teeth, and, of course, dragons.

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My team and I are still tracing the outlines of the emerging digital landscape using a “Digital Evolution Index” that we created and a soon-to-be-released “Ease of Doing Digital Business” ranking of countries, among other measures. We find that on this emerging map, the dragons, serpents and elephants with dental issues are representations of what we fear the most, the loss of trust: We may be awash in data, but we still have no good ways to separate the tangible from the virtual, the human from the algorithm, the real from the fake.

When challenged to fix the problem of, say, fake news and pernicious rumours, perhaps the most palpable breakdown of trust, the hapless leadership of the digital platforms lacks the imagination to figure out solutions. In fact, they seem to be adding to the problems. Consider everybody’s whipping boy these days: Mark Zuckerberg. The latest story to break on this front is that, not only is Facebook and Facebook-owned WhatsApp among the largest transmitters of misinformation, Facebook — the company itself — may be the creator of misinformation. According to the New York Times, it paid an “opposition research” firm to spread misinformation about the billionaire George Soros. The reason: Soros’ foundation funded the Open Markets Institute, which, in turn, was critical of Facebook. This isn’t the first instance of concerns over Facebook fathering — not just furthering — falsehoods. A lawsuit, filed by an aromatherapy fashionwear company, alleges that Facebook’s numbers for the number of users that are targeted by advertisements were vastly inflated, to the extent that the reported number of target users reached in a particular demographic exceeded the total number of Facebook users belonging to that same demographic.

Where are the digital planet’s dragons that are likely to be lurking? In other words, who are the most vulnerable? I fear that the digital dragons congregate in the parts of the world with the least safeguards — among users in the developing world. Moreover, WhatsApp, which is more popular for spreading news in the developing world than Facebook, may be more vulnerable to manipulation for many reasons. For one, it is end-to-end encrypted, making it hard to manage or trace the content. Second, Facebook, the company, has stepped up fact-checking on its main platform, Facebook, but not on WhatsApp, largely because the pressures from American lawmakers are focused on the main platform.

Among developing nations, India, of course, is a prime case study. The country has experienced a slew of violent incidents and killings incited by rumours over WhatsApp. The BBC recently released a report that suggests that in India, narratives that relate to Hindu power and superiority, national pride and “personality and prowess” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are powerful in spreading rumours over social media. With an election around the corner, this means there is even more opportunity for mischief ahead. Interestingly, while neither end of the political spectrum comes across as clean, according to the BBC study, the volume of fake news messages from the right was much more prominent. I recently met the Egyptian activist and originator of the Arab Spring, Wael Ghonim, who made an interesting distinction that the right sends messages that focus on fear while the left focuses on shame. Well, fear travels further and faster.

Unfortunately, India is far from alone. Of course, we now know that neighbouring Sri Lanka and Myanmar witnessed similar (and even worse) rumour-triggered atrocities. While Facebook made some superficial and incremental changes in response, it appears they did little to anticipate similar issues elsewhere. Consider Brazil as an even more recent case in point. There were widespread false rumours of Venezuelan interference in Brazil’s elections and about now-president, Jair Bolsonaro’s opposition distributing baby bottles with penis-shaped tops at schools. The rumours were started on WhatsApp and were reinforced over Facebook and Twitter.

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Now that we have a sense of where the dragons lurk, who are the dragons?

Back in November 2016, Zuckerberg said that fake news influencing the US election was “a pretty crazy idea.” However, by the time he made that statement, insiders at Facebook already knew that this was simply not true. Today, after many hearings and public eatings of humble pie, Zuckerberg and his colleagues still have no long-term plan for countering the problem. One reason is that the spread of rumours gets attention and feeds the social media business model that does well when more people click and share. Zuckerberg is like the dungeon master from the Dungeons and Dragons game whose job is to be the game organiser. It is high time we realised that a clueless dungeon master who does not take responsibility for the game he has organised is also the dragon to be feared the most. The rumour-mongers that use the platform are the lesser dragons.

It is high time we held Zuckerberg and other digital dungeon masters to higher standards. They must now put their game design genius to work, to take responsibility for what is propagated by their platforms and to reinvent their business models that are designed to monetise attention at any cost. It is essential that they figure out how to grow profitably while keeping the digital planet civil, productive, honest and safe. And free of dragons.

