The Sant Who Believes In Some Direct Action

Baba Seechewal now slams 

Pollution Control Board, says he 

will plug the polluting rivulet 

himself since govt doesn’t 

want to. Clearly, it’s a war cry

Sukhjit Kaur

JALANDHAR: At a time when Arundhati Roy is talking about Gandhians with Guns, Punjab is witnessing a clear revolt by a Sant who, tired of the unholy nexus of the powerful with the corporates, is not shy of calling the spade a bloody shovel. Further, he plans to do something about it and has served notice.

Green crusader and Punjab Pollution Control Board member, Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal, who commands a strong following of thousands of devotees, has been fighting to stop the flow of untreated waste into the Kala Sanghian drain by the district administration and pollution control authorities have done precious little except assure him repeatedly, set new deadlines and making a show of their respect for Baba Seechewal.

Now, Seechewal has made clear that he cares little for such shows of respect which mean little. Accompanied by panchayats and people from villages that have been suffering because of the polluted water, Seechewal landed at the site himself and announced that he will wait no more and his devotees will plug the rivulet themselves.

The drain that flows between Gazipur and Chamiara carries a massive 12.9 crore liters of untreated effluents from industry and municipal corporations at any given time. 

Seechewal minced no words in even slamming the Board of which he is a member, underlining that it is not always possible to co-op everyone with a conscience into the system and corrupt him suitably.

Seechewal said he and the villagers have persistently taken up the issue for two years, but authorities chose to put thousands of lives at risk. In the Malwa belt and in Rajasthan, natives drink this water for want of an alternative water  source.

“People living in the 80 and more villages along the banks of the drain, which courses Doaba and Malwa region and part of Rajasthan, have suffered increasing incidence of respiratory diseases, skin, kidney, hair disorders and cancer for over 15 years, but the government has failed to act against industrial units. Let the cities handle their effluents themselves. Villagers will not allow it to flow into their territory,” he said. “If they can’t treat the water they have no right to throw dirty water in a natural drain and it is clearly illegal,” Baba Seechewal said. 

Seechewal’s warnings earlier had brought matters to a head in February 2008 and he no more ready to rest with deadlines.

Earlier, March 31 was the deadline given by the officials to stop flow of a major chunk of untreated water in the drain, which was then extended to April 30 and later to May 31 but nothing has been done even though even June has come and gone.

Seechewal and his associates Baba Sukhwant Singh, Baba Daya Singh and other religious personalities put down the inaction to the government’s alleged covert understanding with the industry and the mineral water mafia.

Strangely, Deputy Commissioner Priyank Bharti claimed he was not aware of the matter, thus only proving the disconnect between the people and the authorities.

Punjab is committing suicide

Punjab Today editorial
from June 19-25, 2010 edition


On a day so important for Punjab because it was the anniversary of Operation Bluestar, the mass circulation Punjabi daily 'Ajit' published an editorial on environmental concerns. Though Dr Barjinder Singh Hamdard, who personally signed the editorial, did not explicitly say so, his choice of choosing to focus on the environment and poor health of Punjab's soil, water and air underlines some interlinkages that many simple minds miss. The reverse violence of Green Revolution that left in its wake unemployment, agri-stagnation, skewed development and poor social parametres formed a great component of the reasons behind the militancy years that Punjab suffered.
Within the next ten days, Dr Hamdard was back, editorially, penning yet another well argued missive on environment under the title "Sarkaran suchet hon" (Governments must stand aware). "The soil, that produces our food, has turned into poison....A sick mentality can only lead to a sick society," the editorial said.
On the same day, The Times of India carried a front page report titled "Parts of Malwa, Rajasthan drinking poison?" It revealed shocking discoveries by a German lab that had tested water samples from five villages near Fazilka. The intrepid reporter of The Times of India followed it up the next day with yet another mind-jolting report from Faridkot that revealed how even the milk that the kids are fed contains uranium traces, and doctors are now looking for solutions in camel milk.
Toxicity is all around us. It is in our food chain. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal's hometown Muktsar has registered 1,074 deaths due to cancer between 2001 and November 2009 while 668 others are on their deathbed. Reports say in Lambi alone, the home constituency of Badal, 211 residents lost their lives and 164 got afflicted with cancer in the last eight years. In Gidderbaha, the constituency of finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal, cancer cases are more a norm than exception.
These statistics are all from a health department survey report.
By the time scientists were fearing arsenic exposure, they are encountering uranium traces. Adults and children are suffering from cerebral palsy and mental retardation as a result.

