Posts Tagged ‘Goa’
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?

Nammalvar, a pioneer of organic India
G Nammalvar, one of the most extraordinary and outstanding pioneers of the organic farming movement in India, passed away on 2013 December 30 near Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu.
Dr Nammalvar was a founder member of the Organic Farming Association and later became its Advisor. He regularly attended meetings and conventions of the Association and large numbers of farmers always looked forward to learning the techniques of organic farming from him.
Claude Alvares, the Goa-based environmentalist and advocate of reform in the ideology of education, and who manages the Goa Foundation and the Other India Press, has said that Nammalvar “was a long-standing friend. We shared many meetings together. He was responsible for much of Tamil Nadu gradually shifting from chemicals to organic over the past 20 years”.
“He was not in the best of health in the past couple of years. He had two choices: either retire and look after his health which most people above the age of 60 are advised to do by their doctors; or carry on relentlessly with his task of promoting organic farming, fighting Monsanto and GM crops, and advising thousands of organic farmers on how they could improve their organic farming practice. We all know he chose the latter. He was happier that way.”
“Now we will find it difficult to find another person like him, to do the things he did. Even an army of his followers may not be adequate. So at this period in the history of the organic farming movement in India, we too have two options. Either we simply mourn the passing of a truly inspiring leader who lived only to promote sustainable, ecological agriculture, and leave it at that. Or we renew fulsomely our commitment to ecological agriculture, listening all the while to what Nammalvar wrote and spoke about it. There is little doubt about which option would make Nammalvar happiest.”
In the Organic Farming Sourcebook (Other India Press, 2009 revised and updated edition), Alvares had interviewed Nammalvar (you can read the full interview in this extract [pdf 835 KB]). Asked by Alvares, “what is the motivator for farmers to switch to organic farming?” Nammalvar had replied:
“There are three main reasons. One is, farmers have realised that land and the natural environment cannot be sustained through chemical farming. All food is poisoned through modern farming. Second, the farmer finds that the cost and quantum of inputs are increasing day by day and so the farmer cannot pay back the loan. The result is that the small and marginal farmers are losing their lands, becoming landless or they are allowing the land to go fallow and migrating to the river belts for seasonal operations and other states and countries doing menial jobs for survival.”
“Third, the export market is facing a problem because the importers of food materials from USA and other European countries find that our foods contain too much of pesticides and insist that these have to be removed and that food has to be organic. So the pressure for changing over is coming from the export market also. Finally, techniques have so improved that a farmer can switch over to organic farming without losing too much income. But most of all, the farmers are interested in organic farming because chemical farming has become uneconomical, grain yield has started declining. These are the prime reasons.”
Amongst many other questions, Alvares had also asked Nammalvar about other obstacles for farmers to convert to organic farming, and the reply was:
“On economic plane many farmers think more of money and not of their home needs and families. On cultural plane they are also tied up with family pressures. Also the women are not involved in this. Secondly, the companies which manufacture and distribute chemicals, hybrid seeds and machineries and so called scientists in the universities deter the farmers from switching over to organic farming. The universities act against organic farming by teaching about and encouraging modern hybrid varieties, genetically manipulated seeds and precision farming. That is a major problem. However the farmers’ movements are giving support co the organic farming movement.”
India’s clumsy, insecure environment ministry hides mountain ecology report
A 522-page report on the ecology of the Western Ghats and the threats to the biodiversity it harbours, a report that was months in the preparation and includes the outcomes of numerous consultations has been ‘released’ to the public by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests. Not as a well-signposted link on the ministry website, no, that is far too direct and discomfiting for the secretive and conniving bureaucrats and their craven staff.
First there is a pdf document summarily inviting comments from the public on the report, the official title of which is the ‘Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel’ chaired by professor Madhav Gadgil. This pdf contains a link, not to the report, but to the disclaimer! This second pdf file has the text of the ‘disclaimer’ which is: “The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report has not been formally accepted by the Ministry and that the report is still being analyzed and considered by the Ministry.” This second pdf then contains a link to the actual Report [pdf, 7.7mb]!
This is from the preface by Gadgil:
“The Western Ghats are naturally an important focus of sustainable development efforts. The protector of the Indian peninsula, the mother of the Godavari, Krishna, Netravathi, Kaveri, Kunthi, Vaigai and a myriad other rivers, Kalidasa likens the Western Ghats to a charming maiden; Agastyamalai is her head, Annamalai and Nilgiri the breasts, her hips the broad ranges of Kanara and Goa, her legs the northern Sahyadris. Once the lady was adorned by a sari of rich green hues; today her mantle lies in shreds and tatters. It has been torn asunder by the greed of the elite and gnawed at by the poor, striving to eke out a subsistence. This is a great tragedy, for this hill range is the backbone of the ecology and economy of south India.”
