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Indian children work despite ban

Byoliveridley

When I mentioned India’s child labor ban last year, I had many obvious questions about the implementation. One year on, this BBC report highlights on findings by Save the Children that the ban has not had much effect.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indian children work despite ban

A year after India banned children under 14 from working as domestic servants or in food stalls, millions continue to be employed, a study says.

The study released by Save the Children says these children are routinely subjected to different forms of abuse and a lot still needs of be done.

Many of the child workers are denied food, and are beaten up, burnt or sexually abused, the study says.

According to official estimates, India has more than 12 million child workers.

Of these, about 200,000 are estimated to be working as domestic servants and in teashops, restaurants, spas, hotels, resorts and other recreational centres – the areas from where they were banned last year.

Well, one can’t legislate away decades of a widespread and prevalent practice with one law. This law was always going to be a beginning, a marker that improving social and economic conditions will eventually catch up to (one hopes). So, color me as not surprised at all. The point is to label something as legally unacceptable, work towards making it socially unacceptable, then finally, unnecessary.

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Benazir Bhutto, martyr

Byoliveridley

There is nothing like stopping at a gas station somewhere in the Catskills, glancing up at Fox News on TV and finding out that they killed Benazir Bhutto. Of all the Bhutto related articles, this one captured my attention.

South Asians like their martyrs. My great-grandfather allegedly brought home a vial of some of the ashes of a teenage revolutionary hanged by the British. Khudiram had thrown a bomb at a British magistrate and gone to the gallows with a smile. Ironically, my great-grandfather worked for the British, in their police service. But he was so awed by young Khudiram’s sacrifice, he used his official connections to get that vial, which he kept in his bedroom.

Benazir was no 15-year-old tilting at windmills in some foolhardy act of defiance. She was South Asian royalty. “Benazir is killed. I’m stunned,” a friend texted me from a cafe in Calcutta. “I really am.” As my friend says, in our feudal societies, much as we might pretend otherwise, we have a royalist streak. And when a royal goes down in a hail of bullets, it sends a collective shiver down our spines.

Benazir Bhutto, martyr | Salon.com

He’s right, having grown up through two major assassinations on Indian “royal family” scions (Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi), the post-martyr deification that occurs needs to be lived through to be understood.

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India, The Emerging (polio stricken?) Tiger

Byoliveridley

States on alert against polio – NDTV.com – News on States on alert against polio

India appears to be in a grip of a polio outbreak with 352 cases reported so far this year, many of them from areas that were free of the virus, and officials fear the number may increase further. Uttar Pradesh alone has reported 312 cases, the highest of all the states, and World Health Organisation officials have described it as an “exporter” of the disease.

In Uttar Pradesh, officials said 90 percent of the cases were due to ignorance in the minority Muslim community, who believed the polio vaccine could make children impotent.

From wikipedia

Only four countries in the world (Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan) are reported to have endemic polio.

I remember reading about a Nigerian Province issue with Clerics claiming “that vaccines supplied by Western donors were adulterated to reduce fertility and spread AIDS as part of a general war on Islam”, which the Wikipedia Polio article verifies. But we have never seen this in India before, and I find it hard to believe. I will remain sceptical about the Muslim clerical influence on India’s polio debacle unless I hear better. News from India sometimes builds its own “truth momentum”, with speculation and hearsay morphing into bulletproof truth in a matter of hours. It is also easy in India to start rumors to deflect blame.Here’s a contrarian take from a Reuter’s Article

“Tens of thousands of children were missed by state health workers over the past year during rounds of immunization, leading to a resurgence of the virus, they said.

“We are very concerned. It raises the threat to India and is also threatening other countries,” said Jay Wenger, head of the National Polio Surveillance Project, a collaboration between the WHO and the Indian government.

One federal official said around 10 percent of children in several western districts of Uttar Pradesh, known for its ramshackle state health care and sluggish bureaucracy, could have missed immunization between late 2005 and early 2006.

“These (vaccination) rounds were of poor quality,” said the official, who did not want to be named.”

Well, sounds more logical, does it not? But why let the depressing truth of inadequacy get in the way of a juicy and self-perpetuating tale of Muslim backwardness.

India, the emerging tiger.

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Monkeys kill Delhi deputy mayor

Byoliveridley

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This is seriously screwed up. I went to school (both undergrad and grad school) on a forested campus where an open dorm room window meant a thorough ransacking by monkeys, who for some reason really loved after-shave! They are aggressive little beasts, though (too much lead exposure on Delhi’s roads?). And apparently, they can cause human deaths.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Monkeys kill Delhi deputy mayor:

“The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi died on Sunday after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.

Monkeys are (and have been) a public health menace in Delhi. Now, they’ve gone too far and claimed a politician’s life. Maybe this will be the wake up call for a round up effort.

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Pesticide Exposure and India's green revolution

Byoliveridley

Pesticide exposure in Punjab and Haryana is out of control. When I was growing up, the Green Revolution was idolized and idealized to degree that in hindsight seems a little excessive. But back then, this octupling of wheat and rice yields in Punjab and Haryana catalyzed the transformation of India from a country mired in famine and food shortages to one that occasionally runs out of room to store excess food. So, this story (courtesy of 3QD) caught my attention.

Green.view | Chemical generation | Economist.com:

IF INDIAN newspaper reports are to be believed, the children of Punjab are in the throes of a grey revolution. Even those as young as ten are sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind. In Punjabi villages, children and adults rare afflicted by uncommon cancers.

The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff.

Ignorance is part of the problem. The report includes details of a survey suggesting that nearly one-third of Punjabi farmers were unaware that pesticides come with instructions for use. Half of the farmers ignored these instructions. Three-quarters put empty pesticide containers to domestic uses.