When someone like Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal, himself a member of the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB), says that the Punjab government is drafting anti-pollution laws only on paper and not implementing, it is time to be scared.
When editors of mass circulation newspapers start hammering a point through signed editorials, and one after the other report shrieks about the slow suicide that Punjab is committing, there should be no reason why our people, our government, and our civil society should waste even a single day in trying to stem the tide. Deathly cyanide is flowing from factories from Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Phagwara into drinking water sources. Malwa is sick. Sewage and untreated industrial waste is flowing into the rivers we worship. It is akin to someone kicking the pooja thali as you say your prayers before your deity.
Piecemeal methods will not work anymore. We need to re-think our view of what is development. We need to return towards sustainable agriculture. We need to end the chemical, radiation and biological toxicity. We are committing highway theft and robbery on resources that legitimately belong to our future generations.
There are none so blind as those who won’t see. It is time we climbed atop rooftops and shouted our neighbours, our children, our government and ourselves into doing something about what we all know is killing us. We need to deal with this problem as we would have done with a highway robbery. You don’t wait to act when you know of a dacoit planning his next hit. Punjab’s air, soil and water deserve no less.

Metro for Ludhiana?

Oh! Come on. Re-consider


Krishdeep Khosla

The idea of development in Punjab seems to be evolving into necessarity a grand project. Much like the view about big dams in India, the politicians in Punjab think that the idea of capacity enhancement for existing facilities or income enhancement schemes for the very poor and poor ar not indicators of development but talk of metro, malls and airports is.
In this vein, we have been hearing for some time the ideas about a metro for a city like Ludhiana. So much so, that the Punjab Government has even signed an MoU for developing metro rail project in Ludhiana.
The venture is being counched as some sort of a landmark in Punjab's history and we are supposed to lap up the talk that it will herald us into an age of post-modern technology. As environmental activist Navdip Asija is fond of quipping, it is debatable whether it is going to be post-modern or post mortem technology.
The metro venture will onvolve huge environmental cost, and the land will come from either extremely densely populated urban areas or fertile agricultural lands. In either case, vulnerable sections of the population will be forced to be physical pushed to farther margins in our race towards development.
At a time when it goes without much gainsaying that Punjab's financial condition is not in great shape, one wonders about who will bear this burden of huge investment to the tune of Rs 3000 crore. On top of that, this figure is again an unrealistic estimation; it does not include the cost of rolling stock. "Large projects like the Metro, the viability gap funding tends to make huge demands on the state exchequer. After this decision the financial burden born by Punjab during militancy era would seem much smaller in comparison to this upcoming mounting debt burden on the State going to be imposed by our political leaders," Asija said.
Asija has pointed out that instead of building a rail based mass rapid transit system; bus rapid transit system can be a good option for a city like Ludhiana, Mohali, Amritsar. Without changing much of existing road infrastructure same can be accommodated and adopted. Bus based MRTS can cater 80% of the total ridership in comparison to the metro, whilst construction cost of  1km elevated metro line is almost 35 times higher than constructing a at grade dedicated bus lane. Other advantages are, bus provides you node to node better connectivity through open and closed system, whilst Metro Involved longer length of walking trips followed by vertical up and down movement to reach metro station. A City is just not a physical structure; it is a social str ucture. We need to address the role of each element and development shall be made by keeping into mind minimal impact on existing social and physical structure. Construction of metro will disturb the skyline of the city and the best example is Chaura Bazar flyover, which has almost spoiled the entire city structure of Ludhiana without changing much improvement in city's congestion situation. Another point of debate can be, metro is required to cater the future demand; but future demand can be very well addressed by developing a better master plan for the city, where people needs to travel lesser distance from workplace to home. Better planning can also results reduced congestion and pollution due to vehicles.
In Delhi alone, modal share in total motorized trips of through existing bus system is 60%. Punjab can learn the lesson from existing studies and areas where Metro has been implemented. Per kilometer Cost of Delhi Metro's Phase-I for the construction of three lines of 65 km in total length is 163 Crore. 10, 571crore, enough money to by 10 full-bodied Boeing 747s. At present metro ridership is near about 7.5 lakh passenger per day, which is not feeding the 1% of total Delhi's population. As per Delhi Metro Corporation estimations, number of originating passengers per day in the year 2011 for Phase I and Phase II corridors would be 26.17 lakhs. A total investment of 20847.92 crore on 213.7 km long rail network just to benefit 2% of the population is not a good idea. In terms of road accidents fatalities on Delhi's Road are increased by 8.6% between 2001 to 2005 period. Passengers using the Metro make up just about a fifth of the numbers projected initially. There is also the sobering experience of the 16 km Kolkata Metro, where ridership is limited to 10 per cent of capacity.
Delhi Metro data reveals that metro is a viable option where people travel corridor in one direction exceeds intra city demand 20,000 persons per hour. "I am sure, just to make metro viable, the Government won't let Ludhiana to reach at this level through wrong policies and planning. Population density of Ludhiana per Sq.kms is 804 persons in comparison to Delhi's population density 9,296 person per square kilometer. With the population density 11 times higher than of Ludhiana, if Delhi metro is not able to generate half of its estimated ridership, then I have doubt that how this metro project will be feasible in the case of circular city Ludhiana which is well connected with linear and radial roads," Asija posits.

