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Sundarbans

PRIMARILY because they are always looked upon and treated as poor, settler communities face difficulties. Living in a continuous states of servitude, they are routinely drawn into the arena of wage labour because of the needs of the state. Yet, the first impression we get of the Sundarbans islands is that of austerity, calm, of inviolable beauty. The disaster management team from the Centre for Law and Governance, JNU, had a minimalist agenda, which was to find out whether the communities who live on these islands have benefited from the relief programmes of the government in the aftermath of cyclone Aliya (or Ayla, as the people call it).

When the cyclone hit the region, the people were completely unprepared. The government officials in Calcutta told us that they failed to give the mandatory 48 hours warning because the storm suddenly turned its path, and hit the Sundarbans. This appears rather odd since the local people were aware that the weather forecasting satellites seemed to work better for Bangladesh, as they not only have quicker responses to the disaster, and evacuation is also speedier. As for themselves, they moved to higher land, wading out with their children, when the water reached chest height. Even though they are used to living with storms, they had no idea that the cyclone would strike so murderously. The officials say that given the uncertainty associated with the weather, they had invested certain resources, including building a disaster shelter which can take in 1000 to 2000 people though there are 4700 families on the island of Bali. The shelter was, however, not at all well maintained. It was mostly used for storing some metal water pipes; it also doubled as a barat ghar, or community hall, for marriages. The problem with its lack of maintenance is that, given the tropical climate, it can rot if left in the condition it is now.

Subsistence societies are essentially existentialist. The panchayat members clearly say that the relief money reached them, and that they used it to good effect. For instance, both their rice storage and hay stacks have been raised by four inches and the clay and sludge brought in by the 2009 storm has been used for creating embankments by the simple measure of filling the sacks with this mix, and then parking it on the earlier embankments. Once the mix dries, it becomes a type of local cement. The assumption is that these simple measures will keep the water out.

In truth, the people live simple lives and work very hard to sustain their economy by farming, fishing, and keeping cattle. The children are educated in a voluntary school run by an NGO which also has a guest house for their officials. There is an internet college run by Prasanjeet Mandal, who is a lawyer trained in Calcutta, with a B.A in English Literature, and also has panchayat responsibilities. He returned to Bali to look after his parents, as they turned old. His panchayat membership allows him to play an active role in local politics, and to mediate with visitors. His father’s farm, which he manages, grows the things his family needs – rice, vegetables such as cauliflower and beans, fruits like guavas and bananas, and the new cash crop, green chillies. He also grows flowers for the market.

A large part of the problem is that what they encountered is still vivid and terrifying, and much of how they think of the past and future, both of which are still represented as coterminous, is coloured by these memories. Fear is something they live with. Several people in the islands work as manual labour in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Some of the elderly men on the island have travelled to Kerala to see their sons at their workplace. One man stood proudly against the electric pole, a cement pillar, and said, ‘By this pole I can talk to my son.’ His deep belief in the magic of the mobile was to assert its efficacy. They do not feel that they are isolated, because they are connected.

Farming is sufficient to give them a good life. It is interesting that organic farming is seen as a way by which vegetables can reach Malancha, a ‘nearby’ town, which is three hours by ferry and two hours away by bus,. The hybrid tomatoes and the large sized vegetables are a testimony to the farmer who stated that he only used ‘waste’ from his fields to cultivate. Other farmers, like Prasanjeet Mandal, use urea as well. The basic assumption is that ‘If one works hard, then one can eat’ – an aphorism that we have also heard from farmers elsewhere. The organic farmer thus believes that this ability to work hard is his characteristic; it is what enables him to feed the family and hold the property together. Unfortunately, the BPL card is only given to farmers with certified landholdings. The organic farmer whom our team spoke to, cultivates land which belongs to a man from Midnapore. It appears that after Ayla he no longer wants to utilize his property, so now it is in the hands of the workers. Though in a manner of speaking they own it, the land is worthless as saleable property without documents. Bureaucracy being what it is, the complexity of paper work required is too difficult for these previously landless farmers to handle.

