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Mar 20, 2007

The Maoists: Their Decisions, Our Abiding Omissions

55 policemen – including 16 personnel of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) and 39 Special Police Officers (SPOs) – were killed, and another 12 injured, on March 15, 2007, when an estimated 600 Maoists (Naxalites) attacked a 79-strong Police Post guarding the Rani Bodli village in the densely forested Dantewada District of the tribal dominated Bastar Division of Chhattisgarh. The pre-dawn attack, with Maoist cadres using automatic weapons, grenades, petrol bombs and rocket launchers, lasted over two and a half hours. While no bodies have been recovered, an estimated 10 to 12 Maoist cadres are also believed to have been killed in the attack.

Were it not for the tragic nature of the events, the farcical character of media and political commentary on this latest Maoist excess would be laughable. There was, once again, talk of police and intelligence 'failures', including shrill questions about why 'reinforcements' could did not reach Rani Bodli for over three hours after the attack commenced, from 'nearby' posts, just eight and 20 kilometres away. That connectivity is poor, and a Force 'rushing' to the rescue would probably have hit mined areas and merely added to the total fatalities rather than provided relief to the besieged camp if its approach did not adhere to systematic road opening procedures, is entirely missed out. There was also an undercurrent of allegations that the CAF men and the SPOs had fled their posts – in which case the number of fatalities and the sheer duration of the engagement would be simply impossible to explain. There was also much surprise about how such an incident could have taken place and why the state was failing to contain the Maoists – exposing the commentators' enormous lack of familiarity with the ground situation in the area where the incident occured.

The cold and harsh reality is that such incidents will continue to take place with numbing regularity. The principal reason for this is not the failure of particular Forces or administrations to 'deal with' the situation, but utterly insupportable deficits in capacities that make a coherent response to the Maoist threat impossible in the near term, and that will take years to address, even if there is a complete consensus (and there is none) across the affected States and the Central leadership, on the strategy and course of action to be adopted. These deficits not only afflict Chhattisgarh, but all the States where the Maoists are already a force to reckon with.

The deficits commence at the level of the Police leadership itself, with Indian Police Service (IPS) cadres far short of sanctioned strength in every affected State – and on many assessments, sanctioned strengths are themselves deficient in terms of the rising challenges of law and order management, on the one hand, and the mounting insurgency, on the other. According to the Annual Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs, 2005-06, the deficiency in numbers of IPS Officers in position, as against sanctioned strength, in the five States worst affected by the Maoist insurgency, was over 20 per cent:

States Sanctioned Strength In Position

Andhra Pradesh 209 193
Bihar 193 153
Chhattisgarh 81 65
Jharkhand 110 82
Orissa 159 107
Total 752 600

At the level of the general police strength, moreover, capacities are dismal and any expectation that this Force, however well equipped or trained (and it is, in most cases, neither), can contain an insurgency of the intensity and spread of the current Maoist movement – even while it continues to discharge its 'normal' law and order management functions – is utterly misconceived. A quick look at police-population ratios in this context, is informative. The United Nations recommends a minimum ratio of 1:450, which translates to roughly 222 policemen for a 100,000 population. The all-India average stands at a thoroughly inadequate 122 per 100,000 (the US has 238; UK, 235; France, 397; Greece, 426; and Portugal, 481).

The Naxalite affected States are uniformly worse off: Bihar stands at 57 per 100,000; Jharkhand: 85; Orissa 90; Andhra Pradesh: 98; and Chhattisgarh: 103; these figures reflect sanctioned strength, and actual availability in most States is well below this figure. In Chhattisgarh, as against a sanctioned strength of 29,188 in 2006, actual availability was just 23,350 – indicating a deficit of 5,838 men, over 20 per cent of the sanctioned force.

The ratio of police personnel to the land area of the State is also abysmal. The Indian average stands at an inadequate 42.4 policemen per 100 square kilometers; Chhattisgarh has just 17.3; Andhra Pradesh, 28.5; Jharkhand, 30.8; and Orissa, 22.4 (Bihar has a healthier 54.2). Deficiencies in arms, equipment, transport, communications, protection and infrastructure are also endemic.

The situation in the Bastar Division – including the Districts of Dantewada (where the Rani Bodli incident occurred), Kanker and Bastar – the heart of the violence in Chhattisgarh, is disturbing. For an area of 39,114 square kilometres, the five Police Districts of Bastar Division have a total sanctioned strength 2,197 policemen ( 5.62 policemen per 100 kilometres). Actual availability is just 1,389, nearly 37 per cent short of the authorized numbers, yielding a ratio of 3.55 policemen per 100 square kilometres. Much of this Force, moreover, suffers an acute lack of leadership. Thus, in the Bijapur Police District, as against a sanctioned strength of 38 Sub-Inspectors (Sis), only eight were at their posts in 2006. For the State at large, of the 2,900 SI strength sanctioned, vacancies stand at 45 per cent. For Deputy Superintendents of Police, vacancies are 50 per cent of the sanctioned strength.

The 'solution' to this deficiency is widely thought to be the 'massive' deployment of Central Paramilitary Forces (CPMFs). The CRPF was inducted into counter-insurgency (CI) duties in Chhattisgarh in 2003, when three battalions were sent in. A Force of 35 companies (including these three Battalions), or roughly 4,600 men, was subsequently deployed across the Bastar region. As a matter of policy, the CRPF only deploys in company strength, thus creating, at best, 35 pinpoints across 39,114 square kilometres. After the mass killings of end 2005 and early 2006 in the wake of the Salwa Judum resistance against the Maoists, the CPMF strength was augmented to 85 companies (11,220 men). However, more than 80 per cent of this augmented force is deployed for passive defence, protecting Salwa Judum camps, important Government installations and projects, including road-building and the railways, and VIPs or others under threat. The CPMF-Army deployment in the Northeastern State of Manipur offers an interesting contrast. With a total area of 22,327 square kilometres (a little over half the Bastar region) Manipur has a deployment of as much as 350 Companies of central Forces, including the Army.

