Archive for the ‘cities and urbanisation’ Category
Inside the deepest tourist murk of Goa
What I will describe in the next few paragraphs has to do with a spot along the coast in Goa, the small state in coastal western India where I live. It’s called Calangute, and was once a village close to the sea. There’s a beach nearby. To the immediate north is Baga, to the immediate south is Candolim, and farther south is Sinquerim, and then the headland of Aguada and its Portuguese-era fort.
But it is Calangute about which I write. It has for some years now, and by that I mean certainly 15 years, come to mean all that is ugly about tourism in Goa. If it was ugly in 2005, its ugliness is simply off the scale, off any sort of chart, today. Its ugliness is breath-taking. The ugliness of what is absurdly called tourism in Calangute, Goa, is outright paralysing.
These photographs show you why I think so. There is a bus stand in Calangute, by which is meant an open plot into which buses from other states make their way and then halt. These buses arrive crammed with tourists from those states. (I will call them ‘tourists’, for now, only because to describe them more fully will surely require an essay.) The Calangute market zone, which extends for about half a kilometre, and perhaps a bit more, in all directions, is packed with small shops and all manner of hostelries, that is, places in which tourists can stay a few nights. There are hotels too, some style themselves as resorts. But for the most part, where tourists stay in Calangute are modest lodgings, what to the generation preceding my own were known as guest houses.
The din in Calangute is deafening. There is in the first place the sounds of traffic. For non-Indian readers of this irregular journal (i dislike the neologism ‘blog’) who have not travelled in India, traffic in India is synonymous with the sound of horns, because you see, the Indian driver of a vehicle, any vehicle, simply cannot drive without tooting the horn every few seconds.
There is the constant rumble of tourist buses, which crawl through lanes that really shouldn’t accommodate more than a couple of bicycles. Every bus like this is trailed by several demon taxi drivers trying to pass the bus, and leaning on their horns in the belief that their horn blasts will magically dissolve the bus in their path. There is also nowadays the rumble of powerful SUVs, in which the more well-to-do tourists travel, shiny and ugly new vehicles which to me seem the size of small Goan houses. There are scooters and motorcycles, ridden either by kamikaze tourists or by semi-somnolent bell boys going home after their shift or by maniac delivery boys speeding chicken biryani to a room on the second floor of the Top A-1 Seashore Residency hotel.
Right in front of what used to be quite simply, in the late 1970s, called the tourist hostel and cottages in Calangute (but which today sports some grandiose title) is a sort of quadrangle. The vehicular entrance to this quadrangle is marked off by not one but two small blocks of what in India are called Sulabh Shauchalaya, that is, public urinals and toilets. That these form modern Calangute’s landmarks tell one how far, how very far and how fast, this once idyllic seaside village has fallen.
The quadrangle is a large parking space, two rows in parallel on either side of a median. Why did they have it here? Perhaps to accommodate tourist buses, perhaps to accommodate the ever growing number of large private vehicles (jeeps and vans) in which groups of mostly men travel to Calangute. Whatever the muddled first reason, space in the cursed quadrangle is taken over by any vehicle can be driven in there and parked, at times for days on end. For a category of ‘tourist’ group that makes its way to Calangute, the vehicle becomes a sort of satellite camp. Plastic containers of water, bags and satchels, soiled clothes, are all stored in the vehicle, whose roof and bonnet are used to dry clothes washed at one of the Sulabh Shauchalayas.
The sides of the quadrangle are lined, most of all, with liquor shops. These do a constant business and it is common to see groups of men in them, arguing about what sort of liqour and which brands they should collectively buy, what they should take back with them, and what beer to drink on the spot while these decisions are being taken. There are restaurants, all of them without exception rude and cheap, whose rough menus – overspiced, oversalted, overoiled – are intended only to fill deadened tourist stomachs in the shortest possible time.
There are vendors, who sell all that is tawdry and throwaway: floppy hats, sunglasses, absurd plastic trinkets for women, shorts and T-shirts, flip-flops. There are tattoo ‘parlours’, holes in the wall with two stools and internet trance channel music. There are rows of brightly painted scooters for the tourists to rent, some with A4-sized sheets of paper carrying only a name and mobile phone number, flapping in the breeze.
There are boarding houses and guest houses. These are truly, and not only here but on every road and side street of Calangute, and likewise in every alley and side-street all across the Sinquerim to Baga beach strip, the ugliness generator of Goa. Usually two storeys, at times one more, they have been cheaply built, iron rebar protruding, water pipes and electricity cables and internet wires snake in open confusion up external walls and through stairwells and around dusty verandahs and into rooms.
They sport any shade of paint that was available to their reckless owners at a discount, or was mooched from another site. They are festooned with boards and signs advertising themselves. External units of air-conditioners are jammed into masonry whever they fit, their rusty water drip making muddy puddles below. Lines of varicoloured ‘fairy’ LED lights are looped from one unfinished unpainted beam to another, behind ragged awnings and around long-empty flowerpots. Their staff are indifferent to the tourists (who are very likely more so to them), surly, unkempt, engrossed by the flicker of their mobile phones, uncaring and unmindful of anything outside their grimy walls.
Why do they still come, ever more, ever fickle, ever banal, an endless tide of human ephemera? Do they not see and feel the rampant ugliness, which stretches like a giant sore right over ten kilometres of the north Goa beach strip, with Calangute its howling, festering centre? Or are they in fact escaping a far gloomier, far darker, ugliness of the urban Indian rot from whence they travelled?
