Why USAID should quit India and look after America

The ‘Feeding America’ county-level food insecurity map. the social situation confronting the great mass of the population, young and old, is characterised by economic insecurity, depressed wages and unprecedented levels of debt.

There is no practical, moral, democratic and defensible reason any longer for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to continue to have anything to do in India (or anywhere else) relating to food or hunger or poverty.

This is because the growth of food insecurity in the USA has paralleled the rise in the numbers of those who are poor, by any measure whether in terms of income, lack of access to a balanced diet, lack of access to essential social sector services. According to studies that have been released from late 2013 onwards, the number of households in the USA that live on less than US$2 per day more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. Moreover, there are now nearly 3 million children who live in households that earn less than $2 per day.

It is absurd and deeply cynical for the government of Barack Obama, the White House, the US State Department, and a host of top-ranking thinktanks to continue to claim that Indo-American ties require USAID and USDA to continue propagating agricultural models and advocating technology-centric solutions in India to solve our problems of poverty and hunger. India must halt all activity with these two agencies and advise them bluntly to turn inwards – for by their own charters that is where they are needed.

The latest evidence comes from Feeding America, which is the national network of food banks in the USA. It has just released its annual report on local food insecurity which shows that one in six Americans – including one in five children – did not have enough to eat at some point in 2012. The report found that there are dozens of counties where more than a third of children do not get enough to eat. The incidence of hunger has grown dramatically. The percentage of households that are “food insecure” rose from 11.1% in 2007 to 16% in 2012.

According to separate data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), food insecurity is more widespread in the USA than in any other major developed country, with the rate of food insecurity in the US nearly twice that of the European Union average, which is by itself worrying for what purport to be the so-called ‘advanced’ economies (whereas India is ’emerging’).

That we have a situation wherein USAID and USDA (“from the American people”, is the sanctimonious tagline attached to USAID interference, when the American people do not know what injustice is being done to other people in their name, and when they are being robbed of food so that American foreign policy goals are fulfilled) continue to set aid agendas in South Asia while a fifth of American children are hungry is an international social disaster fostered by the current economic system and its political defenders.

In the USA both Democratic and Republican administrations (there is no real difference) have become adept at starving anti-poverty programmes, but have taken that expertise to new levels under Obama. The US Congress and the White House have overseen two successive food stamp cuts in just six months: first in November 2013, when benefits were slashed US$36 per month for a family of four, and again in January 2014, when benefits were cut by an average of US$90 per month for nearly a million households.

Even when the US Census had signalled the new levels of impoverishment reached by the average household, some US$4.1 billion was cut from the food stamps, or SNAP, programme citing “waste, fraud and abuse”. It is significant to note here that exactly the same kind of language has been used in India to call for the curtailing and eventual dismantling of our Public Distribution System (PDS). In cutting about US$90 a month in benefits for 500,000 households – more than a week’s worth of assistance for a typical American family in need – they now encroached on the US$1.50 per person per meal equation (around Rs 90, which may buy two meagre vegetarian thalis in an Indian city).

The government of the USA has done this at a time when, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), it spent in 2013 US$640 billion which amounted to 36% of the entire world’s total military expenditure. Still unsatisfied by such heinous perversion, the American White House and Congress discontinued unemployment benefits for some three million people (and their two million dependent children), but continued to stall the prosecution of the financial criminals responsible for the 2008 crash.

The concentration of wealth at one social pole is coupled with disastrous social conditions at the other. A generation of young people in the USA has been thrust into poverty and joblessness – almost 16% of young people aged 25 to 34 have incomes below the national poverty line. In comparison, 10% of people in the same age group were in poverty in 2000. The median income of young households is $8,000 less than it was in 2000, in real terms.

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India marches against Monsanto, hauls it back into court

The anti-GM and anti-Monsanto protest in Bangalore outside the Town Hall on 2013 October 15

This is an important week for the public movement in India against genetically-modified seed and food, and against the corporate control of agriculture. Just ahead of World Food Day 2013, the Coalition for GM Free India has held public protests, marches and events in major cities – Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Thiruvananthapuram and Chennai.

