The message in anti-superstition campaigner Kalburgi’s killing

DHRUBO JYOTI  

MM Kalburgi’s murder was the third and last in a string of similar killings of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. (HT File Photo)

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One year ago today (August 30, 2015), noted scholar and professor MM Kalburgi was shot dead outside his home in north Karnataka’s Dharwad by suspected Hindu right-wingers for offending religious sentiments. His murder was the third and last in a string of similar killings of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare and inspired top authors, scientists and filmmakers to return government awards in protest against what they called rising intolerance in the country.
But things have fizzled down since – both the government and the protesters have moved on to newer and more controversial issues – the beef ban, gaffes by ministers and mounting sedition charges. Kalburgi’s murderers are still out there and the state crime investigation department is waiting to question a suspect in the case.
The probe is going nowhere, despite a Bajrang Dal leader publicly saying anyone insulting Hinduism will die like a “dog” and warning that there would be more murders like Kalburgi’s. All this in a state ruled by the Congress.
While the principal opposition party has been vocal in Parliament and BJP-ruled states about the apparently rising hardline violence, it has done little to arrest any such growth of right wing in the states it rules. 

The blood-soaked clothes of Professor Kalburgi. (HT File Photo)  

In Karnataka – the largest of the Congress-ruled states – the government has repeatedly pandered to right-wing sentiments, the latest being sedition charges filed against Amnesty India for hosting a pro-Kashmir event. In Kalburgi’s case, the chief minister has stopped at announcing a cash reward while his CID has been repeatedly blamed for stalling the probe and not sharing details of the investigation with the CBI that is looking into Dabholkar and Pansare’s deaths.
Whatever be the rhetoric of the top leadership, on the ground there appears to be little fight-back against rising Hindu nationalism by the Congress, if its performance in Karnataka is anything to go by. 

This is unfortunate because the rise of right-wing sentiments is being resisted by far-more vulnerable populations – like the Dalits in Gujarat, who form just 7% of the state’s population but have taken on the influential and powerful cow protection lobby. 

Kalburgi’s murder was significant not only because a anti-superstition, rationalist ideologue was gunned down but also because the murder was brazen – the killers walked up to the writer’s home, shot him and calmly left. The level of smugness in their impunity was chilling. 

The murder showed the world that India didn’t take seriously its tag of the world’s largest democracy, that it was willing to stifle dissenting voices and brought justifiable criticism to the BJP for allegedly pushing a majoritarian agenda. 

But in failing to nab his killers and arrest the rise of this right-wing sentiment, the Congress has shown that it is ill-equipped to take on the mantle of the principal force against the BJP. It is no wonder that in state after state, voters have chosen regional outfits over the Congress to take on India’s ruling party. It is a real shame. 
[Courtesy: Hindustan Times]

The Ganga's Missing Dolphins

ARATI KUMAR-RAO 

The Ganga is home to India's only dolphin reserve. But dams and dredging are endangering the reclusive, long-snouted species. 

The white socks on these rocks rising from the lower Ganga are a grim reminder of the desperately low water levels in the river this dry season. 

The sun is riding high by the time we polish off a plate of puris and parval bhaji topped with a sickly-sweet, thickly curled jalebi. 

Our boatman Pramod — a tall, dark, smooth-skinned man with sharply angled features — is waiting for us on the banks of the Ganga. At the ghat, we find women in wet saris and pot-bellied, bare-chested men, immersed in the river, using tiny aluminum pots to pour the holy water over their heads.

We clamber onto the boat and head east. The river, a sparkling bright green in the morning sun, stretches ahead of us. With me are Nachiket Kelkar, a young, soft-spoken researcher with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and Subhasis Dey, a spirited, deeply empathetic researcher with Vikramshila Biodiversity Research and Education Centre. Both are walking, talking encyclopedias on the ecology of river dolphins and fisheries in this region, having worked with communities on the river for over a decade.

Together, we are searching for dolphins in eastern Bihar's Bhagalpur district. Here, a 67-kilometre stretch of the river that lies between the towns of Sultanganj and Kahalgaon is home to the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary, the only reserve legally dedicated to India's national aquatic animal: the most ancient of all cetaceans, the blind, side-swimming, endangered Gangetic river dolphin or Platanista gangetica gangetica.

The Holy River

As we coast along the river, a row of toddy palms comes into view on the distant south bank. A couple of decades ago, the river lapped at those palms. Today, the waterline is about half a kilometer away.

It's our first visual marker of the extent to which flows in the Ganga have been steadily reducing: this year, the depth sensor tells us, it's at an all-time low.

Tear-shaped silt islands or diaras, dotted with clumps of sedge, grass and local vegetation, rise from the water. These islands that emerge from the river, and are reclaimed by it at will, are full of life. Two bright-beaked skimmers perch on one edge; lesser whistling teals brown an opposite edge; open-billed storks forage in the shallows; a row of hard-shelled tent turtles basking in the sun plop back into the river in sudden alarm at the putt-putt of our boat. 