Seventy-five years of extended colonisation
There is now a third generation of young adults in India who believe, because that is what they have been led to believe, that they live in a free and democratic country. In the way that their parents did and their grandparents did, the young adult Indians consider themselves to be citizens of a sovereign nation which has the wherewithal to determine its identity and place in the world, and that within that ‘national identity’ they are free to find and play out their individual identities and personal or family aims.
This idea is sustained and fed today by a set of tools very much more sophisticated compared with those that were available and used 25 years, ago, 50 years ago and 75 years ago. Many of the new tools are of course deliverred through the internet. Twenty-five years ago it was television, Fifty years ago it was radio. Assisting the new tools that create and spread crude ideas of ‘nationhood’, ‘patriotism’, ‘love for the motherland’ and ‘unity in diversity’ are a legion of minor methods. These include what are today called influencers, advertising by Indian commercial companies – and considerably more by the foreign multi-nationals whose products and services are sold here – television serials that are now beamed through the medium of smartphones perhaps more than they are beamed to TV screens, and a myriad ‘youth’ and ‘grassroots’ organisations controlled by the political formations.
What the young adult Indian of 2022 is fed is a diet of caricatured national belonging. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party formed the national government (it formed the government again in 2019), the childish sloganeering that has, for 75 years, been a feature of Indian ‘democracy’, has increased greatly in tempo and volume. This was a staple during the two earlier national governments – that of 2009 and 2004 – under the Indian National Congress.
The excuse very often given for the great prevalence of sloganeering as the primary communication between political formations and citizens, from the later period of the Struggle for Independence (in the 1940s) and including the two most recent phases of Congress rule, was that illiteracy is widespread, and such messages make a ready impact. That was the strategy for elections in India, and ever since the 2004 central government (and especially since 2014), has also been the strategy used to foist a misshapen brand of nationalism onto citizens, except that since 2004 the brand has had as a wrapper the term ‘development’, or ‘vikas‘.
To me it is very doubtful indeed whether there were more than a very tiny minority of young adults who, by the end of August 1947, when the fervour of the celebrations had abated somewhat, looked around them and asked one another with any seriousness, what is the form and substance of our independence. I do not think that in any of the years from 1948 until today, 2022, such a minority has enlarged its numbers (as a portion of thinking and critical young adults, or indeed adults of any age group of India).
There is nearly nothing at all today, which forms the apparatus and provides the methodologies, utilising which Indian families and adults pursue their lives and livelihoods, which is Indian in thought and form. India’s cities, in which perhaps 55% of the country’s people now live, are easily amongst the most polluted in the world and, together with their abysmal civic conditions, are just as easily amongst the most unlivable in the world. There is no Indianness whatsoever in these gigantic settlements, that are criss-crossed brutally by ‘infrastructure’ and befouled by industrial and consumer effluent. They are several degrees worse than the industrial townships of the communist bloc of the 1960s, but only much bigger.
The food that young adult Indians, that their children and babies are fed, that their elderly parents are offered, is designed to injure and weaken. What was by the late 1990s called the retail revolution in India was indeed revolutionary for the country, because it cunningly household cooking a drab drudgery that chained the woman (who if freed could puruse a ‘career’ and add to the national income) and introduced food ‘convenience’ in the form of Maggi two-minute noodles, which in more recfent years has become the ‘food service’ industry, ready-to-eat packets, and food ‘takeaways’ delivered on a two-wheeler to the consumer doorstep by an underpaid, un-unionised, dangerously overworked slave of a logistics enterprise who, himself underfed, steals from ‘cloud kitchens’ whenever he can.
The medicine and ‘health care’ the young adult Indian is led to spend copious amounts of money on, for himself, children and parents (if his parents have not yet been despatched to a ‘seniors home’ or, more stylish, an ‘assisted living centre’) is, like food but more so (especially after March 2020), a fundamental means of control for the large group of transnational enterprises that in fact control the country. Whereas in the 1980s and even in the 1990s the reach of ayurveda, siddha, unani, tribal and indigenous medicine, homoeopathy, naturopathy and their allies were popular, if relatively inconspicuous, today they have been pushed well outside the margins of what is understood to be public health, whether as the government-sponsored and aided public health system or whether the commercial healthcare industry, both being equally controlled by the pharmaceutical and drugs multinationals.
There is nothing which today in India is called a ‘sector’ – by which a particular kind of activity and its asociated products and services are labelled – which is Indian in concept and finished form. Education is like a remote-controlled Frankenstein’s monster, a figure clumsily composed of ill-fitting parts. The Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management, the ‘top’ tiers of engineering and medical universities and colleges, all compel young Indians – not yet adults – to conform to the demands of global finance capital and the globalised industries such capital controls, invents and replaces.
Transport and mobility, energy and power, telecommunications, information technology, core heavy industry, all these are simulacra of the idea of western ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ transferred to Indian soil and using Indian raw materials. There is no Indian-designed equivalent of the internal combustion engine (nor even an Indian modification of the more than 100 most common kinds of automotive engines that have been invented elsewhere in the world during the last century). There is no Indian electricity-generating plant that does not burn coal or a petroleum derivative in faithful imitation of the west (the smokeless chulha remains a ‘development’ curiosity).
A public sector firm called Indian Telephone Industries used to make the rotary dial telephone instruments for decades. When the global telecom hardware industry invented the mobile phone, that too vanished. Even with the ‘smartphone’ there is no Indian telecom chipset manufacturer (naturally, because indigenous chipset development is prohibited by the same forces) nor is there an Indian operating system for the ‘smartphone’. This of course has much to do with the Indian servility, now more than 35 years old, in ‘info-tech’.