Worse, the areas in which the Maoists have found sanctuary in Chhattisgarh and in which they operate, is ideal guerrilla terrain. Over 75 per cent of the Bastar region is forested. Dantewada District has a total area of 10,239 square kilometers, of which 8,362 square kilometres (82 per cent) is forested. Chhattisgarh also shares 970 kilometres of interstate borders with Maoist afflicted areas of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa – most of it in totally inhospitable terrain, and with Maoists quickly crossing State boundaries in the wake of operations against them.

Despite these tremendous handicaps, Chhattisgarh is one of the few Maoist affected States in India where the battle against the Maoists has been truly joined, and this, indeed, is the principal reason why Maoist violence has escalated sharply in this State. Chhattisgarh – and particularly the Bastar region, and prominently including the 4,000 kilometres of the unadministered, indeed, unsurveyed Abujhmadh forest – is now the epicentre of the Maoist strategy of protracted war. It is here that the Maoists have established their command centres, and it is here that they propose to create their first 'liberated areas'. If they have failed in the latter objective, it is because of the extraordinary resistance that they have met from the State's political leadership, ill-equipped security establishment and, crucially, the people themselves.

What has largely (perhaps completely) been missed by the flood of commentary in the media on the latest attack is the fact that Rani Bodli is the precise location where the popular tribal resistance against the Maoists – which was subsequently organized by the State leadership under the banner of the now much-denigrated Salwa Judum – began. It was here that, on June 16, 2005, an estimated 8,000 tribals from 10 surrounding villages assembled and swore to deny Maoists sanctuary, food or support, and to expel all Maoist cadres and sympathizers from their villages. Their ire had been roused by years of Maoist extortion and tyranny and, in the immediate past, Maoist diktats demanding a boycott of tendu leaf collection (a primary source of income for the tribals), of the weekly haats (tribal markets), and enforced 'reforms' of local practices that displayed extraordinary contempt for tribal belief systems and ways of life and worship.

The attack on Rani Bodli goes beyond the symbolism of a Maoist retaliation against this fountainhead of popular resistance. It is, indeed, a question of the very survival of the movement. With the tremendous pressure that has been exerted against the Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh – particularly their traditional 'heartland' areas in the North Telengana region – the entire top leadership has relocated to the Bastar region, particularly Abujhmadh. If this epicentre of control is lost to the Maoists, the very sustainability of the movement across other areas of the country would come into question. It is for this reason that a continuous escalation of violence is inevitable in Chhattisgarh – and particularly in the Bastar Division.

Indeed, those who have taken comfort from the fact that the latter half of 2006 witnessed declining trends in violence in Chhattisgarh are utterly mistaken, even as are the elements in the national leadership who are flaunting a " 6.15 per cent decline" in incidents of Maoist violence as a measure of their achievement. SAIR has consistently argued that these trends reflect no concrete gains on the part of the state – other than in Andhra Pradesh, where the Maoists have been forced into retreat by aggressive counterinsurgency measures – but are rather a reflection of a deliberate Maoist decision to temporarily de-escalate violent activity, and to secure greater political consolidation, as well as a consolidation of military capacities.

That this period of consolidation is over, and the Maoists have now embarked on a new stage of their 'strategic counter-offensive' is evident not only in the declarations of their 9 th Congress in end-January, February 1, 2007, but also in the spate of incidents that have already occurred across the country in the first three months of the current year .

Over the past year, Chhattisgarh has made some efforts to rationalize the use of its Forces and resources, as well as to augment these. Sanctioned posts in the State Police have gone up to 33,000, and recruitment has taken total numbers up to 30,000 (though much of the additional Force is still to complete training for deployment). The State's newly established Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare College at Kanker has trained 2,590 Chhattisgarh Police personnal, at various levels, between August 2005 and February 2007. Force modernisation has been initiated, and there has been significant improvement in the quality and availability of weapons. A plan to impose 'carpet security' in the affected areas of the State – resulting in the creation of 22 new Police Posts, including the one that was overrun at Rani Bodli – was devised in early 2006. Regrettably, the deficiency of resources, the sheer dispersal of these Posts, the nature of infrastructure available, and their preoccupation with tasks of passive defence rather than active operations to secure contact with, and neutralize the Maoists, limits their utility. Worse, it makes these isolated and ill-protected outposts sitting targets for 'swarm attacks' by the Maoists – a tactic that Indian CI Forces are yet to device an effective counter to. While the Forces have learned to deal effectively with small group operations, there is little that can equip them to deal with the swarming tactics that are increasingly being adopted by the Maoists. SF and Police camps in Naxalite affected areas are, at best, of company strength. Many are of platoon strength or less. Police stations and police posts are often smaller. Against attackers numbering in the hundreds, and absent any significant fortification, other than minimal mud or sandbag barriers or barbed wire fencing, which are easily overrun, they have no meaningful defence.

