Rivers of Dust: Water and the Middle East

Conn Hallinan

It is written that “Enannatum, ruler of Lagash,” slew “60 soldiers” from Umma. The battle between the two ancient city states took place 4,500 years ago near where the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together in what is today Iraq. The matter in dispute? Water.

More than four millennia have passed since the two armies clashed over one city state’s attempt to steal water from another, but while the instruments of war have changed, the issue is much the same: whoever controls the rivers controls the land.

And those rivers are drying up, partly because of overuse and wastage, and partly because climate change has pounded the region with punishing multi-year droughts.

Syria and Iraq are at odds with Turkey over the Tigris-Euphrates. Egypt’s relations with Sudan and Ethiopia over the Nile are tense. Jordan and the Palestinians accuse Israel of plundering river water to irrigate the Negev Desert and hogging most of the three aquifers that underlie the occupied West Bank.

According to satellites that monitor climate, the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, embracing Turkey, Syria, Iraq and western Iran, is losing water faster than any other area in the world, with the exception of Northern India.

The Middle East’s water problems are hardly unique. South Asia—in particular the Indian sub-continent—is also water stressed, and Australia and much of Southern Africa are experiencing severe droughts. Even Europe is struggling with some rivers dropping so low as to hinder shipping.

But the Middle East has been particularly hard hit. According to the Water Stress Index, out of 37 countries in the world facing “extremely high” water distress, 15 are in the Middle East, with Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia heading the list.

For Syria and Iraq, the problem is Turkey and Ankara’s mania for dam building. Since 1975, Turkish dams have reduced the flow of water to Syria by 40 percent and to Iraq by 80 percent.  According to the Iraqi Union of Farming Associations, up to 50 percent of the country’s agricultural land could be deprived of water, removing 124 million acres from production.

Iran and Syria have also built dams that reduce the flow of rivers that feed the Tigris and Euphrates, allowing salt water from the Persian Gulf to infiltrate the Shatt al-Arab waterway where the twin rivers converge. The salt has destroyed rich agricultural land in the south and wiped out much of the huge date farms for which Iraq was famous.

Half a century ago, Israel built the National Water Carrier canal diverting water from the Sea of Galilee, which is fed by the Jordan River. That turned the Jordan downstream of the Galilee into a muddy stream, which Israel prevents the Palestinians from using.

Jordanian and Syrian dams on the river’s tributaries have added to the problem, reducing the flow of the Jordan by 90 percent.

And according to the World Bank, Israel also takes 87 percent of the West Bank aquifers, leaving the Palestinians only 13 percent. The result is that Israelis on the West Bank have access to 240 liters a day per person. Israeli settlers get an extra 60 liters a day, leaving the Palestinians only 75 liters a day. The World Health Organization’s standard is 100 liters a day for each individual.

At 4,184 miles in length, the Nile River is the world’s longest—Brazil disputes the claim—and traverses 10 African countries. It is Egypt’s lifeblood providing both water and rich soil for the country’s agriculture. But a combination of drought and dams has reduced its flow over the past several decades.

Ethiopia is currently building an enormous dam for power and irrigation on the Blue Nile. The source of the Blue Nile is Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands. The Egyptian Nile is formed where the Blue Nile and the White Nile—its source is Lake Victoria in Uganda—converge in the Sudan at Khartoum. Relations between Egypt and Ethiopia were initially tense over water but have eased somewhat with the two sides agreeing to talk about how to share it.

But with climate change accelerating, the issue of water—or the lack thereof—is going to get worse, not better, and resolving the problems will take more than bilateral treaties about sharing. And there is hardly agreement about how to proceed.

One strategy has been privatization.

Through its International Finance Corporation, the World Bank has been pushing privatizing, arguing that private capital will upgrade systems and guarantee delivery. In practice, however, privatization has generally resulted in poorer quality water at higher prices. Huge transnational companies like SUEZ and Veolia have snapped up resources in the Middle East and global south.

Increasingly, water has become a commodity, either by control of natural sources and distribution, or by cornering the market on bottled water.

Lebanon is a case in point. Historically the country has had sufficient water resources, but it is has been added to the list of 33 countries that will face severe water shortages by 2040.

Part of the current crisis is homegrown. Some 60,000 illegal wells siphon off water from the aquifer that underlies the country, and dams have not solved the problem of chronic water shortages, particularly for the 1.6 million people living in the greater Beirut area. Increasingly people have turned to private water sources, especially bottled water.

