Development and Resistance

Development is a funny word -- it's a word that you can't argue against. How could anybody rationally be against such a positive concept? But resistance to development can be seen all over India, perhaps most visibly in the protests against the acquisition of land for building what are known as special economic zones, clusters of export oriented industry for which the government provides infrastructure services and tax incentives.

Last week, I attended a meeting about the process of land acquisition for special economic zones in Tamil Nadu. Dozens of these zones have been approved for the state, and the Tamil Nadu government claims that the process of land acquisition in the state has been completely without dissent. However, the experience of villagers has actually been very mixed. Many people have faced problems with the process of land acquisition: they have been forcibly evicted from their lands, they are arrested and harrassed for protesting against unfair treatment by the authorities, they receive far less than the value of their land from the government. They also lose their job security: after they sell their farmland, people find that they do not have the skills to actually work in the factories that are built there.

The more I listened to the stories of these villagers, in which the state appeared to be a villain that used the Land Acquisition Act as a weapon, the more I wondered -- why were so few people at the meeting? Only about 200 to 300 people came from the villages, surprising at a meeting which was supposed to address land issues for a wide range of SEZ projects all over Tamil Nadu, from Ennore port to Sriperumbudur. If the state had been iron fisted in acquiring land, why was there so little resistance in Tamil Nadu?

After talking to some attendees, I think I found the beginnings of an answer to this question.

Firstly, the pattern of urbanization in Tamil Nadu is such that the state is both highly urbanized relative to India as a whole (40% versus 27%) and that urban centers are spread out throughout the state. This means that most villages are within a one or two hour bus-ride of a major metropolis. As a result, even most farming families have one foot in urban economies -- they own a roadside stall which benefits from traffic to and from urban areas or they have one or two family members working in urban areas. So that means that there are few villages, or even few families, that end up as clear losers as a result of losing valuable agricultural land. -- There are no clear sites of resistance to land acquisition.

Secondly, this meeting was also entirely attended by landOWNERS. But apparently Tamil Nadu has the largest percentage of landless rural people in the country. These landless rural poor may not have any clear gains from agricultural land being converted to SEZ's, but they certainly also have nothing to lose.

These two factors are unique to Tamil Nadu, and may help to explain why the process of land acquisition for SEZ's here has been relatively smooth. Economic development is a positive phenomenon, but its benefits are highly unequally distributed in India. The meeting made clear, however, that the government still has not found a way to redistribute the benefits of development so that everyone wins.

You know you've been in Chennai too long when...

... the sight of a woman with dark brown skin and a bright yellow face doesn't make you blink. Women here often wear turmeric paste on their face, because it is good for your skin. But what about the number it does on your complexion?

Language in south India

A piece by Vijay Nambisan in the India Foundation for the Arts' magazine made some interesting points about written and spoken languages in South India:

"... Malayalam is a highly diglossal language, much more so than any of its northern sisters. The farther south you go in India, I think, the further apart grow the written and spoken languages.... I can barely comprehend the newspapers, and most literary texts are closed books to me." (32)

I feel his pain -- as a near fluent speaker of one variety of Tamil (spoken in one place among one caste), it is a source of constant frustration to me that I have to concentrate to understand the news on Tamil Doordarshan or political speeches.

The world's most perfect junk food

I thought the south Indian tiffin couldn't possibly get any better. I was wrong. The forces of globalization have created in Chennai the world's most perfect junk food: the cheese dosa. A paper thin rice flour crepe folded around a salty cheese filling. Served with sambar and three kinds of coconut chutney (!!!) at the Sangeetha Hotel near my house.

Bombay on the mind, but not in Chennai, and V. P. Singh

The rains finally let up in Chennai, and today, except for the occasional stubborn puddle or whiff of sewage from a pipe that overflowed, it feels like they never happened. And even though Bombay is on the front of every newspaper, I don't feel the weight of that incident on the people of this city. Certainly, there is no fear, not even much conversation about it. Could it be that Tamilians feel that anywhere north of Bangalore is part of "North India," and, therefore, not part of the local consciousness? Or perhaps that the struggles of daily life here are so engrossing for the majority of the population that there is no time to fret?