An effective strategy against the Maoists requires the creation of tremendous capacities for intelligence based preventive actions; the creation of a network of fortified encampments, with layered defences, that are independent and self-sustaining, and that can tackle envisaged emergencies on their own, without requiring 'reinforcement' from the outside; and large CI Forces that are not tied down to static duties, but that actively seek out and engage with the enemy. Eventually, it is only through the establishment of a permanent infrastructure for policing and intelligence gathering – the thana and chowki – not the paramilitary or police camp and column, effectively covering every inch of the State's territory, that decisive successes against the Maoists can be achieved.

This, regrettably, is a far cry from the situation on the ground. The current situation in Chhattisgarh (indeed, across much of the Maoist dominated eastern region) is not something that has emerged abruptly. It has been decades in the making – and state agencies have slept through the best part of these decades. Chhattisgarh appears to have clearly recognised the magnitude of the Maoist threat, but the creation of CI capacities and responses will clearly take time – though perhaps not as much time as State authorities and the Centre may prefer to give themselves. Till these capacities have been established and operationalised in adequate measure, however, the Maoists will continue to operate, and to engineer massacres like the Rani Bodli incident, with near-impunity.

http://peacejournalism.com/ReadArticle.asp?ArticleID=17795

Looking for jobs? Come to shoppers' stops

Jamshedpur, Feb. 19: If it's not IT, it must be retail. A whopping eight million jobs, both direct and indirect, are expected to be generated in the country through organised retail making it one of the most sought-after job sectors right after software.

And with a retail boom slated to hit Jharkhand shores soon, the state, too, is expected to bite a fair share of the employment pie.

If figures are anything to go by, you might as well uncork the champagne bottles and set off the celebrations. According to Technopak Advisors, a retail industry body, an average of one and a half persons can be employed in an area of 400 square feet.

By that measure, 1,066 employments are going to be generated in the immediate future with the fruition of the Pantaloons and the Reliance Retail ventures (taking into account a 4,00,000-square feet project for Pantaloons and an average of 26,500-square feet for three Reliance Retail outlets).

"However, this is just a modest estimate as there is no strict yardstick and the figures vary according to formats. It includes all employees loaded on the floor plate that the retailer operates on," said Abhijit Das, regional director, Trammell Crow Meghraj Property Consultants.

Anil Rajpal of Technopak echoes his sentiments. "There is a huge requirement of manpower in the retail sector for all segments, whether logistics to shop floor personnel to the higher-ups," said Rajpal.

According to The Rising Elephant: Benefits of Modern Trade to Indian Economy, a report jointly published by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the CII, the employment generated by retail has had a positive impact on a section of the society that has not benefited from the IT wave.

Will it replace the existing stores? The figures say that only about only about 3 per cent of the 3.6 million urban outlets in the medium segment category might shut down in the face of competition from retail bigshots. However, the report suggests that in the long run, the organised retail sector will redeploy this workforce, which lost jobs in the boom.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070220/asp/jamshedpur/story_7415677.asp

India: Jharkhand farmer brings 'Ber' fruit crop to parched land

An innovative youth from the rural belt of Padma village near Hazaribag in Jharkhand has reaped a harvest crop from parched land.Mahendra Mahato, who worked as a bulldozer driver on the outskirts of Mumbai, found 'Ber' tree in abundance.

Intrigued by how little water and fertilizers were need by the 'Ber' crop, Mahato decided to grow the crop in similar dry conditions back home."I operated the bulldozer all day and conferred with the farmers about how best to cultivate the 'Ber' crop. I thought that this is one thing that I could try in my own farm back home, where little else grew. Earning from the crop will help me stay back home and give up slogging as someone else's employee in the city," he said.

When Mahato visited his piece of farmland, his employer marvelled at the fact that Mahato was sitting atop a goldmine and yet slogging away in faraway Mumbai. That was in the year 2001. The two planned to explore how best grow 'Ber' in the hitherto lying wasteland.

"My employer held back my year's earnings of Rupees 36,000 and added another Rupees 35,000 from his side. From these, rupees 70,000, he shipped me 234 grafted saplings of ready-to-plant 'Ber' trees. Now these trees were not available in Bihar or West Bengal but had to be brought from Maharashtra," said Mahato.

During the first year, he picked no fruits and had no profits. Thereafter every year, he has been increasing the investments in multiples of five thousand rupees.

For an investment of Rupees 20,000 in the current season, Mahato hopes to earn Rupees 70,000 to Rupees 80,000 on the two acres of land. To maximize profits, Mahato has also planted mango, lemon and pomegranates.

Mahato has become a role model for the local youth. NGOs and local leaders cite Mahato's example to youth who want to leave the under-developed terrain and households behind to strive in metros.

The 'Ber' tree grows on a variety of soils. The tree is remarkable in its ability to tolerate water-logging as well as drought. Some types of 'Ber' ripen as early as October, others from mid-February to mid-March, to the end of April.

There are two crops a year, the main in early spring, and the second in the fall. Seedling trees bear 5,000 to 10,000 small fruits per year in India. Superior grafted trees may yield as many as 30,000 fruits.

The fruits have medicinal uses and the various parts of the tree serve different purpose.

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/126589.php/Jharkhand-farmer-brings-Ber-fruit-crop-to
-parched-land

Winds of change in a Bihar hamlet

Kishanganj (Bihar), March 20 (IANS) It's easy to miss Simalbari, the Santhal hamlet in Kishanganj, Bihar. The dusty track leading to the tribal community is narrow and uneven. Electricity too is a distant dream here. Yet, a change is taking place, albeit slowly and silently.

In a state where 60 percent of the girls are married before the age of 18, adolescent girls in Simalbari are beginning to stand up against early marriage, writes Grassroots Features.

