Where the big rivers are

The biggest river deltas are flat and that’s why the cities which occupy some of the have expanded so much, so quickly. The last 50 years has seen a big population expansion on deltas – cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh. Twelve megacities on deltas have expanded in terms of populations from 62 million in 1975 to 153 million in 2010, an expansion that is not slowing.

‘Global Change’, which is the magazine of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP), has brought out a special number of deltas and the risks borne by city administrations that occupy deltas. The IGBP, in its own words, “coordinates international research on global-scale and regional-scale interactions between the Earth’s biological, chemical and physical processes, and their interactions with human systems”.

Flooding both from rivers and the sea is increasing. There was a storm surge in the Irrawaddy in Myanmar in 2008 when 200,000 people were killed. But people are still living on the delta. However, the estimate is that two million people have left the Indus delta in Pakistan to move to higher ground as salt water has invaded the farming zone. [A larger version of the graphic above can be found here (1.4MB). The original IGBP infographic which I have modified can be found here – caution, big file (12.7MB)].

The Po delta (near Venice in Italy) subsided largely because methane was being pumped from underground. They stopped the pumping and the delta is sinking 10 times less fast than it was. But the land surface is not actually rising, and it’s still below sea level. The Chao Phraya River Delta (along which Bangkok is built) subsided because of groundwater being pumped out to supply Thailand’s thirsty capital. So they introduced a tax on water use, such as showers. In Shanghai, the local government slowed the rate of pumping water out of the ground.

However, when countries set up commissions to look at the natural environment, it’s often water/river courses they’re concerned about, like with the Rhine. There is not so much focus on the delta. Where countries have tried geo-engineering, they can scarcely bear the prohibitive costs. It is estimated that China in the 15th to 18th centuries used 12-15% of its historical GDP in attempts to control the Yellow River from spilling out into its floodplain, but these gigantic efforts were never really successful.

The Great Nepal-India-Pakistan Spinal Beetle Rally

That's Kanak with a cuppa 'chai' behind the wheel of his powder blue 1973 VW Beetle

Kanak Dixit of Kathmandu will embark on a fundraising drive across South Asia – from Kathmandu to Lucknow to Delhi to Amritsar to Lahore to Rawalpindi to Peshawar, to raise funds for spinal injury centres in all three countries at the rate of USD 100 per mile for a journey of 1,100 miles (EUR 45 per kilometre, GBP 62 per mile, INR 3,089/km) or 1,760 kilometres.

Here’s what his campaign flyer says:

The Journey: Our 1973 model VW Beetle will start its journey from Kathmandu Valley on 4 of November 2011. Coming down to the plains, it will enter Uttar Pradesh and reach Lucknow. Westward to Delhi, it will arrive at the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre (ISIC). Travelling along the Grand Trunk Road, it will pass Amritsar and the Wagah-Atari border to Lahore and its Mayo Hospital. We will then take the M-1 motorway to Rawalpindi / Islamabad, and end our journey at the Paraplegic Centre in Hayatabad Peshawar on 16 November 2011.

Why the Adventure: The sudden rise of the number of patients over the last year has forced us to raise our service from 39 beds to 51. This has led to an unexpected financial crunch. The rally will help meet the challenge of growth even as we make plans for sustainability.

One More Reason: The Spinal Beetle Rally is also an effort to raise awareness of spinal injury prevention, rescue, care and rehabilitation in the Subcontinent. In this effort, the Spinal Centre is assisted by ISIC-Delhi and the Paraplegic Centre-Peshawar.

The Rallyists: The Spinal Beetle will be driven by journalist and civil rights activist Kanak Mani Dixit, Founder Chairman of the Spinal Centre Nepal. He will be accompanied by Shanta Dixit, board member and educationist. It was Kanak’s trekking accident a decade ago, resulting in a broken spine, which led to the establishment of the Spinal Centre.

That's the route plan for the Spinal Beetle, parathas and chicken tikka not included.

Done it Before, Twice: Kanak has driven the Spinal Beetle Kathmandu-Dhaka, in 2002 and 2005, to generous response.

Support and Sponsorship: The Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in Delhi is 540 miles from Kathmandu. The final destination, the Paraplegic Centre in Peshawar is 1100 miles away. Supporters are asked to sponsor the drive at the rate of USD 100 per mile, or any fraction or multiple of that amount. Payment details are given below. If you find the payment procedure cumbersome, please just pledge and we will revert.