At night, since there is no electricity, there is a fear of the Royal Bengal Tiger, who does not discriminate between deer and humans. The waters connecting the islands are crocodile infested. The boat only comes during fixed hours. There is no hospital or police station. Trafficking and alcohol abuse are common, and in case of rape, the immediate punishment is to kill the rapist, using the common sickle to severe the neck, according to an informant.

The sense that here are people left to themselves to live or die is in part mitigated by the self-assurance that they communicate, which is the essence of being human. They are connected to one another; they value being alert to one another. Their sense of love for the land, and the beauty of the landscape is palpable. This is possible only because the inhabitants feels responsible for what they have. We must remember that after Ayla only 200 families left Bali for good. Clearly the others believed that they should continue to live on the island, inspite of the terrible environmental disturbance.

The government response was swift. The IAS officer in charge of relief operations was instructed that rice should immediately be provided to all families, and that no one should go hungry. What was neglected, however, is training for immediate response should another storm hit. The people have not developed their ‘best practice’ for this eventuality. There is no leader, nor any community management to organize any drills for evacuation.

The resources for survival and sustenance remain simple and private. The rich alluvial silt the storm left behind by the storm has made the fields more fertile. Sajjal Baruah, a veterinary doctor who has settled down in Bali, initially came as a wildlife photographer. He then bought land, built four rooms, two for himself and his wife and his mother, and two for guests. He believes that eco-tourism in Bali is viable, and that people will come to this remote island for the pleasure of living in pristine and primeval conditions. Baruah told our team that when he initially came as a photographer to the specific place he now farms, he pitched a tent and slept there. At night a tiger came and prowled around; it had never seen a tent and lay down beside him. As legends go, it would seem that those who truly respect the wild have no enemies among the animals. As an organic farmer, he has already established the vegetable gardens he will need for his commercial venture.

When we think of tourism, there are many questions that we need to be sensitive to – the problem of regulation of numbers; the question of disposal of garbage; how natural resources may be used in a habitation by people who bring with them their specific needs for food, toilets, and luxury goods. All three are related. Organic farming is essentially tuned to family needs, and has been a parallel ecological practice for decades. Once, however, it becomes commercialized, a fresh set of problems arise. Some of these have been successfully handled, for instance, by the Kerala government. These include training of housewives, children and retired people to practice farming as a vocation rather than being dependent on the market. In Bali this may be possible as there are key agents, such as a ‘labour class’ (as they proudly refer to themselves) who have returned to Bali, and who already have knowledge of the successful Kerala experiment. It involves agricultural scientists providing Bali residents with seeds generated as natural, or hybrid (not GM seeds), and then proliferating the gardens with local horticultural produce for the family and tourists. Those farmers who are more successful than others should receive state recognition. There should be outlets where the vegetables and fruits grown by organic farmers can be sold to other residents and tourists. The simplicity of the exercise lies in the dependence of state and people to each other. The poverty of the migrant to Kerala, who live in terrible circumstances all over Kerala, and are socially reviled for being lower class, is actually contrasted to the very good living conditions in an unpolluted environment.

Sundarbans, a delta which is constantly in the making and has been around for four thousand years, is known for its fertility. Tribal people from Chota Nagpur were first settled here for clearing the mangroves, initially by the colonial state and then by wealthy Bengali landlords in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, densely populated, a critical need is for replanting the mangroves so that the land remains anchored. There are other ways by which the state can improve the life of these frugal horticulturists and fishers. Every house has a tank outside it. The degree of cleanliness of these tanks says a lot about how people live here, their respect for water. Alsa alsa, a moss like fern, grows on many of them, providing resource for fish farmers and prawn cultivators. The spawn for fish farms is easily made available by local cooperatives, and is an important source for fish for Calcutta restaurants. However, the encroachment into the mangroves constitutes a serious problem. As the mangroves are depleted, the likelihood for cyclone and storms which can kill people and dissolve the land, increases. The water at the embankments, according to panchayat members, is now two feet higher than it was previously. The rise of the sea, due to global warming, is because of climate change.

