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.

The Long Road To Tribal Education

There are over eight million tribal people living in the state of Orissa, in the east of India, representing some 22% of the population. Despite their numbers, this indigenous rural population is continually marginalised and disenfranchised. The eyes of the world briefly turned to the tribal people earlier this year when the Dongria Kondh battled with mining company Vedanta to stop their sacred Niyamgiri hills being ripped apart for bauxite. They won that battle, but tribal people across the state are losing a much longer war to get their children a decent education.

On a sunny morning in the village of Nuaguda, in the south of Orissa, I met children from tribal families arriving at school. On the way there, I had seen many more in the surrounding fields and villages. This is a common sight, particularly in rural areas. According to the Indian Education Department, although 96% of India’s children start primary school, by the age of 10 around 40% have dropped out.

I asked Sunita Dolei, of local NGO Ekta, why this is the case. She told me that for tribal people, school is secondary to the need for survival. “Education is a livelihoods issue,” she says. “Tribal people often need to send their children out to work in order to survive, which means that they aren’t able to attend school regularly.”

She argues that while the Indian central government offers support to those living in poverty, it is those who need it most who often end up missing out – precisely because of their lack of education. She describes a vicious cycle. “The Indian government have introduced many schemes to try and reduce poverty,” she says, “but those who need the help most lack the necessary education to take advantage of the schemes.”

The literacy rate for Scheduled Tribes in Orissa stands at just 37%. Although the literacy rate has been steadily growing over the last few decades, it has remained significantly lower than the rate for the rest of the population. In 1991, the literacy rate for tribal people was 18% compared to 41% for the general population. By the time of the 2001 Indian census it had risen to 37%, but the rate for the population as a whole had risen to 54%.

There is also a significant and worrying gender disparity in education. While the tribal literacy rate stands at 52% for males, it is just 23% for females. Three in four tribal women will never be able to read or write their own name, cutting them off from many of the schemes designed to help them and curtailing their own independence.

Ekta are visiting Nuaguda today as part of their programme to get tribal children back to school. When the team first arrived they quickly realised that there were a high number of dropouts from the village school. They organised a meeting with parents to explain what a difference education could make to their children’s lives. Few of the adults who attended had spent much time in school themselves. They grew up in a time before the constitutional amendment, introduced last year, which makes education a compulsory and fundamental right for everyone from the ages of 6 to 14. Community involvement is key to successful schools in these remote villages, so Ekta know they have to start with the parents.

A further complication is the diversity of languages spoken by tribal people. Although the most-widespread language in Orissa is Oriya, there are numerous tribal languages from a total of three different language groups – Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. Many children are put off school simply because they find it impossible to study in a second tongue. If education is to function, it must take account of these regional variables.

Ekta’s staff work hard to persuade parents that broadened horizons in the future outweigh the financial benefits of sending children out to work. Lulu, 24, is one of Ekta’s village facilitators. He’s from a nearby town, and he tells me of that there is also a lack of opportunities available to adults. “There is no education to help them provide a livelihood for their children,” he says.

Getting children into the classroom is only half the battle. Jagannath Mishra, Ekta’s Chief Secretary, estimates that as many as 70% of rural teachers have not been to school and are illiterate themselves. In many cases they don’t even turn up. He says that there have been reports of people bribing officials to appoint them to the relatively lucrative role of teacher, and then bribing them again to turn a blind eye to their own poor attendance. A UNESCO report into education in tribal areas found that poor attendance by teachers is a major problem at traditionally run schools.

One possible solution is the creation of community schools. Trials in tribal areas near Vishakhapatnam, in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, have shown that putting communities in charge of their own schools, with the power to hire and fire teachers, improves attendance by staff and pupils.

Localising responsibility for teaching should not let the Indian government off the hook. In the country as a whole, Scheduled Tribes make up a smaller but still significant proportion of the population, at around 8.5%. Their lack of education is a factor in the ‘two-tier’ development that India has witnessed over the last decade. ‘Scheduled Tribes’ were identified in 1976 by the Indian government as requiring special measures to safeguard their interests. There are 645 different tribes in India, with 62 living in Orissa alone. 13 of Orissa’s tribes have been categorised as ‘endangered’.

The government acknowledges that the tribal population has specific needs, and this needs to be reflected in education policy. When educators and academics met in Bhubaneswar, the state capital, in 2006, they concluded that “the state should come out with an education policy that reflects and includes tribal children and families.”

Improving the literacy rates among India’s tribal people will require a concerted effort to engage with local realities and dedicated teachers willing to stick to their task in remote and often underfunded schools. But the message from the villages is clear: there is a new willingness to learn. Ekta’s Amit Kumar Njayak oversees the schools intervention project. He tells me that the tribal people he works with are increasing aware of the need for better education for their children. “The villagers and the school teachers really appreciate the importance of this cause. If with this project we have been able to make a small difference in the life of the community then I think that all our work is on the right track.”

He acknowledges, however, that there is still much more progress to be made. “We know that this is only the first step of our journey,” he says. “We still have a long way to go.”

Secrets and lies

My article about tackling HIV among female sex workers in Damanjodi, Orissa has been published by The Guardian.

