yet another reason why india needs manual scavengers

the united nations general assembly declared water and sanitation a human right just a couple of weeks ago.

most of the humane world had already come to recognize drinking water and basic sanitation as 'human rights obligations related to water and sanitation' long before the u.n. had endorsed it. if the u.n. says 'an estimated 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water and a total of more than 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation' it must mean a large part of the world (of nearly 7 billion people) is already fulfilling its 'human rights obligations related to water and sanitation'. as for the rest of the hardly human world, nearly half of those '884 million people who lack access to safe drinking water' and nearly a third of the 'more than 2.6 billion people' who 'do not have access to basic sanitation' in the world must be living in india.

on the count of violating 'human rights obligations related to water and sanitation', india is the world's biggest offender. it isn't that india's ruling classes steal all the water meant for drinking and sanitation needs of over three-fourths of its population. it's just that they don't think much about people who, in their view, are less than human. they need to be taught how to be human before they're granted any rights.

the excuse makers

why do people attack artists, filmmakers, actors, writers? because the attackers think the artist, filmmaker etc in question has produced something that offends their 'sensibilities'. a recent trend has been to attack artists, filmmakers etc even for expressing their views on some issue not connected with their work. the telangana separatists have now moved even beyond that: a couple of months ago, they started attacking film shoots and screenings of films starring relatives of some film personalities who had expressed their views on the political unrest in the state. now it seems like things have taken on an even more surreal tone: random separatist bands attack film shoots just because they're happening in their neighbourhood. some news stories on attacks in recent months, starting with the the latest:

Allu Arjun and Gunasekhar were filming action sequences for their film Varudu, at Moosapet in Hyderabad, when T-activists belonging to TSF and NSUI tried to barge their way into the shooting spot and disrupt the shooting. However, their bid was foiled by the Kukatpally police. The schedule got affected, albeit for some time.

The activists, who identified themselves with the aforementioned unions, came out in shoals of 50-100, and shouted loud slogans in favour of Telangana. When the situation grew tense, the police were called in.

This is the second time that Varudu's shooting has been disrupted by T-activists.

another :

The Telangana activists along with the workers of the mines in OCP-3, Ramagundam stalled the shooting of the movie. Rana was surrounded by Telangana activists and was not allowed to move until he said "Jai Telangana". Earlier the shootings of Manchu Manoj, Allu Arjun and Jr NTR were disrupted by the Telangana agitators. The Telugu Film industry condemned the attacks and stated that politics shouldn't be attached to the film industry. However the attacks are continuing and the state government is not able to provide enough security for the film shootings.

and another :

Hyderabad, Dec 24 (IANS) Continuing their attacks on film shootings, pro-Telangana protestors Thursday targeted actor Mahesh Babu's film at Vikarabad in Ranga Reddy district, police said. Dozens of protesters barged into the shooting area and set fire to the sets and two vehicles in the district, about 100 km from here. The actors and other artists had to run for cover. Police said no one was injured in the incident.

This was the third attack by pro-Telangana groups on film shootings in and around Hyderabad in as many days.

and another :

In yet another indication of mounting trouble for the Telugu film industry due to the growing regional divide in the state, a group of pro-Telangana activists attacked the shooting of a film featuring young actor Manoj, son of actor and producer Mohan Babu.

Workers of Telangana Rashtra Samiti attacked the film shooting unit at Pet Basheerabad in outskirts of Hyderabad and ransacked the cameras and other equipments. They shouted slogans in support of Telangana state and against Mohan Babu for his anti-Telangana stand.

The situation could be brought under control only after the police rushed to the scene and disperse the Telangana activists. The police also booked a case against both the sons of Mohan Babu- Manoj and Vishnu allegedly attacking the media personnel who had gone there to cover the incident.

you might have some serious differences with people who attack artists for writing something, or painting something. how do you begin to understand people who attack artists just for being artists? can you think of any other political groups in the world which have attacked artists just for being artists? not many, i think. the senas come close, the taliban are a better fit. and both of them, like the separatists, have also raided or attacked sporting events or sportspersons. how do the ideologues of the movement feel about climbing up, or down, into such an exclusive club, i wonder.

some separatists might offer this excuse: they're andhraites. does that make it better? or, this: their relatives/father/mother/uncle/brother-in-law/distant cousin doesn't support the idea of a separate state. yes, the excuses sound even worse than the attacks.

sharing rivers, but not water

balagopal on river-sharing:

Small wonder then that not only the States of Karnataka and Maharashtra but the people of Telangana and Rayalaseema as well have always nursed a fully justified grievance about the distribution of the Krishna river waters. And even though there is no allocable water left in the Krishna river in terms of the Bachawat award, proposals aimed at watering the parched lands of Nalgonda, Mahbubnagar, Kurnool, Cuddapah and Anantapur districts have been put forward in abundance. And the State government too, at various points of time – if only at election time in most cases - has promised execution each of these proposals. Not counting the minor proposals, the major ones alone would need about 200 tmc.ft of water: 40 each for the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (Nalgonda district), Bheema, Nettempadu, Kalwakurthi & other lift irrigation schemes (Mahbubnagar district), Galeru-Nagari and Handri-Neeva (for the four Rayalaseema districts), and Veligonda (the uplands of Markapuram division of Prakasam district). The profusion of the demands reflects the stark reality of heart-breaking drought in these areas.