In many seismically sensitive areas such as New Delhi, even though people know that they live with risk, they nevertheless do not leave because of their families and livelihood. The same is true of horticulturists who grow fruit and vegetables in Ladakh; they do not expect to die because of climate change or a sudden cloudburst. Such is the optimism of human life; people just do not expect terrible things to happen. Disaster preparedness is thus a paramount need, and the training for survival has to start very early, at the schooling stage itself. The Japanese case of rigour and calm is the best aspect of preparedness. As one Japanese delegate at the JNU Centre for Law and Governance Disaster Management Conference in 2015, said to me, ‘We are trained very early to know that there may be earthquakes.’ At the same conference, a Japanese psychiatrist and his team showed a film about how they had trained a team of visually, orthopaedically, and mentally challenged patients in a hospice to climb a mountain at a very fast pace, over four years, not anticipating an earthquake, but preparing for one. When the earthquake did strike, it was these challenged patients who led the entire village to safety.

An inhabitant in Bali said to the disaster management team: ‘First the water was continually pushing the bank. When the Ayla came, it burst the banks and the tanks were overfilled. The huge field was full, but as the tanks were empty at that time the water went there. Poisonous snakes went away at that time, so the people were saved. Two deer cubs were rescued and returned to the forest.’

Prasenjeet Mandal told us that when the cyclone hit his mother was not at home, and he and his father were at a neighbour’s house. When the flood came they escaped to higher land. He left his father there, and returned to save his neighbours. Under the Indira Avas Yojana, all houses are now built on higher land. But this is the Sundarbans, and the waters can flood their homes anytime. On handling pollution, there are government instructions. They clean the water with bleaching powder and hydrogen tablets for drinking purposes. In this area though they have faced many hurricanes, Ayla still took them by surprise. They are now building houses at a height, in an attempt to be better prepared. People help each other, regardless of caste, religious beliefs and even political affiliation. The mutuality of human recognition is higher than other places. There was no known case of a person left abandoned. They were re-established in kin groups.

The embankments have been weakened. Even before Ayla, when the embankments were low, the repairs could not keep up with the rise in water levels. Since 1991, the water has risen by two feet. The people are using the NREGA scheme to raise the embankment. After the Ayla in 2009, there have been some changes. Fresh embankments, mangroves, ponds and a new primary health centre have been developed or promised. Roads have been improved. At Rs 2.5 crore, river embankments have been the greatest investment. Since the population can be flooded if the embankments are neglected, strengthening it is of the utmost importance. The water that comes from Nepal and floods Bihar is sweet. But the water that floods the Sundarbans is salty and the fish also get killed. People know that they live near the sea, and they annually expect the flood, but the Ayla has provided them with new levels of anticipation, of preparedness.

Disaster management funding has so far focused mainly on plantations, embankments and drainage. However, having an emergency evacuation plan is a necessity. There should be a classification of responsibilities with a committee. Who will save women and children? Who will bring supplies? Is there training as to how to proceed if disaster strikes? The committee from JNU and interacting institutions was keen that the work of disaster preparedness should be made available to lay people all over the country at the earliest.

Susan Visvanathan

 

How not to run an organization

FOR quite some time now, the ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) has not been in the news. One wonders whether this is a good thing or bad. It is good in the sense that the government is probably not interfering in its management, for the moment it does, the media is likely to be up in arms. But in another sense, it is bad. It tends to suggest that the government is indifferent. And that may well be worse since indifference, as much as direct interference, can fatally damage an organization.

What might be the reasons? Those of us who remember the controversies surrounding the ‘saffronization’, among others, of the ICHR and FTII, are surprised that ICSSR has so far escaped the BJP/RSS’s attention, though that happened during the earlier BJP regime, when Atal Behari Vajpayee was heading the NDA coalition (1998-2004). The present neglect is, therefore, intriguing. One wonders whether it is the proverbial lull before the storm.