When 15-year-old Radha Hemdar refused to give up her studies and get married, it sent shock waves across her community. It was hard for the illiterate tribal hamlet to understand why Hemdar was ruining her life by giving up the pportunity of marrying a 'good' boy for the sake of studies. But Hemdar remained steadfast. She has become the first woman in many generations to reach Class 9 here.

'I am studying because I want to become somebody and also because I know that early marriage is not good for my health,' said Hemdar.

Inspired by her, several girls between 10-14 years here have told their parents that they don't want to give up studies for marriage till they are 18.

'Convictions like these have given us hope that our work with adolescent girls on reproductive and sexual health is finally bearing fruit,' said Sayeeda Hussain, chairperson, Azad India Foundation (AIF).

But the path has not been easy for AIF, a NGO working on adolescent reproductive and sexual health (ARSH). Funded by the National Foundation of India (NFI), this project, which began in 2003 in 15 villages of Kishanganj, has seen numerous twists and turns.

One of their biggest challenges came from the Mirbhatta village in Powakhali block. A majority of Mirbhatta's predominantly Muslim population is illiterate. Girls are married young and have no control over their bodies or the number of children they give birth to.

Local religious leaders or maulanas play a crucial role in all-important decisions pertaining to the community.

'The maulana had opposed all our efforts to talk about adolescent health. He argued that young girls would become 'polluted' if informed about their bodies or talked to about reproductive and sexual health,' said Parwez Raza, AIF field supervisor.

So pervasive was the maulana's influence that even his brother Qurban Ali, an influential community leader and one-time AIF ally, resisted any ARSH intervention.

But AIF workers did not give up. They just changed their strategy. Instead of talking about adolescent health, they decided to use their existing non-formal education (NFE) centres to rally parents around their cause. Ali and the other parents were invited every week to see what their children were learning.

After four weeks AIF workers asked the parents to give them a chance to talk about adolescent health if they were confident that their children would not be taught anything wrong.

It was then that Ali changed his mind. 'In the beginning I was opposed to it. But after AIF explained that our children would be able to protect themselves by learning about the biological and behavioural changes that take place when girls and boys reach puberty, I realised it was wrong to resist them. I have also managed to convince my maulana brother to end his opposition,' he said.

AIF was quick to realise that they could sustain the intervention only if a member of the community spearheaded the initiative. So they decided to train Ali's daughter, 17-year-old Marguba, as a peer educator.

But 55-year old AIF worker, Madhuri Das, needed more than just perseverance when she was given the duty to introduce the initiative to Mohiuddinpur village. Despite being a more affluent, educated and urbanised village, the mindset of its residents was no different from Mirbhatta's.

Here too, the maulvi was opposed to any discussion on adolescent health. But Das was adamant. 'I am a follower of goddess Kali. I realised that I had to be equally aggressive if I was to succeed in my mission. So I kept at it despite the abuses and taunts. Even when some people pelted stones at me, I did not run away,' said Das.

'Fortunately, the maulvi understood that what we wanted to teach the girls would help them to look after their health before they took on the responsibility of child-bearing,' she added.

Once AIF was able to win over the maulvi, the 70-year-old religious leader even invited Das to hold the classes in the madrassa itself. 'The Koran says that if need be one should go to China to acquire education. So why not the madrassa?' said Maulvi Gyasuddin.

However, not all religious leaders have been helpful. AIF has had to close down three of its centres because of resistance from both Muslim and Hindu religious leaders. Nevertheless, AIF believes that without religious leaders on their side, it will be difficult to make a breakthrough.

The district of Kishanganj ranks 588 out of 590 districts in the country on the reproductive and child health (RCH) index, according to a government survey of 1998-99. Although AIF's work is showing some results, they have a long way to go before they can improve the abysmal record.

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/india/features/article_1280163.php/Winds_of_change
_in_a_Bihar_hamlet

Church convention asserts dalit dignity

PATNA, India (UCAN): A convention organized by a Jesuit center that promotes solidarity among dalit groups drew a huge crowd of 40,000 people.

State Governor Ramkrishna Suryabhanji Gawai, who opened the March 10-11 convention in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, said the large gathering overwhelmed him. "They have not gathered here to watch some film show or cultural program, but to seek justice and equality," said Gawai, who represents the Indian president in the state.

The Bihar Dalit Vikas Samiti (BDVS, Bihar dalit development society) organized the program in the state capital of Patna, 1,015 kilometers east of New Delhi. The society, established in 1982, works with dalit groups, promoting literacy, self-sufficiency and awareness of their legal rights.

Dalit is a Sanskrit term that literally means "broken," and refers to the former untouchable castes at the bottom of India's multi-tiered caste system. Dalit groups comprise 16.48 percent of India's 1.02 billion people.

The governor said that dalit zeal in seeking justice shows that the winds of change have begun to blow and "none can prevent people from achieving justice, equality and dignity."

Gawai, a dalit, says India can shed its image as a poor country only if its dalit people make economic and social advancements. He commended Jesuit Father Jose Kananaikil, founder of BDVS, for realizing that dalit empowerment is not "anyone's grace," but the need of the nation. The priest's "pious mission" stemmed from his yearning to see India as a dignified nation within the world community, the governor added.

BDVS state coordinator Kishore Bhai told the gathering that his center has enlisted about 200,000 dalit families since it started in 1982. The center has become "a movement" that strives for dalit people's socioeconomic, cultural and psychological empowerment, the 50-year-old dalit leader added.