In all the attention on Bombay and the weather in Tamil Nadu, one important event was almost entirely forgotten. The former Prime Minister of India V. P. Singh died on Thursday afternoon after a prolonged illness. He is best remembered for radically expanding India's caste-based affirmative action program during his eleven months in power. But I remember Singh for something much more recent. During the spate of slum evictions in Delhi between 2003 and 2006, Singh was the only political leader who consistently spoke out in favor of the slumdwellers. Even as the Delhi government bulldozed thousands of homes along the Yamuna River, Singh allowed the newly homeless to camp on the grounds of the house that he was given as an ex-Prime Minister. I think he was one of the last of that breed of gentlemen politicians who truly believed that an independent India would create a more socially just society.

39 hours and counting

39 hours have passed since the beginning of the attacks in Bombay. Loud blasts were just heard at the Taj hotel, and a hundred (!) Indian commandos have invaded Nariman House and are trying to kill the estimated two to three armed militants inside. The whole episode seems to be a lesson in how much damage a handful of attackers with the aim of wreaking the most havoc possible without any regard for their own lives can do. Meanwhile, the rest of south Bombay seems to have settled into an eerie peace. Reports indicate that the attackers arrived on boats from the sea. They are young men, between 20 to 25 years old. One witness who saw the boats being unloaded at India Gate said that they looked well-off. Who are they? What do they want?

What is more worrisome to me now is that Narenda Modi, the Hindu fundamentalist leader who presided over Gujarat during riots that killed hundreds of Muslims, is now in Bombay. He released a statement blaming Pakistan for allowing terrorists to use its sea routes for the attacks, and added that Manmohan Singh’s public statement yesterday was “disappointing.” Before riots break out that could kill many, many times the number of people already affected, political leaders here need to take control, keep people like Modi quiet, and encourage all citizens to remain united and peaceful in the aftermath of the attacks. There is a real potential for widespread retaliatory violence that needs to be diffused. But where are the country’s leaders? They have been far too quiet.

In Chennai, we are far removed from the drama in Bombay, but many of the city's residents are watching the news anxiously. The rains have eased for the moment, but the sky is still overcast, and severe rains are predicted for this evening and night. I hope that this does not lead to further flooding.

The nightmare in Bombay continues

I have been watching live reports from NDTV about the terrorist attacks in southern Bombay, and it is surreal, to say the least. As Barkha Datt finished her report in front of the Taj, we heard multiple rounds of gunshots in the background. Up to 200 people are still trapped in the Oberoi building, and as the news cameras watched, people in the hotel rooms waved to outsiders, pleading for help. As the sun set, the military entered the Oberoi, and began shooting at terrorists on the eighth floor of the building. Bombs just went off at the hotel, and fires are raging from some of the floors. There is still no clarity on so many things – on how many terrorists there are, on how many hostages, on what they want, on which organization they belong to.

Fire trucks without ladders have been straining to put out fires on the higher stories of the hotels. Policemen carrying shotguns and wearing shoddy uniforms are facing off against militants armed with hand grenades and AK-47s. As policemen stood with guns outside of places rumored to contain armed terrorists, curious passers-by peered over their shoulders into the buildings, and assembled in crowds in front of the hotels. This was absurd to watch.

Reports from people who have escaped from the Taj describe a nightmare – corpses lying around the hotel lobby and restaurants, terrorists indiscriminately firing machine guns at guests and staff. Guests escaped from rooms by climbing down on curtains and sheets tied together.

While India has faced repeated incidents of violence, I have naively always thought of violence as something that happens to others -- to people in Kashmir or the Northeast, to people who didn't have access to the support networks that I have here. My illusion of safety has been definitively shattered.

Meanwhile, severe rains continue for the third continuous day in Chennai. The streets are waterlogged, and homes are flooded. It is a replay of the last November I spent in Chennai.