On 2 November 2014, a year and a half back, the tenure of all the 18 ‘academic’ members of the ICSSR governing council expired. Conventionally, it is the government which fills the vacancies. So why has it not acted? Is it that after having expended so much energy on the above mentioned institutions, as well as on the ‘intolerance’ debate, it has little appetite left for another controversy, that too concerning the social sciences. Social sciences being a diffused field unlike history are more difficult to manipulate by the ruling class? Without offering in any palpable ideological gain, intervention may only provide fresh ammunition to the opposition’s arsenal. Another reason might be that the RSS has so far failed to find enough ‘correct’ people from its ranks to fill the governing council if it decides to ignore the recommendations of the ‘lame-duck’ Council. If the government appoints persons from outside the list, it would open itself up to criticism for violating the ICSSR Memorandum of Association (MoA). Note that the MoA was prepared a few years ago by the high-powered Deepak Nayyar Committee, and duly approved by the UPA government.

Is it really so difficult to choose just 18 people from a list of 230, the so-called ‘collegium of eminent social scientists’, which ICSSR prepared less than a year back? That the list fails to include some eminent names does not speak well of the ICSSR, but that is another story to be told on some other occasion. If the BJP/RSS cannot find ‘the correct’ people even from such a long list, it reveals a lot about their thin base among intellectuals. Both these propositions, nevertheless fail to explain the government’s apathy towards ICSSR. For this apathy the BJP alone cannot be held responsible. The ICSSR, setup in 1969, is now 47 years old, and for most of the time it reported to a non-BJP government. In its long experience, no government, has been helpful. To add to the malaise, some of its leaders too bear responsibility. But whoever is to be blamed, the end sufferer is the ICSSR staff.

The non-filling of the governing council is just one problem; there are others. The most important concerns the appointment of a member-secretary (MS), the CEO of the ICSSR. The MS is seldom appointed on time and his/her credentials are quite often questionable. It was 20 years back that the drift started when, for the first time, the post of the MS remained vacant for months on end. Thereafter, the disease became chronic. For as many as 15 of its 47 year history, the ICSSR has been without a duly appointed or duly qualified MS. During these 15 years, ICSSR officials served as officiating MS for 10 years. For the remaining five, IAS officers of joint secretary rank held the post. It must be underscored that the MS is expected to be an academic of eminence with a proven contribution to knowledge through research in the social sciences, something that has not happened for a third of its existence. Presently too, the ICSSR is headed by an officiating MS, an associate professor of a central university on deputation to the ICSSR. It is baffling as to why such positions cannot be filled on time, when tenures are fixed and the date when the incumbent is to demit office is known well in advance. Why can the appointment process not start in time as happens elsewhere?

One commonly advanced argument is that the pay-scale of MS is unattractive. While there is some truth to this, it obfuscates the real issue. Though the pay-scale is lower than that of a university professor, in the event a professor is appointed to the post, his/her pay is protected. But herein lies the catch. Why would a professor even bother to apply if the pay package is lower than what s/he is getting at the time of application. Moreover, it is widely believed that the incumbent must have government backing, since the ICSSR is fully funded by the government. This provides a window only to ‘close-to-power’ academics, who usually manage the posting by circumventing the process in connivance with the ruling establishment. In short, the competition is rarely transparent and this makes it virtually impossible to initiate the process of appointment well in advance.

As for the ICSSR secretariat, nobody seems to be know much, far less be bothered about the miserable state it is in. When the ICSSR was created in 1969, two sets of people manned the organization – one, academic/professional, and the rest, bureaucratic personnel. Some of the latter had been inducted from what was earlier the Research Programme Committee of the Planning Commission. Strangely, however, no structural differentiation was made between the two sets of staff, nor was there any serious thinking in respect of their upward mobility. Even later, when both the government bureaucracy and the university academia were awarded substantial pay hikes by separate pay commissions, the ICSSR secretariat was totally sidelined. Possibly because of their small numbers, they could hardly hope to be a viable pressure group. Keeping in mind a similar situation obtaining in autonomous bodies functioning under other ministries, there were some efforts to remedy the situation in the early eighties, but since the numbers still remained small, the demand was ignored.