The young Indian adults, a group that forms the overwhelming majority of the ‘IT engineers’ of India, are lower than the assembly-line or factory shopfloor workers their parents and grandparents were. They modify nothing, their specialisations are extreme, their range of competencies is shockingly narrow, they are constantly goaded by externally-set and directed ‘performance markers’. They inhabit a truly frightening world. Their seniors write no standards for any product, and are chained by meaningless perquisites and stock options to the whims of the global capital vultures who use both info-tech and telecom as 21st century devices of overwhelming control.
There could be around 850 million adults in India in 2022. But we don’t know because the 2021 Census of India was not begun in 2020 and has still not begun. The administration of the colonised territory that is India has no interest in counting its people because that counting is done many times every single day – by the many subsidiaries of the transnational corporations whose smartphones, digital wallets, telecom service providers, ‘smart’ home televisions and assortment of ‘internet of things’ gadgets relay the daily minutiae of every Indian adult, child and senior that posesses them. The state, that is, what is presented as being the Republic of India, in this 75th year, is either redundant or is nearing redundancy. The notion of ‘independence’ therefore is an utterly false one.
India’s material burden, gigantic and unseen
Mumbai as seen from an aircraft coming in to land. Neither city households nor wards care about the material throughput they cause and live with every day, week, month. Electricity and water, packaging and food, all contribute to the household footprint.
Should a trend continue as it has done for the last ten years, then in February or March of 2021 India’s annual extraction of material will cross 7.5 billion tons. It was in 2011, only eight years ago, that the country’s material extraction had crossed six billion tons. This stupendous mass comprises what are called non-metallic minerals, most of it limestone, structural clays, and the several kinds of mixtures of sand, gravel and crushed rock that are used for construction, which in 2017 amounted to an estimated 3.2 billion tons.
[This article was published in The New Indian Express.]
There was biomass, by which is meant harvested crops – foodgrain, horticultural crops, pulses, sugarcane and plantation crops – and crop residues, both straw and leaves, which was an estimated 2.8 billion tons (sugarcane accounting for nearly 370 million tons), coal of 732 million tons and wood of an estimated 242 million tons (of which about 210 million tons were used as fuel). Collated from data provided by national agencies, the International Resource Panel of UN Environment maintains the material use profiles of nearly every country.
Apportioned by household, at the beginning of 2020 this vast material budget can be atomised to about 26 tons for each, in much the same way as per capita income is calculated, as a notional distribution, for each individual of India. Yet material allocation is a measure that, for all its tangible bulk, is treated as nearly invisible. Money and income, wages and savings, credit and assets are calculated and assessed to the third decimal by the financial services industry. But there is no corresponding industry to measure, assess and pronounce upon the solvency of the material intake of a household, whether in quintals or in kilograms, whether as fluid diesel or as grain or as burnt brick.
When it comes to the physical basis for the household’s shelter, its roster of daily consumption, the durable goods purchased and disposed of, its tribe of electronic gadgets, there is no literacy effort to be found run by any industry, or by government, or even by centres of higher education. The Indian household – whether amongst the estimated 96 million in urban centres or the 183 million in villages – is transiting from circumspection born of scarcity to profligacy in material accumulation.
The forms and vegetal densities of a typical ruralscape of coastal Tamil Nadu, this being near Pondicherry. Unlike the overground forms of a town, here there is no disharmony. Dwellings, orchards, crop fields, bunds, tracks, ponds all blend in material balance.
That the consequences of such a trend cannot be contained or managed in a meaningful way was already being signalled to us a generation ago, when our mega-metropolises (cities and adjacent urban agglomerations with a combined population of 10 million and more) found no alternative to the small hills of refuse and compacted rubbish that towered over some unfortunate outlying ward. Those hills have only become larger at a faster pace, and they are joined – as a new category of topological landform – by the waste and rubbish pits (‘landfills’ in the American vernacular) that the great majority of our class 1 cities (population of 100,000 and more) turn to as their means to deal with the accumulation of unwanted material.
How did the material burden of our settlements grow so quickly? Part of the reason must be ascribed to the collective race away from poverty, both monetary and of basic goods. It is rare to find today a discussion about whether a poverty line is reasonable or not, although a generation ago it was an important subject just as it was in the previous generation. The race has been set as one by the intentions and terminologies of a kind of economics based almost wholly on the concept of development. Thus one of the standard references for many years, the Cambridge Economic History of India, advised that “the declared goals of development policy were to bring about a rapid increase in living standards, provide full employment at an adequate wage, and reduce inequalities arising from the uneven distribution of income and wealth.”
Yet the development policies of the socialists, of those who designed the ‘command economy’, of the licence raj mandarins, of the globalisers, of the commodities capitalists, of the services barons, of the infotech-biotech persuasions, not one of these policy pathways has advised where sufficiency lies, and what to do after we have consumed our way out of poverty and into maintenance. None of these can, because ‘growth’ and market control is the engine that motivates their methods. Sufficiency – or consumption stability – also has the accompanying corollaries of societies making purchases last (by repairing and reusing them) and not purchasing at all.
It’s time to rid India of the GDP disease
A woman in the Aravalli hills of Rajasthan carries home a headload of field straw. India’s National Accounts Statistics is completely ignorant of the biophysical economy.
On 5 January 2017 the Central Statistics Office of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, issued a note titled “First advance estimates of national income, 2017-18”. The contents of this note immediately caused great consternation among the ranks of those in business and industry, trading, banking anf finance, and government who hold that the growth of India’s gross domestic product is supremely important as it is this growth which describes what India is and should be.