The Church center has achieved "a milestone" in inculcating pride and dignity among the dalit, Bhai claimed. A poor high-caste Hindu would feel superior to all, whereas a dalit, even if he is rich, considers himself inferior because of centuries of suppression, he explained.

BDVS members have achieved radical transformations after they shed their inferiority complex, he added.

Father Kananaikil, 73, cited the convention as "clear proof" of dalit transformation. "Otherwise why would they, almost all daily-wage earners, come spending their own money and losing nearly a week's wages?" he asked. The convention has asserted that dalit have woken up and "would do every legitimate thing to win justice and their constitutional and human rights," the Jesuit priest said. He said his center has helped the dalit to imbibe the spirit of dignity and solidarity, "the real pillars of empowerment."

The priest says he has not yet accomplished his mission, but feels satisfied the dalit associated with his center have broken out of their "caste cocoons."

Kaushalaya Devi, a dalit woman who traveled 250 kilometers with 1,500 people to attend the convention, agrees. The 48-year-old woman from the chamar (cobbler) caste told UCA News her people would have continued to suffer if the Jesuit priest had not helped them understand their democratic rights.

"Our sacred constitution grants only one vote for everyone. So why are we 'low' and others 'high'?" asked the woman, who has a 10th-grade education. Dalit will no longer accept injustice and discrimination from high-caste people, she asserted.

Uday Narayan Choudhary, a dalit leader, recalled at the convention his people were "abysmally marginalized" when the Jesuit priest started the BDVS. According to him, several dalit leaders unsuccessfully tried to unite their people, who are divided into various subcastes. So he was skeptical initially about the prospects of the Jesuit priest's mission to unite dalit people.

Father Kananaikil's "unflinching commitment" to the cause prompted him to join the mission, he added.

Choudhary urged the dalit participants to "scripturally follow" the BDVS call to shed casteism and unite people in breaking their shackles.

Madhav Tiwary, 53, a high-caste Hindu who has attended previous BDVS conventions, says no dalit politician could mobilize such a crowd even if he were to spend a lot of money. The priest does not even provide food at such conventions, but dalit flock to them nonetheless. He added that the dalit people trust the priest "because he genuinely helps them, unlike the dalit politicians who have the hidden agenda of garnering their votes."

http://www.theindiancatholic.com/newsread.asp?nid=6775

It's aftershocks in Orissa after West Bengal quake

BHUBANESWAR: The Nandigram violence has cast its shadow on the industrialisation process in Orissa, too. The stand-off between the villagers threatened to be displaced and the state government is getting further cemented with the Opposition taking a cue from the violence in West Bengal last week.

Even as the state government had some relief after the tribals in Kalinga Nagar lifted the blockade without police intervention, the hard stance by them not to allow Tata Steel representatives enter the area has caused much heartburn among the Tata executives and the government officials here.

People have been up in arms ever since the Tatas tried to enter Chilika and set up a steel plant at Gopalpur in the last decade. The protest took a violent turn when three tribals were killed in police firing in December 2000 at Kashipur in Rayagada district where Utkal Alumina had proposed to put up an one-million tonne alumina plant. The tense situation there still continues.

"Industries can only come up with people's consent. Neither the government nor the corporate houses can dictate terms to the people who have to vacate their inherited land. Wide consultation with the affected people must precede much before the projects take off. There should not be any intermediaries and if people say no to industries, it should not be imposed upon them," Achyut Das, director of Agragamee, an NGO working among tribals in the backward districts in Orissa told ET.

Mr Das said what happened in Kashipur is getting repeated elsewhere. "The state should not work like the agents of the industrialists. Let the people and the industrial house work out the terms and conditions. Let the industrial houses agree to take farmers land on lease basis with provision of annual increase in the rent. Unless we come out with alternative development strategy, such violent incidents would be on the rise," he warned.

The new Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy [R&R], touted as the best one in the country has not tapered off the ongoing protest against Posco's proposed 12 million ton steel plant project. Hundreds of activists under the banner of Ekta Parishad, Naba Nirman Samiti, People's Watch Group, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Vinoba Seva Sadan and Ambedkar Bichar Lohia Manch on Friday staged demonstration in front of the governor's house here in support of their cause.

and shouted slogans against West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Orissa chief minister Navin Patnaik.

Violent clashes between supporters and opponents of the POSCO project were reported this month injuring some 50 people and angry farmers have erected a bamboo gate at the entrance to the village of Dhinkia under the Posco project area near Paradip to keep both the government officials and Posco executive away. The government officials have not been able to enter the area ever since the country's biggest FDI project was announced to be set up at Paradip.

In the backdrop of Kainganagar and Nandigram violence, the Orissa government has decided not to use force to free the land from the villagers and is considering to spare the most sensitive Dhinkia village and the Posco authorities have been informed. "We are taking cautious approach to convince the people who are likely to be displaced by various projects. The government had decided to depend more on strategy than applying force to deal with land acquisition," a senior government official said.

Though the new R&R Policy is one step forward from the earlier one, critics think it is not the best one. "The policy is silent about social audit and regulatory mechanism to ensure the implementation of the packages. Who will monitor the actual implementation at the grass-root? People have bitter experience of the officials taking them for a ride in the past. Most of the displaced people in Orissa have ended far worse off than what they were before their displacement", Mr Achyut Das asserted.

Industrialisation in Orissa now hinges in balance and the next move of the state government to address the contentious issues of land and livelihood of the displaced people will decide the fate of the huge investment lined up in the state.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Its_aftershocks_in_Orissa_after
_West_Bengal_quake/articleshow/1785755.cms

Ratan Tata: One of India's most powerful magnates on social responsibility

Ratan Tata is one of India's most powerful magnates - with a dream to build cars for his country's poor. But as a farm girl is found butchered on his land, Peter Popham asks: is the price of his vision too high?