Let's All Become Political

Because We All Would Love To Be Environmentalists

To be an environmentalist 

is to be political. To ask

about teacher-student ratio 

in government primary schools 

is to be political. To try and 

understand what genetically 

modified foods can do to our

future is to be political. To 

question our law makers about

big dams, about the need for
super-highways, about the malls
dotting our cities, about the SEZ’s
everywhere, is political. On this 

environment day, let's all resolve

to be political.

Being political is about being human. 

Rajneeti is not about a Bollywood film. 

It is about us.

Nischay Pal

PUNJAB NEEDS TO become relevant. Every Punjabi wishes for that. "But are we not relevant already," one may ask. The simple answer is, we were. At one time, we were the food grain providers extra ordinary. And on top of that, we are a border state. As long as South Asia remained an unstable zone, we were very relevant.

Academics, students joining a protest against BT BRINJAL at
Panjab University, Chandigarh

Now, with agriculture in stagnation and many other states catching up and becoming food grain providers to the national granary, Punjab is losing its prime relevance.
We are well on our way to become a super power, at least in the region we inhabit. With India and Pakistan no more hyphenated by the world, and certainly not by the United States, we can well forget a full scale war scenario in the near or even distant future.
So even that one aspect of life that made us seriously relevant is now fading away.
With just 13 MPs in the Lok Sabha in coalition times, and with three parties to share the numbers, Punjab is no more relevant even in the one House that matters.
That brings us face to face with a worrying reality: Punjab's intervention in the Indian national political scene is virtually missing.
Unfortunately, an impression seems to have been generated, more because of the force of circumstances than any serious application of mind, that an intervention is possible only through the arena of electoral politics. That leaves only the mainstream hankerers after party tickets as any serious interventionists.
It is time people in Punjab ponder seriously about our missing civil society. Is it not possible to remain relevant without spending scarce and precious resources in election campaigning?
A whole number of engaged institutions involved in the social and religious domain stay away from the elections, as do many bodies in the field of education, culture and intellectual exercises. This is a phenomena seen the world over. Why should Punjab's men of letters, academicians, activists, NGOs not prefer to avoid being dragged into the dirty cesspool of electoral politics?
Some will call it the right approach as our politicians have little use for men of intellect or those making any real contribution towards the community and society but it will be naive to think that such a deduction is absolutely right.
A community's political life is more nuanced and subtle than a simple rejection of the election process or a decision to stay away from it, at least proactively, and confine oneself to merely trudging to the polling booth and casting our votes.
Democracy is not merely about casting the vote. That is a reductionist view of democracy that the politicians have or love. Entrenched interests in Punjab have deliberately reduced the definition of democracy to a so-called gift to the people of an ability to vote every five years. Punjabis need to interpret the democratic notions more broadly and see the ways in which one can engage oneself with the democratic process.
We see in Punjab that the political parties often do not take a stand on issues that impact our lives but make much noise about certain other issues. This happens because we do not have engaged activists and a concerned media that asks the right questions.
For example, what is the Akali Dal's stand on Foreign Direct Investment caps in media sector? Or the Samajwadi Party's stand on the Sri Lanka question? What do we know about the Bahujan Samaj Party's stand on the Kashmir issue? Will Sardar Rattan Singh Ajnala please tell us his view on the big dams, since he has a vote in Parliament? And what is Navjot Singh Sidhu's view on Copenhagen's failures?
Parties at the state level think they can afford to simply stay mum and not have a view on most matters and they have coached their electorate in such ways that there is no pressure on them to spell out their policy.
But must that be the Punjabis' approach? Should we not question more sharply so that at least we force political parties to send better equipped men and women to Parliament who can draft laws and vote on them with some visible grey matter usage?