Fishermen set out at sunset for a night of fishing on the Ganga. These silt islands or diaras can prove to be treacherous for them, as armed bandits roam, looking out for fishermen with a tidy catch. 

Walls of silt rise up from the green waters on both sides of the river, pocked, like ancient computer punch-cards, with the homes of bank-mynas. The birds flit in and out, dipping and rising in a murmuration.

A grave greater adjutant stork wades past us, its wizened face wary as it examines us. Two more display their massive black and white wingspans further out on the diara and a fourth bird makes an awkward landing. This part of eastern Bihar, one of only three regions where storks breed, has been a breeding site for the endangered stork species. There is, reportedly, a stable population of 300 individuals here.

All along the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, diaras are claimed and ‘owned', farmed and patrolled. The silt is as fertile as it gets, and the claim across the basin is that vegetables grown on these silt-islands are the tastiest in the world. Silt transforms floodplains into food bowls. Silt makes deltas. Silt is the silent, unassuming hero of South Asia. And the Ganga is probably the siltiest river in the world, even more than the Amazon.

Tumbling down from the Gangotri glacier some 1,500 km to the north-west, in Uttarakhand's Himalayas, the Ganga begins its descent as Bhagirathi. Mixing Alakananda into itself at the multihued confluence of Devprayag, the river cleaves the Himalayan mountains, picking up massive amounts of silt along the way, and hurtles down towards the plains. Its white waters roil past Rishikesh, placate at Haridwar, and flow down to the floodplains of Uttar Pradesh.

The holy river turns putrid at Kanpur, and is so severely extracted that it is nothing but sand when it flows into Allahabad. Here, the waters of Chambal remake its flows. Defying all scientific odds, its dark waters purify a million sins at Varanasi while taking in more foul foam, fecal matter, chemicals and cadavers.

And then the Ganga enters Bihar.

After suffering the conurbations and confusions of modern civilization, the river is renewed. The Ghagra, Gandak, and Kosi rivers, coming down from the Nepal's side of the Himalayas, infuse it with fresh life. In Bihar it is no longer the ‘holy waters of Gangotri' but the sum of its tributaries. That is its savior. It meanders now with fresh waters and braids its way through the floodplains for another thousand kilometers, down to West Bengal and Bangladesh, en route to its home in the Bay of Bengal.

We have intercepted the river in the lower floodplains. Its swatch here is arced with ox-bows and punctuated with comma-shaped diaras — silt islands that are neither completely land nor water. Soon, the river will drink from the clouds, its flow will be largely fluvial and it will try its best to erase memories of the abominations upstream.

In search of the Gangetic dolphin

From the lower observation deck of this boat specially outfitted for dolphin surveys, three pairs of eyes — two experienced, one novice — seek signs of the trademark arc of soft grey, of a beak-like snout cleaving the surface to breathe, of the gentle curve of a dorsal fin diving back in: the Gangetic dolphin or “Soons,” which sounds the same as a nasally pronounced “sauce.”

We'd spotted one when we had pushed away from the shore, but have seen none since. This, my researcher friends point out, is unusual — in this season, 70-100 dolphin sightings is par for this short course.

We go past the four kilometer-long Vikramshila Setu (or bridge) at Bhagalpur and past the burning ghat. The Bhagalpur Engineering College hostel comes into sight — the marker for the outer limit of safe passage along the river. Beyond the college, men on horses roam the diaras with guns and black flags in hand, waylaying boats, looting and, occasionally, even killing those who refuse to comply with their demands.

In the shadow of the Vikramshila Setu (bridge), non-traditional fishermen cordon off a part of the river with illegal mosquito netting, to try their luck in the river gravely diminished in fish. 

Not wanting to tempt fate, we turn around and return to the Sultanganj ghat, traversing a stretch where 15-20 individual dolphins have hung around for years. Now, they are nowhere to be seen.

Speculations abound in the team. Had they been hunted? Had they moved downstream? Had dredging of the river, deepening it for impending barge-traffic, disturbed them? Had they died of other causes?

There were no answers yet, only alarm and concern.

A traditional fisherman sets off in a low dinghy near Bhagalpur.

The Bane of the Barrage

On paper, the dolphin sanctuary is a protected stretch of river but in a heavily human-dominated landscape. People all along the route, from Sultanganj to Kahalgaon, use the river for various purposes. There are 3000 fishing families in the area that depend directly on the river, as they have for generations.

Every morning for the ten days I was there we headed to the market to see what fish had come in. That was an indicator of the biodiversity of fish in the river.
The Kahalgaon fish market is shaped like a sleeping ‘m', lined with open 8ft x 10ft stalls, colored in purples, sunshine yellows, pista greens, fuchsias and electric blues. In the doorway of each stall hangs a huge scale, the weights towering beside it on the scratched, concrete floor. An ice crusher stands at the hump end of the “m” and shudders into use every hour or so, its rhythmic crushing drowning our voices.