"I want to be able to go to bed at night and say that I haven't hurt anybody," Ratan Tata says. He repeated the sentiment twice in a recent interview with The Economist. The company he runs, Tata Group, India's oldest and biggest conglomerate, is one of the few Indian firms to have built a reputation for taking its social responsibilities seriously. True, its 19th-century origins selling opium to the Chinese were not an auspicious beginning for a firm bent on doing good. But once it started smelting steel 100 years ago, the attention it paid to the living and working conditions of its workforce was far ahead of its time. It's the sort of firm that likes to talk about its dependants as family.

So, if Ratan Tata, the 70-year-old Parsi who chairs the Tata Group, is true to his word, the death of a teenage girl called Tapasi Malik must lie heavy with him. Malik was 16 when she died. Her half-burned body was found in a grave-like trench only yards from her home, but within the 997-acre area cordoned off by West Bengal's Communist government for a new Tata car factory where, within a year, Ratan Tata hopes to be producing the world's cheapest car.

Though still an adolescent, Malik had become closely involved in the struggle to stop Tata taking her family's land and that of the 22,000 other farmers who tilled the luxuriantly fertile fields of Singur, raising rice, potatoes and two more crops per year - taking the land and evicting them with a cash compensation payment equal to about half its market value. She had joined in a hunger strike against the mass eviction, and, according to friends in the village, the guards of the factory site and the Communist goons employed by the state government to terrorise the villagers were keeping her in their sights. Repeatedly, they had tried to grab her, but she had eluded them.

Before dawn on the morning of 18 December, she left the small hut where she lived in order to urinate in the fields. She was pounced on by several men and dragged across the fields on to the company's land - her ankles were found to be covered in cuts and bruises, and hanks of her hair lay scattered about. Then she was strangled and set on fire. Her charred remains were dumped in a trench within sight of the wooden posts that demarcate the factory.

Malik's friends in the village found her corpse still smoking. Police later claimed that the girl had committed suicide.

Tapasi Malik would have struggled to find the money for one of Ratan Tata's new cars. Mr Tata wants to help India's poor. That's why he dreamed up the idea of what in India they call "the one-lakh car", the car that costs only 100,000 rupees, less than £1,400. But there are the poor and the poor, especially in India. Tapasi's family are what they call bargadars, sharecroppers. Because they have no title to the land that keeps them alive, they had initially been left out of the deal presented by West Bengal's government to the landowners of Singur. As so often in India, the poorest of the poor were simply to be turfed out.

The absentee landlords who own 30 per cent of Singur were happy to take the government's money. But when most of those living on the land refused to make way graciously, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya agreed to pay off the bargadars, too. The sum was nine lakh (900,000 rupees) per acre, about £10,500. Most of Singur's sharecroppers scrape a living from far less than an acre. The few thousand rupees they would collect from the government would have to suffice to set them up in a new life somewhere else. In reality, it would pay for a bus ride to the Calcutta slums, the corner of a squalid shanty there, some rice and potatoes to keep body and soul together, and perhaps some bottles of the filthy local whisky to blot out the humiliation for a while.

Tapasi Malik's death is only one hideous punctuation mark in a saga that has turned Indian politics upside down, and drawn harsh attention within India and beyond to the appalling consequences of its rush to riches.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has ruled West Bengal since 1977. It came to power because the failure of earlier governments to improve the condition of the rural poor had prompted a Mao-inspired uprising in the village of Naxalbari, which spread rapidly to many other parts of the state. The uprising reflected widespread rural discontent, and once in power, the Communists did more than any other state government in India to break down feudalistic landholding systems, distributing thousands of acres to the poor peasants who worked them.

The Communists, who are a vital part of the United Progressive Alliance coalition government in Delhi, have remained, in theory at least, the peasants' friends since. They have stood shoulder to shoulder with poor farmers protesting the confiscation of their land for dam projects in the Narmada Valley, for example. And outside their home state they have taken a tough line on India's up-and-coming Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

India pioneered the idea of special economic zones in the 1960s, but they never worked properly. In 2005, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had another go. The idea was, as in China, to offer the manufacturing industry special areas where they would be exempt from taxation and customs charges, and where no environmental impact assessments would be required of new factories; places where both Indian firms and multinationals could capitalise on India's immense growth potential without hindrance. Sixty-seven such zones have now been approved, and hundreds more are in the queue.

Beyond West Bengal, the Communists have taken a tough line on the SEZs. "There is no justification in alotting huge tracts of agricultural land to the SEZs," the Communist leader Sitaram Yechuri said last year. "When we are importing wheat, such policies will have a serious impact on our agricultural production." In Calcutta, however, struggling to reverse the state's long-term decline, they have been much more pragmatic. The day after his election victory, chief minister Bhattacharya announced that Tata, whose other vehicle factories are over on the other side of the country, in Pune, was bringing its People's Car to the People's Republic. The chosen site was Singur: only 40km north-west of Calcutta, just off a major motorway, close to an important rail junction - and home, as it happened, to thousands of people who failed to vote for Battacharya's party. More fool them!