“Today, India is also under threat from the hazardous products that Monsanto wants to profiteer from – these are products that affect the very food that we eat to survive and stay healthy and our environment. These are products that have the potential to jeopardise future generations too,” said the Coalition at the protest meetings and marches.

These actions have come when, in a very significant ruling by the High Court of Karnataka, a petition to dispose criminal prosecution of the Monsanto subsidiary in India, representatives of an agricultural university and a partner company, has been dismissed.

Mahyco-Monsanto, the Indian seed company, the University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad (which is in the state of Karnataka), and Monsanto collaborating partners Sathguru Consultants were accused by the National Biodiversity Authority and the Karnataka State Biodiversity Board of committing serious criminal acts of biopiracy in promoting B.t. Brinjal, India’s first food GMO.

The Bangalore-based Environment Support Group (ESG) had said to the court that the entire process by which the product had been developed violated the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, and “constituted an outrageous act of biopiracy of India’s endemic brinjal (eggplant) varieties”.

To substantiate this charge, the ESG produced evidence that all the endemic varieties of brinjal that had been accessed by the University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad and Monsanto-Mahyco, with technical support from Sathguru Consultants and USAID, and the act of inserting the B.t. gene (a proprietary product of Monsanto), were undertaken without any consent of local Biodiversity Management Committees, the State Biodiversity Board and the National Biodiversity Authority.

As the Coalition for GM Free India has pointed out repeatedly, Monsanto’s misdeeds in India and its growing threat to food security and the right to food cultivation and consumption choices are considerable:
* Mahyco-Monsanto used its Bt cotton seed monopoly to set exorbitant prices. The Andhra Pradesh government had to use the MRTP (Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices) Commission, which observed that Monsanto-Mahyco was using unfair trade practices in India, while asking the company to reduce the royalty/sub-licensing fee being charged in India.
* Monsanto-Mahyco did not hesitate to sue governments in India on issues related to compensation for loss-incurring farmers or price-regulation.
* After the advent of Bt cotton, Monsanto entered into licensing agreements with most seed companies in India so that out of 22.5 million acres of GM cotton, 21 million acres is planted with its seed, Bollgard. Today it controls nearly 93% of the market share of cotton seeds in India, with little choice left to farmers.
* Monsanto is on the Board of the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, under which bio-safety regime for GM crops was sought to be weakened.
* Monsanto entered into agreements with several states (Rajasthan, Orissa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir) under which the states spend hundreds of crore rupees of public funds every year to purchase hybrid maize seeds from them. Such agreements were found to have no scientific or funding rationale to support them. Appraisals have shown these to be risky for farmers. However, the corporation has found huge, ready markets supported by taxpayers’ funds!
* Monsanto is pushing the sales of its herbicide glyphosate which is known to cause reproductive problems. Approval for its herbicide-tolerant GM crops would skyrocket the use of this hazardous chemical in our fields.

The action in court and on the streets of major cities must be recognised by the central and state governments in order to pursue the criminal prosecution against biopiracy in B.t. brinjal. This is critical, said the ESG, because it is for the “first time that India has sought to implement the provisions of the Biodiversity Act tackling biopiracy, and thus the effort constitutes a major precedent to secure India’s bio-resources, associated traditional knowledge and biodiversity for the benefit of present and future generations”.

A food and agri trojan horse for South Asia

Keep your research questions away from our diets and our street food.

What happens when the formation of a “multi-country multi-institutional research programme consortium” is announced, the aim being to aid nutrition in South Asia? In my view, what happens is the beginning of a carefully guided construction of evidence, in some form, that will aid – not nutrition, but – the further industrialisation of crop staple cultivation, its transformation into processed food, and its delivery to urban consumers through retail food oligopolies.