All we need to do is to make ourselves aware of the issues and then understand that  electoral politics is not the only way to make an intervention in politics. Of the many ways of making a meaningful change through politics, the electoral politics is only one. There are umpteen examples of how a meaningful change can be made in the realm of ideation and in pursuing policy matters. A movement on the political front may not necessarily come through the electoral arena. Our politicians, or at least most of them, are masters of the political electoral arena which has place only for the corrupted and the degenerate. We are all aware of the role of money, muscle and mafia in the elections, and the story remains the same not just in the Lok Sabha polls but also Assembly, municipal committees and even panchayat elections.
Let us look at the ways in which people have impacted the political debate in India without being sucked into the vortex of dirty electioneering. Look at the work of Aruna Roy, a Chennai-born self-less Indian political and social activist who quit the IAS in mid-70s and is known for her campaigns to better the lives of the rural poor and empowered millions in Rajasthan through successful enactment of Rajasthan Right to Information Act and is largely credited with the success of RTI Act across India. This Magsaysay Award winner has impacted the course of political debate in India more than anyone among us.
Consider Jean Drèze, a development economist of Belgian origin who along with Amartya Sen has extensively engaged with issues of rural poverty, famine, policy reforms etc and has empowered millions with his relentless work on an employment guarantee scheme in India which ensures work for the poor.
All those who are behind a scheme like the NREGA are people who have made a significant contribution towards saving hundreds of thousands of lives and are giving hope to millions. It is easy to sit back and blast NREGA if one if one is devoid of the notions of poverty but for those who know Indian politics, it should be clear that the RTI and NREGA are two center pieces of a work that has been pushed by people essentially outside the electoral arena.
Men like Rajendra Singh, the well known water conservationist from Alwar, Rajasthan who won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership for his pioneering work in water management and holy men like Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal and Sant Sewa Singh of Khadoor Sahib can impact the terms of political debate in Punjab more than the lip service being paid by the politicians to the falling ground water table and the state of our rivers.
Where are the civil society activists working to save Punjab? Had a political party been working single-mindedly to focus on the state of our government-run schools, it would have meant more for the people than the filibustering on umpteen issues. We hardly have a proactive NGO other than Seechewal's efforts or that of the Kheti Virasat Mission on the environment front.
Politics is changing, and also changing are the ways in which one is seen as political. For far too long we have remained stuck in a groove in which talking about certain issues is considered politics and rest be damned.
It is time that we became political, time that we understood that Rajinder Singh's ideas of saving and harvesting water, Seechewal's resistance to dumping industrial waste into rivers, all the talk about environment, Umendra Dutt's loud protests against Bt Brinjal and chemical fertilisers are not just about environment; they are hugely political interventions. These actions will be deciding our politics. Punjab's politicians are pushing the envelope on the neo-liberal urban centric model of development which is leaving out and aside the teeming millions. Across India, more than eight million people have been pushed out of agriculture and there is no record or study of where they went and what they are doing. In Punjab, apathy has replaced the feeling of ennui which replaced the feeling of guilt whenever the number of people who committed suicide is mentioned. Every 30 minutes in India, one farmer has been committing suicide since 1997 (that is, ever since the government started collecting data). That the data itself is highly conservative and deliberately understated is a separate story. In Punjab, one farmer commits suicide every day, as per the latest data being compiled by the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana.
Those who have been demanding land reforms, the farmers who know the best how to save the environment are at the receiving end. The corporate media in Punjab has remained completely silent after the day light murder of a tall farmer leader.
Has any political party made an issue of the fact that thousands seemed to have committed suicide at a time when Punjab revenue records, cited by the state government, showed merely 130 suicides? To be an environmentalist is to be political. To ask about teacher-student ratio in government primary schools is to be political. To try and understand what genetically modified foods can do to our future is to be political.
On this environment day, let's all resolve to be political.