In its usual bland way, the Central Statistics Office said that this was “the First Advance estimates of national income at constant (2011-12) and current prices, for the financial year 2017-18” and then proeeded, after a short boilerplate explanation about the compilation of estimates, delivered the bombshell to the GDP standard-bearers: “The growth in GDP during 2017-18 is estimated at 6.5% as compared to the growth rate of 7.1% in 2016-17.” [pdf file here]
To me, this is good news of a kind not heard in the last several years.
But India’s business and financial press were thrown into a caterwauling discord which within minutes was all over the internet.
An example of one out of the many messages in a daily barrage delivered by the Government of India’s ‘GDP First’ corps. This is from what is called the Make in India ‘initiative’ of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Ministry of Commerce. “Make in India is much more than an inspiring slogan,” the DIPP says. “It represents a comprehensive and unprecedented overhaul of out-dated processes and policies.” For this childish GDP rah-rah club, environmental protection, natural reserves, watershed conservation, handloom and handicrafts are all outdated practices and ideas.
‘GDP growth seen at four-year low of 6.5% in 2017-18: CSO’ said the Economic Times: “Most private economists have pared the growth forecast to 6.2 to 6.5 percent for this fiscal year, citing the teething troubles faced by businesses during the roll out of a goods and services tax (GST).”
‘7 reasons why FY18 GDP growth forecast should be viewed with caution’ advised Business Standard: “The fact that growth will be 6.5% is significant as it is even lower than the Economic Survey assumption of 6.75-7.5% for the year. Hence, it is not expected to be higher than the base mark which means that it would be lowest in the past three years. The effects of demonetisation and GST have played some role here.”
‘CSO pegs FY18 growth at 6.5%; why forecast is an eye-opener for Narendra Modi govt’ said Firstpost: “The healthy uptick in volumes displayed by many sectors in November 2017, is expected to strengthen in the remainder of FY2018, benefiting from a favourable base effect and a ‘catch up’ following the subdued first half. Accordingly, manufacturing is likely to display healthy expansion in volumes in H2 FY2018, which should result in a substantial improvement in capacity utilisation on a YoY basis.”
‘GST disruptions eat FY18 economic growth; GDP seen growing at 6.5%, lowest under Modi government’ huffed the Financial Express: “For a broad-based recovery the rural economy needs to recover and we can expect the upcoming budget to focus on alleviating some of the stress in the rural economy and concentrating on measures to augment the flow of credit in the economy. Overall growth is likely to improve in the coming year and possibly move up beyond the 7% mark in FY19.”
‘India’s GDP growth seen decelerating to 6.5% in 2017-18 from 7.1% in 2016-17’ said the Mint: “The nominal GDP, or gross domestic product at market prices, is expected to grow at 9.5% against 11.75% assumed in the 2017-18 budget presented last year. This may make it difficult for the government to achieve the fiscal deficit target of 3.2% of GDP in a fiscally tight year.”
‘India Sees FY18 GDP Growth At 6.5%’ observed Bloomberg Quint: “Growth in gross value added terms, which strips out the impact of indirect taxes and subsidies, is pegged at 6.1 this year, versus a revised 6.6 percent last fiscal. Both GDP and GVA growth were marginally below expectations. A Bloomberg poll had pegged GDP growth at 6.7 percent. The RBI had forecast GVA growth at 6.7 percent at the time of its last policy review in December.”
‘India’s FY18 GDP growth estimated at 6.5%, says CSO data’ said Zee Business: “Real GVA, i.e, GVA at basic constant prices (2011-12) is anticipated to increase from Rs 111.85 lakh crore in 2016-17 to Rs 118.71 lakh crore in 2017-18. Anticipated growth of real GVA at basic prices in 2017-18 is 6.1 percent as against 6.6 percent in 2016-17.”
So great is the power of the School of GDP and of its regents, who are as priests of the Sect of GDP Growth, that the meaninglessness of GDP is a subject practically invisible in India today. Just as it has no meaning at all to the woman in my photograph above, so too GDP has no meaning for all, including the 2.7% (or thereabouts) who pay income tax.
This tweet shows us the scale of the problem. An article by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (a club of powerful globalists) is posted on the website of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ! The head of the ruling BJP’s information unit broadcasts it.
India’s National Accounts Statistics presents every quarter and annually, estimates of the size of the country’s GDP, of the rate of GDP growth, of the size of ‘gross value added’, to which GDP is bound in ways as complicated as they are misleading. There are wages, interests, salaries, profits, factor costs, net indirect taxes, product taxes, product subsidies, market prices, industry-wise estimates and producer prices to juggle.
For the most part, these are prices and costs alone, upon which various kinds of taxes are levied and whose materials and processes may qualify for subsidies. All these are added and deducted, or deducted and added, and finally totalled show a GVA which then leads to a GDP. The prices are arbitrary and speculative, as all prices are, the arbitrariness and speculative nature being attributed to something called market demand, itself a creation of policy and advertising – policy to choke choices and advertising to spur greed. On this putrid basis does the School of GDP stand.
The GDP and GDP-growth frenzy in India spares not a minute for a questioning of its fundamental ideas, which in certain quarters had begun to shown as hollow and destructive in the early 1970s, when the effects of the material and consumption boom in Europe, North American (USA and Canada) and some of the OECD countries after the end of the Second World War became visible as environmental degradation.
Over 30 years later, sections of those societies inhabit and practice what are called ‘steady state’ economics, ‘transition’ economics (that is, transition to low energy, low consumption, recycling and sharing based ways of collective living) and ‘de-growth’, which is a scaling down of economic production and consumption done equitably and to ensure that a society (or groups of settlement and their industries) strictly observe the bio-physical limits of their environment (pollution and pollutants, land, water, biodiversity, etc).