Am I right or wrong? Time will tell, and as this is designed to be a six-year long programme, I think we will see early evidence by end-2013. The programme’s full name is curious as it is revealing – ‘Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)’. Is the mix of agriculture in South Asia currently unable to provide nutrition? If so what has changed from say 50 years ago? What does ‘leveraging’ mean and who will move the levers? To what end? As I see it, the programme’s name advertises its provenance, and this is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

In the view of the CGIAR and its constituent research institutes, agriculture’s most important task “is to provide food of sufficient quantity and quality to feed and nourish the world’s population sustainably so that all people can lead healthy, productive lives”. According to the CGIAR (and its donors, and its powerful collaborators and patrons, more of which below) achieving this goal “will require closer collaboration across the sectors of agriculture, nutrition, and health, which have long operated in separate spheres with little recognition of how their actions affect each other”.

This view is insidious and its logic is cunning – the CGIAR and its patrons use the climate change problem, they use food insecurity as a totem, and use food price volatility as justification for what they present as solutions. Until the rise of industrial agriculture and chemical fertiliser and the mechanisation of everything from field preparation to remote sensing, agriculture and nutrition and health existed at the core of the holistic existence of agrarian societies.

Vegetables, fresh and local and simple, more sensible by far than ‘incentivised’ ‘interventions’.

Because the CGIAR imprint is so visible, it becomes immediately clear when we look at the members of this consortium, for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is there. But not leading. The leading institution is the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) of India, and who better – for the CGIAR and its determined patrons – than to have as a helmsman in this spinerette of policy than the man who partnered Norman Borlaug all those years ago in the Punjab? Ah yes, in the shaping of modern agriculture contemporary history does provide inspiration, and I will tell you why in a moment more.

The excuse presented for LANSA to be brought to life is an unremarkable one, it is not original and has been used and abused for all sorts of schemes and programmes ever since India’s days of ‘garibi hatao‘, the 1960s mobilisation cry that was also an election slogan. “Despite rapid economic growth in South Asia, its rates of child undernutrition remain the highest in the world, with nearly half of children stunted or underweight,” complained the LANSA flyer, and added, “progress to reduce these rates is extremely slow. Ironically, most people in the region make their living from farming, which researchers say, offers great potential for improving nutrition”.

Great potential yes, but improving nutrition? We shall see. The programme (according to the scanty literature available, in concert, on all the partners’ websites) “will first examine existing agriculture policies and activities, looking at India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan” (why are Sri Lanka and Nepal excluded? I have a theory, and will comment in a follow-up post). “It will then propose new initiatives to link agriculture and nutrition in the region, working closely with key decision-makers to ensure the research meets their needs.” Read that again – to ensure the research meets their needs! What happened to the children you were so concerned about, dearies? “The goal is to promote cooperation throughout the region, given the trans-border nature of many of the region’s food- and nutrition-related issues”. Yes we share rice and wheat growing ecologies, but what trans-border cooperation does this vastly ambitious consortium have in its collective mind? That too, I think, we shall see soon enough.

I have named two of the members of this group, and the others are: the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC, Bangladesh), the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR, Pakistan), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, UK), and the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH, UK). Let’s take the last first. This is the philanthropic part of the Lever that we find today, far more omnisciently, via Unilever, for whom processed food is a large and growing part of its businesses. The IDS is at first glance an odd member of the group, but it has worked with the centres from both Bangladesh and Pakistan, and moreover, carries some weight with the government of Britain, whose chestfuls of pound sterling are fuelling the whole enterprise. Policy-making connections apart, this does seem to me to be mercenary of IDS, but perhaps that is the new nature of development research outfits, and neither vintage nor experience now provides insulation from the temptations of the infernal market.

What have they said they will attempt? The minimalist pamphlet mentions three “core research questions” and these are: 1. How can agriculture be provided with an enabling environment in which to leverage nutrition? 2. How can agriculture and agri-food chains be incentivised to be more pro-nutrition? 3. How can more pro-nutrition agricultural interventions be designed and implemented?

I find these very worrying. What is meant by “enabling environment”? Does it mean the same as “reform” and “austerity” for example? Are they intending to tamper with India’s mid-day meals programme from which many millions of schoolchildren benefit – and who currently (most of them every schoolday at least) eat fresh cooked meals instead of packaged, processed, biofortified, micronutriented cardboard? That second core research question reads like MBA gobbledygook to me, but coming from this famously wise group, becomes all the more worrying – “agri-food chains” and “incentivised” and “pro-nutrition”? Who will do the incentivising and at what public cost – isn’t that a fair research question too? And the third one has “pro-nutrition” again, this time combined with “interventions” – by who? Tesco and Walmart?