Being Gay in India: World AIDS Day

In the week running up to World AIDS Day I’ve been visiting colleges here in Orissa, in the east of India, to talk to students about HIV awareness. For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how switched on Indian teenagers are – for a country where just talking about sex, especially sex before marriage, is considered a taboo they’ve been surprisingly open and forthright about their knowledge of the topic and the value of using condoms to prevent HIV transmission.

The sessions I’ve been running have involved an essay-writing competition and they make for fascinating reading. Well, I thought so anyway. While I was marking them a teacher from the college told me to hurry up. “In India, you just read a few sentences and judge the essay on that,” he told me. Poor kids, I thought – but who knows, maybe my teachers all did the same thing?

Anyway, even if the students aren’t used to actually having their work read, for me it proved to be an invaluable way of understanding social taboos. The students went into real depth about their views and feelings about HIV.

I should emphasise that for the most part, their essays are pretty similar to those you’d expect anywhere else in the world – a mixture of dry scientific knowledge about what HIV actually is, mixed with the key messages about transmission that have obviously been drummed into them by the HIV awareness campaigns that have gone before.

However, a handful of essays caught my eye because of what they wrote about homosexuality. Here are a couple of quotes so you can see what I’m talking about:

“Homosexuality should be discouraged because it is considered to be one of the causes of this virus.”

“In both developing and developed countries, a rule should be made against homosexual sex because it leads to infection and causes the disease.”

Sadly, I can’t say I was particularly shocked to see people repeating these stereotypes. Even so, it’s maybe worth reiterating that the perception of HIV as a ‘gay plague’ is wrong. While gay men have certainly historically been more at risk of contracting HIV, according to Avert of the reported 24,296 people diagnosed with HIV in Western Europe in 2008, 42% probably acquired HIV through heterosexual contact while only 35% were men who had sex with men. Closer to home for these students, in the southern states of India HIV is primarily spread through heterosexual contact. (If you really want to get into the details – it’s anal sex, whatever your gender, that really ramps up the risk of transmission.)

When I talked to the students about this, there was a fair bit of uncomfortable squirming. If I thought talking about sex was taboo, homosexuality is really pushing it. Bear in mind that it was only last year, on 2 July 2009, that the Delhi High Court decriminalised homosexual intercourse in India. When you consider that, it’s worth celebrating that just last Sunday, hundreds of people marched through Delhi for the city’s third Gay Pride parade. The times they are a-changin’. Slowly.

Rural Orissa is not Delhi, so it’s not surprising that these views crop up – indeed I’m sure you can find the same views in countries like the UK where gay rights are much more firmly established.

It’s always a minefield when you bring your own values with you to a culture as different as India’s, but I still think it’s important to challenge homophobia whenever and wherever it arises. After all, the theme of World AIDS Day this year is ‘Universal Access and Human Rights’ – and if you think that people have the right to do whatever they want in their own bedrooms, it really shouldn’t matter what country you’re in.

Diwali: Festival of Frights

Yesterday was Diwali, the 'festival of lights'. In Koraput, there was no electricity all day. I assumed at first that this was at least partly deliberate - that the intention was that for one night the whole town would be lit solely by the candles that traditionally dot everybody's houses for the occasion.

It turns out that it was actually just another in our regular series of 24-hour power cuts, but nevertheless it seemed well-timed to create some magical, candle-lit scenery. At least, it would have been magical if it wasn't for the constant explosions lighting up every street in town. Diwali, it turns out, is more about bundles of firecrackers than serene candles.

The constant drumroll chatter of these smaller explosions was regularly punctuated by a ground-shaking boom from some truly heavyweight explosives, cutting through the air like a full stop.

I ventured out into town for a while but eventually decided to retreat. There's nothing like a series of loud explosions to sharpen your sense of being an outsider. It's not that the fireworks were particularly impressive - but the relaxed attitude to lighting them made them scary in the same way that neglected seaside fairground rollercoasters contain much more real terror than any of Disney World's chrome dreams.

I was keenly aware that I wasn't familiar with 'the rules', or if there were any. Does everyone else know not to go down this or that pitch-black street because they've just rigged it with explosives? Speaking of not being familiar with 'the rules', I'm pretty sure nobody in Koraput has ever heard the phrase "never go back to a lit firework". As for keeping pets indoors, I was surprised by how calmly the packs of street dogs reacted to it all - but then, I suppose you don't last long as an Indian street dog with a nervous disposition.

On my way back home I met my boss and his family stood on their porch watching the neighbour's children play with catherine wheels on sticks. He started to explain to me the significance of Diwali in Hindu culture - it marks the occasion of King Rama and his wife Sita returning from exile, and imprisonment, to their Indian kingdom in the 15th century BC.

He asked, naturally, if we have a similar celebration in Britain. By coincidence, this year Diwali, which is decided by the lunar calendar, fell on 5th November. "Yes, tonight is Guy Fawkes night", I replied over the noise, "We mark the occasion of a terrorist getting caught trying to blow up the government. It probably would have sounded a bit like this." He looked at me like I was quite mad.