Since ICSSR professionals could not be equated to university teachers, they by default began to be looked upon as government servants, but on the periphery of the structure. As a result, they could neither take advantage of the university system nor of the governmental system, resulting in their experiencing systemic financial loss, an anomaly which every subsequent pay commission has only made worse. Any casual enquiry will reveal the rampant frustration among the staff. The ICSSR started with a 3-tier setup consisting of assistant director, deputy director and director corresponding to lecturer, reader and professor in the university system. In its initial years, the ICSSR directors drew a salary higher than that of a university professor. Today, a ICSSR director is not even equivalent to an associate professor. Salary-wise he is equivalent to a deputy Secretary in the ministry. A deputy director is paid less than an assistant professor, insofar as their end-scales are concerned.

Some of ICSSR’s chairmen and member-secretaries did try to rectify the anomaly, but either they did not get the necessary time or, more likely, the required government support. For example, when G. Parthasarathi served as the chairman (1980-87) and Iqbal Narain the member-secretary (1985-89), they attempted to redress the staff grievances. The ministry at this stage decided not to oppose G. Parthasarathi’s proposal, given his eminence and proximity to the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. But as soon as he demitted office, the matter was back to square one under the ministry’s diktat.

There are a few more such examples, which tell more or less the same story. Many high-powered committees, such as the Ashok Jain Committee, Anand Swaroop Committee, A.K. Vaidyanathan Committee, Justice Malimath Committee and the Deepak Nayyar Committee, recommended higher pay scales for ICSSR professional staff. But the ministry has paid no heed to them in spite of their recommendations being approved by the governing council, which has six ex-officio members representing the government. The ministry took recourse to well tested tactics – sitting on the files till they are forgotten; raising some technical/procedural objections; and passing on the buck, saying that it does not want to interfere in the ICSSR’s autonomy. Heads I win and tails you lose.

But it is not the government alone that needs to be castigated. The ICSSR leadership too is responsible for aggravating the problem. New recruitments have come to a grinding halt and regular promotions delayed indefinitely. In the 1970s, the ICSSR professional staff consisted of six directors, 11 deputy directors, and nine assistant directors. Today, it does not have a single functioning director, only two deputy directors, and four assistant directors. Of the total of 208 sanctioned posts, as many as 117 are vacant, that too almost entirely at the professional level. The consequence of this is predictable. Before long, the ICSSR’s non-plan grant would be slashed by the government on grounds that it does not need so many professional level officers. The present situation is so deplorable that often it is difficult to even find an officer who is authorized to sign a sanction

Ironically, while all this is happening, the ICSSR’s grant has gone up multifold. In 2005-06, the plan and non-plan grant stood at Rs 178,000,000 and Rs 240,000,000, respectively. In 2015-16 the corresponding figures were Rs 1,118,700,000 and Rs 636,500,000. Unfortunately, when more money is sanctioned/received, without insisting on commensurate rigour in the evaluation of grant requests, or introducing new innovative programmes, there is danger of the quality of grant making being compromised. The inherent compulsion of spending the grant within the current FY further aggravates the situation. Still, if the grant instalments from the government are received on time, better planning is possible. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. It is a common practice to release the last instalment on the last day of the FY. Sometimes there are last minute cuts also. These irregular disbursements affect both the ICSSR funded projects and fellowships resulting in greater hardship to its doctoral and post-doctoral fellows who are expected to have no income other than their fellowships. How on earth they are expected to survive during this period does not seem to bother anybody.

In conclusion, one hopes that even if the BJP government is unable to fill the ICSSR governing council with its people for reasons explained above, it can at least contribute to its better governance. Let that be the MHRD’s contribution to Narendra Modi’s campaign for good governance, howsoever minuscule that may be.

Partha S. Ghosh