It is troubling that hovering behind all this trendy goal-setting and consortium building is the hungry shadow of the CGIAR and its powerful patrons. It has striven mightily to place the agriculture, nutrition, and health combination on the development agenda (formally with the IFPRI ‘2020’ conference in 2011) and including the CGIAR Research Program 4 (insiders call it CRP4). But there are the close links that are far more alarming – to USAID’s Feed the Future, to the World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture machinations and to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its championing of agri-biotech. These, in our era, are designed as the heavy machinery that supports foreign and trade policy in the international sphere. With such connections LANSA, I fear and suspect, is a new food and agriculture policy trojan horse being readied for South Asia.

Agriculture, nutrition, health: the new global focus begins

I am attending the “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” conference under way in New Delhi. Organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), this is a sprawling conference with over 900 international participants from all three sectors.

What’s it all about? “Agriculture is much more than just producing food and other products. It is linked to people’s well-being in many ways, and it has the potential to do much more to improve their nutrition and reduce their health risks. But to accomplish this, we need to re-imagine agriculture,” said Shenggen Fan, director general of IFPRI.

The gathering is meant to examine ways in which agriculture can enhance the health and nutritional status of poor people in developing countries. To work toward this goal, said IFPRI, they have brought experts together (I’m civil society, and there are very few NGOs/CBOs here) from all three sectors “to take stock of current knowledge, share information and best practices, and build consensus on the actions most needed to move forward”.

Here’s the IFPRI rationale. Agricultural scientists have traditionally focused on developing more productive crops and livestock and on reducing their susceptibility to disease. IFPRI and the conference sponsors (list below) say that by incorporating nutrition as a goal, researchers and breeders could provide farmers with a wide range of healthier products. For example, breeding crops with higher levels of micronutrients like vitamin A and iron can potentially reduce death and disease, especially among women and children.

“Increasing crop productivity overall is not enough. A new paradigm for agricultural development is needed, so that agricultural growth leads also to improved nutrition and health,” said Fan. The CGIAR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and the conference sponsors say that improvements in other factors such as land distribution, women’s status, rural infrastructure, and health status, can have a positive effect on nutrition, the paper contends. “Complementary investments in rural roads, nutrition programs, and other targeted interventions can make a huge impact.”

IFPRI's agriculture, nutrition and health logo

The development community needs to be conscious of the entire “value chain” – which is a central concept running through the discussions and presentations here. This is defined as including production, storage, transportation, marketing, and consumption, “as all of these have implications for health and nutrition”. Moreover, “after harvest, there are opportunities for improving health and nutrition, from better storage and transport to stronger nutritional marketing from retailers”.

The conference features heavyweights in the international agricultural research sector and representatives from the major UN agencies involved in these sectors. The proceedings were inaugurated by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. M S Swaminathan was there; John Kufuor (former president, Ghana), David Nabarro, UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition, and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, head of India’s Planning Commission were all there.

The conference concludes on 12 February and it will take me a few days to put my thoughts together on the themes and what they represent – the implications beyond the powerpoint world and what is driving this new focus.

The sponsors: Asian Development Bank; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Canadian International Development Agency; Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) (ACP-EU Cotonou Agreement); Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ); International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); Indian Economic Association; International Development Research Center, Canada / Le Centre de recherches pour le développement international (IDRC-CRDI); Irish Aid; PepsiCo; UK Department for International Development (DFID); United States Agency for International Development (USAID); Feed the Future Initiative; The World Bank.