We are at Chandan's purple stall at 7 AM on a late May morning. We perch ourselves on hastily gathered rickety plastic chairs and wait for the market to come alive. The catch should have come in by this time, Chandan says. Maybe the squall of the previous night, where silt flew in from the diaras like white arrows, meant a bad night for the fishers and they'd be late. We'd have to wait and see.
Chandan has never taken to the river to fish, but his father, Dasharathji, now pushing 70, is a veteran fisherman and respected village elder. “We've been here about 200 years,” he tells us. “This is our hometown.”

Back then, his family would ferry cargo and people in much bigger boats. Although they fished, they were not dependent only on fishing. But the catch was plentiful. If they put out their nets at 8 am, by noon they'd catch 100 kilos worth of fish. The fish would then be packed in ice that would arrive from Bhagalpur before it was transported to Nabadwip and Chinsurah in West Bengal.

“One year, there was so much hilsa, so much hilsa!”
His face breaks into a toothy smile at the memory. “It sold for just Re 1 for a kilo, and still no one to buy!” These days hilsa caught in Indian waters rarely weighs a full kilo and sells for around Rs. 800, the price for choice cuts rising as high as Rs 1,500-2,000 in the festive season.

The river's stock of fish, according to Dasharathji, has depleted in both biodiversity and abundance. Multiple studies have confirmed that stocks have plunged between 70 percent and 90 percent in the last thirty years. 

Traditional fishermen with wide-weave nets set out at sunset for fishing on the Ganga. 

What we see at the Kahalgaon fish market is no aberration — the story repeats itself the next day, and the next, and the next. We never see the weighing scales outside the stalls move, burdened by the heft of fish.

With nothing else to do, two little fisher boys convert a stall into a recreation room and start up a game of carrom. The other stalls, including Chandan's, wait for fish that never come.

The same eerie quiet envelops fish markets all along the Ganga.

“Ever since the Farakka barrage was built, hilsa, jhinga, pangas, bachwa, seelan and other migratory fish are completely finished,” says Mantu, a 70-year-old fisherman. “We don't ever see them any more.”

Every fisherman, in Kahalgaon, in Barari, in Naugachia, in Koskipur, on both banks of the Ganga, past the confluence of the Kosi, said the same. Hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha), the queen of fish, the prized meal in any Bengali household, used to swim up the Ganga, against the monsoon freshet, all the way to Allahabad, to spawn. The young ones would then return to the sea and repeat the spawning cycle come the next monsoon. But that changed when India built the barrage at Farakka in West Bengal. Their upward migration barred, hilsa, tiger shrimp and such plunged to near zero upstream from the barrage. This was the beginning of the collapse of fisheries in the Ganga. Fishermen are quick to identify Farakka as the root of all their ills.

The barrage is definitely to blame but it doesn't explain the disappearance of non-migratory species of fish, such as Hemibagrus menoda known locally as belonda. The blame for that lies elsewhere.

The Fishermen who don't know how to fish

In 1991, the Ganga Mukti Andolan led the effort to free the Ganga from panidars — feudal water lords who are the equivalent of zamindars in the water. They laid claim to stretches of the river and “owned” everything on that stretch, including fishing or any other use of the river. Fishers were free to choose whether to work or not. But if they worked and refused to pay up in the form of half the catch (which was the norm), they were threatened.
The abolition of these feudal water-lords was necessary but freeing the Ganga from oppressive contracts turned out to be a double-edged sword. Now, anyone could fish anywhere. While that seemed like a win at first blush, it has proved disastrous for both traditional fishermen and the river's ecology. As more non-fishermen took to fishing, the number of people fishing in this part of the Ganga swelled. 

The Ganga turned a deep green this past summer from the tea-coloured silty soup it normally is. 

The fishermen of Kagzi Tola in Kahalgaon speak over each other as they rush to explain the destruction of their river as they see it. At first, they say, it was a few fishermen who came upriver from West Bengal and put out mosquito nets to catch fish. Now, instead of 10 fishers there are 100 fishers and these include non-traditional fishermen too. They all set up mosquito nets across the river for all 12 months of the year.

“Earlier, one boat cast one net,” explains Dashrathji. “Now, with cheap nets available, each boat casts ten nets.”
There is a simple way to distinguish the ‘traditional' fishermen from the free riders. Those who can weave a fishing net by hand are the real deal. “Non-fishers,” fishermen say, can buy expensive nets but they don't know how to fish.

The problem with using the the mosquito nets, they explain, is that the weave is so fine it catches everything — gravid fish, baby fish, yearlings. These baby fish — the next generation of riverine stock — die in the nets and are tossed back into the river since there is no market for such small catch. Thus, entire generations of fish are killed on a daily basis, rapidly eroding the river's stock beyond the possibility of replenishment. If fishing in the Ganga were restricted to hand-made nets, fishermen believe, the river would be fecund still.

For the part-timers, fishing is not a primary business. They depend on their fields, where they grow vegetables. Sustainable fishing is not a priority, intent as they are on making a quick buck. The traditional fishermen, however, have no land and no alternate means of livelihood. They depend on the river for all of their sustenance.