from this article ('Pulichintala - A Test Case', by K.Balagopal) at the site which isn't small enough enough to think beyond rights that i had referred to yesterday.

i'd talked about perspective here, in response to some comments. going back to the article, let's look at balagopal's perspective:

According to a note circulated by the Irrigation department in the year 1998, the Pulichintala project is slated to use 982 million cubic meters of water from the Krishna river, which comes to about 13 tmc.ft. One tmc.ft of water is sufficient to irrigate six thousand to ten thousand acres, depending on whether it is used for wet cultivation or `irrigated dry’ cultivation. Taking the latter, these 13 tmc.ft of water would irrigate 1.3 lakh acres of land. How happy would any of the above districts from Nalgonda to Anantapur be to get at least this much irrigation water, though it is nothing compared to the 20 lakh acres that would be irrigated by all the projects all of them taken together have been dreaming of for decades now!

And what use is this project going to be put to? Not even to irrigate 1.3 lakh acres of as yet unirrigated land in Krishna district, but to ensure that transplantation of paddy in the Krishna delta under the old canal system takes place in June-July. Almatti in Karnataka and increased ayacut under Nagarjunasagar in upland Guntur and Nalgonda districts are said to have slowed down the arrival of water into the Prakasam barrage in the early monsoon weeks, thereby rendering transplantation of paddy in the months of June and July uncertain, and therefore 13 tmc.ft of water will be stored in the balancing reservoir at Pulichintala to be sent down to the Prakasam barrage at the appointed time so that the schedule of transplantation that the delta farmers are accustomed to is not upset. What solicitude!

krishna, and unsolvable problems like pulichintala have fuelled discontent in telangana for a very long period. but how is balagopal's perspective different from how those on the other side of the krishna think? from the perspective of the farmers in the delta, who wouldn't share any water even with their neighbours, leave alone those on the other side? when a discussion on rights doesn't start with drinking water and wet toilets, or universally recognized human rights, for the largest number of people, i don't see how even any reallocation of water between regions, would solve any problems. inequality is embedded deep in this perspective: higher needs should be met first. so, it's always the upper caste paddy farmer, in the three regions, whose 'parched lands' would be recognized first. millions of parched throats, in hundreds of villages all along the krishna basin region, can only wait forever. does the separatist movement look beyond this casteist perspective? or at a future beyond agriculture (as defined by the green revolution)?

i don't wish to know why manmohan singh or advani is better

while india's brahminized classes, like always, successfully managed to hijack the current elections for their own narrow, grubby ends, a few questions that remained unasked:

*what are they going to do about rural indians? a great majority of them have to move away from agriculture in the next 10-20 years.

*what are they going to do about universal education? more than a 100 million children of school-going age are not in school right now.

*what are they going to do about drinking water? around two hundred thousand children in one district, nalgonda, have withered limbs from drinking groundwater with high fluoride content. that's one district. while one paddy growing district in punjab probably uses/misuses more water, in one season, than the whole of delhi and its satellite towns in one year. or as much water as the whole of rural rajasthan probably drinks in more than one year. and to think that punjab doesn't consume even a fraction of the rice it produces.

* what are they going to do about hunger and malnutrition that over half of india's women and infants, among others, suffer from? luring punjabi farmers to produce more rice, so that more farmers in traditionally rice-producing states in the south and east lose their livelihood, and then looking away when the punjabi farmers commit suicide in droves isn't going to help. anymore.

*what are they going to do about primary health care in 6,00,000 villages? india has over 6,00,000 doctors of whom only 20,000 odd thousand work in the countryside. each doctor caters to around 60 villages, or 50,000-1,00,000 villagers. how about a doctor for every village, a tap and a toilet and electricity for every home? and schools and sanitation systems for every ward? that's primary healthcare according to the u.n. etc.,

*what are they going to do about people who work on medieval occupations like weaving to scavenging? probably around 50-75 million families depend on those occupations. and earn medieval wages.

*what are they going to do about immediate and sustained relief for the vast majority of workers in the unorganized sector (93% of the workforce in the country) who earn less than a dollar a day? social security for them would be useless if it comes in only when they get seriously injured. how about relief for today, this month, next month, next year- for as long as they can't retrain themselves to look for better work opportunities? or until better work opportunities are created?

*how about a mechanism for ensuring people who oppress dalits, women, children and others in every village are brought to justice as fast as ajmal kasab?

terrorists are animals?

NEW DELHI: A senior judge of the Supreme Court on Tuesday likened terrorists killing innocent people to "animals" and said they cannot be allowed to take benefit of human rights.

"Those who violate the rights of society and have no respect for human rights cannot be a human," Justice Arijit Pasayat said at a seminar on terrorism here.

"We should not talk about human rights violation of terrorists because terrorists are the people who kill innocent people with AK-47 and AK-56," he said, adding that "those who killed innocent people by no stretch of imagination are human beings. They are worth not more than animals."

animals? my view is that they generally started out as human beings. a lot of things helped them along on their progress towards animalhood. including human-made structures, institutions, ideas and sometimes, perhaps, chemicals in their brains. not forgetting other human beings who refused to believe that they were human.