August 2012 CUSP OF CHANGE Stories of lives, lessons, legends from Mewar Manual cross pollination of Bt cotton ABOUT THE COURSE Challenge of the Balance: a course on Policies, Politics & Practices of Environmental Management in the Developing World Objective This inter – disciplinary month long structured course on environment / development issues is for about 25 participants from various international institutions of learning. For this summer school, CSE has collaborated with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) United Kingdom, and EWB chapters in South Asia. Programme design Challenge of the Balance is an orientation programme to give international participants a first-hand experience of Southern perspectives concerning the environment-development debate. It includes classroom lectures, seminars, local field excursions, together with challenging individual and/or group project work. Participants will be given an intense briefing on issues that are of concern to India and other developing countries. Field trips will serve to illustrate innovations and eco-restoration efforts that communities make to enable them to face the challenges of managing their natural resources base. Challenge of the Balance August 2012: Participants from the UK, Scotland, Italy, Japan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh and India Centre for Science and Environment 41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi – 110062 TRAINING VENUE COURSE CONTACTS Anil Agarwal Green College Aditya Batra Sharmila Sinha 38, Tughlakabad Institutional Area Prog Director, Education & Prog Officer, Education & Training New Delhi–110062 Training & South Asia Programme Email: [email protected]; Email:[email protected] [email protected] Mobile: +91-9810825775 Mobile: +91-9818482018 Office Tel: +91 (011) 29955124 +91 (011) 29955124/125 Fax: +91 (011) 29955879 2 thread August 2012 EDITORIAL thread from the editors’ desktop Editors Hello, please make yourselves at home. Anjali Nambissan Yash Maniar This the thread where we post accounts of the state of the environment as we see it. A network of complex, interconnected issues does not begin Copy-Editors to describe it. Threading together stories of lives, livelihoods, water, waste Benjamin McIntosh-Michaelis meant endless hours of brain racking and lots of coffee and conversations. Enrico Prunotto This is our thread, where we post interactions with the people we met and Rory Richardson how we’re all just trying to wrap our minds around it all. Pravnav Pokhrel Yousof Khan I don’t know how many of us were surprised by what we saw. Water brings communities together, while easy money tears them apart. The polluters never end up paying, while the people who live with the pollution are left Design Editors without options. Livelihoods, or the lack thereof, take people on surreal Sarah Livingstone journeys. Farmers make choices they shouldn’t have to for reasons they Waiman Tsang don’t know themselves. Grassroots organisations fill in the gaping abyss left by a lax administrative machinery. It’s inspirational to travel with Reporters grassroots organisations and the enthusiasm of each member is palpable Anjali Nambissan and contagious. Alak Sharma Benjamin McIntosh-Michaelis The environment, to us, does not mean just trees and hills and natural Deney Chu resources, it’s also about how waste becomes a survival tactic for some, Istiak Ahmed or about people in crowded city villages who cannot challenge the change Khimananda Sharma around them. Mahjabeen Pranav Pokhrel It’s not about man versus environment anymore. Built or natural, Rory Richardson manmade or pre-made, forest or cityscape, they are all central to the Radhika Goel existence of the human race. When we say environment we mean this Sarah Livingstone world as an indivisible whole. Sewa Tripathi Stephanie Davies Waiman Tsang Keep it conscious. Anjali Nambissan & Yash Maniar Yash Maniar Yousof Khan Yuki Noritake Sincere thanks to Centre for Science and Environment for publishing this magazine. Special thanks to Aditya Batra, Sharmila Sinha, Surender Singh, Illustrations D S Bains, and the entire DTE Team. Pranav Pokhrel PHOTOS: WAIMAN TSANG Cover photo Yash Maniar Manual cross pollination of Bt cotton August 2012 thread 3 LETTERS TO EDITOR Point/Counterpoint Did the field visit to rural India to ‘witness development’ allow us also to join the dots and construct an alternative worldview in this media saturated world? Enrico Prunotto until a good Facebook photo was table, sowing cash crops becomes acquired. We interacted with the the trend, often leading to debt, e have lost villagers and then we left with alcoholism and suicide among Wour me - smiling faces. All was over; we were farmers. mo ries; the in our safe and comfortable bus, But real life has