“If we don't allow the eggs to hatch, if we don't allow the fingerlings to grow, how can we expect to eat tomorrow?” This is a refrain we hear across traditional fishing communities in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin.
To add to the fishermen's woes, oppressive panidars have now been replaced by armed bandits. Marauding the diaras, these gangs regularly target fisherfolk. “They waylay us with our fish and force us to cook and they take our fish away,” says Dashrathji. “If we don't comply, they could kill us.”

There are several such rival gangs, all of them armed and dangerous. The dolphin-survey team has been caught in crossfire twice, an unwitting bystander in a gang war that never ends.

The case of the missing dolphins

The plot thickens with the non-appearance of the dolphins.

The Gangetic dolphin is almost completely blind. Evolving, as it has, in silty, murky environs for over 30 million years, it has all but lost its eyesight. Its eyes have no lenses and it can only sense the direction of diffused light. Sound is everything. It navigates, feeds, avoids danger, mates, breeds, nurses babies and lives by echolocation: dolphins send out sound waves that echo back, allowing them to sense where something is located.

What effects will the plan to make the Ganga a major waterway have on this endangered creature? How will dredgers and continuous navigation by large barges and tourist ships affect its population?

In March 2016, the government of India passed the National Waterways Act (NWA), which identifies 106 rivers that will be engineered into cargo-carrying waterways. The rationale is that shipping is “greener” than road traffic. But, says Kelkar, “There has unfortunately been barely any debate on the ecological and social risks the NWA poses to river biodiversity and to the communities that depend on the river.”

The importance of riverine ecology, and of the livelihoods it sustains, seems to be absent from the radar of not just administrative and political circles but also prominent environmental and scientific groups.

As per the plan, National Waterway 1 (NW1) will go from Haldia in West Bengal to Allahabad in UP along the Hooghly, Bhagirathi, and Ganga. It will involve the construction of more barrages along the river and heavy dredging of silt so that a width of 45m and a depth of 3m can be maintained throughout. This would enable passage for barges carrying 1,500-2,000 tonnes of cargo.

"Constructing more dams between Allahabad and Haldia will convert the Ganga into big ponds," Bihar's Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said last year. “It will adversely affect the river's ecosystem. We should allow uninterrupted flow of the Ganga waters.”

Kelkar, writing for the South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers & People, has analyzed the NWA and called out its implications. Now, as he and I sit by the Ganga watching the sun hemorrhage into the river, his observations come alive.

We see a dredger silhouetted against the fiery orange shimmer of the river. It scoops up sediment from the river bed and plumes it back into the main channel of the river. This is crucial to maintaining navigability of NW1, given the Ganga's heavy sediment load — it is also a potential death knell for aquatic species.

With Ganga being declared as National Waterway 1, dredging has become common in and around the Vikramshila sanctuary. This is causing changes in the river currents and endangering the lives of pilgrims and locals coming to the riverside for a dip. 

Many species of fish live, feed and breed at the bottom of the river bed and under small rocks. Dredging disrupts and scoops out these breeding and feeding grounds, endangering the survival of the species, Kelkar explains.

As we travel along the river, a more sinister fallout of dredging comes to the fore. The plume that the dredger jets into the river's main channel settles further downstream and functions like a plug. This plug heightens the riverbed in the center and deepens it by the shores. Imagine a “W” shaped river bed with its elbows resting near the shores. The river, obstructed by these plugs and trying to find the path of least resistance, rushes into and over these deep channels, scouring off silt from under the concrete of the ghats.

This is where locals and pilgrims take a dip in the holy river. Thus far, no one had any reason to expect a sudden, deep drop off. But since December 2015, when dredging started to become regular in the reserve, there have been twenty deaths by drowning in Bhagalpur's Barari Ghat alone — people washed away because the ground beneath their feet was replaced by swift currents.

To state the obvious, dredging should not be happening in the sanctuary, much less during the vital fish-breeding season.

Ongoing research has predicted that Gangetic dolphins will become extinct from many rivers without adequate flow. Dredging and vessel engines can mask the dolphins' hearing of lower echolocation frequencies, which might severely limit their ability to find food and navigate. Also, the physical upheaval of river sediment caused by dredging seems to disturb river dolphins.

Writing about the negative impacts of heavy dredging on dolphins near Bhagalpur, Kelkar's team had this to say: “During intensive dredging operations, the surfacing frequency of river dolphins (breathing time between dives) reduced approximately 3 times as compared to a natural dive-rate of approx. 1.5-2.5 minutes during feeding peaks. In dolphins, this is a clear indication of stressful physiological and body conditions. Further, Ganges river dolphins are highly vocal in normal circumstances, but their acoustic activity was noted to be much lower than on an average non-dredging day. Further, river dolphin mortality due to boat propeller hits has been recorded on a couple of occasions from the same area. During the movement of tourist cruise ships, we observed that the impact of loud sounds produced by the engines lasted for over two minutes — in which river dolphin diving behaviour showed signs of suppression.”