And this from the introduction:
“Mountains also create isolated habitats far away from other similar habitats, promoting local speciation. Hence distinct species of the flowering plant Rhododendron and the mountain tahr goat Hemitragus occur on the higher reaches of the Western Ghats and Himalayas, with a large gap in the distribution of these genera in between. Moreover, mountains, being less hospitable to human occupation, retain much larger areas under natural or semi-natural biological communities.”
“This is why the Western Ghats and the Eastern Himalayas are today the most significant repositories of India’s biodiversity. Amongst them, the Western Ghats scores over the Eastern Himalayas in harbouring a larger number of species restricted to India alone. Not only are the Western Ghats and Eastern Himalayas biological treasure troves, they are also two of the world’s biodiversity hot spots, a hot spot being a biodiversity-rich area that is also under a high degree of threat.”
Costing Goa’s mineral resource curse
In late August we had a discussion to talk about the ways in which the ‘suppressed entitlement’ of Goa’s population, in relation to mining profits, could be freed. This would have the effect of galvanising a sense of right and ownership using the admittedly troublesome monetary incentive route (we will find a way to deal with this).
The concentration of wealth is astonishing, even in a region that is part of a country whose state Gini coefficients for income are well over 0.45 (over 0.30 is considered to be potentially socially destabilising). Goa’s top six iron ore mining families together with India’s largest private sector iron ore exporter have amassed immense wealth. Based on the derived industry profit for 2009-10, the share per resident family is Rs 3.19 lakh (not including profits from illegal ore sale, not subtracting for the ‘producer’s share of risk and managerial input’).
Based on time-series profits for the years 2000-01 to 2009-10 and average per ton prices we can ‘entitle’ the 360,000 resident families to their ‘withheld shares’ as follows: Rs 2.80 lakh in 2008-09, and working backwards Rs 2.50 lakh, Rs 2.15 lakh, Rs 1.80 lakh, Rs 1.45 lakh, Rs 1.10 lakh, Rs 76,000, Rs 40,000 and Rs 28,000. This totals close to Rs 16.5 lakh due per family for a decade of mineral exploitation. That’s one aspect, to place in perspective the stratospheric super-profits of the main mining families (companies). The other is to work towards a ‘true cost’ accounting of the extraction.

Rice is still planted and harvested in the coastal talukas, but fields such as these are threatened by urbanisation
The startling per family ‘entitlement’ also raises the question of how they have been used by the state of Goa. The indications from the contribution of mining and quarrying (the basic accounting head) in the Goa state accounts is that this has contributed between 6% and 4% of state domestic product. We may raise this contribution by 2% to include mineral extraction activities not covered directly by this head. Even so, where is the gross capital formation rate at the state level to show how this wealth has been used? Where is the rise in the net savings rate to show how this wealth has been retained? These are serious questions for the state government to answer.
A ‘true cost’ accounting of the extraction will help us achieve two things:
1. It will help fix the liability of the state administration towards the costs of ecosystem loss and degradation caused by mineral extraction.
2. It will similarly ‘spread the liability’ on a per family basis so that an economic disincentive is created at the household level for such an activity (mining) if households shared both profit and liability.
How are the populations of the 11 talukas (populations in the note below) to benefit from their share of ‘entitlements’ and ‘liabilities’ of the export profits and environmental burden of iron ore mining? To what extent must the state administration bear the liability and underwrite the costs of mitigation for all of Goa’s affected (directly and indirectly) families? How can participatory shares and fund instruments be created that embody these concepts, who will regulate them, how will they be counter-guaranteed? These are the community economics questions that will face us when we make such calculations.
India’s food price inflation in high gear
There has been no shortage since November of news reports and analyses about the food inflation. The 19% annual rise in fact masks widespread individual urban centres’ price shocks and individual food item trends. I have tried to unpack the year-on-year ‘national’ food inflation number using data from the Ministry Of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution – Department Of Consumer Affairs (Price Monitoring Cell). My guess is that this data is an under-estimate but is useful for spotting trends.
I collected prices for the 36 cities tracked by the PM Cell, monthly from 2007 December. Based on a small basket of staples (rice, wheat, atta, tur dal, sugar, gud, tea, milk, potato, onion, salt) a crude index shows that in 33 out of 36 cities, the 24 month (07 Dec to 09 Dec) rise in prices of items in this basket is more than 24%, and that in 23 cities it is more than 50%.
