Orissa's Got Talent

A January evening in Koraput and the streets are densely packed with hordes of people all heading in one direction. The insistent sound of tribal music comes drifting over them, pulling them closer. On a hillside, ‘PARAB’, the word for ‘festival’ in a local language, is picked out in lights. It feels like the circus is in town.

But despite the vendors hawking toxic-looking candy floss and the Indian equivalent of mini-doughnuts, Parab has little in common with a British fairground. Its mixture of tribal dance, music, arts and crafts make it something unique to Orissa and the indigenous traditions that are preserved in the state’s villages.

The festival itself is the culmination of a month-long series of events in schools, colleges and the local government areas known as ‘Panchayats’. Almost a hundred-thousand people participated in various performances, with Parab as the finale and a platform for the very best performers. The result is a rich and diverse display of a shared cultural identity.

The centrepiece of the festival is the display of Odissi dance, the local classical dance form which is quite staggeringly ancient. By examining sculptures and engravings, historians have identified the same dance being performed as far back as the 2^nd century BC, presumably for a very early series of ‘Orissa’s Got Talent’. Fortunately there was no pantomime panel of judges here; just huge models of a pair of tribal elders gazing down benevolently over the dancers and musicians.

Stalls around the grounds demonstrated that the breadth of tribal culture extends far beyond the field of dance. Local artisans presented hundreds of terracotta statues and ornaments, intricately carved woodwork and hand-woven textiles produced on looms that date back centuries.

Somewhat awkwardly juxtaposed with this traditional folk-craft were stalls run by some of the mega-corporations who today call Orissa home, such as the National Aluminum Company and some of the many aerospace companies who build military jets here.

In this sense, Parab is a microcosm of society in Orissa, a place where big factories and corporations set out their stalls alongside farmers and craftsmen. The challenge for development agencies and others here is how to balance the encroachment of the outside world, and the much-needed investment and relatively lucrative employment that it brings with it, with the fragile value of the region’s tribal heritage.

Rajesh Prabhakar Patil, writing in ‘The New Indian Express’, tapped into this debate and expressed a view that I’ve heard repeated by many locals in Koraput – that in a world of transient pop fads the longevity of Orissa’s indigenous culture is a welcome link to a simpler time. India as a whole may well be emerging as a growing market for the latest technological toys and gadgets, but many people here are more concerned with ensuring that they don’t lose sight of what it is that makes their culture unique. They are fiercely proud of their heritage.

The very existence of Parab is evidence that the people of Orissa know that their ancient tribal culture is something worth protecting and celebrating. As Rajesh Prabhakar Patil writes: “There won’t be any development in the true sense sans cultural inputs.”

Toilet Training

London may have the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, but have you ever dreamt of spending your holidays at a museum entirely dedicated to toilets? Of course you have. We all have. It’s perfectly natural.

Isn’t it?

Anyway, seek no further: the place you are looking for is located in Delhi. The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets is a strange place to spend a day, but it also has a lot to teach the world about sanitation and development. There’s a lot more to this place than kitsch value or prurient, scatological humour.

I arrived early in the day to find that I was the only visitor. Admittedly, it was raining heavily – but I began to worry that perhaps the toilet museum wasn’t the must-see visitor’s attraction I’d been led to believe it was. Fortunately, the museum’s curator was on hand to assure me that it was just the rain keeping the punters away. I glanced at the barrels of dried poo behind him and nodded in agreement.

The museum itself is well-maintained and the curator took the time to give me a personalised guided tour. They have a staggeringly varied collection of toilets from around the world, as well as displays and diagrams about pre-toilet sanitation. But what really brought me here wasn’t the history of toilets, but the future. You see, as well as running this museum, the Sulabh Sanitation Trust is dedicated to bringing toilet facilities to rural India. In the past 30 years it has provided toilets now used by 10 million people every day.

Next door to the museum the Trust maintain a working laboratory where they demonstrate how human waste can be put to work (which finally went some way to explaining the barrels of dried poo – it’s a valuable source of fuel, apparently). They run a free public toilet block on site, and incredibly the waste that it produces then powers an electrical generator and their kitchen. There is a filtration system behind the public toilets which Sulabh uses to extract nutrients from human waste, collecting methane gas for cooking and street lighting. The water is also treated and reused to water their plants (although I still wasn’t going to drink it).

For me, the most important part of their work is the low cost toilets they have developed for use in slums and rural villages. In India, as in so much of the world, sanitation is a life or death issue, with poorly disposed of waste spreading disease, so this is essential work.