But the Central Statistics Office of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, is ignorant of such critical thinking. It is just as ignorant of the many efforts at swadeshi living, production, cultivation (agro-ecological) and education (informal learning environments instead of reformatted syllabi lifted wholsesale from countries whose exploitative economies installed globalisation as the default economics mode) that are visible all over India today. The CSO and MoSPI are not entirely to blame for this abysmal blindness, because the Ministry of Finance (like every other major line ministry of the Government of India, and like every state government) has decided to be even more blind.
To read the insensate paragraphs disgorged every quarter from the CSO (and Ministry of Finance, likewise the Niti Aayog, the chambers of commerce and industry, the many economy and trade think-tanks) is to find evidence to pile upon earlier evidence that here is an administration of a very large, extremely populous country which cares not the slightest about the indubitably strong correlations between ‘GDP growth’ and more forms of environmental damage than have been reckoned.
The GDP-GVA-growth fantasy cares not the slightest about energy over-use and CO2 emissions, about the effects of widespread atmospheric and chemical pollution on the health of the 185 million rural households and 88 million urban households (my estimates for 2018) of India, and about the terrible stresses that the urban households in more than 4,000 towns, district headquarters and metros are subject to as a result of their lives – through mobile phone apps, banks, the food industry, the automobile industry and the building industry – being micro-regulated so that an additional thousandth of a per cent of GDP growth can be squeezed out of them.
The GDP asura has brought ruin to India’s environment, cities, farms, households, forests, rivers, coasts and hills. Let 2018 be the year we burn the monster once and for all.
The plot to cripple the Bharatiya kamadhenu
To focus your attention on the terrible fate that threatens our indigenous breeds of cow and buffalo, here are the connections, which are now more than 45 years old, between the period that led to Operation Flood (or ‘white revolution’ as it was also called) and with it the campaign to increase the supply of milk in India by steadily weakening the desi gou, and the situation we have today of a National Dairy Support Project, which continues to do the same.
A little history. At the end of the 1960s, surplus dairy products from what was then the European Community were sent to India through the World Food Programme (WFP). This dairy produce was sold to cooperative and state dairies in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai, ‘reconstituted’ with local milk and sold to city consumers. This project was known as Flood I and was to end in 1975. It continued until 1981.
From the Chapter on Agriculture and Food Management (page 181), the Economic Survey 2016-17, Volume 2, uses language like “terminal value of assets, in this case the no-longer-productive livestock” and warns about social (that is, the Hindu cultural view) policies which “drive this terminal value precipitously down” affecting “private returns… in a manner that could make livestock farming less proftable”. The Finance Ministry and India’s macro-economic planners see our gou and buffalo only as milk producers or sources of meat, and calculate only what it costs to keep them producing or profitable.
Three years earlier in 1978 Flood II had begun. This extended Flood I to the whole country, and was financed by a loan from the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) and direct aid from the European Community. Flood II was to conclude in 1985 but was extended until 1987.
In the late 1980s this nearly twenty-year long programme was considered to have:
* improved the living conditions of 10 million families of milk producers by adding 13 million litres of milk per day to the cooperative dairy industry’s processing capacity
* created a milk distribution network covering 142 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants
* created the infrastructure needed to carry out programmes to promote dairy production, such as artificial insemination, vaccine production, the manufacture of compound foodstuffs
* raised daily milk consumption to 180 grams per inhabitant “to obtain a nutritionally balanced diet”
Now to our recent past. On 15 March 2012 the World Bank approved a National Dairy Support Project (project number P107648) for India. The project began on 22 June 2012, was reviewed in April 2015, had an original closing date of 31 December 2017 which has been revised now to 29 November 2019. It has three components which are: ‘Productivity Enhancement’ (US$193.80 million), ‘Milk Collection and Bulking’ (US$77.30 million) and ‘Project Management and Learning’ (US$22.00 million).
The World Bank’s description of project number P107648 is:
“The National Dairy Support Project (NDSP) which supports India’s National Dairy Plan, Phase I (NDP-I), aims to cover about 40,000 villages across 18 participating dairying states with investments in Productivity Enhancement (e.g., high genetic merit bulls, disease-free semen production, doorstep artificial insemination services, ration balancing program, fodder development) and Milk Collection and Bulking (e.g., village-level infrastructure such as bulk milk cooling units).
Brazenly ‘free market’-oriented in its advice and advocacy, Niti Aayog has mentioned only breeding in its section on livestock, in the policy paper on ‘Doubling Farmers’ Income: Rationale, Strategy, Prospects and Action Plan’, March 2017. The usual complaint of low milk productivity, growth in milk output needed, better feed and nutrition for animals are found in this think-tank’s MNC-directed view.
The description continues: “At its inception, this eight-year project was expected to directly benefit about 1.7 million rural milk producing households through its interventions, a large majority of whom are small holder producers with six animals or less.
“Cumulatively till date, 158 End Implementing Agencies – EIAs (e.g., milk unions, milk federations, dairy producer companies and livestock development boards) are implementing 364 sub-projects across 18 states with a total outlay of Rs. 1904 Crores (USD 292 million), out of which Rs. 318 Crores (USD 48.9 million) are contributed by the EIAs. These participating states account for nearly 95 per cent of India’s milk production, over 87 per cent of the breedable cattle and buffalo population and 98 per cent of the country’s fodder resources. To date, over 2.7 million milk producers have benefited from overall NDP interventions in breed improvement, animal nutrition and bulk milk collection.”