(Readers can obtain old issue of PUNJAB TODAY  by writing to Editor-in-Chief, mentioning the issue number or the article. You can send queries/feedback/mail at punjabtoday@gmail.com. Cost of old issues varies, and availability is limited.)

MAKE BIG MONEY DO IT

Do you love the green cause?

Then call the capitalists for some help!

Sukhjit Kaur 


FOR THE FIRST time in human history, there is no excuse for mass poverty and deprivation. Neither the money nor the resources to reach out and help. Still, our planet is going downhill, ecologically. And our economy as a whole is in a crisis. It is time we connected the dots. Just like the world economy had moved into a war machinery groove during WWII, and found its way back to health, it is time to turn the entire economy into an environmental groove.
Big money will only come to our aid if there is profit in the venture we suggest. When we align everything to good environmental practices, big money will not be a hindrance but will be a help. Imagine re-aligning millions of houses with better environmental norms, imagine turning every building, venture, project, institution into a green one.
We could be standing on the cusp of a revolution. Everything will change. The very idea of how we plan our cities, what materials we use in designing our cars and houses, how we lay our roads, how we make oil rigs, how we treat our forests.
To the devout of the environment domain, this may sound like blasphemy, but it is time we dialled the capitalists for big money that we need for our planet, our environment.
True, there are links between big growth and environmental crisis, connections between the food and energy crises and the financial crisis, and links of all of these to the climate crisis, but therein also lye the ways forward.
We know better the horrors of the global economic system, and its corollary - the inequities of a system that condemns hundreds of millions of human beings to lives of brute survival. It is now time to underline the hypocrisies of those who benefit from that very state of affairs. Many of these will be part and parcel of the World Environment Day celebrations, and our success will be in understanding who the real passionate lovers of environment are, and who are the parasitic enemy.
The complexities of the recent financial meltdown and the interconnections between the global economic recession, environmental degradation, and food security issues are not exactly the stuff that those schooled in neo-liberalism want to hear or read. Neo-liberalism numbs the human senses. It will not inspire you to join a social movement, or be sad at any unjust action of the government, or itch to contribute to an effort to protect the natural world.
As we mark this World Environment Day, we must understand that "everything is connected to everything" but that must not make us complacent in identifying the priority connections to understand how they work together and what we can do to change them, because they definitely do need changing.
There is a crisis of mass poverty and of growing inequality within individual countries and between the rich and poor countries and also about the financial crisis that Wall Street and the public authorities refused to see coming because they were living in bubble-land. It began with the subprime affair in the United States but has spread inexorably like a lava flow in the US and elsewhere, threatening to plunge the global economy into a prolonged period of stagnation as severe as the Great Depression.

A grab of the article from the print
edition of Punjab Today
(Readers can obtain old issues of
Punjab Today by writing to
Editor-in-chief, Punjab Today.
Cost varies. Availability limited. All
rights reserved.) 

But it is the third most ominous of all crisis of climate change that is accelerating faster than most scientists, much less governments, thought possible, causing many to ask if we have not already entered the era of the runaway greenhouse effect.
No one seriously denies the numbers. The World Bank has already conceded that it had grossly underestimated-by about 400 million-the numbers of the very poor. Even then its figures stop at the year 2005, which means the recent upheavals in food and energy costs that have swelled the ranks of the impoverished are not counted.
What is shocking to understand is what may not be obvious to everyone: That the world is actually awash in money. Most of it is still in North America and Europe but the numbers of the seriously rich on other continents are catching up fast.
Those who have the money know very well how to keep it and, with their hired help, the battalions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists, they are busy salting away their profits in tax havens, finding loopholes and protected investments, lobbying fiercely in parliaments and ministries against regulations on banks and financial markets. Any talk about poverty is sure to lead us to its links with the financial crisis.

Just look at the few figures:
* Ten million people, according to a recent Merrill-Lynch World Wealth Report, together boast investable, liquid funds of more than $40 trillion? That's 40,000 billion or 40 followed by 12 zeroes.

* This wealth is above and beyond the value of their houses, cars, yachts, wine or art collections and so on and it is equivalent to about three times the GDP of either the United States or Europe.