About price increases in rural settlements I can find no organised information at all, although direct experience in western Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa tells me that a staples basket can cost up to 2-3% more than in urban areas. (Agmarknet collects and maintains detailed mandi prices for farm produce but there is no comparable effort for rural retail food staples.)
The National Sample Survey 61st Round (2004 July-2005 June) on ‘Household Consumer Expenditure in India’ put down the finding that out of every rupee that the average rural Indian spent on household consumption, 55 paise was spent on food and mainly:
18 paise was spent on cereals
8 paise on milk & milk products
6 paise on vegetables
5 paise on sugar, salt & spices
5 paise on beverages, refreshments, processed food, purchased cooked meals, etc
Of the non-food expenditure 10 paise was spent on fuel for cooking and lighting.
I have tried to maintain this weightage in my calculation, but it is really no more than a crude reckoning because I haven’t been able to spend the time to clean up the publicly available data – querying the website database of Dacnet (Dept of Agriculture and Cooperation) or FCAMin returns report formats that are terribly messy, even though they contain useful data. (Although I think there may be differences even between these for the same foods and same date ranges.)
Based on what I have seen and heard on the field in Karnataka, Goa and western Maharashtra (and learnt about Gujarat and eastern UP from others) the available food basket seems to be shrinking (the so-called ‘coarse’ cereal group is conspicuously less), and where families have young and teenaged children there is pressure to buy processed and packaged snack foods (which is really a blight in our small rural markets). There are all sorts of oddities about the form that food takes in these markets – the price of a 50 gram pack of biscuits for example (Parle Glucose is the standard) has hardly moved in the last 3-4 years yet at the same point-of-purchase end, look at the way the prices of ground wheat have moved.
Then there’s fuel and transport to account for, more about which you’ll find here. This question needs much more work in 2010 to strengthen some of the reliable data we have with updates, and to try to build in what we see and hear and sense from conversations with those who live and work in all those tahsils and talukas and blocks and mandals. I feel very strongly that we are lacking in our data the presence and impact of the many linkages that connect and influence the rural farming/labour household. Many of the measures we have have served us well but I think need to be supplemented – how to integrate the lessons and findings from the comprehensive National Family Health Survey, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the many studies into the income-providing measures of NREGA.
Even though we worry about what the rural/urban poor household must spend on, the attraction to buy mobile phones amazes me. I have met young men who earn around Rs 4,000 a month but who have bought Samsung mobile phones costing Rs 5,000! Imagine spending more than a month’s income on a phone, I asked them, but they saw nothing worrying about their expenditure. Retailers who sell mobile phones used to keep the low cost and hardy Nokia phones which 3 years ago cost around Rs 1,700-1,800 (mine is still working), but not any longer, or they work at discouraging those who ask for the relatively cheaper phones. Much more than the hundred-dollar laptop we need the thousand-rupee mobile phone.
The image is of a chart I made for the project group I work with (part of the National Agricultural Innovation Project, it’s called Agropedia and you can read more about it here). This chart helps point to some patterns (you can download the hi-res image here). I’m curious for example about Gujarat, whose grain and commodity traders have a long and murky history of hoarding. The North-Eastern cities could be insulated to some extent from the regional transport subsidy (road and rail). Cities in the Deccan are relatively better off than North Indian cities. The big difference between Chandigarh and Mandi is puzzling.
In his hugely interesting paper, ‘India And The Great Divergence: Assessing The Efficiency Of Grain Markets In 18th and 19th Century India‘, Roman Studer (University of Oxford, Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, Number 68, November 2007) has written: “Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented. This is not to say that no grain was traded over longer distances, but the extent was very limited, as the prices from some 36 cities all over India still exhibited various characteristics of isolated markets.”
“First, annual price fluctuations were extremely high. Second, differences in price levels between markets were very pronounced and persisted until well into the nineteenth century. Third, apart from neighbouring villages or cities, price series from different markets did not show comovements at all.” Studer looked at century-old data, but we still have 36 cities to tell us about staple food retail prices! Also, the three characteristics he mentions can be seen today too.
Happy New Year!
Elements of durable design
Some designs need no improvement. The river ferries that ply on Goa’s rivers were put into service by the colonial Portuguese government in the early 1950s. Even though new bridges connect the many riparian communities, Goa’s citizens make heavy use of the flat-bottomed boats. This one is the latest addition to the hard-working fleet and was inaugurated a few days before I took this picture. More than two generations later, this vessel’s builders stayed faithful to the old blueprints. They did add another engine to this vessel to make it twin-screw. Their reason? In 2008 a fully-loaded ferry on this route (Betim-Panaji, across the river Mandovi) went adrift as its single engine failed, so this builds redundancy into a tried and tested inland water transport design.