For each of the years 2013 to 2016, the National Dairy Support Project has required the import of “frozen in-vivo produced” and “pure bred” Holstein, Friesian and Jersey bulls. This is to continue for 2017 to 2019 so that the 100 million doses “target” of the artificial insemination programme is reached.
This is the brief outline and background of the government-managed, World Bank-directed programme to weaken generation after generation of our desi gou through a machiavellian plan of cross-breeding them with foreign cattle (Holstein, Friesian and Jersey), so that the gou-based economy of Bharat will be destroyed and replaced by a dairy products industry designed and controlled by multinationals that include Nestlé, Danone, Lactalis, FrieslandCampina, Fonterra, Dean Foods, Unilever, Kraft Heinz, Schreiber Foods and 11 others. It will also be partly controlled by Amul, Mother Dairy, Kwality, Hatsun Agro, Heritage Foods, VRS Foods, Anik Industries, Parag Milk Foods, Creamline Dairy Products and others who greedily want their share of what is calculated to be a market sector worth more than Rs 80,000 crore. There is no desi gou, nor the reverence to kamadhenu. There are only products, consumers and an arsenal of sickening technology and breeding programmes that if not stopped now will result in the remaining 39 desi gou breeds losing their desi qualities.
It is this that lies behind the Rashtriya Gokul Mission that was launched in December 2014, the National Programme for Bovine Breeding, the National Mission on Bovine Productivity that was launched in November 2016 (which includes the Pashu Sanjivni for identification of animals in milk using UID, embryo transfer technology labs with IVF facilities, the e-pashu haat portal, the National Bovine Genomic Centre for Indigenous Breeds), the National Kamdhenu Breeding Centres (one in Andhra Pradesh and another in Madhya Pradesh), and the three subordinate organisations: Central Cattle Breeding Farms, Central Herd Registration Scheme, Central Frozen Semen Production and Training Institute.
This is the horrifying extent of what has been done since 2012, the methods for which were introduced over 45 years ago, and which are now frighteningly augmented by the unchecked and unregulated animal genomics.
Villages in their splendid talukas
As part of my continuing and long term study on the relation between populations both rural and urban, the land base upon which they depend for the growing of food, and the socio-economic changes taking place in our districts, I have begin an examination of how households are distributed in administrative regions, that is, districts and talukas. This graphed plot describes one kind of finding. (Click here for a full size plot that lets you explore each data point.)
States are administratively divided into districts (earlier the concept of a ‘division’, which was a group of districts, was more common – the ‘division’ is still used, for revenue determination but also for home affairs) and these are divided into talukas. How many talukas does the typical district have? Some have four, others as many as 12. There are talukas whose households are entirely rural as there is not a single census town, let alone a municipal council, within its precincts. The taluka contains villages and these can be numerous. Some talukas may have 50-60 villages whereas others may have 200 and more.
It is always an interesting matter to ponder. How did households in a small sub-region – at the confluence of a stream and a river for example or at the edge of a plain and at the margins of hills – become villages and what determined the distribution of such hamlets in a very local habitat? The factors were always environmental and there was often a strong cultural reason, such as proximity to a sacred site, a mandir or a venerated shrine, historical sites (such as those mentioned in the Ramayana and documented in detail thereafter in numerous local commentaries).
From the set of districts analysed so far a few guiding figures have emerged. The number of rural households in a taluka varies from 7,200 to 96,800; the number of villages in a taluka varies from 28 to 338; the average number of households in a village is 330; there is one urban household for every 3 rural households.
Where the agro-ecological conditions are favourable, there is to be found a denser gathering of villages and these will have larger populations. This can easily be understood. It is less clear how the toil of the households accommodated in a large number of villages are required to maintain, in many ways, urban households which are now clustered in a town or two of the same taluka. This dependence is what a study of not only the rural-urban population, but also how it is distributed within agro-ecological boundaries, can help uncover. The graphed plot included here is one step towards that understanding.
Sizing up rural and urban settlements in Maharashtra
The districts of Jalna, Osmanabad, Hingoli, Satara, Ratnagiri, Washim, Nandurbar, Gondiya, Gadchiroli and Sindhudurg in Maharashtra all enjoy a rural built-up to urban built-up ratio of more than 2 (where the built-up area of the district’s rural settlements are at least twice the area of its urban settlements).
In the chart, the light green bars show a district’s rural built-up area, the light maroon its urban built-up area. The number associated with the name of the district is the ratio between the two kinds of built-up area.
Such a comparison helps us understand the dependency of the two kinds of populations in a district, rural and urban, upon the natural resources (as classified by land types). The chart shows us that some districts (see Jalgaon, Sholapur, Satara and Ratnagiri) have total rural built-up areas of 150 square kilometres and above. But whereas the urban built-up areas of Jalgaon and Sholapur are more than 100 sq km each this is not so for the other two districts.
Districts may have similar ratios between rural and urban built-up areas – see Ahmednagar, Akola and Dhule – but whereas the built-up areas of both types are more than 100 sq km in Ahmednagar they are smaller in the other two districts. There are only three districts for which the total rural built-up area is less than 50 sq km: Parbhani, Hingoli ad Washim.
There are 15 districts in which there is at least 1.5 sq km of rural built-up area for 1 sq km of urban built-up and this indicates that in these districts the base of agricultural and allied activities is still strong and therefore needs continuous encouragement. There are 7 districts for which this ratio is between 1.5 and 1 and these therefore must be watched for signs of quickening urbanisation which will need to be curbed in the interests of sustainability and indeed of the provision of food.