Source: Indian Express, 3/12/2018

Dance Of Dervishes

Sufism is a teaching based on love. There is a sense of unity of thought which speaks of the fundamental one-ness of all religions. Sufis believe that everyone evolves to a known destiny. For more than a thousand years the Hindus and Sufis exchanged ideas and many Sufi sayings were similar to Sanskrit shlokas about human aspiration. In Sufism, the laws of life were kindness, generosity, good advice, forbearance to enemies, indifference to fools and respect for the learned ones. Jalaluddin Rumi warned: “Judge not the Sufi to be that which you can see of him, my friends.” He himself had been transformed when he met Shams of Tabriz, a travelling Dervish. Dervishes were ascetics who founded the Sufi fraternity in Arabia. In their beliefs they unified the inner philosophy of all religious thought, and created a new genre of music and movement. The sacred dance of the Dervishes is said to have happened when Rumi once took a rhythmic turn. This movement unconsciously whirled the skirt of his garment. It formed a circle and with that the dance was created with a group known as the whirling Dervishes. There were varied scholars of Dervishes. The sect which developed in India was the Naqshbandi, founded by Naqebhand, a great Sufi personality of his time. Rumi’s ghazals continue to inspire singers and poets with their artistic reflections of spiritual love through human aspiration.

Source: Economic Times, 3/12/2018

What is Marshall-Lerner condition in economics?

This refers to the proposition that the devaluation of a country’s currency will lead to an improvement in its balance of trade with the rest of the world only if the sum of the price elasticities of its exports and imports is greater than one. For instance, if total export revenue falls due to inelastic demand for a country’s exports and total import expense rises due to inelastic demand for its imports, this will lead to a further worsening of the country’s trade deficit. So devaluing its currency may not always be the best way forward for a country looking to reduce its trade deficit. The Marshall-Lerner condition is named after British economist Alfred Marshall and Russian economist Abba P. Lerner.

Source: The Hindu, 30/11/2018

The children left behind

UNESCO report highlights the gaps in education policy for children of migrants.

People move around India all the time. Around 9 million move to live in another state every year while the rates of those migrating within their state have doubled over just 10 years. If you were an education minister tasked with making sure schools are flexible enough to deal with this, what would you do?

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UNESCO has published a global report on migration and displacement. Entitled ‘Building bridges’ not walls’, it looks at countries’ achievements and bottlenecks in helping migrant and displaced children benefit from a quality education. People have always moved away from their homes, in search of better education opportunities, for work. In India, education was the main reason young men gave for moving within the country.

A lot has been done to help internal migrants. In 2009, the Right to Education Act made it mandatory for local authorities to admit migrant children. National-level guidelines allow for flexible admission of children, for providing transport and volunteers to support mobile education, and creating seasonal hostels. The guidelines are designed to improve coordination between sending and receiving districts and states. And because central directives may not cover all bases, many states also did their part. Gujarat introduced seasonal boarding schools and started an online child tracking system. In Maharashtra, village authorities worked with local volunteers to provide after-school psychosocial support to children left behind by seasonal migrating parents and Tamil Nadu provides textbooks in other languages.

Some of the children most in need of new solutions are the children of seasonal workers. In 2013, 10 million children lived in rural households with a family member who was a seasonal worker. This movement is common within the construction industry: A survey of 3,000 brick kiln workers in Punjab found that 60 per cent were inter-state migrants.
The Global Education Monitoring Report shines a light on these children. Eight out of 10 migrant children in worksites across seven Indian cities did not have access to education. Among young people who have grown up in a rural household with a seasonal migrant, 28 per cent identified as illiterate or had an incomplete primary education. The report shows that up to 40 per cent of children from seasonal migrant households are likely to end up in work rather than school.

One reason for this is that the interventions designed by states are aimed at helping children who are in their home communities, but they do not actively address the challenges faced by those who are on the move. There are other challenges. Despite efforts, a pilot programme used on brick kiln sites in Rajasthan to track the progress of out of school children did not improve learning in any substantial way. Teachers on the sites reported culture, language, lifestyle, cleanliness and clothing as major barriers between them and the kiln labour community.

While analysing migration and its links to education, it is hard to ignore one of its most visible results on Indian cities: The growth of slums. But policymakers seem to turn a blind eye to them. Our estimates are that an additional 80 million children will live in slums around the world by 2030.

It was positive to see the 2016 India Habitat III national report commit the government to universal provision of basic services including education. Yet, research from the same year showed that urban planners were not being trained to understand the needs of slum dwellers. Our research shows there is only one urban planner for every 1,00,000 people in India, while there are 38 for the same number of people in the UK.