The long road to here

At work, I'm currently trying to understand the history of spatial planning in India. It hit me as I was reading just how fast and how much the ideologies motivating the Indian government have changed in the last few years. Nowadays, the widely accepted goal of urban planning is to provide the right incentives to make the private sector solve urban problems. But in 1957, when the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was created to implement the city's newly written Master Plan, the first city plan in the country, it went about it in true socialist style -- by acquiring massive amounts of land, developing that land with infrastructure, and then leasing it to private developers and cooperative societies for building housing and commercial space according to the zonal dictates of the plan. Some 150 odd development authorities were set up in cities all over the country, all following the example set by Delhi.

Development authorities in India are now widely known to be some of the most corrupt institutions in the country. The large-scale transfers of money required to acquire land and build housing left plenty of room for siphoning off state funds. Development authorities in the major cities are big, bloated bureaucracies-- the DDA has at least 40,000 employees-- in which bribes are absolutely necessary to do anything. I recently heard a story that when the head of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority tried to instate a rule that all employees had to collect their salaries in person, he faced stiff resistance from the families of people who were long dead who still collected their salaries!

Not only were they corrupt, but the development authorities were also ineffective at controlling urban growth. In Delhi, land acquisition was a slow process, and legal land from the DDA was scarce and expensive. In addition, standards for housing were set very high, making it hard for poorer residents to build houses that conformed to building regulations. As a result, the number of illegal buildings proliferated -- buildings that violated building laws or were built on land not authorized for construction. Entire neighborhoods came up without planning permission, both neighborhoods of the rich in which residents paid for their own electricity and water supply infrastructure as well as the hut clusters of poor. These so-called "unauthorized colonies" number more than 1,500 and house more than 20% of the city’s population.

Failure on such a massive scale is bewildering (as an aside: how far does a plan have to deviate from reality before people start questioning the very basis on which the plans were made?), and it likely explains the fervor with which people here have embraced the idea of market solutions to what are basically problems of governance. Having only spent time in India after liberalization, I can only imagine the disappointment that citizens felt as they watched institutions that embodied the socialist hopes of a young and independent India fail repeatedly and so thoroughly.

Mexico City Mayor addresses basic needs of citizens

From the Mayor that brought you an ice-skating rink in Mexico City comes yet another brilliant policy: free Viagra for all Mexico City men aged 70 and older. The rationale? Mayor Marcelo Ebrard says that sex "has a lot to do with quality of life and our happiness." The mayoral seat in Mexico has been seen as a stepping stone to the Presidency. What better way to prove your worth as a politician than to keep your constituents happy? The government begins handing out pills on December 1st.

Renting in Chennai

Will you bear with me for a few moments while I complain about the Chennai rental market? First of all, the quality of the housing here is terrible, especially for the price. The rental market here is very tight, and prices have skyrocketed in the last five years. Small two bedroom apartments near the beach go for Rs. 25,000 or more. Government flats, even those in terrible condition, go for over Rs. 10,000. There are no one-bedroom apartments, only unwieldy two or three bedroom ones.

The architecture of much of the newer housing makes no concessions to the unforgiving heat that blankets the city for most of the year. Ceilings are low and windows are placed with no thought to cross-ventilation – if there are any windows at all. And most apartments are dingy, dingy, dingy -- mosaic tiled floors that never look clean despite hours of scrubbing, bathrooms in which the corners are unspeakably dirty.

Second of all, not even the basics are guaranteed. Water is a constant problem in the city. Apartments with connections to Metrowater (the Chennai Corporation’s water provider which provides clean and fairly regular water for many citydwellers) are highly prized. But many apartments rely on groundwater, brought up from borewells. This water can be brown colored, and is often extremely salty. In places like Besant Nagar, the water is so salty that it corrodes metal pipes, pots, and pans and makes people’s hair fall out. Most apartments are not vermin-free: an apartment, especially on the ground floor, is subject to visits from rats, bandicoots, and cockroaches, and a small army of mosquitoes is currently conducting daily evening time offensives in my apartment. During the monsoons, constructions built in low-lying areas or on lakebeds regularly flood.