* Assume that you have one billion dollars, which is the cut-off point for the latest Forbes magazine list of 1125 truly rich individuals in the world. If despite your billion you are such a dim-witted investor that you get only a five percent return on your fortune, you will still have to spend $137,000 every day of the year in sheer consumption or you will automatically become richer.

* The UN World Institute for Development Economic Research, WIDER, estimates total world household assets at about $125 trillion. This is about three times world GDP and unsurprisingly, the top two percent of the world captures more than half of that wealth.
* The top 10 percent hold 85 percent, while the bottom half of humanity is obliged to stumble along with barely 1 percent.

* All you need to be classed in the top half of humanity is a meagre $2200 in total assets-that includes your house, your land or items like your car or your refrigerator-hardly a princely sum.

* If all household assets were divided equally-impossible and probably not even desirable to achieve-everyone on earth could have a share of $26,000. So again, money as such isn't the problem.

To those who often get swayed by the neo-liberals assurances that the progress being made in the world will one day end poverty, sorry to shatter even that assurance. Rising tides will not lift all boats. Neo-liberals do admit that inequalities have grown, but still argue that the poor are better off than they were. It seems almost rude to remind them in turn that falling tides have the opposite effect, they swamp and strand the more fragile boats and that is where the tide of the financial crisis is now taking us.
Indians are so fond of quoting China all the time. And often worry that it should be "Cheeny Kum, India Zayada". But at what cost is China growing? China has now overtaken the United States in greenhouse gas emissions and frighteningly has hardly even begun its transition to the automobile society. China also requires at least 10 times as much energy as the more mature industrial societies to produce a unit of GDP.
Growth certainly isn't the answer ecologically, but even economically it fails the test because the benefits accrue almost entirely to the top of society.
It is entirely possible to push tens of millions of poor people off the ledge where they had just gained a foothold and send them back into the depths of poverty. Food riots, most of them urban, in at least thirty different countries have revealed another scary new phenomenon: the worldwide food crisis. Until now, food shortages and famines tended to be local, but so many societies have accepted neo-liberal trade mantras and become dependent on world markets for their basic daily staples that today a sudden spurt in prices is felt from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh.
The Bank-Fund-EC policies have made a tiny fraction of international society rich beyond imagining, they have kept many dependent countries dependent in a new, less visible sort of colonial relationship and they have made so-called free trade, privatisation and unfettered capitalism the rule in countries that previously wanted little or nothing to do with them.
Furthermore, they have imposed their policies with relatively little organised protest because their ideology has been expertly produced, packaged and delivered.
The frantically innovating financial institutions, the large institutions that know perfectly well that they are "too big to fail", are leading to mass murders that don't seem visible. Now that the bailouts are a norm, it is socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street, in which the profits are grabbed by the usual suspects and the losses, tremendous losses, are billed to taxpayers.

WHAT, THEN, IS THE 
SOLUTION?

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim walks past an image of the
 world during a meeting in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Friday,
June 5, 2009.  Slim took part in a panel discussion on
environmental issues as part of World Environment Day.
We need the kind of money his ilk has!

It is clear that had it been possible for "people like us", for "we, the people" to set things right, they would have done so. It is time to concede that it is not possible. Time has passed for telling people to change their behaviour and their lightbulbs. What is required is a much bigger thing: Change the entire economy into a climate friendly economy.
The panacea, if there is one, lies in scaling up the environment industry. We must have the courage to challenge not just our political leadership but the entire neo-liberal, unregulated, privatised, capitalist economic system in place in order to provoke and promote a quantitative and qualitative leap in the scale of environmental action.
We know that many hearts would break at such a thought, that individual and local solutions are tragically insufficient.
But we must seize the opportunity. And we must see the current financial crisis as a great opportunity. We must show that the ecological transformation and environmental practices can earn money, create jobs, run economy, and benefit business. Politicians must be convinced that these policies will not just work but also be highly popular with their constituencies.
People, business and government must come together in a new incarnation of the Keynesian war economy strategy. Push for massive investment in energy conversion, eco-friendly industry, new materials, efficient public transport; the green construction industry and so on.
The scenario can be sold to the elite. A huge ecological conversion is a job for a high-tech, high-skills, high-productivity, high-employment society. It would be supported by the entire population because it would mean not just a better, cleaner, healthier, more climate-friendly environment, but also full employment, better wages, and new skills, as well as a humanitarian purpose and an ethical justification.
A worldwide carbon tax and building of broad citizen alliances should be part of the new steps to generate funds that could be invested in reversing crisis which has reached a critical stage.
Debt cancellation procedures should be linked with reforestation, soil conservation, water management and making public transport more energy-efficient. Economic packages to banks must carry an ecological criterion.