Dredging, clearly, is not dolphin-friendly. Here's a statistic that heightens the worry over a distinct depression in sightings on our days in the sanctuary: over 90 percent of the endangered Gangetic dolphin population overlaps with the proposed National Waterways.

Even if the dolphins had to move, where would they go? The dredgers and barges would be everywhere.

(After I left, a short survey on this stretch of the river confirmed that the dolphin sightings in short stretches around Bhagalpur and Kahalgaon have fallen 66-75 percent. There have been whispers of dolphin deaths, which are still unconfirmed.)

Falling waters

Water levels in this stretch of the Ganga are at their lowest ever.

But the National Waterways plan calls for more barrages. While the irrational demand for “barrages every 100 km” may not come to pass — though how the waterway will function with the proposed cargo load sans these barrages is a question worth asking — any interruptions to the flow would further fragment habitats for dolphins and migratory fish and “reduce the Ganga to ponds” in the words of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar.

The plan for waterways does not seem to consider the most important ingredient for a waterway: availability of water. The Ganga and its upstream tributaries have already been dammed several times over, diverted into canals, sucked up for irrigation and syphoned off into power generation. While the monsoons make it seem like there is a “surplus” of water, it is flows in the dry season that should be the determining factor.

In most of India's rivers, those flows are dismal. There is also the troubling matter of a rapidly receding Gangotri glacier, now receding at (depending on who you listen to: the government or independent scientists) 10m per year or 22m per year respectively. Either way, it is retreating and the freshwater available will at some point begin to diminish.

Then there are the inherent hazards of shipping cargo along ecologically invaluable ecosystems. The consistency of mishaps in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, including an oil spill, should set alarm bells ringing.

The Ganga feeds and supports 600 million people. Misguided engineering has already contributed to disastrous social and ecological outcomes (Farakka being just one case in point). Mishaps and more engineering may just be the proverbial last straw that breaks this camel's back.

One evening, after crisscrossing the river, while taking depth readings and becoming increasingly alarmed at the pronounced “W” of the channel we were in, we climbed an ancient granite outcropping in the middle of the lower Ganga. Squeezing between and clambering over rocks, half-climbing a tree to reach nearly 100m above the river for a bird's eye view, we watched yet another day dissolve.
It is the last day of May. The waters of the Ganga should have started to rise by now. But the depth meter shows a lower value than two months before. Either there is less glacial ice available for melting this year or whatever coursed down from the Himalayas is impounded behind dams.

The Ganga's holy water is to be had in bottles bought online, channeled for farmers, and sucked up to power bright city lights. What is left for the lower Ganga? Not much. No water. No fish. No livelihood. No dolphins.
The social-ecological web of the lower Ganga floodplains hangs on by a thread of hope stretched precariously thin.
This story was made possible by a grant from thethirdpole.net and Earth Journalism Network

[Courtesy: The Hindustan Times]

Rural India is eating less than it did 40 years ago

Despite higher economic growth, malnutrition levels are almost twice as high in South Asia as compared to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Pavitra Mohan

As India’s 70th year since Independence begins, widespread progress is evident, but in rural India, where 833 million Indians (70%) live, people are consuming fewer nutrients than are required to stay healthy, according to a National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau survey.

On average, compared to 1975-'79, a rural Indian now consumes 550 fewer calories and 13 gm protein, 5 mg iron, 250 mg calcium and about 500 mg vitamin A lesser.

Children below the age of three are consuming, on average, 80 ml of milk per day instead of the 300 ml they require. This data explains, in part, why in the same survey, 35% of rural men and women were found to be undernourished, and 42% of children were underweight.

In poorer areas, the situation is worse, as a survey conducted by Aajeevika Bureau, a not-for profit organisation, in 2014, across four panchayats in South Rajasthan indicated.

Almost half the 500 mothers surveyed had not eaten pulses the previous day, a third had not eaten vegetable and almost none had eaten any fruit, egg or meat. As a result, half of all mothers and their children under three in these areas were undernourished.

What hunger means for India's future

This data has implications for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make-in-India and Skill-India programmes for economic growth.

“The consequences of child undernutrition for morbidity and mortality are enormous – and there is, in addition, an appreciable impact of undernutrition on productivity so that a failure to invest in combating nutrition reduces potential economic growth,” this 2015 World Bank report noted.

Despite higher economic growth, malnutrition levels are almost twice as high in South Asia as compared to Sub Saharan Africa, V Ramalingasami and Urban Johnson wrote in a seminal 1997 paper, titled Malnutrition: An Asian Enigma. While the lower status of women in South Asia was offered as an explanation, almost two decades later, rural Indians just do not seem to have enough food to eat.
India’s economy has been growing consistently since the early 1990s. The country has survived the recessions that started in the US in 2008 and affected large parts of the world. What is not as well known is that over the same period, more and more people in rural India were eating less and less.

While growth of gross domestic product is estimated every six months using different methods, nutrition levels are estimated once every 10 years, leading to data gaps that IndiaSpend reported in July 2016.