to be seen to be philosopher back to our lives. Is that all? Is it believed. A month-long experience Umberto Eco just a quick look that the students at Challenge of the Balance in defines us as wanted when they applied to these August 2012 reaffirms that. Not an alien gene- eco-courses? We don’t believe so. only is the field trip a reality check ration, arguing However, this will be the result like no other; through the lectures that we are no if the learning is not managed you come to know and continue to longer used to living in nature. We properly after these visits. The be inspired by people who have only know cities and we live in first reaction could easily seem devoted their lives and used their unreal spaces, trained by the superficial when you don’t really education towards making sense of media, which tells us about know how to behave. However, this this crazy world. problems no longer seen in our is just the surface of the experience A field trip like this teaches you everyday life, such as chronic and only after connecting all the not only about the world around poverty or lack of food and water dots will we get true value. you, but also about your own supply. However, we live in a world From the knowledge obtained limitations. There’s you with your where pressures and tensions of by this course we can now air-conditioned tour of a tribal change require global awareness. understand the backwards value- village, but there's also little To drive this process, a lot of chain and what we are paying for Emiya you meet on that tour. She institutes offer programs on eco- when buying a cotton T-shirt. No has to till the weeds to feed her development issues based in one can force us to change our goats and doesn't get to go to school developing countries for students to lifestyles; however, after these like the rest of the children of her interact with local communities. experiences, making a conscious village. The course Challenge of the choice should become our duty. We You have to get over the fact Balance is a good example, as its need to remember it. that that there are no black and main pillar is a one-week-long field Our generation already lost white solutions in a world full of trip to rural India. The course many memories and we are here to grey human beings. Complex, program officer Sharmila Sinha learn back what was probably the interconnected issues make up this considers this practical learning basis for most of our grand-parents. reality. It's not just the awareness model extremely effective to “inform you have but what you do with it the students, who probably have Benjamin Ruaridh that counts. Virtue is nothing but never been on a farm before, to try McIntosh-Michaelis words till it is acted upon. and see what it is like.” You face up to that challenge When we arrived in village ewspapers, and realise that there's really not Dhingavarikala, villagers stopped Nmagazines one thing you can change about their activities to look at this group and television this world. There are many things of “developed people” with good news relay and there is nothing. It is how you clothes and white faces, an unusual these stories face up to this challenge and alter sight for them. Soon however it was every day. If your life. If you think making our turn to to be surprised: an you’re a reason - conscious choices well within your open-air toilet, a Bt cotton plant ably informed comfort zone is enough, so be it. and grazing goats. For many of us ‘global’ citizen For me, it’s about challenging this was a first-time experience. It you know that of the poorest in limitations to know what I’m made didn’t take much time for us to start India 94 per cent do not have of and alter my sense of virtue.■ grabbing farming tools and toilets and that, as agriculture pretending to be farmers, at least increasingly becomes less profi- The views expressed by the authors are their own 4 thread August 2012 CONTENTS EDITORS PAGE 3 LETTERS TO EDITOR 4 FEATURE Small Village in the Big City 6 PROFILE Man Behind the Bears 8 SPECIAL REPORT Public trash, Private interests 10 REPORTER’S DIARY In the Shadow of the Taj 12 REPORT Conflict of interests 13 COVER STORIES Slippery Soap 15 Development Conundrum 16 Udaipur’s Lake and PIL 17 A Cut Above 18 A River Reborn 19 Turning Waste into Want 20 Cultivating Controversy 21 Rural Resurgence 22 Mautana – Then & Now 23 The Invisible Workforce 24 PUZZLES 26 PHOTOS: YOUSOF KHAN August 2012 thread 5 FEATURE Small Village in the Big City Peculiar to Delhi, these urban villages are tiny bits of rural life, seemingly exempt from big city influence • ANJALI NAMBISSAN rowded and narrow lanes thread together a cowshed, Csome haveli-style houses, a Panchayat, a baraat ghar and many multi-story apartment buildings leaning on one another.