But the most noxious part of the entire process is the landlord. Lease agreements are negotiated here in an atmosphere of complete distrust, perhaps unsurprising in a country where taking someone to court for a violation of a contract is simply not a viable remedy. Landlords ask for 6 to 10 months of rent as an advance before they will agree to even prepare a lease, and if you break a lease within 11 months of moving in, you forfeit a month’s worth of rent. Costs for any repairs the landlord takes care of are usually cut from the advance before it is returned to you when you leave. And the timely return of an advance is not guaranteed.

I think that this atmosphere of distrust is part of the reason why you see so many rental advertisements in the papers that openly state that they rent only to Brahmins – perhaps they suspect that fellow-caste members would be less likely to cheat them out of rent or advance money.

That, and the fact that people here openly discriminate on the basis of caste. One potential landlord asked me whether I planned to cook eggs in the apartment – eggs were not permitted because he conducted pujas (religious ceremonies) in the home. This same gem of a landlord also told me that he once threw a tenant out who claimed to be a teetotaler when he found him smoking a cigar (I did not mention that technically, the tenant could still have been a teetotaler). Oh, and he refused pointblank to take care of any repairs.

Landlords also frequently police apartments for suspicious activities. I’m not talking about stopping tenants from selling narcotics or running a prostitution ring. Do you drink? Smoke? Bring home visitors of the opposite sex? Are you having pre-marital sex? Stay out late on a regular basis? Laugh loudly? All of these are fair game for a landlord’s questions and complaints. As a single female looking for an apartment, I was asked repeatedly whether I planned to have male visitors (what's a good answer to that question? Lots, if I'm lucky?). One landlord told me that he liked me a lot, but he had a policy of not renting to spinsters because they cause him too much trouble. That's right. In Chennai, at the age of 27, I’m already a troublesome spinster.

Quote of the day

From Niall Ferguson's article "Wall Street Lays Another Egg" in Vanity Fair:

"There, in a nutshell, is one of the key concepts of the 20th century: the notion that property ownership enhances citizenship, and that therefore a property-owning democracy is more socially and politically stable than a democracy divided into an elite of landlords and a majority of property-less tenants. So deeply rooted is this idea in our political culture that it comes as a surprise to learn that it was invented just 70 years ago."

"The more Asia was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. The Asian savings glut was thus the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance, and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge-fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private-equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right, and center to finance leveraged buyouts. And it was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash by 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job, and no assets."

PPP Madness!

The Ministry of Urban Development and the Council of Indian Industries organized a conference in Delhi yesterday called "Public-Private-Partnerships -- The Learning Curve." According to news reports, the tone of the conference seems to be in line with much of the discussion in India around PPPs, which sees them as the quick-fix solution to pressing gaps in infrastructure financing in the country. Among successful cases PPPs cited by experts at the conference was the example of solid waste management in Chennai. This seems odd to me: Chennai in recent years has relied on private contractors for trash collection in parts of the city. But contracting out parts of infrastructure provision hardly addresses the infrastructure financing gap that everyone is talking about. Indeed, I have yet to see any evidence that contracting out public services in India actually reduces costs. Different kinds of PPPs provide different benefits for the government, but discussion around PPPs tends to be so superficial that the distinctions between different relationships between the public and private sector get lost. Indeed, PPPs like the Chennai solid waste management example still leave government with the massive role of monitoring the quality of private sector operations. Both the government and the public need to understand that there is no quick fix to the problem of urban infrastructure, and no alternative to improving the quality of governance in India.

Innovative data gathering and data presentation

I have a fascination with data -- how it is collected and how it can be presented well. Two data-related articles this week which caught my attention: First, UNESCO released a map of "hidden water," a high resolution map that shows where underground aquifers of freshwater are located throughout the world. Freshwater aquifers, which can be rechargeable but are not always so, contain 100 times the amount of fresh water available in surface sources at any given time. The UNESCO map shows just how many of these aquifers are located across country borders, underscoring the pressing need for global legislation on managing these water sources. Second, Google announced that it may be able to improve upon current methods to predict outbreaks of the flu by a week to 10 days by using data about where people are searching for information about flu symptoms and treatments. Google Flu Trends charts the frequency of such searches over time and across the US. A very clever use of all the data that Google has in its possession, but which also leads me to wonder how all this data could be used if Google were not so benevolent.