Nutrition monitoring has been defined by the World Health Organisation as the measurement of the changes in nutrition status of a population or a specific group of individuals over time.

The National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau was set up in 1972 to monitor the status of nutrition in rural India across 10 states. The Bureau conducted nutrition surveys in rural areas in these 10 states over three time periods: 1975-79; 1996-97 and 2011-2012. These surveys provide us a temporal understanding of food intake among rural India over the past four decades.

Source: National Nutrition Monitoring Board

One would imagine that with a growing economy over these years, people would have more food in their plates.
Instead, the intake of all nutrients decreased over these four decades. Why is this happening?

Link between landlessness, prices and hunger

The National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau survey also revealed that over 40 years, the proportion of landless people in rural areas grew from 30% to 40%, and the proportion of people who were owners and cultivators decreased by almost half. Meanwhile, food inflation in India increased at a faster rate than overall inflation (10% versus 6.7%).

Within overall food inflation, the price of pulses, fats and vegetables rose quicker than that of cereals. The result is that fewer people can buy these foods. So, most rural people are neither growing food, nor buying it in adequate quantities.

There is a caveat here. Despite declining nutrient intake, malnutrition levels have decreased over the years. In absolute terms, however, these levels remain among the highest in the world, as IndiaSpend reported in July 2015. India has reduced malnutrition, but it is 13 times worse than Brazil, nine times worse than China and three times worse than South Africa.

Yet, India does not take policy action for identifying this hunger, even 69 years after Independence. In 2015, the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau – the only source of longitudinal data on nutrition levels and food intake across 10 states of India – was shut down.

The shutdown may not reveal what we need to know, but it will make sure that we do not encounter such uncomfortable facts in future.
This article first appeared on IndiaSpend, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.

Smallpox could return as Siberia's melting permafrost exposes ancient graves

Last known case of the deadly disease was in Somalia in 1977, but Russian scientists investigating an anthrax outbreak have found the virus's DNA in corpses once entombed in the frozen ground 

Ian Johnston

Smallpox – a deadly disease eradicated from the world in 1977 – could return as the frozen tundra of Siberia melts and releases the virus from the corpses of people who died in a major epidemic about 120 years ago, experts have warned.

The disease was once one of the most feared in the world. Up to 30 per cent of people who caught it would die, according to the World Health Organisation, after experiencing symptoms including a high fever and the characteristic pus-filled spots.

Spores of potentially fatal anthrax from dead people and reindeer that had been entombed in the permafrost are already thought to have infected 24 patients currently in hospital in Salekhard near Russia’s north coast.

But health experts told the Siberian Times this was a warning sign that there could be worse to come.

Boris Kershengolts, of the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences, said: “Back in the 1890s, there occurred a major epidemic of smallpox. There was a town where up to 40 per cent of the population died. 

“Naturally, the bodies were buried under the upper layer of permafrost soil, on the bank of the Kolyma River.

“Now, a little more than 100 years later, Kolyma's floodwaters have started eroding the banks.”

The melting of the permafrost has speeded up this erosion process.

The tundra in Yakutia normally melts to a depth of 30-60cm, but this year it has reached a metre Rex Features

After anthrax spores have been found Yamal peninsula near Salekhard, experts from the Novosibirsk-based Virology and Biotechnology Centre have been testing for other diseases. 

They found corpses that bore sores that look like the marks left by smallpox.

While the experts – dressed in protective clothing because of the risks – did not find the virus itself, they did detect fragments of its DNA.

The permafrost of the Yakutia region usually melts to between 30 to 60cm, but this year it was more than a metre, according to Mikhail Grigoriev, the deputy director of the Permafrost Studies Institute. 

“The rock and soil that forms the Yamal Peninsula contains much ice,” he said told The Siberian Times.

“Thawing may loosen the soil rather quickly, so the probability is high that old cattle graves may come to the surface. 

“Some graves dug in the past may be just three meters deep, covered by a very thin layer of soil. The spores of the disease [anthrax] are now on the loose.” 

There are also fears that the Siberian permafrost could release vast amounts of methane gas, which has a much greater greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, in a vicious circle that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.

[Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/smallpox-siberia-return-climate-change-global-warming-permafrost-melt-a7194466.html#gallery]

A group of conservationists are trying to replant native trees in the Western Ghats

Sibi Arasu 

India is home to iconic wildlife like tigers, dholes and even lions, as well as many species found nowhere else in the world. But they share the subcontinent with the world’s second-largest human population – and as India’s 1.3 billion people vie for space with wilderness, wilderness has often lost out. 

Such is the case in the Nilgiris district of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Once covered in a mosaic of montane forest and grassland, the Nilgiris was transformed into a land of plantations over the past two centuries. But now efforts are underway to restore the landscape to its native state. 

Stretching 1,600 kilometers (990 miles) along India’s western coast from Tamil Nadu at the subcontinent’s southern tip north to Maharashtra, the Western Ghats mountain range is considered as one of the most biodiverse places in the world and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The range is home to thousands of different plants and animals, and is also host to a high level of endemism – meaning that many of species that live there are found nowhere else. 

