a 'sight' of dissent

Remember the dharna i mentioned in my last post? Here are a few moments from the dharna. (Sorry no pictures of the annoying sugarcane farmer) The protestors were from different parts of India and their representatives would come up and share the story of their struggle.

vikas ya visthapan? He seems to have an opinion.

this fiesty old lady wanted her voice to be heard as well..even if it meant interrupting the speaker


So..why are we here again?


Medha Patkar of the National Alliance of Peoples Movement(NAPM), making an announcement


"Mahila shakti zindabad! zindabad!"

Dharna mana hai

This last week I was in Delhi attending a three day rally (18th-20th November) organized by the National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM). Hundreds of villagers whose lands and rivers had been forcibly acquired were present to demand that the Land acquisition Act be repealed and the National Resettlement and Rehabilitation policy be revised before being passed as an act.


As my colleagues and I walked to the venue at Jantar Mantar we turned a corner and came upon this huge sea of people on the street. “How wonderful” I thought to myself, “What an amazing show of strength, so many people from different corners of…hey…wait a minute…why are all of them carrying sugarcanes?” Something seemed ‘dal mein kaala’. This sea of people composed entirely of men. Men with sugarcanes who glared lecherously at every passing woman.

Unfortunately for us, the first day of the dharna at Jantar Mantar clashed with the sugar cane farmer’s protest. The sea of people was an unfriendly lot who I had mistakenly thought to be ‘our people’. I have attended a few such events before and one thing that is common to all of them is the large number of women at such meetings and the men present at these meetings have never made me feel uncomfortable. We finally made it to the NAPM dharna site and heaved a sigh of relief. The people here were warmer and friendlier and as we positioned ourselves on the dari, the men stationed themselves, protectively, around us. It was difficult to hear what the speakers were talking about, since our dharna site was an island in the sea of protesting sugarcane farmers who actually had a larger island, right next to ours with louder loudspeakers (that’s ‘two’ loud right there for you). Well after a shouting match between their island and ours, a large group of the farmers came up to our tent and started pointing their sugarcanes threateningly at us. If this would have been a movie, it would have been comic, but I was right there and comic, was the last thing that came to mind. Suddenly this woman sitting right next to me got up along with a few others and shouted back. I am not sure where she was from but her accent was hard for me to understand but here’s the gist, ‘Why cant we both speak, our issue is just as important. They took our land and I have small children to feed, where will I go now?’



I sat there feebly in the corner witnessing this fiasco. Clever idea, this. Just shove all the protestors in one corner give them loud loudspeakers and just walk away as they self-combust. And it made me wonder, what is this country doing to its own people? Free speech in a limited space, say this but not here, do this but do it this way, here’s progress but you’ve got to move. A lot of debate can ensue on the limits of freedom in a democratic state but I wonder whether this debate will mean anything to that lady. One of the speakers narrated an anecdote about the foolish god and the clever devotee. A clever devotee asks this foolish god to make him rich and says in return he would sacrifice a large bull. The foolish god grants him his wish and waits for the bull to be sacrificed. Weeks pass by and the sacrifice still hasn’t been performed. The foolish god appears to the devotee and demands his sacrifice. The devotee makes excuses says he has a lot of bills to pay and a lot of other expenses and can’t he just sacrifice a smaller animal, say a goat. The God accepts. 15 days later still no sacrifice. The whole incident is repeated several times and ends each time with the foolish god accepting a smaller sacrifice. Until at last the god says, I have had enough! Give me my sacrifice right now! To this the devotee says, O god I promised you I would sacrifice a small bird but I am really busy, aren’t you powerful enough to catch a bird and sacrifice it yourself? The foolish god represents the people who have lost their lands to the government and the clever devotee is the government who promises a lot but delivers nothing. As we sat listening to this story and the other speeches, shouting fiery slogans, I smiled a smile of satisfaction on having done my good deed for the day but sitting next to the lady as she wiped her tears I didn’t know whether any of this would help her get her land back and we sat silently as the speeches continued.

watching rivers..

I was up in the Bhagirathi valley last week, and was lucky enough to see the river and its tributaries in many moods.

Boisterous.

Nurturing.

Playful.

Contemplative.

.

The Ganga

This rather long post is part of an article I had written earlier. I hope you like it. If it gets a little too long, skip parts of it and move on to the pretty pictures!

For most people across the world, the Ganga is the first thing that comes to mind when they think of India. For most Indians, the Ganga is never far from their thoughts. Over the centuries, the Ganga has been India’s, giver of sustenance, spiritual guide, protector and means of contacting the outside world.
It is difficult to for the mind to encompass all that the Ganga is. We search for figures and facts to try and express the size of it, as if it were the chief thing that mattered. And yes, those facts inspire awe. The Indo-Gangetic plain covers a little more than 26% of the country’s geographical area in a graceful south-east sweep from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. As it flows, it provides physical and spiritual sustenance to 370.2 million people. The numbers of animals- both individuals and species- that it nurtures have not yet been satisfactorily counted.
It is not just individuals that the Ganga sustains. This river is a shaper of civilizations. It is difficult to imagine the nation, or indeed the entire sub-continent without this bounteous giver of silt and water- the elements of life- and this inspiration to poets and kings. The abundance in the Gangetic plains led to some of the early civilizations being established there. The Ganga is first mentioned in the Rigveda and then receives increasing importance in the later three Vedas. It is also praised in the Puranas, and India’s great epic- the Mahabharata is set in it’s plains.
Today, the river means different things to different people. The pilgrim sees it as a ‘mokshdayini’ – as one with power to free the self from this painful cycle of birth and death. The planner sees in the Ganga an opportunity to increase the country’s GDP by providing water to far-off lands and electricity to the nation. Ecologists see it as a marvellous repository of endemic wildlife. The animals and river communities see it as home.
To the river-bank dweller, the Ganga is life itself. The communities that live on the banks have their lives intertwined with the Ganga as surely as if the two were braided together in Shiva’s hair. In the mountain communities that live along the Ganga, an already harsh life would be unthinkable if it were not for the river.
The Ganga has been flowing in the region before the Himalayas rose. How long it will keep flowing in a matter for speculation. The Ganga is beset by a number of threats today. Construction of dams on the upper reaches are leading to the death of the flowing river as we know it, and also threatening the lives of the mountain communities. Withdrawal of water for irrigation and industry is sucking the river dry. The unregulated discharge of untreated sewage into the river is poisoning whatever water there is left.
There are attempts being made, at the national as well as at the local level, to save the Ganga before it is too late. In recognition of the incredible significance of the river to India’s identity, it’s prosperity, its ecosystem and its people, the Ganga has been accorded the status of a National River. This will help motivate the administration to make the preservation of the Ganga a high-priority task. For most people, this is already a high priority area. Life would be unimaginable without this magnificent, multi-faceted sweep of water to revere, love, and seek sustenance and inspiration from.