I have taken the data from the land use and land change information for 2011-12 collected by the Resourcesat-2 satellite with land classification and calculation carried out by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Department of Space, under the Natural Resources Census Project of the National Natural Resources Repository Programme. It is available through Bhuvan, the geo-platform of ISRO.
Urban areas are non-linear built-up areas covered by impervious structures adjacent to or connected by streets. This class includes residential areas, mixed built-up, recreational places, public and private utilities, communications, commercial areas, reclaimed areas, vegetated areas within urban zones, transportation infrastructure, industrial areas and their dumps, and ash/cooling ponds. Rural built-up areas are the lands used for human settlement in which the majority of the population is involved in agriculture. These are built-up areas, small in size, mainly associated with agriculture and allied sectors and non-commercial activities. They can be seen in clusters both non-contiguous and scattered.
The last 4 districts – Nagpur, Nashik, Thane and Pune – have their urban built-up bars coloured differently to indicate that their scales are beyond, and very much above, the 150 sq km of the chart. Mumbai city and suburban is omitted entirely.
The relative speeds of urban inflation
How to read this chart. The light grey bars are the current month’s CPI-IW (consumer price index for industrial workers) for each urban centre plotted to the left scale (the current data is for 2016 May). The green square marker is the reading for the difference between the current month’s CPI and the average of the previous six months. The yellow square marker is the reading for the difference between the current month’s CPI and the average of the previous 12 months. And the red square marker is the reading for the difference between the current month’s CPI and the average of the year previous to 12 months ago. These are all plotted to the right scale, and their vertical separation helps tell us whether overall consumer inflation is rapid (or not) compared with other cities. You will find accompanying this chart a table. This associates a city code, such as ST21, used for the charting process, with a city: ST21 the city is Shimla in Himachal Pradesh. Data only (not method or treatment) are from Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Belgaum and Mysore in Karnataka with 12 points. Warangal, Telengana with 12 points. Panaji, Goa with 12 points. Munger, Bihar with 11 points. Bangalore, Karnataka with 11 points. Salem, Coimbatore and Coonoor in Tamil Nadu with 10 points. Rourkela, Odisha with 10 points. Sholapur, Maharashtra with 10 points. Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh with 10 points.
Charting process codes used for urban centres and the cities they correspond with.
These are not Swachch Bharat rankings nor are they ‘ease of doing business’ scores. They are, for each urban centre, the number of points its consumer price index (CPI) increased in May 2016 over the average for the previous quarter. The data is collected and distributed by the Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment. This is one of the ways in which the monthly CPI numbers for industrial workers (a somewhat dated term which suited an era when the public sector dominated the economy, but which still relates to urban households) can usefully indicate the acceleration in inflation of household staples.
The picture changes when the CPIs of urban centres for a month (the latest available being 2016 May) are compared with their own averages for the last six months, the last 12 months or the year which ended 12 months ago. When the frame of comparison is the average of the previous 12 months, I find that in 30 of the 78 centres for which a CPI-IW is calculated, the increase is 10 points or more. Warangal in Telengana, Kollam in Kerala and Mysore in Karnataka are 16 points above their previous 12 month average while Munger in Bihar, Rajkot in Gujarat and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand are 15 points above.
This is the relativist picture that perhaps makes the most illuminating use of a monthly index, whatever its faults and shortcomings. The well-appointed chart that I have drawn helps show why the speeds and acceleration, between a current measure and an earlier set of measures, are more important to consider than the absolute numbers themselves. This is an experimental way to help visualise a subject that is alas rather dry but of great import for every single household. I will update this as new CPI numbers are released by the Labour Bureau every month.
Bharat at 1.3 billion
In July 2016, the population of Bharat will cross one billion three hundred million. In 1937, the population of what was then British India was 300 million. Seventy-nine years later, there are a billion more.
This numerical landmark is based on the 2011 Census of India total population (which was 1.21 billion) and the growth rate of the population, or what demographers refer to as the rate of natural increase.
For a country of the size of Bharat – and for that matter, even for the states with large populations – any ‘total’ or ‘final’ is no more than an estimate that is subject to variability. The population count of any administrative unit (such as a state or district) can be estimated with census data modified by health data (birth rate, death rate) and by seasonal changes (migration).
There are several extenuating reasons why this exercise needs to be done automatically at least every month by the states and the central government ministries and departments. Perhaps the 1.3 billion landmark can goad them into doing so. The carrying capacities of our river basins, the watersheds, the valleys and floodplains, the ghats both Western and Eastern, the plateaus and grasslands, the deltas and the hill tracts cannot be ignored.
Equations that govern these are simpler than they are typically made out to be by science. There is only so much water, land, forest, and vegetation (or biomass) available to support us. The 2001 Census found that the population of Bharat had crossed a thousand million. At that point at least the consequences of a steadily growing population (182 million had been added since 1991, and 345 million – which was the population at the time of Independence – since 1981) needed to have become the subject of monthly reflection and policy.
With Bharat at 1.3 billion being barely three months away, the new state population counts (in the chart) show why such monthly reflection and policy is vital, indeed a matter of urgency. We now have ten states whose population is more than 50 million – the comparisons of the sizes of our state populations with those of various countries around the world are now well-known.
West Bengal in May 2016 has a population of 97.7 million and will cross 100 million by the same time in 2017. In May 2016 the population of Bihar is 111.4 million, Maharashtra is 120.3 million and Uttar Pradesh is 214 million. These are gigantic numbers and it is because they are gigantic that they seem to escape planning notice – but the population of these four states is very much more than the population of the European Union of 28 countries.