The Nilgiris district sits squarely in the Western Ghat’s southern portion. Its 2,565 sq km were once covered in a mixture of tropical montane forests – locally called “sholas” – interspersed with grassland. But in the last 200-odd years, the district has lost around 80% of its native vegetation, according to a local official.
These forests are now replaced by sprawling tea estates, coffee plantations, exotic tree plantations, and by invasive species of grass and small plants. Along with the loss of forest habitat, plants and animals are also disappearing.

Undisturbed shola forest near Doddakombai, Nilgiris. Photo by Sibi Arasu

“Over the past many decades, the exotics have taken over the Nilgiris and I think only around 20% of the district still retains native forests,” said C Badrasamy, a retired Divisional Forest Officer who has more than three decades of experience in the field. 

However, some in the district are trying to reverse the situation. Through reforesting small tracts of land, conservationists in Nilgiris hope to return their mountain home to its pre-colonialism glory.

The forests on the extreme left consist mostly of exotic trees, those at the center are sholas and on the right are abandoned tea estates. Photo by Sibi Arasu

All for a cup of tea and a piece of paper

Sky islands are isolated mountain ecosystems that are radically different from the lowlands surrounding them. Because of their isolation, sky islands act as hotbeds of evolution, harbouring unique species found nowhere else in the world. In addition to their biodiversity, sky islands provide ecosystem services like water catchment for nearby communities.

“The high altitude forests of the Nilgiris are some of the few sky islands in the Indian subcontinent,” said Godwin Vasanth Bosco, a naturalist based in Ooty, the largest town in the district. 

To help preserve the components of this vanishing ecosystem, Bosco has been collecting and nurturing native shola and grassland plant species for the last three years. 

“The Nilgiris’ unique characteristics are also its downfall,” he told Mongabay.”While the shola, which are dense forests, grow only in mountain folds, the district was also home to hundreds of kilometres of high-altitude grasslands. The biodiversity value of the grasslands is invaluable but that is of little concern when they are also easy to clear off and setup tea estates or plantations of commercial timber.” 

Tea plantations alone currently cover more than 600 square kilometers of the district, generating more than 135 million kilograms of tea in an average year, according to the Indian Tea Association. Nilgiris tea is also among the most expensive in the world. A high-grade variety of tea produced here once fetched a world record price of $600 per kilogram at a tea auction in Las Vegas in 2006.

The shola native species magnolia nilagirica at a reforestation site. The remnants of what was once a tea factory can be seen in the background. Photo by Sibi Arasu

Timber plantations were also once prominent in the region. Starting around 1840, plantations of acacia, eucalyptus, and other commercially valuable tree species were established by the British, with those in the Nilgiri plateau considered among the most productive in the world.

Between 1950 to 1990, the Indian Forest Department also planted a large number of these trees in the grassland region of the Nilgiris to satisfy the various needs of a growing economy – tanning bark for the leather industry, wood pulp for the paper industry – as well as to satisfy an increasing demand for firewood. According to Farshid S Ahrestani, a wildlife ecologist, over 11,000 hectares (110 sq km) of grassland across Tamil Nadu had been converted to tree plantations by 1988.

“We shouldn’t forget though that during the British era and also post-independence, it was us who planted these trees for livelihood and commercial purposes,” Badrasamy told Mongabay. “These trees were a requirement then but have now become an environmental hazard.” 

These ecological concerns prompted the forest department to cease timber production in the 1990s. But rather than disappearing from the landscape, the acacia and other commercial trees have invaded nearby forests. Because they grow fast, they easily out compete native species; grasslands in particular are readily displaced. 

However, Bosco believes native species could recolonise the land – if given a hand by conservationists.
“This is what we’re trying to do,” he said.”If we provide a safe environment for the grasslands and the sholas to develop, after six months to a year, they will be able to take care of themselves. These are still early stages though and while reforesting sholas has had relatively more success, bringing back grasslands is proving to be a tough task. Constant invasion by non-native weeds being only one among many problems.

Why reforest?

The entire district of Nilgiris falls within a biodiversity hotspot, and is home to a plethora of wildlife – including many species found nowhere else in the world.

The Nilgiris’ shola forests are home to trees endemic to the region such as the mohonia, rhodomyrtus, Nilgiri champak and mountain navals, as well as unique grass species. Mammals include the Nilgiri tahrs, Nilgiri langurs, Nilgiri martens, Indian bison, civets and Bengal tigers; more than 350 bird species have been recorded in the district.

A demolished tea factory at Cinchona overlooks abandoned tea estates that are set to soon become 50 acres of reforested native shola forest and grasslands. Photo by Sibi Arasu

As with the rest of the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris is a herpetological heavyweight, with several endemic frog species.

“There is an abundance of endemic species in the Nilgiris and the Western Ghats in general,” said Sathyabhama Das Biju, one of India’s foremost herpetologists. “In the past few decades alone, more than 80 new amphibians have been discovered in the Western Ghats.” 