Did Battacharya really not expect resistance from Singur's landowning farmers and bargadars? Did he imagine that no one would notice the Communist Party's amazing U-turn on the SEZs? The acquisition of Singur was sprung on its inhabitants without warning, without consultation, without plans for rehabilitation, with a non-negotiable offer of compensation. And slowly it became clear that the farmers were refusing to be treated that way. Through November and December of last year, resistance to the plans gathered force. Beginning with simple farmers such as Tapasi Malik's family, as weeks went by and the clashes between police and CPM goons on the one hand and the farmers on the other grew more frequent and violent, the grotesque injustice of what was taking place - the boundary posts of the factory already banged into place, the deal a done thing - slowly became apparent to India at large.

India is blessed, or cursed, with a vigorous and pretty free media. We know, because we have been told, that tens of thousands of clashes have occurred in China between state authorities and poor farmers, as the state moved ruthlessly and efficiently to industrialise. We know that fully 40 million Chinese farmers have lost their land to industrial development. Because there is no media freedom, however, in the case of China those remain dead statistics. In the case of India, a similar process is under way, and even a ship as tight as that run by Calcutta's Communists cannot keep the cruelty of dispossession off the screen and out of the papers.

This, the brutal dispossession of the poor, is the flip side of "India Shining", and it's in the papers and on the news every day. Ratan Tata's cute line about never hurting anybody may conceivably have been true while India progressed at the stately "Hindu rate of growth", but now that Tata is fighting the likes of Lakshmi Mittal, the world's number-one steel producer, originally from Rajasthan, for the rights to India's iron ore, people are getting hurt all the time.

It was on 2 January last year that 13 peasants in a place called Kalinganagar, in the state of Orissa, were shot dead by police while peacefully protesting the arrival of a planned Tata steel plant, which would have swallowed their village whole. The massacre stopped Tata in its tracks here: protesters have blocked a main road through the region ever since. So now the company is looking elsewhere. In Bastar, a legendarily beautiful tribal belt in the state of Chhattisgarh, north-west of Orissa, more than 1,600 tribals are fighting in the courts Tata plans to impose iron-ore mines and a steel mill, and destroy their ancestral lands.

While the fight over Singur was still under way, a new front was opened up in West Bengal when thousands of farmers, in a place called Nandigram, took violent exception to state government plans to impose an enormous Indonesian chemical hub on their paddy fields and fisheries. This one was nothing to do with Tata, but at least five farmers have already died in clashes.

The only positive thing to be said about the spectacle of India tearing itself apart in the effort to grow rich is that lessons are learnt, slowly and painfully. Initially a peasants' revolt, the Singur fight steadily accumulated allies, including Romila Thapar and Sumit Sarkar, two of the nation's leading historians, the novelist Arundhati Roy, and Medha Patkar, leader of the Narmada dam resistance. By the time trouble had erupted in Nandigram as well, a long-overdue debate was under way about the SEZs. Were they going to be the salvation of India? Or were many of them, as one commentator put it, "tax havens masquerading as manufacturing hubs", golden opportunities for property speculation, for seizing land cheaply under a British-era Land Acquisition law of 1894 on the pretext of "public interest" - then throwing up shopping malls and posh housing estates in which some of the dispossessed peasants might later hope to find work as domestics?

On 22 January, the Indian government announced that it was freezing the entire SEZ programme pending a rethink. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Calcutta, said: "Is the huge increase in inequality in China connected with SEZs? ... And if it happened in China, can it be prevented in India? If it can't be prevented, then is it the right thing to do, despite the fact that it contributes to economic growth?"

That's India's problem, we may say: let them sort it out for themselves. But that's not true any more. Many of the overlords of the new India, people such as Lakshmi Mittal, the Hindujas, Anil Agarwal of Vedanta Resources, live in Britain, some donate millions to the Labour Party, and some have been honoured. Britain's international development budget has enormous influence on where and how development occurs. Even more directly, a European firm, Fiat, became Tata's proud "strategic partner" in December, at the height of the Singur row.

Even if Indians were not our partners and neighbours, our destinies would still be entwined. The freedom that India gives itself to devastate its backyard - in SEZs where no environmental-impact assessments are required - is one of the things that makes the subcontinent such an attractive destination for your ISA or pension-fund manager; yet it is making an oversize contribution to the fact that, within the lifetime of our children, much of the earth may become uninhabitable because of global warming. The World Bank says India's greenhouse-gas emissions rose by 57 per cent between 1992 and 2002, and India is now one of the Big Four carbon polluters, along with the US, China and Russia. But because the global-warming crisis is "our", ie the West's fault, India doesn't want to be required to do anything about it. And your stockbroker, greedily eyeing that 9 per cent annual-growth figure, is right behind them.

It's not just Ratan Tata who needs to lie awake brooding about Tapasi Malik and what she died for. She should trouble the dreams of all of us.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2356334.ece

Posco launches mobile health service in Orissa

Bhubaneswar, March 19: In its bid to woo the locals, Posco-India has launched mobile health units at Kujang and Ersama blocks in Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa.

The South Korean steel major, facing problems in acquiring land for setting up its proposed 12 mtpa steel plant near Paradip, launched the health service three days ago.

The company was planning to extend the mobile health service to different villages except Dhinkia village, a company release said today.

"Since the people of Dhinikia have erected barricades at the entry points to the village preventing movement of any vehicle, the mobile health units would not go there", it said.

Pointing out that the mobile health units would be a part of the company's village friendly programme, the release quoted Posco-India CMD Soung-Sik Cho saying that the service would cater to the needs of nearly 2500 families.

Elaborating on the company's plan, the release said Posco was also contemplating to start round-the-clock ambulance service to meet emergency needs of the people.

"Health of women and children is the prime focus of the company," it said.