About the Spinal Centre Nepal: Inaugurated by Sir Edmund Hillary [the mountaineer, think ‘Everest’] on April 2002, the Spinal Centre will be ten years old in 2012. Originally catering to patients from traditional accidents such as fall from trees and cliff-sides, spinal injury victims of ‘modern-day accidents’ related to construction, rock mining and traffic events are more and more filling our wards. We offer physiotherapy, occupational therapy, nursing, medical care, counselling and home rehabilitation. We are also involved in prevention. The Spinal Centre is run by the non-profit Spinal Injury Sangha Nepal.

Jump in and donate your MILE! Send us the equivalent of USD 100, or more or less!

Three ways to support the Spinal Beetle Rally:
1. Donate online on our webpage www.sirc.org.np : through our project partner Livability Ireland at the Biggive – free of charge!
2. Contact us: (if you want to hand over the money personally) kanakd@himalmag@.com or spinalinju@wlink.com.np
3. Transfer money to our account: Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre, Current Account No. 00501030250429 – Nepal Investment Bank Ltd., Banepa Branch, Kavre, Nepal (Swift Code: NIBL NPKT)

More information: Contact Ms Esha Thapa, Director, Spinal Centre Nepal | Tel: +977 11 660847/48 | spinalinju@wlink.com.np | eshthapa@hotmail.com

Hasina 1, Yunus 0, Grameen retired hurt

Dhaka’s politicians have won this round. Muhammad Yunus has been forced to quit the institution he founded. Yunus and the Bank will appeal to the Supreme Court in Bangladesh, according to David Roodman at CGDev.

Just as the Board and the Bangladesh Bank (the central bank) have been adversaries in court, they could fight over the choice of successor. Each side has a veto. Nine of the 12 board members are still elected Grameen members. However they are chosen and however independent they are from Yunus (or not) they can expected to remain allies of the old guard.

Perhaps that will play in favor of Dipal Barua, Roodman has said. He is the deputy managing director who was let go last year. He is both a longtime insider, born in the village where it all started and working with Yunus since the beginning, and now a dissident outsider. If the government moved quickly to nominate someone like him, that would be very reassuring about its long-term intentions with regard to preserving the Bank.

An alternative scenario is a protracted struggle over succession. Uncertainty can be deadly for a financial institution. There has been plenty of reporting on the struggle. There is the New Age’s close, factual reporting;David Bergman, of New Age, in Himal has written about  Hasina vs Yunus (Roodman has reminded us that Bergman’s father-in-law is one of Yunus’s lawyers. The New York Times reported ‘ Microcredit Pioneer Ousted, Head of Bangladeshi Bank Says‘ and the Economist reported ‘You’re Fired, No I’m Not’. The Financial Times carried an editorial Dhaka’s spiteful attack on Yunus while Asif Nazrul in the Daily Star commented ‘When the target is Prof Yunus‘. Philanthrocapitalism said ‘ Leave Yunus Alone’ and NextBillion carried a personal statement from Yunus. Finally here is the Statement by Grameen Bank.

Earlier, the BBC and AFP reported that Muhammad Yunus was fired from the Grameen Bank. At a Monday meeting, the board failed to support a motion to fire Yunus.

Asia’s epic urban sagas

Courtesy UN-Habitat: Waterside shanties in the Philippines.

National governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation. These governments are therefore commissioning a welter of studies and reports, from within and without, to show their citizens why more cities and towns are a good thing (jobs and citizen services, they say) and why mobilising a great deal of money to build infrastructure for these settlements is a good thing (more jobs, more ‘development’).

The cleverer authorities are linking South Asia’s rising urban trendline to a variety of socio-economic goods, such as product and monetary innovation, such as cities being the wellsprings of social entrepreneurship, such as greater tax receipts which will help accumulate funds for social sector spending on the poor and marginalised. For companies and banks that deal with the building of big infrastructure, its engineering, its operation and its financing, this is a persistent swell of good news, and this group is doing everything it can to sustain the urbanisation wave.