Waste towers and a reconception of waste management

BLDGBLOG reports that a group of architects in London have proposed a series of "waste towers" across the city -- easily accessible recycling centers that can also provide energy for surrounding areas. These waste towers prompted BLDGBLOG to think about even more decentralized systems of recycling that would change the Western lifestyle and attitude towards trash. Meanwhile, how can Indian cities not make the same mistakes that Western cities made in trash management as they grow? An Indian solution to decentralized waste processing would likely look different from this proposed solution -- perhaps a decentralized system that is low-tech, low-cost, and labor intensive might be more appropriate to the financial and social context here.

Support for Barack Obama from an unexpected source

Vaiko, the head of the Tamil political party, the MDMK, released his book about Barack Obama yesterday. The book was titled "Yes we can: Black People in Various Countries and the rise of the United State presidential candidate Barack Obama." I wonder what the book has to say about Dravidian history and its connection to Africa.

Quote of the day

From The Hindu's article on a meeting of women bank officers: 

"It is often said that there is a woman behind every successful man. But how often have we heard of a man behind a successful woman?" asked chief guest I. B. Vijayalakshmi, cardiologist at the Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology. "You have not heard of one perhaps because such a man does not exist," she added. 

Art and money

"Bolaño’s dishevelled, wandering characters are, more profoundly than they are left-wing, anti-bourgeois, which is to say disdainful of comfort, security and success: an attitude more than a politics, but the attitude is deeply felt. Even to write ‘marvellously well’, Bolaño declared, was not enough; ‘the quality of the writing’ depended on the author’s understanding ‘that literature is basically a dangerous calling’."

from Benjamin Kunkel's review of Bolano's Savage Detectives in the London Review of Books.

More on cities and infrastructure.

"With nearly 300 million urban residents, India's cities contribute over 60% of GDP and account for more than 90% of Government revenues."

From the World Bank's Project Appraisal Document for the Third Tamil Nadu Urban Development Project, May 25, 2005.

"To reorient India's failed infrastructure policy, the government will have to reduce emphasis on user fee revenues and focus on providing cost-effective service to users. It must realize that infrastructure is not where you raise revenue; that is a function for taxes. Infrastructure is where you spend those taxes, which then generates more revenue through increased economic growth."

From Partha Mukhopadhyay's piece "Falling through the cracks: India's failing infrastructure policy."

From Keith Gessen's "Money" in n+1

"And when you think of the long-standing idea of art in opposition to the dominant culture, if only by keeping its autonomy from the pursuit of money—the only common value great writers from right to left have acknowledged—you begin to sense what we have lost. Capitalism as a system for the equitable distribution of goods is troublesome enough; as a way of measuring success it is useless."

Another quote on labor law --

"There are probably no longer any solid reasons to restrict a statute of labour's fundamental rights, such as the Statuto dei lavoratori only to those legally classified as 'employees' employed in productive units with more than fifteen employees.... The Statuto dei lavoratori was intended, as everybody knows, to bring the Constitution inside the factory gates. Some time ago, labour walked right through those factory gates and dispersed among the network of subcontractors, franchisees, and small service contractors. The Constitution too should be able to take a few steps in the same direction." -- Massimo D'Antona in "Labour Law at the Century's End," in Labour Law in an Era of Globalization, 2002.

Einstein says....

"Everything in the world has changed except our thinking."

A quote from Karl Klare about Labor

"As applied political theorists, labour lawyers should consider whether democracy and human self-determination may be better served by taking advantage of technological progress gradually to release people from paid work and to reduce its centrality as a life-activity (while maintaining living standards), rather than by intensifying people's commitments to paid employment (as seems to be implied in the traditional view). Conceivably, arranging flexible entry to and exit from well-compensated, flexibly scheduled jobs and between jobs and other life-contexts such as family community and education may contribute more to ending the subordination of workers than, say, a right to vote on enterprise financial planning." (19) from Labour Law in an Era of Globalization, a book that addresses the important questions about the changing context of work in the modern world.