Their scientists showed me around their outdoor display of toilets which are designed to keep waste away from the village water supply. To take one example, they calculate that it costs on average 1,700 Rs. (£24) to dig and fortify the substructure and 950 Rs. (£13.50) to build the superstructure. These toilets then become permanent features of villages and slums where before people would just go out in the open.

It might not be the most glamorous business in the world, but the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets is, in its own way, changing the world. It’s a dirty business, but someone’s got to do it.

Ekta Parishad's March For Land

Ekta Parishad is an Indian people’s movement dedicated to non-violence. Their activists work towards building community-based governance with an emphasis on local self-reliance. Their aim is to see India’s poorest people gain control over their own livelihood resources such as land, water and forests.

In October 2012, they are planning a march across India to raise the issue that land is a key asset for development and poverty reduction. They believe that levels of landlessness and deprivation need to be reduced in order to achieve development for all the people of India, not just the wealthy few.

Rajagopal, who is leading this massive undertaking, told Ctrl.Alt.Shift about the staggering logistics that will be involved – and why it means so much.

CAS: How will the march be organized?

This is a march in which a hundred thousand people are going to participate. We will begin the march from the city of Gwalior. Gwalior is significant because that was where the surrender of bandits—the dacoits—took place before the picture of Gandhi in 1972. About 400 of them surrendered, rejecting violence, there after our work has been nonviolent. That was a kind of goodbye to violence so it is important to us.

We believe that globalization is violence. Taking resources from the poor people is violence. Discrimination and oppression are violence. So if bandits could say goodbye to violence in 1972, then this democratic government of India should be able to say goodbye to violence too.

The march will start on October 2 and we will be walking 15 or 20 kms a day and so it will take about 32 days to reach Delhi.

There are many logistics involved in this, as we learned in our march of 2007. People are eating on the road, sleeping on the road. There will be discussions and entertainment on the road. So it is basically a huge, mobile training program.

CAS: What is the significance of this sort of march?

This has been used in India since the very beginning. Religious leaders, for example, also used the padayatra—what other option did they have but to walk?

From that point, Gandhi took the idea and developed it into a tool for social change. He made his famous Dandi padyatra—the Salt March as part of the liberation struggle. Gandhi linked it to his idea of satyagraha—‘clinging on to truth’. That is what he meant by a padayatra—it was a spiritual activity and also an activity for social change.

For our purposes, walking is the tool of poor people. It is something they do and can do without money. A second thing is it has no limits; cars and trains and buses have limits but walking only has the limits of the human being and it allows many, many people to participate. You can add as many bodies as you want. As well you are accessible—people can approach and speak with you. You are not hurrying to a destination but you can walk and talk, talk and walk with people. Especially for a country like India, this padayatra allows for access and participation. Here everyone can afford to walk, it is a journey which is possible for everyone.

Of course, most people will come first to Gwalior by train, and because they are poor they will insist on traveling for no charge. They will say this is not my personal fight, but I am doing this for the country. The railway officials will let them pass.

CAS: What can people in the UK do to support this work?

In the UK people can do advocacy with their MPs. I know that there is already a strong movement among UK MPs on some of the Dalit issues in India. It is very important to connect the issues of poverty with the issue of land. That is the only real solution to poverty in India. It is not at all a question of creating jobs—there are simply too many people, too many poor people in India for that to work. No ‘growth in the economy’ could possibly support them. Yet if people have a small amount of land, then they can support themselves. And with all of the landgrabbing going on now by multinationals and our own rich and powerful people, land is being lost by many poor people.

British parliamentarians can in turn have a big impact on parliamentarians here. There is still a lot of influence from our colonial past. So people have to say, land reform is the issue and we want you to take it up. There is a huge amount of development aid coming to India from England and also a great deal of business, so that can be some leverage. When Mr. Cameron came, they made a series of deals with the government for arms sales and other business. So if a group of parliamentarians took a position on this issue, it would help us a lot.

We also need resources. We are mobilizing a vast number of poor people, people who really have nothing and they are standing up for their rights. It takes very little in Western terms of money to support that, but a little bit will go a long way here.

Finally we are looking for volunteers like doctors who can come for one month to help us. And we need people to help us translate. We also want journalists and photographers and advocates. We are happy to welcome anyone who is sincerely concerned for the poor people. So we need all kinds of support, moral, political and economic.

Really all of this would be proactive, it would help us prevent the disaster of violence in India. Because if we don’t do something there will be more and more violence here. What we are doing is trying to head that off by democratizing the country. Helping now is being preventative and hopeful about the future.