Ganga

Keoladeo: A Gambhir Matter

Those of you who spotted the pun in the title get full marks in the Dying River Identification Test. The Gambhir is one of the two rivers that cause Keoladeo National Park (formerly the Bharatpur bird sanctuary) to exist. Simply put, no river = no wetlands = no birds.

The 'no river' is not a hypothesis, either.This river, like all others, has been dammed along its length. In recent years, a series of protests have moved the government to drastically reduce releases from the Panchana dam and block water to the National Park. Last year, this issue was 'resolved' by developing a Rs.56 crore plan to bring water from the Govardhan river, 17 kms away.

This is disturbing for several reasons:
1. The whole struggle hinged upon 'are farmers more important than birds?'. This is rhetoric aimed to inflame emotions rather than a real question. The truth is that both farms AND birds are part of the ecosystem and benefit from instream flows.

2. The 'solution' is not a solution, but a band-aid fix. Negotiations would be a true solution. Inter-basin transfer, even at a relatively small scale is not only eco-illogical, but also vulnerable to future protests. Water 'stolen' from another basin is not an assured source.

3. The plan to provide water to the park was not really made for the sake of the birds who journey here from Siberia and are bewildered when they encounter a dry expanse. Still less was it made for the eco-system. It was made because Keoladeo has World Heritage Status and losing it would mean some loss of face for India. The action is good, but the motive? In case you are not against an anthropomorphic view of an ecosystem, this poem might interest you and hopefully inspire the conservation of an ecosystem for it's own right to exist..

so we found them..

but are we going to lose them again?

Frogs that fly and fish that clamber up rocks..the article I read today reminded me of the fairy stories I heard as a child of flying horses and talking geese. But guess what? All these are real, true animals. 350 new species have been discovered in the Himalayas in the last decade.
But maybe I am not too wrong after all. In a very short while, the animals might just be found in stories and in the pages of old journals. The rampant hydropower development happening in the Himalayan region will cause rivers to stop flowing, irreparably change the environment, and affect the local climate. This may just prove too much for even these tough, resilient creatures to survive.
The thing about extinction is that it is depressingly final. Once there is no longer a viable population left, it’s gone. Forever. For always. Gone. From everywhere. One incredibly complex, intelligent, fascinating, important part of the world is no longer there. Why? Because I want an air-conditioned mall. Hmmm.
Incidentally, the rather cool photo of the frog, and the article accompanying it can be read here.

childhood memories

Rivers and us, it’s simple. We didn’t need to spend too much time on what we would name this blog. We want to use this platform to talk about rivers and what they mean to us, inviting as many people as possible to share their experiences and stories. City life doesn’t offer one many chances to witness a river in all its rapturous glory. Most rivers in the city are tamed and packaged to cater to groups of loud, boisterous, picnicking families and tourists. At least the fortunate ones are, the rest are merely carriers of sewage.

As much as we’d like to disassociate ourselves from such embarrassing childhood memories (like almost drowning and being rescued only to find your swimming trunks weren’t as fortunate) most of us have at least one childhood memory revolving around some water body: a river, a lake or a pond. So, what is your happy memory? We’d love to hear it. Drop us a comment.

Rivers and us

Well, ok. So the first questions would be, why rivers and why us. And hot on the heels of those would be ‘Who is us?’

It will be tough to separate the first two, they are linked so. We are a part of an NGO called the People’s Science Institute (PSI) that works in the central Himalayas, mainly in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Uttarakhand is the birthplace of many magnificent rivers, chief of which is the Ganga. Rivers are likened to mothers for a very simple reason- they support life. Not only are riparian and freshwater ecosystems dependent upon them, but so are civilizations. The various kinds of life that rivers support, from the iconic Gangetic Dolphin to the humble mayfly, have their roles in keeping our web of life intact. Even if we were to consider it purely from a human point of view, it would be a sad, lonely, inhospitable world if rivers ceased to flow.

Sadly, that is just what is happening in most of the world. Excessive consumption, indiscriminate damming, and unrestricted pollution are all combining forces to kill our rivers. In Uttarakhand and other Himalayan states, the mind-boggling number of dams is killing our rivers and our mountains in one fell swoop.

And that is why rivers and why us.

But ‘us’ is not just this little group of enthusiastic river-lovers, or just PSI. It is everyone who feels a connection to a river, any river, and considers rivers worth protecting.