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=361017&sid=REG

Maoist rebels are causing trouble across much of the country

Maoist rebels or "Naxalites" killed an estimated 55 people in an attack on a police camp in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh on March 15th. The Maoists' enduring foothold across many parts of India remains a serious concern for the central government, so much so that the prime minister last year called it the "single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country". But the Maoist insurgency is not just a law-and-order issue: it also has implications for the energy and minerals sectors, and highlights dilemmas inherent in the central government's current high-profile drive to bring economic development to the rural poor.

The government is finding the Naxalite problem stubbornly difficult to eradicate. The Naxalites are so named after Naxalbari, a town in West Bengal where a communist rebellion erupted in 1967. The 40-year-old insurgency is thought to have a presence in as many as half of India's 28 states and is a major political force in poor tribal states such as Chhattisgarh, Jharkand and Orissa. By some estimates, the movement has spread to nearly 40% of the country's geographical area. A large number of people have been displaced as they have fled the Maoists, although the movement also benefits from support in rural villages, making policing its activities difficult. Also feeding the conflict has been the relatively recent emergence of an anti-Naxalite tribal militia known as Salwa Judum, which has assisted local police and security forces.

The Maoists' revolutionary ideology aside, the government believes that the heart of the Naxalite problem lies in many of the same issues—poverty, lack of economic opportunity, poor public services—that currently dominate its national-level economic policy thinking. Last year the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, identified exploitation, low wages, unemployment, a lack of access to resources, geographical isolation and an underdeveloped farm sector as the main factors that have contributed to the growth of the Naxalite movement.

Herein, however, lies the dilemma. The areas in which the Naxalites operate are in dire need of economic development, but experience has shown that investment in infrastructure or industry requires care to avoid the perception that is just perpetuating the very exploitation it is intended to address. Villagers are often suspicious, not without reason, that new projects will not provide as many local jobs as promised or are simply an excuse for rapacious developers to seize land from farmers without adequate compensation. It is noteworthy that the latest attack in Chhattisgarh coincided with an outbreak of rioting in the state of West Bengal that left 14 villagers dead. The protesters were complaining about plans to develop a chemical complex. Similar concerns have fuelled resistance to the spread of special economic zones—based loosely on the successful Chinese model—throughout India in recent months.

The government's handling of the Naxalite rebellion also has implications for India's energy security. The rebellion is strongest in states that have reserves of the natural resources, especially coal, that are required to fuel India's industrial boom. The five states in which the movement is strongest account for 85% of India's coal deposits. India's electricity generation is predominantly coal-based. Naxalite rebels have, on occasions, made direct attacks on companies in the sector.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8875555

Trouble for ultra mega projects

DELHI: While the controversy over the government's first ultra mega power project at Sasan refuses to die down, there is more trouble brewing with Chhattisgarh government questioning the allocation of power.

Chhattisgarh has been from the beginning staking a claim on power generated from UMPPs and had even sought free power from the Akaltara UMPP, leading to the Centre putting it on backburner. The state has now said that there should be a policy in place for power allotment to states from UMPPs. Chhattisgarh's protest stems from the fact that not only it was not allotted any power from Sasan after being promised 250 mw, but was also denied power from UMPPs in Jharkhand and Karnataka that are next in the line to be taken up by the Union government.

What Chhattisgarh got was only 3% out of the unallocated quota of power from central sector, while facing 43% peak demand shortage and 23% shortage otherwise.

Nearly 60 million tonnes of coal from the state every year is sent out to other states like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Mahrashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat for generating 15,000-16,000 mw of power.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1086060

Social Contract

Communist China began experimenting with the market economy in the early 1980s, and its parliament has just legalised private property.

If this seems a long hiatus, there's good reason. Property doesn't just mean ownership of tangibles such as land or capital, it can be extended to such things as one's labour or one's ideas — in short, the degree of property rights implies to what extent one owns one's own self.

If property, labour or ideas are made available to others that can only be under contract that is voluntarily arrived at by both sides.

But the sanctity of contract would limit totalitarianism, as it would establish a sphere of civil society where the state has no control.

That's why China hesitated so long before instituting property rights for individuals. Property ownership, however, can give millions of people a stake in the system and reinforce a sense of citizenship, while the lack of it can mean that state officials, property developers or both acting in collusion can deprive citizens of the fruits of their labour.

That's indeed happened on a large scale across China, leading to scores of protest movements and riots. In the interests of political stability, the Chinese have been impelled to provide institutional protection for property rights.

How has India, as a democracy, fared with property rights? Not too well, unfortunately. The government can acquire anyone's land at a rate of compensation that's decreed by it.

Besides, clear property titles under legally valid contract are the exception rather than the norm, and most Indians are disenfranchised in property terms.

That means few Indians have a stake or sense of participation in the system. Part of the problem may be that Indian socialists and other champions of the aam aadmi haven't looked at property rights closely, since in their eyes property is an abomination.

One-man one-vote is a necessary condition for empowerment of people but it may not be sufficient, if well-defined and widespread property rights aren't part of the democratic matrix as well.

In their absence protest movements and riots are likely to grow in India as they have in China.

At Nandigram, villagers are resisting government acquisition of their property. In Chhattisgarh and other areas, Naxalites can draw on large armies of the dispossessed to wreak havoc.

As pressure on land grows, this could be the trend of the future. But much of the violence could be forestalled if property rights were reinforced by sanctity of contract, and if the government were to facilitate private deals under which land and property change hands voluntarily.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/OPINION/Editorial/TODAYS_EDITORIAL_Social_
Contract/articleshow/1775969.cms

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