What I never understood about money ...

Today I read a totally silly article which suddenly made me realize what always puzzled me about money. The article was called "Anglers let big cash bonanza get away," published in Reuters on April 25, 2008. (I'm going to now sound like a complete simpleton.) The article is about three Hong Kong fishermen, one of whom is a housewife, who caught an 85 kg rare fish and sold it for HK $20,000. They thought they had really hit it big. Then the fish changed hands two more times, finally selling for HK $ 1 million to a businessman. The fishermen felt cheated.

Two things are weird about this to me. Firstly, the actual fish didn't change. It arguably lost value by the time of the third sale since it was probably rotting. But the price paid for it increased so much. No extra work had been put into the fish, but within three transactions and not more than 48 hours, the price of the fish rose by nearly a million dollars.

The second thing that's weird is that the people who initially sold it for $20,000 thought they had hit the jackpot, but when they later learned that the fish sold for HK$1 million, they realized they lost money. Yet, here again, nothing changed about their initial situation (their sale of the fish for $20,000). They still had the money. They had expended no more effort. So how were they the losers in this situation? But even my stomach churns for them! They were cheated!

Even though I know that this is a common and normal situation, I still find it difficult to understand how something is valued. How do we arrive at a consensus on what something is worth? And isn't it strange that people are able to profit off the process of reaching that consensus?

The roots of revolutions, a quote via Cheryl

"Whether conditions in China had deteriorated to the extent to which a revolution was inevitable is perhaps besides the point, although this issue animates an impressive body of Western as well as Chinese scholarship. It takes more than oppression and misery to make a revolution... There is no threshold of human endurance beyond which human beings automatically become revolutionary. A revolution is the product of the human ability to reflect on one's conditions of existence and to work those reflections through a system of ideas that provides a vision of a more hopeful future, a social vision that exists at the level of the imaginary in that it conceives of something that does not yet exist" (Ann Anagnost, 34)

From my notes, extreme frustration, March 16, 2006

It is typical of the development projects announced by the government in India that they are ambitious beyond belief -- as cartoonishly outsized as the 80 foot hoardings of political leaders erected before elections. Consider the plan to develop the Taj Mahal into a mall and tourist complex, complete with cineplex. Or the Marina Beach development project, where the Tamil Nadu government was going to built a state of the art administrative complex on the seashore. There are no 2-lane highway projects, only 6-lane superfast highways.

The Important Numbers to Know

From Ashutosh Varshney's "Is India Becoming More Democratic?," Journal of Asian Studies

"According to the 1991 census, the scheduled castes constituted about 16.5% of India's population, and the Scheduled Tribes 8.1%....The Mandal Commission, the only nationwide source available on the OBC's, suggests that Hindu OBC's constitute about 43.7% of the total population."

Something to remember: Madras schools

According to the Draft Project Completion Report of the first Madras Urban Development Project (1984), 50% of the primary schools and the majority of secondary schools in Madras were private. I wonder what kind of implications this has for education policy, considering that Tamil Nadu has done so well on increasing literacy. If I remember correctly, Madras district has some of the lowest literacy rates next to extremely poor and rural districts like Dharmapuri.

More on Obama

From "Obama is Moving to Down-to-Earth Oratory," The New York Times, April 1, 2008

“The problem with talking about hope all the time is that these are not hopeful lands; Obama is talking change to people who equate change with life getting worse,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic Party consultant who has studied the political culture of these working-class states with a Talmudic intensity.

...

“If you’re an unemployed steelworker, a former coal miner, you want to know about job training, who pays your health care,” Dr. Madonna said. “Obama’s speeches are uplifting but without much specificity, and that’s a tough sell for working people who don’t live in a world of ideas.”

