Holi Days In The Slums Of Kolkata

I’m walking towards a taxi rank in Kolkata when a driver accosts me and starts haggling. He’s probably asking too much for the journey I want to take, but it’s difficult to negotiate with a man who’s painted bright pink from head to toe. Then again, aside from a few patches of blue around the cheeks, so am I.

Today has been Holi, India’s festival of colours, and as he tells me a few minutes later when I’m safely ensconced in the back of his cab, it’s a festival that levels everyone – no matter your caste, class or everyday skin colour, nobody is safe from the powders, paints and water bombs and everyone looks the same when you’re covered in colours.

Kolkata is a city that really embraces Holi and with it the opportunity to come together for a shared party. It was here in Bengal that the tradition of playing with colours started, when worshippers would visit Krishna temples and cover themselves with red powder to signify the passion with which they would work to honour Krishna and struggle to improve society.

In Kolkata, that struggle is still great. In a city of 15 million people, the third largest in India, some 3 million people live in slums. According to UN-Habitat’s ‘Global Report on Human Settlements’ there are 5,500 slums here, of which around 2,011 are registered slums known as ‘bustees’. The other 3,500 unregistered slums have grown up by the side of canals, large drains, garbage dumps, railway tracks and roads. Space in the slums is hard to come by, and on average each small room is shared by 13 people.

Many of the authorised slums date back to the days of British colonialism, when middlemen let out huts on landowners’ land to migrant workers. These migrants needed a place to live and had no alternative but to accept accommodation without basic amenities. Today, the situation is much the same as workers come from states such as Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar to seek work in Kolkata.

Dr. Nitai Kundu interviewed Kolkata slum dwellers for the UN-Habitat report. One man he spoke to, Safi Ahmed, lives in a Kolkata slum called Narkeldanga and works laminating paper. As a child he lived in a slum in Park Circus with his parents but after his marriage moved to Narkeldanga to live with his family. He earns Rs 300 (just over £4) per week with which he supports seven family members, and he pays Rs 300 a month in rent for their shared home.

Another man, Rajan, is 70 and has works in a slum in ward 38. He is employed rolling bidis: small, leaf-rolled cigarettes tied with string. He makes 500-600 bidis every day and is paid Rs 70, less than £1. All the members of his family share a single room so it’s normal for the male members to sleep outside on the pavement, a common sight on Kolkata’s streets.

Stories like these highlight the industriousness of the slums and how long and hard their inhabitants work for such a paltry reward. But on days like Holi, when Kolkata forgets its divisions and comes together in celebration, its true colours shine through.

Why Aid India?

When Andrew Mitchell, the secretary of state for international development, announced recently that the UK plans to give more than £1billion in aid to India over the next four years, it prompted a wave of derision from some sections of the press. “Why on earth is cash-strapped Britain giving £1billion of aid to a country that can afford its own space programme?” asked Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail while over in the Express, Jimmy Young argued ‘India doesn't need our aid anymore... Britain does.’

I can see why people are making this argument – India has the world’s second fastest growing economy and is now firmly established as a ‘middle-income country’, but the fact remains that there are 450 million people living on less than US$1.25 a day. This apparent disconnect extends well beyond India. It used to be the case that development aid was about helping poor countries, but now 72% of the world’s poor people live in middle-income countries.

I think part of the problem is a failure to grasp India’s vast size. There are more poor people in eight Indian states than there are in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined, and looking at these states individually makes the need for aid obvious. For example, Bihar has a population the size of Germany and an annual income per person of £200.

DFID will focus its spending in just three states: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa – the state where I live and work. I decided to get in touch with DFID here in India to get their opinion on the debate. They told me: “The pace of India's transformation to date is remarkable. But India's poorest states - each of them larger than most African countries - still face huge development challenges. For example close to half of the young children in Orissa are undernourished. To put the scale of the challenge into context, in Orissa - just one of India's 28 states - the number of people who live on the equivalent of less than 80 pence a day ($1.25) is 40% of the entire UK population.”

They added: “As part of the revitalised British relationship with India, following Prime Minister David Cameron's successful visit last year, our development partnership has an important role to play. We are discussing with the Government of India a new approach. Over the next few years, in India's poorest states, we want to help the private sector to deliver jobs and basic services like health and education in areas which desperately need them. We also want to target our support to the poorest women and girls, and help them get quality schooling, healthcare and nutrition.”

Meanwhile in the UK, Christian Aid director Loretta Minghella welcomed the fact that DFID money will be going where it is needed most: “The emphasis of the UK government programme is on three of the poorest states in the country where there remain huge challenges, particularly in providing education and health care, nutrition and jobs.”

The Indian government is running a host of its own schemes designed to alleviate poverty in these states, but the UK’s attention is able to leverage support and attention for the poorest people who often lack a political voice within the country. There’s also an argument that by helping the poorest Indians, the UK is making friends and influencing people who will soon be a global power themselves. As Ms Minghella pointed out: “The UK aid will fit in well with the Indian government’s own strategy of targeting the poorest and most excluded communities. To withdraw aid at this crucial juncture in India’s development would be extremely short-sighted.”