Punjab’s Cancer Trains and Chemical Addiction

Do not ever tell anyone in Bathinda that
people need to be aware about environmental
issues. That awareness comes easy in Punjab’s
Malwa. Everyone knows someone who has 
contracted cancer, and every glass of water reminds
one of what we have done to our soil, air and water. 
The whistle of the train has the ring of death.

Punjab Today Bureau





ON A SCORCHING June afternoon in Jhajjal village in southwestern Punjab, elderly men have gathered in a communal courtyard to quell the boredom of the long afternoon with a game of cards. The cotton crop has been sown, and the farmers have a few weeks’ holiday before they must return to their fields. As with most small villages, everyone knows everyone else here, and the conversation centers around marriages and births. But these usually mundane topics have taken on a tragic twist, involving couples failing to conceive, children being born with genetic disorders, people of all ages succumbing to cancer. Nadar Singh, the village headman, says there have been some 20 cancer-related deaths during the last five years in Jhajjal, a village of only 3,200. “A 23-year-old died of cancer in our village last year,” he says, “But such news has stopped shocking us. Here even kids have cancer.”

Punjab's Cancer Trains, a fact of life. Even the media has stopped finding the story shocking.

India’s rural activists for years have blamed the overuse and misuse of pesticides for a pervasive health crisis that afflicts villages like Jhajjal across the cotton belt of Punjab. Evidence continues to mount that the problems are severe.A government-funded study revealed that chemical fertilizers and pesticides have seeped into the groundwater in four Punjab districts and are causing an alarming array of ecological and health problems including cancer and mental retardation. Another study by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment found residues of between 6 and 13 pesticides in blood samples of villagers from Mahi Nangal, Jajjal and Balloh villages in Bhatinda district. Recent research by Punjabi University at Patiala established evidence of DNA damage among agricultural workers exposed to pesticides; damaged genes can give rise to a range of cancers as well as neurological and reproductive disorders. Bala, a 24-year-old day laborer, worked for two months in the fields during the spraying season four years ago. Not long after, her second child, a boy, was born with a neurological disorder and has recently been diagnosed with hydrocephalus. “His treatment is so expensive that we have had to borrow large amounts of money... I know he won’t survive” she says. Umendra Dutt, the executive director of the rural NGO Kheti Virasat Mission, says, “Punjab is paying with its life for a dubious promise of prosperity.”
Punjab’s lethal pesticide legacy can be traced to the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, when high-yielding varieties of cotton were introduced in the region’s relatively arid Malwa belt. Initially the move was successful as yields and prices were good. But farmers soon discovered that the cotton was highly susceptible to pests, and ended up spending huge amounts on pesticides. As the pests, such as pink bollworm and aphids, became increasingly resistant to chemical spraying, farmers reacted by laying on even more, sometimes mixing two or more products against all scientific evidence. The region virtually became a chemical laboratory. The expense of spraying put many farmers deep in debt, yet they remain vulnerable to outbreaks such as a mealy bug attack last year that destroyed 70% of the crop. “Earlier, we used less water, traditional crops and organic manure. Now, it’s all chemicals,” says Sarmukh Singh, a 93-year-old patriarch in Jhajjal. “We’ve got our land addicted, but we don’t know how to fight this addiction.”

Across Malwa, journalists never have to search too far
 for a family for a photo like this. 

