Climate Disasters Triggered Food Crises Across 23 Countries -World Food Programmes 2018 

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There is now growing empirical evidence on how climate change disproportionately affects the poor. With climate change, people face shortage of water and food, resulting in increased competition to access these basic necessities. This increases the chances of the intensification of existing conflicts and also creates new ones.The water crisis in Cape Town began in 2015, and the city continues to live under the threat of becoming the first major city in the world to run out of water. However, the poorer neighbour hoods in the city have not only been dealing with reduced access to water for years now, but are more likely to face the brunt of the crisis.

  • In the Democratic Republic of Congo, shifts in the timing and patterns of rainfall have led to lower food production and greater competition on arable land, increasing ethnic tensions and conflicts in the country. Such conflicts affect the poor the most, and further lead to an increase in poverty and displacement, pushing people into a vicious trap.
  • Frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change lead to food shortages and rise in food prices. This causes ­hunger and malnutrition, the effects of which are felt most strongly by the poor. According to the World Food Programme’s 2018 Global Report on Food Crises, “climate disasters triggered food crises across 23 countries, mostly in Africa, with shocks such as drought leaving more than 39 million people in need of urgent assistance.”
  • According to the 2018 Global Report on Internal Displacement, “30.6 million new internal displacements associated with conflict and disasters were recorded in 2017 across 143 countries and territories.” This amounts to 80,000 people being displaced every day. The report identifies floods and storms (mainly, tropical cyclones) as the primary causes of displacement, leading to 8.6 million and 7.5 million displacements, respectively.
  • Climate refugees can be found all over the world, displaced by coastal flooding in Dhaka, by hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, or due to the desertification of Lake Chad in West Africa. It is estimated that the number of people seeking asylum in the European ­Union due to climate change would see a 28% increase by 2100.
  • India ranks fifth globally for the losses it has experienced due to climate change. Around 800 million people in the country live in villages and depend on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. With at least 50% of the farmlands in the country being rain-fed, changes in the pattern of the monsoons will affect their livelihoods the most. Empirical evidence suggests that climate change has led to a decline in wheat yields and has lowered the productivity of workers.
  • Studies reveal that small farmers are aware of the long-term changes in the weather pattern and have changed their practices to deal with the resultant socio-economic changes. Small farmers also lack access to credit and other means of insurance, which makes them more vulnerable to climate change. Thus, climate change will make the existing problems of poverty, malnutrition, and farmer suicides worse.
  • At the Katowice Climate Conference in 2018, India called out the developed nations for reneging on their promises to provide developing countries with the financial support to combat climate change. It is the poor and developing countries that are being affected by the effects of climate change in the worst way, while having contributed next to nothing in creating the crisis of ­climate change.
  • And, it is these very countries that are being left behind both in terms of growth and development and mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change as they try to juggle their commitments to both. If steps are not taken quickly, climate change has the potential to reverse decades of growth and development globally, and particularly in India.
  • The warning bells have been tolling for a while now, and the widening disparities between the developed and the developing countries, the rich and the poor, the global North and the South, are emerging clearer than ever where climate change and its effects are concerned.

India Ranks 29th in the World by Doing Business’s “Getting Credit” Index

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Construction of indices are a tricky technique in economics and statistics. Indices seek to provide a way to aggregate diverse attributes. The weights and choice of dimensions tend to override the objective methods of comparison. There are of course “fair” ways of aggregating two attributes, but there is a high possibility of bias influencing results. Certainly, the greatest strength of an index is that it simplifies complex phenomena into comparable numbers.

  • This very simplicity makes ranking popular and hence powerful, making it a dangerous and often misguided tool for policy formulation. While not all stakeholders buy into such rankings, these are widely publicised and become impossible to ignore.
  • While discussions around its methodology hardly get much prominence, the often meaningless movement of ranks gain undue public attention.
  • What is more troubling is when such rankings incentivise governments to tweak their policies in order to go up the ranks. In fact, the Indian government in its output–outcome framework document for 2017–18 for industrial policy and promotion states as its first goal, the desire to reach the 90th rank in the EDB index in 2017–18 and 30th rank by 2020.
  • India, as has been widely reported, now ranks 100, up from 130 last year. Now, for instance, India ranks 29th in the world by Doing Business’s “getting credit” index leading to the impression that India is doing quite well on the access to credit front, contrary to many enterprise survey and research findings.
  • This index actually measures the “strength of credit reporting systems and the effectiveness of collateral and bankruptcy laws in facilitating lending,” and not “access to credit.” Review reports of Doing Business have also noted that it uses misleading terminology that has a far-reaching influence on public perceptions of economies.
  • The terms used suggest that the indices provide a comprehensive measure of business environment, while it only looks at on-paper regulations. The desire to go up the ranks tends to lead governments to change policy in favour of what drives the index, which need not be what their people or economy require.
  • The perception that a better ranking is positively correlated with foreign direct investment is another problematic consequence of these rankings.
  • Importantly, this one-size-fits-all approach to the “ease of doing business” ignores the diverse contexts of development in different countries. If countries fulfil these conditions, disregarding their own contexts and paths of development, they climb up the ranks.
  • This is akin to a world cup football tournament that lays out not only a common set of rules to be played by, but also rewards one strategy over others! Though Doing Business avowedly wants to inform policy, and not prescribe it, nor outline a normative position, its rankings do precisely that.
  • The newest controversy should prompt the World Bank to have another look and to do away with the EDB index altogether.