The table shows the current estimated population (2016 May) for the age bands (from Census 2011 and adjusted for simple growth), which helps us understand the populations of infants, children, adolescents, youth, early adults, mature adults, the middle-aged and the elderly. About 257 million are under nine years old (19%), about 271 million are between 10 and 19 years old (20%) and about 111 million (8%) are 60 years old and older.
These are aspects that require as much study, comprehension and policy measures as we demand on subjects such as governance, corruption, the price of food, the extent of our forests, the supply of water, and the adequacy of monthly incomes. At the 1.3 billion mark, Bharat’s population is starkly in the foreground.
Big cities, large appetites, fewer farmers
By March or April 2016 the populations of several of our smaller Class I cities (those whose populations are 100,000 and more) will pass certain marks. These marks mean little by themselves, but ought to be used by city administrations (municipal council and civic services departments) to judge for themselves how essentials are being provided for and used: food, water, sanitation, electricity, waste.
There are now 152 towns in the National Urban Information System, which is – if I have understood this national urban administration maze – under the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (which goes by the utterly unfriendly acronym of UIDSSMT). This is described as: “a component of JNNURM. The Mission aims to encourage reforms and fast track urban infrastructure and services delivery, community participation, accountability of ULBs/parastatal agency towards citizens.”
As you can see, the Ministry of Urban Development likes dreadful acronyms, and likes keywords such as ‘component’, ‘reform’, ‘fast track’, ‘services’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘PPP’ and anything else that sounds large, technical and expensive.
The JNNURM which got all this going in the first place (the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission) turned ten years old in December 2015. Its ideas, assumptions and performance ought to have come under careful scrutiny at least on this occasion. It didn’t because there’s so much else to be distracted by when it comes to smartening up cities and towns in India these days.
The JNNURM favoured 65 cities for what it called a “higher level of resources and management attention” and with typical confusion also said these 65 ‘mission cities’ are under the Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG) programme. But, as I have written about here earlier, there are many towns in India whose populations are growing quickly, because of which ‘services’, ‘infrastructure’ and more modest levels of ‘resources and management attention’ all become programmes (with complicated balance sheets, naturally).
And so we have the Smart Cities Mission and the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) – I’m still working out how it fits together with everything else going on in the Ministry of Urban Development.
Here’s what the officialese says: “Smart Cities Mission is based on the idea of developing the entire urban eco-system on the principles of complete and integrated planning.” Leaving aside the question of whether non-Smart cities (and towns) are destined to remain unsmart and unacronymed, 100 cities have been selected to become smart.
Nor is that all. There is an Urban Rejuvenation Mission (which goes by the, erm, unprepossessing acronym of URM) which the ministry says it is finalising which seems to have very much to do with infrastructure development, but on a much larger canvas of 500 cities, “to be implemented over a period of 10 years from 2014-15 to 2023-24”.
Nowhere in this plethora of programmes and schemes and grand visions have I seen anything that remotely refers to foodstuffs that city populations need, every day, week, month and year.
And so to return to March or April 2016 when the populations of several of our smaller Class I cities (those whose populations are 100,000 and more) will pass certain marks. Using the 2001-2011 decadal growth rates for the urban centres, and adjusting for lower growth rates for the most recent three years (to account for factors such as fewer work opportunities in these centres, rising urban costs of survival compared with the slower increase in wages for informal work, and the benefits of the MGNREGA, here is a summary that shows the sort of change we continue to see in towns and cities.
Chhindwara and Guna in Madhya Pradesh, Nabadwip in West Bengal, Bhusawal in Maharashtra, and Modinagar and Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh will all have reached or crossed the mark of 200,000 residents. Likewise, Vadakara in Kerala, Ganganagar in Rajasthan, Haldwani in Uttarakhand, and Karur, Udhagamandalam and (all three in Tamil Nadu) will all have reached or crossed the mark of 250,000 residents. And moreover Farrukhabad-Fatehgarh in Uttar Pradesh, Satna in Madhya Pradesh, Jalna in Maharashtra and Navsari in Gujarat will all have reached or crossed the mark of 300,000 residents.
What is the impact of these increases in the populations of these cities? Using the recommended dietary allowance (prescribed by the National Institute of Nutrition) this is what the population increases mean for the provision of food essentials. Every day in 2016, Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh will need 92 tons of cereals, 8 tons of pulses and 20 tons of vegetables. Compared with the city’s needs in 2001 (when the previous census was done) Sitapur will consume 23 tons more of cereals, 2 tons more of pulses and 5 tons more of vegetables – every day.
In the same way, every day in 2016 Navsari in Gujarat will need 137 tons of cereals, 12 tons of pulses and 29 tons of vegetables. Compared with the city’s needs in 2001 Navsari will consume 31 tons more of cereals, 3 tons more of pulses and 7 tons more of vegetables – every day. Then there is Hosur in Tamil Nadu which every day in 2016 will need 115 tons of cereals, 10 tons of pulses and 25 tons of vegetables. Compared with the city’s needs in 2001 Hosur will consume 77 tons more of cereals, 7 tons more of pulses and 17 tons more of vegetables – every day.
This is an indication of the food dimension of the population change that we are seeing – of ever greater quantities of the bare essentials being needed, but fewer agriculturists and cultivators – that is, fewer farming households growing these and other food essentials in their fields – remaining to support nearby (and distant) urban populations.
These equations are simple enough to understand for the Smart city lot, the JNNURM technocrats and the engineers and financiers running the PPP treadmills. Why then hasn’t daily food budgets of our towns and cities made it to the top of the urban renewal charts of India?
Shaktichakra, the wheel of energies 