The race to own India’s water

Water privatisation in India today comes in a wide range of what are called “solutions” by the votaries of public-private partnerships. There is water-related engineering and construction (such as earth-moving activities, alteration of river courses, artificial linking of rivers, building of dams and pipelines, etc), water and wastewater services, and water treatment, which affect both nature and communities. What remains outside the ambit of “solutions” – only until the victims can be persuaded to pay – are the impacts of the micro-scale geoengineering. Every impact damages people and the environment. Impacts can be categorised as: ecological (effects on natural ecosystems), social (related to rights of human beings and communities, health, cultural norms, attitudes, belief systems), economic (affecting livelihoods, well-being, and access to basic services) and even legal and institutional.

We are now seeing increasing pressure for private sector development in India – and the rest of Asia-Pacific. Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, an independent research unit concerned with water in India (they are based in Madhya Pradesh) says that this pressure is being mounted mainly by two influential international financial institutions: the World Bank and its regional partner, the Asian Development Bank. The World Bank gives funds, advice, training and technical assistance to governments and the private sector to implement privatisation.

Four entities allow the World Bank to undertake various functions. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) lends directly to the private sector and can even purchase equity in private companies. The Public Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) seeks to improve the quality of infrastructure through private participation. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) insures the private sector against commercial and political risk. The International Court for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) takes charge of disputes between investors and states. The Bank also has some other mechanisms that promote its activities in India including Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), Water and Sanitation for Urban Poor (WSUP), Water for Asian Cities (WAC) and others. The World Bank’s funding partners include the JBIC, AusAid, GTZ, USAID, DFID, UN-Habitat and the ADB.

More growth in large cities and towns, and urbanisation becoming a dominant land use pattern in more districts of India mean that the industrial, residential and municipal demands for water are rising quickly. India’s Central Pollution Control Board (an agency of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India) has released its ‘Observation on trend of Water Supply, Wastewater Generation in Cities and Towns’. Here are its main comments and highlights. I’ve left the language as it is – the import is what counts.

From The Economist's special report on water, 22 May 2010: Global water sources

“In decade of 90’s the growth of cities is observed is 33% while the growth of the decade in beginning of millennium is slowed down. Metropolitan cities is increased from 3 to 6 Nos. from 80’s to 2008. Class-I cities increase from 37 to 53 Nos. Class-II towns increase from 22 to 35. This trend indicates that all type of cities has grown in the decade of 90’s.”

Findings and Recommendations

• Since the cities are growing, the population is enhanced from 30 million to 48 million.
• Consequently water supply has been increased approximately twice in magnitude from 4,970 MLD (million litres per day) to 8,782 MLD.
• Sewage generation has risen 38%.
• Comparing the data of decades of 90’s to 2008, it is indicated that coastal cities and towns are not growing significantly.
• Treatment capacity of sewage in comparison to decade of 80’s to until now has increased almost double (93%).
• There are 498 Class-I Cities having population of 257 million and 410 Class-II Towns having population in India.
• Total water supply including all class-I cities and class-II town in India is 48,093.88 MLD.

The CPCB says that wastewater generation from all class I cities and class II towns is 38,254 MLD whereas the installed treatment capacity is 11,787 MLD, which means that no more than a maximum of 31% of total sewage generated can be treated. (If the question is ‘where does the rest go?’, the CPCB answers that too in its report.) “This evidently indicates ominous position of sewage treatment, which is the main source of pollution of rivers and lakes,” warns the CPCB report. “To improve the water quality of rivers and lakes, there is an urgent need to increase sewage treatment capacity and its optimum utilisation.”

The CPCB, which thankfully still has a reputation for straight talking, has advised India’s municipalities and town administrations to “set up a very thoughtful action plan to fill this gap in a minimum time frame”. The CPCB has suggested that large cities in which and from which the pollution problem is more severe, cities/towns whose effluents and sewage are polluting rivers and water bodies “will be required to be taken up on priority basis in first phase”. Why is the CPCB so insistent? Quite simply, it says there is an “urgency of preventing pollution of our water bodies and preserving our precious water resources”.