The Wrong Side Of The Tracks

On a recent trip to Kolkata I spent a couple of hours sat on a train outside Howrah Junction, one of the city’s main stations, waiting for a platform to become free. These kinds of delays are a regular occurrence in India, and each time a train stops groups of children who live alongside the railway tracks jump onboard to try to earn a few rupees from the passengers by sweeping the carriages, singing and busking or simply begging.

The children I saw were no older than eight or nine, but I should probably count myself lucky that they weren’t any younger. In one case reported by Times of India last month, a seven-month old baby boy was found abandoned onboard a train headed for Howrah – and the man who found him was told to keep him.

That’s right – its finders-keepers on children in India, with railway officials refusing to even make loudspeaker announcements and the police attempting to locate parents who may well not want to be located. It makes you wonder whether the many children in India who have to fend for themselves have anyone looking out for them at all.

Cities like Kolkata have particularly high numbers of street children due to increasing urban populations and rural-urban migration. In Kolkata’s slums, large numbers of people live without access to basic services such as sanitation, safe drinking water, shelter and education. With or without parental care many children end up in bus-stands, railways stations, markets and roadside pavements. They often fall into hazardous forms of work including begging and rag-picking and are at risk of becoming victims of trafficking.

Although the Indian government has expressed concern for the welfare of these children, there remain serious doubts over whether they have the capability to deal with the number of children who don’t live with their parents, or who do but still need an income to survive. The estimates of how many children there are working in India varies from the official statistic of 12.6 million to a figure of at least 50 million used by many human-rights groups. Nevertheless, in recent years the government has taken several steps towards outlawing child labour. In 2006 they extended bans on children working in dangerous professions to cover households and the hospitality industry, and in 2009 they introduced their biggest legislative effort yet: the Integrated Child Protection Scheme.

The scheme has grand plans, and in places like Kolkata it should theoretically facilitate the opening of shelters where children could spend their time in a safe environment. Their basic health and shelter requirements would be met and vocational training could also be provided. The scheme also aims to encourage sponsorship, foster care and adoption with the aim of keeping as many children as possible within families. As Sujata Mohanty, Project Director of the Taskforce on Alternative Child Care, said at a recent district level consultation on the Scheme in Orissa: “All children have a right to a family.” She added: “Institutionalisation should be the last resort.”

The Taskforce on Alternative Child Care is just one of the civil society agencies to whom the government has delegated much of the vast task of actually implementing their scheme. This multiplicity of actors could prove to be the scheme’s biggest weakness. As with the railway officials who said that the missing boy was “not their concern”, the fact that there are so many agencies and government bodies involved makes it easy for people to pass the buck on difficult cases – because in the end nobody wants to be left holding the baby.

Making Sure Disability Counts

Ever tried counting to a billion? India is attempting it this month as it rolls out its 2011 census, the first since 2001. “Never before have we tried an exercise of this scale,” said Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister. “In fact, nowhere in the world has a government tried to count, identify and issue identity cards to more than a billion population. This is the biggest exercise, I believe, since humankind came into existence.”

As an indicator of what a mammoth task this is, there are two and a half million ‘enumerators’ fanning out across the country this month to collect the statistics in person. There are a good fifty countries in the world that don’t even have that many citizens in total, or to put it another way, there are eight times more civil servants working on this thing than there are people in Iceland. That is, as they say, a lot.

It’s a remarkable operation designed with the best of intentions. As the Census Commissioner C. Chandramouli put it: “The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10 years, in a dispassionate manner, whether government programmes are reaching their intended target and plan for the future.” I hope he’s right, but it’s worth bearing in mind a truism that has been repeated since the 19^th Century - that there are three types of falsehoods: lies, damn lies and statistics.

One person who shares my concern about the mendacious nature of seemingly authoritative facts and figures is Ajit Kumar Behera of Swabhiman, the Odisha State Disability Network. He believes that there was a huge discrepancy in the number of disabled people counted in the census figures of 2001 which led in turn to severe underfunding.

According to those figures, around 2% of the Indian population is disabled. To put that in context, the UK census put the number of disabled people at around 17% of the total population, which is roughly the same as the USA and Canada. The World Bank link here goes some way to explaining why these numbers seem so far apart, and suggests that “a worldwide estimate of about a 10-12% rate of disability seems reasonable.”

Behera agrees with this estimate, and says it chimes more accurately with his experiences in the field than the official figure of 2%. So what happened to all the disabled people who weren’t counted?

The simplified version of Behera’s answer goes like this: if there were ten people with hearing problems, but the government only had two hearing aids to give out, then only two people could be given them. When the census was conducted, only the two people with hearing aids were counted as having hearing problems, so eight became ‘invisible’. The government then uses its own census data to decide that next time around it only needs to provide enough resources for two people with hearing problems, and so the cycle continues.

The 2011 census represents a once in a decade opportunity to affect the way that the Indian state allocates resources, which is why Behera is campaigning hard to raise awareness of the importance of identifying disabled people correctly on the census.

I recently visited Nayanamate, a 17 year old who was born with both cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and who lives in Bariguda, a small tribal village made up of fewer than 70 houses in a rural area of Orissa. It is physically and psychologically a long way from Delhi, and her mother and grandmother told me of how remote they feel from the support of the Indian government. In making such gigantic strides to count and identify their citizens, India should also be taking a small but important step towards understanding who in the population needs their help most. That’s what really counts.

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.