The best thing I've read on the election

From Paul Krugman's column "Loans and Leadership," March 28, 2008, New York Times

"All in all, the candidates’ positions on the mortgage crisis tell the same tale as their positions on health care: a tale that is seriously at odds with the way they’re often portrayed.

Mr. McCain, we’re told, is a straight-talking maverick. But on domestic policy, he offers neither straight talk nor originality; instead, he panders shamelessly to right-wing ideologues.

Mrs. Clinton, we’re assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats babies. But her policy proposals continue to be surprisingly bold and progressive.

Finally, Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox.

Do these policy comparisons really tell us what each candidate would be like as president? Not necessarily — but they’re the best guide we have."

The choice: A good life or doing good in life?

From "For Top Medical Students, Appearance Matters," The New York Times, March 19, 2008

"'It is an unfortunate circumstance that you can spend an hour with a patient treating them for diabetes and hypertension and make $100, or you can do Botox and make $2,000 in the same time,' said Dr. Eric C. Parlette, 35, a dermatologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass., who chose his field because he wanted to perform procedures, like skin-cancer surgery and cosmetic treatments, while keeping regular hours and earning a rewarding salary."

The American Way

From "No Man's Land" by Eula Biss, The Believer, February 2008:

"Every society is threatened by a nearly infinite number of dangers, Glassner writes, but societies differ in what they choose to fear. Americans, interestingly, tend to be most preoccupied with those dangers that are among the least likely to cause us harm, while we ignore the problems that are hurting the greatest number of people. We suffer from a national confusion between true threats and imagined threats. And our imagined threats, Glassner argues, very often serve to mask true threats.

Quite a bit of noise, for example, is made about the minuscule risk that our children might be molested by strange pedophiles, while in reality most children who are sexually molested are molested by close relatives in their own homes. The greatest risk factor for these children is not the proximity of a pedophile or a pervert but the poverty in which they tend to live.

...

The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy."

Taxation?

This new article about the richest people in the world has a number of Indians, the Ambani brothers, Lakshmi Mittal, the DLF chairman. It made me curious -- how much of their income do they pay in tax? What percentage of Indian tax revenues comes from its richest people? Is this the best way to earn tax revenues?

Microlending and the Cult of the Entrepreneur

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker's Financial Page online on micro-lending called "What Microloans Miss." Surowiecki argues that micro-loans may help to make individual borrowers better off, but it does not help to bring a country out of poverty. While micro-loans are meant to help small businesses grow, they are usually used for non-business expenses, like education or health costs. Most micro-businesses also only have one employee, the owner. But increased numbers of jobs are what will allow a country to pull itself out of poverty. These jobs will normally come not from micro-enterprises, but small and medium sized firms, which provide 60% of the jobs in developed countries, but are largely missing in developing countries (a phenomenon known as the "missing middle"). He says, "[m]icrofinance evangelists sometimes make it sound as if, in an ideal world, everyone would own his own business." But in fact, only 14% of Americans own their own business, while in a country like Peru that number is almost 40%, not because Peruvians are more entrepreneurial, but because most Peruvians do not have access to the kinds of jobs that Americans have. Surowiecki argues that real poverty reduction strategies should target improving the small and medium sized business sector because these really generate more jobs.

One last one from Hobsbawm

From The New Century

"We should not forget that, whatever yardstick is used, the majority of peoples are better off at the end of the twentieth century, in spite of the extraordinary catastrophes that have marked it....Overall, we have today three times the population there was at the start of the twentieth century, and all these people are physically stronger, taller, longer living and healthier. They suffer less hunger and famine, enjoy a higher income, and have an immeasurably greater access to goods and services, including those which guarantee greater opportunities in life, such as education.... This is also true of poorer countries. After all, there has not been a famine in India since 1943."

From Amita Baviskar's speech at MIDS, 2005

"The cultural politics of environment and development demand that we make the connections between poverty and unbridled consumerism of a privileged class, its sense that it can have it all, aspirations that can never be met without sacrificing someone or something."