With shifting goalposts, the task of education ministers is not enviable. But I believe that our work over this past year can help. It is time for states to address the education needs of children and youth who have already migrated. The government must face up to the permanence of informal settlements. Like it or not, education is on the move

Source: Indian Express, 30/11/2018

India needs more good Samaritans

Unfortunately for victims of road accidents, crowds are just observers, and often hesitate to help, and with good reason. With accidents come the police, and with the police come investigations. Assistance is therefore, not always easy or instinctive. This is primarily because people are unaware of Section 134A of the Motor Vehicles Act – the Good Samaritan Law.

According to the World Health Organisation, 2015 saw over a million people across the globe losing their lives in road-related accidents, and in a call to action, stated that road accidents are a “massive and largely preventable economic toll”. Many developed countries in the west now consider this a top priority. Their action plans include immediate medical care through bystander intervention. Bystanders, who witness these accidents, are not just expected to help, but in some countries are even punished for negligence if they don’t. Through France’s Non-assistance à personne en danger (or Duty to rescue), the liability of the photographers who pursued Princess Diana’s car on the day that she died was investigated. The charges against them were that of negligence – they failed to render assistance to the victims (they were taking photographs of the dying celebrity in the car) .Eventually, the prosecutor dropped the charges as the driver was to blame. But because of the high-profile case that was, the question of ‘moral duties’ of citizens was raised.

In India, it doesn’t take much for a crowd to gather (not just photographers). Curiosity tends to get the better of most people on the streets, many of whom often will stop traffic just to get a quick (or long) peek at whatever is happening. Even accident spots aren’t spared. WhatsApp forwards that preach road safety are almost always accompanied by gruesome, bloody videos of fatal accidents with a crowd often circling the scene.

Unfortunately for victims of road accidents, crowds are just observers, and often hesitate to help, and with good reason. With accidents come the police, and with the police come investigations. Assistance is therefore, not always easy or instinctive. This is primarily because people are unaware of Section 134A of the Motor Vehicles Act – the Good Samaritan Law. It defines a good Samaritan as a bystander at the scene of an accident who offers to provide medical or non-medical assistance to the injured, by either calling for an ambulance, the cops or even taking the victim to the hospital themselves. These eyewitnesses, who are assumed to have acted in good faith and no expectation of reward, are shielded from legal inquiries by the police or hospitals. No personal details are required from them, their identity needn’t be disclosed, and they cannot be pulled into any investigation that may occur after the accident: no civil or criminal liability. This is to ensure that an act of goodwill driven by empathy and a sense of social responsibility is respected. But this law, enacted for all the right reasons, is not implemented.

According to a multi-city survey conducted in 11 cities by the not-for-profit SaveLIFE Foundation with a sample of 3667 people, including the police and hospital administrations, nearly 90% were unaware of this law and a little under 53% of good Samaritans have been detained by the police. Another aspect of the law which saw a shocking 0% compliance is mandatory charters which are meant to be placed in hospitals; which were not. This isn’t just alarming, it’s unlawful.

This is a recent addition to the larger Motor Vehicles Act, having been incorporated following the directions of the Supreme Court in Save Life Foundation vs. Union of India. England, Wales and Ireland have similar laws, all having been recently enacted. England and Wales have “Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act” which looks at some Samaritans as ‘heroes’.

The roads in our country are dangerous, for pedestrians and vehicles, alike. Roads everywhere are either congested, narrow, falling apart or un-navigable, making accidents a common occurrence. According to data by the ministry of road transport and highways, Uttar Pradesh tops the list of maximum number of road deaths and Maharashtra isn’t far behind. An average of about 150,000 people die in road accidents every year. The WHO in its ‘World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, 2004’ has projected that by 2020, road accidents will be one of the biggest killers in India.

Let’s piece these statistics together: 150,000 deaths, of which about 50% died due to the lack of immediate medical care, during what’s called ‘the golden hour’, the first hour of injury (WHO). According to the survey, only 29% of the participants were willing to escort a victim to hospital, 28% were willing to call an ambulance, and only 12% would agree to call the police. This is a worrying minority vis-à-vis the number of deaths. While the main reason for their hesitation comes from the fact that they fear the police, what is also significant is the fact these percentages prove that police interrogations deter people from the moral choice of saving a life. And that points to a larger problem of empathy. Respondents shouldn’t just be empowered to act but also encouraged to, taught to act swiftly and consider it their social responsibility for the benefit of society. Also, and more importantly, the police and hospital administration must ensure compliance to the SC judgment and protect the rights of good Samaritans.

Source: Hindustan Times, 30/11/2018