The health impact on the region is shocking. A daily passenger train that runs from Bathinder to Bikaner in neighboring Rajasthan is nicknamed the “Cancer Express” because it routinely fills a dozen cars with patients and their attendants on their way to a charitable hospital. Despite the high incidence of cancer, there is no government-run cancer hospital in the Malwa region, although the government announced plans to build one last year. “Officials sometimes visit our village, but they never seem to do anything,” says Santosh, a 35-year-old resident of Jhajjal who was diagnosed with leukemia three years back and goes to Bikaner every six months for a blood transfusion.
There’s plenty of blaming going on. Pesticide companies blame farmers for not adhering to prescribed quantities and not using protective gear. Workers who spray the chemicals blame landlords for not investing in protection, and companies for not properly informing them of the dangers of exposure. Farmers claim it is greedy dealers who push them to spray more, and also blame the government’s failure to change its policies after the harmful side effects of the Green Revolution began showing. “We know what we are doing is not sustainable,” says Nadar Singh, the chief of Jhajjal. “The agriculture department and the Punjab Agricultural University, which pioneered the Green Revolution, should come up with an alternative.”
Faced with the latest studies on the effects of pesticides on the ecology and on people’s health, Punjab Pollution Control Board is holding a meeting in the coming weeks to decide what action to take. For the moment, the government doesn’t seem to have a plan of action, though piecemeal steps are afoot. It is promoting herbal pesticides and extending outreach programs to better educate farmers about the dangers of pesticide overuse—not only in this region but all over Punjab. Some farmers are taking up organic farming, and many scientists have been calling for a return to crops more suited to the local landscape—in the case of the Malwa region, pulses and cereals like bajra and maize in addition to cotton—to restore the biodiversity of the soil. India is now talking about the need to launch a second Green Revolution, for which it is partnering with countries like the U.S. and Israel to devise technologies that are more sustainable. It is looking at developing and introducing transgenic crops and other advances in biotechnology. But as Kheti Virasat Mission activists point out, the government must ensure that it doesn’t repeat the mistakes it made the first time around. “The Punjab farmer basks in the glory of making Punjab    the bread basket of India but the price has been too high. Punjab cannot pay with the lives of its next generation.”

People’s Courts and Environmentalism

Ravleen Kaur

Is it possible to do good politics with environmentalism as your tool? Well, that could be debatable, given the real ground realities in Punjab, but one thing is clear. You do need to educate yourself in environmentalism if you need to survive in politics in times when men like Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal inculcate in people the art to ask the right questions from politicians.
Take the case of last Lok Sabha elections in 2009. When the entire media was saying the elections were issue-less, the environment sage Seechewal forced one issue, and made the politicians come running to participate in his people’s conclaves.
But soon, the politicians were left to discover that the people have been educated enough by the environment movement not to swallow empty promises.
The moment you ask the right questions, the politician does not know how to respond since he has long lost the art opf engagement, thanks to a total disconnect between the people’s needs, concerns and expectations and the politcian’s ability to even understand it.
Baba Seechewal held people’s environmental courts and had invited the local politicians to respond to questions posed by the voters. The charge was the same against the politicians of all hue: the Congress, the SAD and the BJP had failed to stop the pollution of the state’s water bodies.
All that the people wanted was for the politicos to tell them about one specific programme for cleaning up the environment. While most politicians failed, the event went a long way to sensitise politicians on environmental issues.
The bad news for the politicians is that by the time they go asking for votes again, too many would have had an idea for similar people’s courts. In fact, the NGOs in Punjab should take up the strategy as a master game changer. Political party representatives should be told that if they wanted votes, they should first spell out specific agendas on how they proposed to clean up the water bodies, deal with pollution of the soil, depleting water table etc.
Punjabis in their hundreds are dying due to pollution but such deaths do not end up in the news, on TV or even in statistical data. We all know that cancer, skin ailments and respiratory diseases have increased among those living near polluted drains. The residents alongside the Kala Sanghian drain, Chitti Bein and the Buddah Nullah are a living example of the apathy of the state.
Once, the focus turns towards environment, it will naturally force all to think about the development and economic model being pursued by the mainstream parties.
It is only when politicians face piercing queries from people will they understand that environmentalism is not a romantic love affair or a social movement that means cleaning up a rivulet or planting a sapling as a ritual. It means asking the rulers in whose name do they sign the MoUs to give away people’s lands and forests to billionaire corporate houses, and in whose name they acquire agricultural lands to set up industries. The mantra of paying market rates to the farmers will then work no more.

Punjab Today Special Environment Issue Being Released

PUNJAB TODAY Special Issue On Environment

Punjab Today's Special Issue on Environment Day 2010 was released at a special ceremony at the state level function held at NIPER in Mohali. The special issue was released by Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Rajendra Singh, well known environmentalist Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal and Mr. Rajat Agarwal , Chairman of Punjab Pollution Control Board. Also joinihn them was Mr. Vishavjit Khanna, Secretary, Science, Technology, Environment and Non-conventional Energy Resources.