Malcolm Adiseshiah Award Ceremony Speech

From David Mosse's "Tank Irrigation in South India"

"If tank systems declined under colonial rule, then it was the result of this isolation of resource management from the wider political relations through which it had been organized." (315)

"The legitimate need to generalize 'design principles' for farmer-controlled irrigation here, no less than the colonial administration's use of 'custom' involves an institutional isolation of resource management from its particular historical and social context, and, in doing so overlooks the importance of political relations and the 'cultural' construction of natural resources." (304)

"The extension of state power which lay behind the regimentation of 'local knowledge' and invention of tradition was hardly disguised." (312)

From my summer notes (from Phil)

From Wallace Stevens' "The Solitude of Cataracts"

"There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over."

From Eric Hobsbawm
"The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of removed decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities."

From The Age of Extremes

"During the short twentieth century, more human beings had been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in history." (12)

"It is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our nineteenth century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism... We forget that an international convention once provided that hostilities in war 'must not commence without previous and explicit warning in the form of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war,' for when was the last war that began with such an explicit or implicit declaration?" (13)

He quotes the following from Rules as to Bombardment by Aircraft, 1921
"It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of "barbarity" of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in character....to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible. It may be some time until another war occurs and meanwhile the public may become educated as to the meaning of air power." (21)

From The Age of Capital

1848 "marked the end, at least in Europe, of the politics of tradition, of the monarchies which believed that their peoples accepted, even welcomed, the rule of divinely appointed dynasties presiding over hierarchically stratified societies.... Henceforth, the forces of conservatism, privilege and wealth would have to defend themselves in new ways." (39)

The unprecedented economic boom after the revolutions of 1848 "gave the governments shaken by the revolution invaluable breathing space and conversely wrecked the hopes of the revolutionaries." (45) Between 1800 and 1840, world trade did not even double. Between 1850 and 1870, there was a 260% increase. There were two, maybe three, preconditions to this massive increase in trade -- the railroad, the telegraph, and to a lesser extent the gold rushes which provided the capital.

From Sam Bass-Warner's "The Private City," 1968

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Two quotes I recently read on food

From "UN Agency Cuts Food Rations for Sudan Victims," New York Times, April 29, 2007.

"The World Food Program, the United Nations agency responsible for feeding three million people affected by the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, announced Friday that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributed there because it was short of money.

The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories — about half the level the agency recommends.

In March, the agency announced an initial cut of sugar, salt and beans to some Darfur residents, but that reduction did not include grain, blended foods or oil, the rations' main sources of calories."

From Graham Hancock's The Lords of Poverty, 1989

Describing the events during the joint annual meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund attended by 10,000 people.

"The total cost of the 700 social events laid on for delegates during that single week was estimated at $10 million..... Ridgewells, a well known Washington catering company, prepared twenty nine parties in one day alone, according to executive Jeff Ellis who added: 'This year the hosts want more expensive menus, and they're inviting 30 per cent more people. No one is stinting -- but, then, they never have." A single formal dinner catered by Ridgewells cost $200 per person. Guests began with crab cakes, caviare and creme fraiche, smoked salmon and mini beef Wellingtons. The fish course was lobster with corn rounds followed by citrus sorbet. The entree was duck with lime sauce, served with artichoke bottoms filled with baby carrots. A hearts of palm salad was also offered accompanied by sage cheese souffles with a port wine dressing. Dessert was a German chocolate turnip sauced with raspberry coulis, ice-cream bonbons and flaming coffee royale." (38)

Quote from the Draft Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2004

The Rural Employment Guarantee Act was supposed to guarantee 100 days of employment to any rural resident willing to do manual labor.

Among the entitlements of labourers according to the 2004 draft of the Act is the following:

"(2) The following facilities shall be available at the worksites: (1) safe drinking water; (ii) shade for small children and periods of rest; (iii) a first-aid box with adequate material for emergency treatment of minor injuries, strokes, body aches and other health hazards connected with the work being performed."

Water and shade? It is astounding to me how minimal these entitlements are.