Mining is the Biggest Source of Electoral Funding in Meghalaya State

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This unregulated and hazardous industry has been projected as a “cottage industry” of Meghalaya, till the time the National Green Tribunal (NGT) put a ban on it in 2014. There were no serious efforts to enforce the ban, though. In fact, the ruling parties came to power with the promise to get the ban lifted.Mining is the biggest source of electoral funding in the state, with many of the present ministers and legislators either owing or running the mines. Many candidates in the elections of 2018 had stakes in mining and transport activities. Meghalaya was never exempted from central laws regulating mining, although, now, the government is making efforts to circumvent the “illegality.”

  • Not all locals benefit from mining. It has led to the privatisation of the commons and grabbing of land by a few. It is directly related to the increasing landlessness in the districts in which it is prevalent. There are, on an average, more than 50 mines per square kilometre in the Jaintia Hills.
  • It is a tragedy that coal has become the mainstay of the economy, as other sources of livelihood have dried up because of mining. Those with access to more capital and resources inevitably get more profits, while the locals, in whose name the extraction is done, live at the behest of coal barons.
  • More than 15 workers were trapped in one such black hole on 13 December 2018, as the water of the Lytein river gushed in through a puncture. Rescue operations have continued since then, although the crucial initial time was lost. The pumps to pull out the water from the mine reached the site only after two weeks.
  • The mines were unmapped with no blueprint to aid the rescue work. Even with the navy pressed into action, it was difficult to take out the disintegrating bodies of the miners. Two miners were again killed in the same district on 6 January 2019. A similar incident in the Garo Hills had led to the NGT ban in the first place.
  • Forty men had died in a similar way in 2002, while five miners were crushed to death in 2013. Deaths and injuries from falls, cave-ins, and flooding are an everyday event in the mining area, for which no one is held accountable.
  • Rathole mining has been disastrous for the environment as well. Jaintia Hills has come to be known as the “land of dead rivers,” as the high sulphur and metal wastes have made the rivers toxic and acidic, killing the fish and degrading the soil quality. Thousands of acres of forest have been cleared and fields destroyed for mining or storing the coal.
  • The landscape stands disfigured and ravaged, with the uncovered abandoned pits acting as death traps. With such degradation of the environment, mafia activities, child labour (an estimate putting their numbers at 70,000 in 2010), trafficking, and the lack of concern for workers’ life and safety, the government’s promises of regulation do not invite trust.
  • Scientific mining also does not appear to be the answer, as coal seams are thin and deep inside and spread out, requiring mining over larger areas. The coal is also not of a good quality, undermining the economic viability.
  • Who should take the responsibility of the recurring tragedies in the mining holes and manholes? Such questions have become much more difficult to answer in neo-liberal times. In this specific case of Meghalaya, despite the ban and the knowledge of violations, the business continued unabated, ignoring the fact that humans can enter the mining holes crawling on all fours like rats, but, in the case of inherent disasters, they cannot make their way out like rats.

She Recovered Many Histories – A Tribute to Aparna Basu

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The meticulousness and brilliance of Aparna’s scholarly works can be evinced from the fact that her doctoral thesis grew into a published and significant book called The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898–1920. The book, which is the scholarly production of her lively and enthusiastic mind, is thoroughly documented in both unpublished and published primary sources, and is buttressed with maps and tables based on the public and private papers of the administrators, and four important leaders of the national movement.

  • It has two major themes: the Government of India’s attempted control of education, and the development of education under the social pressures of the time. Arising from these two are the effect of will, or the lack of it, upon governmental projects, and the deadening effect of bureaucracy upon all creative activity.
  • Her thesis and the book are significant contributions to the study of the links between education and politics in India about which there are far too many myths, and too little systematic research.
  • She was also the author of another dozen books, biographies as well as anthologies. Some of her significant books were Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990, Breaking Out of Invisibility: Women in Indian History, etc.
  • In Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause, Aparna has skilfully presented the life of the revolutionary heroine of the independence movement, who was born into the Sarabhai family of Ahmedabad in 1911.
  • A non-conformist and a rebel championing unpopular causes, she spurned offers of high office in the political arena of national government.
  • Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990 narrates in detail the history and the changing nature of activities undertaken by the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) during its long career from 1927 to the present.
  • Along with Anup Taneja, Aparna utilised some of the rare sources such as the AIWC files, private papers of Muthulakshmi Reddy as well as some hitherto unknown women’s journals.
  • A large number of interviews that she conducted among women threw new facts about women’s activities in the public sphere.
  • Breaking Out of Invisibility: Women in Indian History marks a welcome recognition of the importance of situating women’s history within the broader perspective of social history, and illustrates the wide variety of themes in women’s history on which historians have been working over the last few decades.

Generous Scholarly Guide

  • The 14 essays by leading specialists are a rich insight for the readers into the gendered history of India. But aparna had another credential which is not common amongst high flying scholars, and that was the willingness, the generosity to “bend down” to assist other more action-oriented projects.
  • She responded to so many requests for her guidance and contribution without assessing whether they would add to her credentials or were worthy of her status—just due to the generosity of her spirit. Aparna undertook the leadership of the AIWC at a critical time in its history, causing the organisation to reinvent through newer activities.
  • Even after her term as president was over, she continued to mentor it. Her involvement with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s work was another area she traversed, no longer really the fashion amongst academics.
  • Undaunted, Aparna took up the chairpersonship of the National Gandhi Museum in 2013 (and held it until her death), changed its character, made it lively by holding meetings, conferences and exhibitions and publishing tracts, all of which brought the institution and its legacy into prominence.
  • The extraordinary fact is that Aparna engaged in all this governance and direction while simultaneously writing well-researched books and informally guiding scholars and academic friends and colleagues. She guided researchers not only on where to look, but how to organise the material.
  • In 2016, she pulled together an outstanding exhibition on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s life at the India International Centre. In 2018, she did the same for an exhibition on the Ahmedabad millworkers’ strike of 1918.
  • Her absence has created a serious gap in the working of many institutions, as well as the recovery of many histories.