The Nilgiris’ known amphibians include the Ghats wart frog (Fejervarya murthii), the Nilgiri montane tree frog (Ghatixalus variabilis), the Nilgiri bush frog (Raorchestes tinniens), the Nilgiri cricket frog (Fejervarya nilagirica) and the Nilgiri tropical frog (Micrixalus phyllophilus). Of these, all are endangered with the exception of the Nilgiri tropical frog, which is considered Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List.

The Ghats wart frog is of particular conservation concern. Listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, the frog’s main threat is agricultural conversion of its montane forest habitat. Satellite imagery and data from the University of Maryland show much of its range has already been converted, with large spots of relatively recent tree cover loss in what forest remains. The data indicate tree cover loss in the frog’s habitat over the past 15 years has been double that for the Nilgiris district as a whole.

A common Indian toad (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) at the EBR site. Photo by Sibi Arasu

Habitat loss is not just a threat in the Nilgiris. Conversion of forest is putting the pressure on amphibians and other animals and plants throughout the Western Ghats.

“In the [Western Ghats] the most major threat to amphibian life is habitat loss,” Biju told Mongabay. “More than 80% of their habitat is lost or moving towards being lost and being fragmented.”
In addition to the wildlife they supports, native Nilgiris forests provide important ecosystem services for surrounding communities.

“Even an acre of native forests, if successfully brought back can make a huge difference in the amount of water available for human habitation around and below the forest,” said Anita Verghese, deputy director at the Keystone Foundation, an organisation that has been working with indigenous communities in the Nilgiris and surrounding districts since 1993.

The Alliance for Zero Extinction maps the known ranges of endangered, endemic species around the world. Its plot of the distribution of the critically endangered Ghats wart frog shows tree cover loss is still occurring in its habitat. In the Nilgiris overall, data from the University of Maryland indicate the district lost about 1 percent of its remaining tree cover between 2001 and 2014; the range of the Ghats wart frog experienced twice that loss over the same time period. In addition to hosting endemic amphibians, the Nilgiris is part of a Tx2 Tiger Conservation Landscape, which means the region has the potential to double wild tiger numbers by 2020 with proper management.

“While small efforts are encouraging, it is up to the department of forests to take this forward on a large scale, since more than 50 percent of the land is under their control,” Verghese told Mongabay.”There also needs to be more awareness among the people here about why reforestation is important and there should be efforts taken to encourage more people to get involved.”

However, not all are in favour of a reforestation approach.

“I completely understand that there are administrators, politicians etc who are trying, rightfully trying for some kinds of development,” Biju told Mongabay. “But destroying a forest and then planting trees is not biodiversity. This whole conventional thinking of substituting forests is wrong. It’s taken a forest millions of years of evolution to reach its state now. After cutting that area and saying that some companies need the area for mining and then if the companies then plant 1,000 saplings, that’s not the way for conservation.
“My suggestion is that if you are destroying the area, then it’s better to leave the area after sometime, rather than artificial planting. Many times, they plant the wrong trees at grasslands and so on and that completely destroys everything.”

Satellite images of the Ghats wart frog’s range show much of its habitat has already been converted to farmland. Imagery courtesy of Google Earth.

Recognition, removal, restoration

In 2014 the Madras High Court passed an order for the removal of eucalyptus and acacia from Tamil Nadu’s portion of the Western Ghats. The High Court in its order acknowledged that the overall environmental impact of invasive exotics far exceeded their short-term economic benefits.

However, implementation of the order by the state’s forest department in the last few years has been has been beset by a variety of problems such as limited funding for removal and reforestation, lack of technical expertise and insufficient manpower.

“The removal of exotics and reforestation of native forests are still in an experimental stage,” forest officer Badrasamy told Mongabay. “This is something that cannot and should not be done immediately. Since being hasty about this might make the situation worse. The bringing back of native forests is the need of the hour, but to do it on a large scale is a herculean task to say the least.” 

At the village of Cinchona near Doddabetta peak – the highest mountain in the Nilgiris, rising 2,637 meters (8,980 feet) above sea level – naturalist Godwin Vasanth Bosco has been replanting sholas and grasslands at a decommissioned tea estate spread across 50 acres.

Naturalist Godwin Vasanth Bosco, who is helping with the reforestation project at Cinchona. Photo by Sibi Arasu

“Here, we are doing our best to maintain ideal conditions for the shola to come back,” Bosco told Mongabay. “One common mistake is that sholas are also grown where grasslands are supposed to be and this never works out well. We are learning from past experiences and hope to bring back sholas where they used to be and grasslands where they were once grasslands.” 

The team of 20 people has met with success and after three years more than 30 different shola species are showing signs of healthy development. 

“This one shrub called [impatiens], we didn’t even plant it. After extensive weeding it started growing on its own,” Bosco said.”That’s the thing about these forests. All they need is a head start. They’ll take care of themselves afterwards.”

This article first appeared on Mongabay.