[You can find my full essay at Energy Bulletin]

The raw numbers are on the side of the powerful urban-centric cabal. Among the world’s cities ranked by average population growth rate per year (in per cent) for 2006-2020, there are 37 South Asian cities (Afghanistan 1, Bangladesh 3, India 25, Pakistan 8) and 8 in China in the top 100. In the next 100, there are 20 cities in China and 11 in India. Asia’s two biggest countries have between them 64 of the top 200 cities that are projected, by the global group of city mayors, to grow the fastest in the next decade. This extraordinary prognosis for the two most populous countries – both of which have become economic powers – has enormous implications for global energy, food and resource flows.

When China and India buy material (as they have been doing, with China’s headstart over the rest of the BRIC/BASIC group placing it in a league of resource acquisition by itself), entire populations of supplier countries will face the consequences. Moreover, much of the material the two countries will commandeer will be directed towards their cities. China’s urban population is already 45% of its total population, while India’s is 30% and set to grow faster than it has at any period until now. There are combined numbers so large in the cities of China and India that the implications of the consumption by this grouping alone have become too profound to internalise for planners and administrators. Amongst the 300 most populous cities in the world, 97 are in China and these 97 are home to 243.98 million people (2010 estimate); 26 are in India and these 26 are home to 90.38 million people (2010 estimate).

In the state of Goa, western India, new residential blocks loom over shrinking fields. The produce from such fields once fed the capital city of Panaji, which now imports food 130 kilometres from the neighbouring state of Karnataka

What do we know about India’s food consumption patterns? Let’s look at some numbers to illustrate this. India’s most admirable National Sample Survey Organisation has just begun releasing summary data from its 2007-08 survey of household consumption (the earlier such ’round’, as it is called, pertained to the 2004-05 period). In rural India, average monthly per capita cereal consumption was around 10.3 kg for the poorest 10% of the population. (The survey distributes both rural and urban populations by ten ‘deciles’ – bands of 10% – which correspond to level of consumption expenditure.) It was between 11 and 12 kg for each of the next six decile classes, and was above 12 kg for the top three decile groups.

This means that for rural India, there is a strong positive correlation between ability to spend on food and quantum of consumption of cereals – the greater the household income, they more it is able to spend on staple foodgrain. In urban India, per capita cereal consumption increased from under 9.5 kg to about 10 kg per month over the first four decile classes but then showed a tendency to fall slightly rather than to rise in parallel with further increases in total expenditure.

This indicates the fulfilment of staple foodgrain needs and that expenditure on food thereafter is on cereal substitutes, processed food or eating out (what the surveys call ‘purchased cooked meals’), and fruit. Average cereal consumption per person per month was 11.7 kg in rural India and 9.7 in urban India. From this it would appear that the average urban person’s monthly cereal intake was about 2 kg less (a difference of 67 gm per day) than that of the average rural person. But it needs to be factored in that in urban areas the cereal content of processed foods and eating out (‘purchased cooked meals’) gets left out in the estimation of cereal consumption, which is why the difference in cereal consumption between the two may be less than it appears.

The FAO food price index plotted from 2000 to early 2010

India’s urban national average of per capita daily cereal consumption is 9.7 kg. At this average, we are able to gauge the cereal supply needs of cities with populations of over a million. Using population estimates for 2010 (from the City Mayors website database) we find:

Pimpri-Chinchwad (Maharashtra) with a metro population of 1.515 million consumes 483 tons of cereals a day
Nagpur (Maharashtra) with a metro population of 2.42 million consumes 772 tons of cereals a day
Varanasi (Bihar) with a metro population of 3.15 million consumes 1,005 tons of cereals a day
Ludhiana (Punjab) with a metro population of 4.40 million consumes 1,403 tons of cereals a day
Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) with a metro population of 6.29 million consumes 2,006 tons of cereals a day
Kolkata (West Bengal) with a metro population of 15.42 million consumes 4,918 tons of cereals a day
Mumbai (Maharashtra) with a metro population of 21.2 million consumes 6,761 tons of cereals a day

These daily consumption demands mean movement, by road and rail, of food produce citywards at prodigious scales. In Navi Mumbai, an urban satellite of Mumbai which is a fair-sized city by itself today, lies the food wholesale depot that marshals and redirects the daily procession of trucks, lorries, light commercial vehicles and pick-ups bringing food for Mumbai’s millions. The number of vehicular movements in this yard are reckoned to be over 2,000 every day which indicates the vast physical reach of the giant city’s food gathering subsystem, one that holds in its thrall a region that could comfortably encompass western Europe.