But even in the India of non-city and non-town landscapes, there are plans being hatched by the would-be water merchants. An indication of the mischief afoot comes from a report righteously entitled ‘Pro-Poor Financial Services for Rural Water: Linking the Water Sector to Rural Finance’. (If so many good deeds are ‘pro-poor’ nowadays how come the ranks of the do-gooders is only increasing?) Here is what it says: “Previous studies suggest that a considerable demand for pro-poor financial services for water in rural areas remains unmet. The number of potential microfinance clients in rural areas for investments in water supply is estimated to be 5.0 million in East/Southeast Asia, 10.3 million in South Asia, and 3.1 million in sub-Saharan Africa.” Those three numbers get to the heart of the matter.

The report continues: “Concerning microloans for rural sanitation, there are 17 million potential clients in East/ Southeast Asia, 30.8 million in South Asia, and 4.4 million in sub-Saharan Africa. In total, the potential demand for micro-loans in these three regions is estimated at US $ 1.5 billion in the case of rural water supply, and US $ 5 billion in the case of rural sanitation. The challenge is how to unlock this latent demand and turn it into an effective process.” The authors make no bones about it, the riches at the bottom of the water table is what they’re after. And who are the authors? The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (well-known as GTZ in Asia, and which I was surprised to learn is a GmbH), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and of course the World Bank.

Cover of The Economist's special report on water, 22 May 2010

The water merchants have their cheerleading squad in place in the form of a pliant media, and The Economist has obliged by bringing out one of its typically characterless ‘surveys’, as it likes to call them. It is a special report on water (the 22 May 2010 issue) and the subject is dealt with in the sycophantic manner that the weekly reserves for the captains of industry. “Yet even if it takes two litres of groundwater to produce a litre of bottled water, companies like CocaCola and PepsiCo are hardly significant users compared with farmers and even many industrial producers.” (Hear, hear, who needs those pesky farmers anyway?) “PepsiCo has nevertheless become the first big company to declare its support for the human right to water. For its part, CocaCola is one of a consortium of companies that in 2008 formed the 2030 Water Resources Group, which strives to deal with the issue of water scarcity. Last year it commissioned a consultancy, McKinsey, to produce a report on the economics of a range of solutions.” This transatlantic weekly, once upon a time British, puts in a word for big dams too: “Dams and reservoirs certainly need constant repairs and careful maintenance and do not always get them, usually because the necessary institutions are not in place.”

Who are operating as water merchants and what do they want? There are several North American / West European companies now in India: Ondeo-Degrement, Veolia Environnement, Saur of France, RWE/Thames Water of Germany and the UK Bechtel, Enron (US), Compagnie Generale des Eaux (CGE). Indian companies are going to either compete with them, or join them – Tata subsidiary Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company (JUSCO), IVRCL Infrastructures and Projects, Mahindra Infrastructure Ltd., IL&FS.

Surat, Gujarat: Fishing boats near the mouth of the Tapi river

The foreign multinationals are involved in several projects across the country. Compagnie Generale des Eaux (CGE) is operating urban water supply project in Hubli-Dharwad in Karnataka. Veolia is operating water and wastewater plant in Nagpur in Maharashtra and it has also formed a joint venture with JUSCO. Ondeo-Degremont has won contracts to construct water treatment plants in Mumbai and Chennai and it is also operating a wastewater treatment plant in Delhi. Thames Water was involved in a leak reduction project in Bangalore while United Utilities and Bechtel are partners in the Tiruppur project. JUSCO has projects in Jamshedpur, Bhopal, Kolkata and Adityapur. IVRCL is working on a wastewater treatment project in Alandur, desalination in Chennai and solid waste management in Tiruppur. IL&FS is involved in various projects in Haldia, Tiruppur, Vishakhapatnam and municipal waste processing facilities in Delhi and Ajmer, Rajasthan.

The CPCB has outlined the water, sewage and pollution tasks for cities, but its worries are going to be transformed into “a challenge to unlock latent demand” by the multilateral lending organisations on the one hand and the global water merchants (together with their Indian partners). Already deficit in terms of civic infrastructure and struggling with yawning gaps in the provision of healthcare and education, India’s towns and small cities will pass the burden of water profiteering on to those who can’t afford it. They leave the rural districts to earn a living in the cities, when their water rupee gets squeezed down to the last drop, where will they go then?