The article concludes by saying that the government is encouraging the use of techniques including organic farming, more crop rotation, etc, and how this is ironically “reversing” the green revolution. But two separate issues are getting mixed up here. The green revolution was not won on excessive use of fertilizers, monoculture, excessive water use, and so on. Instead, the development of new hybrid, high yielding varieties of rice and wheat kick started the revolution. The wholesale adoption of water and input intensive agricultural techniques came along for for the ride with the rest of the revolution.

Hopefully, the Punjab government will not stop at writing reports, but start grassroots education projects with the farmers to encourage sensible farming techniques that take the good parts of the green revolution and leave the bad parts out.

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Green Building in India: NOT

Byoliveridley

There is a buzz about green buildings. But the question is: what does one mean by building green? And how does one design policies to make the green homes of our dreams?Green is not about first building structures using lots of material and energy, and then fixing them so that they become a little more efficient. Building green is about optimizing on the local ecology, using local material as far as possible and, most importantly, building to cut the power, water and material requirements.

via Green buildings: how to redesign | Centre for Science and Environment.

Sunita Narain makes some excellent points about building in India, and how western architecture influenced glass facades, closed buildings, etc. make little sense in India, and how traditional building concepts, optimised for local conditions would make more sense.

Two points:

  1. Traditional buildings are not necessarily optimised for density. To fit a lot of people in a little space, you need to build up. No, not 100s of stories, but fives and tens? It would be interesting to figure out that contradiction. But I’m no architect and I don’t know the answer
  2. The glass facade concrete skyscraper jungle look is associated with aspirational prosperity, ask any affluent Indian what they like about Hong Kong, or New York, or Singapore, and the shiny buildings will figure pretty high on the list after cleanliness and shopping. This is the kind of building associated with modernity and “class”. Making a sealed glass and concrete hell hole work in regions of high heat and humidity without large amounts of energy use for air conditioning is difficult.

It appears, though, that at least some people are thinking about this, as this book, helpfully titled Tropical Sustainable Architecture, would attest to.

BTW,
Sunita Narain’s editorials for the Down to Earth magazine are always thoughtful, and required reading for anyone interested in India’s development and environmental issues.

Great News, but Innovative, Really?

Byoliveridley

The “innovation” in this approach is not scientific, but economic.

Cheap drugs for poor nations | Guardian Weekly | Guardian Unlimited

Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medicine that is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company and can be made and sold cheaply. The process has the potential to undermine the monopoly of the big drug companies and bring cheaper drugs not only to poor countries but back to the UK.

Okay, I may be missing something here, but this is not a scientifically innovative strategy. They are called Me-Too drugs. Pharma has been doing this for years. Read this article in the Stanford Medicine Magazine about exactly how this is done.

Nexium illustrates the drug makers’ strategy. Many chemicals come in two versions, each a mirror image of the other: an L-isomer and an R-isomer. (The “L” is for left, the “R” is for right.) Nexium’s predecessor Prilosec is a mixture of both isomers. When Prilosec’s patent expired in 2001, the drug maker was ready with Nexium, which contains only the L-isomer.

Is Nexium better? So far,

there’s no convincing evidence that it is, says Stanford drug industry watcher Randall Stafford, MD, PhD.

This is a well known and well used strategy. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently released a study which concluded that 68% of all drugs developed in the US between 1993 and 2004 were Me-Toos.

So, what is “innovative” and “revolutionary” about this approach is that non-profits are driving the drug development. By outsourcing the entire clinical trial to India, substantial savings are to be had. By not having to fund the US shareholders’ need for huge profits, enormous company overhead, high salaries, multi million dollar executive bonuses and marketing expenses that US/European pharma require, cost savings are potentially huge.

The downside? Well, unless the studies are run according to US/EU GLP/GMP guidelines, data quality, and therefore, drug safety can be suspect. The pedigree of the people involved in this effort makes it unlikely that the data is going to be suspect. If their ultimate aim is to sell these drugs in England, then they will have to meet the most stringent standards available.

Of course, these drugs will never hit the US of A. I can already hear the fear mongering, the safety doubts being raised, the “terrorists may get their hands on your pill” bogey, etc. But, Americans can afford to pay for their drugs more than your average Indian suffering from Hepatitis C can. Once the already teetering (by first world standards, of course!) healthcare system in the US gets closer to collapse (by first world standards, of course!), some of these “innovations” will become more viable in this most reactionary of countries.

I hope this model is proven to be viable.

One Comment

  1. I am afraid there are some socio-economic leverages at work behind the scene which will prove your optimism unjustified. Your post of last year raised a number of questions which were pretty much on point then, and are still relevant today: “who will enforce? will they selectively enforce? Will this be just another extortion excuse? Will people complain if they see any child labor in their local tea shop? What will poor parents make their kids do to earn extra income for the family?”

    Merely labeling something as unacceptable does not work in a two-step process like to suggest: “making it socially unacceptable, then finally, unnecessary”. I think it does, indeed, issue a clear message to the citizens that child labor is unacceptable. But what follows this clear message is not invariably behavioral change, which makes the law unnecessary.

    Take homosexuality for example: Some believe it to be illegal, relying on section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. I do not intend to give legal advice on whether or not Indian law criminalizes homosexuality per se, but it is clear that even though a “clear message” is sent to the citizens, it will not have the effect of modifying significantly behavior. Rather, it will render the object of the law more taboo, and modify social codes and conventions as a consequence. Then, insofar as the “necessity” of the law is concerned, I believe that the “clear message” conveyed by the law contains some highly moral content (like the interdiction to kill somebody for example). Whatever behavioral change is achieved by the effect of the law, I think the law should remain provided its moral content is just.

    Bruno Héroux
    http://www.deactivate.wordpress.com

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