Multi-national corporations, like Nestle, drain water from California and Michigan and sell it in Lebanon. Nestle, though its ownership of Shoat, controls 35 percent of Lebanon’s bottled water. Not only is bottled water expensive, and many times inferior in quality to local water sources, the plastic it necessities adds to a growing pollution problem.

There are solutions out there, but they require a level of cooperation and investment that very few countries currently practice. Many countries simply don’t have the funds to fix or upgrade their water infrastructure. Pipes lose enormous amounts through leakage, and dams reduce river flow, creating salt pollution problems downstream in places like Iraq and Egypt. In any event, dams eventually silt in.

Wells—legal and illegal—are rapidly draining aquifers, forcing farmers and cities to dig deeper and deeper each year. And, many times, those deep wells draw in pollution from the water table that makes the water impossible to drink or use on crops.

Again, there are solutions. California has made headway refilling the vast aquifer that underlies its rich Central Valley by establishing ponds and recharge basins during the rainy season, and letting water percolate back into the ground. Drip agriculture is also an effective way to reduce water usage, but it requires investment beyond the capacity of many countries, let alone small farmers.

Desalinization is also a strategy, but an expensive one that requires burning hydrocarbons, thus pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and accelerating climate change.

As the Middle East grows dryer and populations in the region continue to increase, the situation will get considerably worse in the coming decades.

The Middle East may be drying up, but so is California, much of the American Southwest, southern Africa, parts of Latin America, and virtually all of southern Europe. Since the crisis is global “beggar thy neighbor” strategies will eventually impoverish all of humanity. The solution lies with the only international organization on the planet, the United Nations.

In 1997, the UN adopted a convention on International Watercourses that spells out procedures for sharing water and resolving disputes. However, several big countries like China and Turkey opposed it, and several others, like India and Pakistan, have abstained. The convention is also entirely voluntary with no enforcement mechanisms like binding arbitration.

It is, however, a start, but whether nations will come together to confront the planet wide crisis is an open question without it, the Middle East will run out of water, but it will hardly be alone. By 2030, according to the UN, four out of 10 people will not have access to water.

There is precedent for a solution, one that is at least 4,500 years old. A cuneiform tablet in the Louvre chronicles a water treaty that ended the war between Umma and Lagash. If our distant ancestors could figure it out, it stands to reason we can.

Hiroshima Unlearned: Time to Tell the Truth About US Relations with Russia and Finally Ban the Bomb

Alice Slater

August 6th and 9^th mark 74 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where only one nuclear bomb dropped on each city caused the deaths of up to 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Now, with the US decision to walk away from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiated with the Soviet Union, we are once again staring into the abyss of one of the most perilous nuclear challenges since the height of the Cold War.

With its careful verification and inspections, the INF Treaty eliminated a whole class of missiles that threatened peace and stability in Europe. Now the US is leaving the treaty on the grounds that Moscow is developing and deploying a missile with a range prohibited by the treaty. Russia denies the charges and accuses the US of violating the treaty.  The US rejected repeated Russian requests to work out the differences in order to preserve the Treaty.

The US withdrawal should be seen in the context of the historical provocations visited upon the Soviet Union and now Russia by the United States and the nations under the US nuclear “umbrella” in NATO and the Pacific. The US has been driving the nuclear arms race with Russia from the dawn of the nuclear age:

— In 1946 Truman rejected  Stalin’s offer to turn the bomb over to the newly formed UN under international supervision, after which the Russians made their own bomb;

–Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation, miraculously, without a shot;

— The US pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders, despite promises when the wall fell that NATO would not expand it one inch eastward of a unified Germany;

–Clinton bombed Kosovo, bypassing Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council and violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit a war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of attack;

–Clinton refused Putin’s offer to each cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the table to negotiate for their elimination, provided we stopped developing missile sites in Romania;

–Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put the new missile base in Romania with another to open shortly under Trump in Poland, right in Russia’s backyard;

–Bush and Obama blocked any discussion in 2008 and 2014 on Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound Committee for Disarmament in Geneva;

–Obama’s rejected Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war;

–Trump now walked out of the INF Treaty;

–From Clinton through Trump, the US never ratified the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as Russia has, and has performed more than 20 underground sub-critical tests on the Western Shoshone’s sanctified land at the Nevada test site.  Since plutonium is blown up with chemicals that don’t cause a chain reaction, the US claims these tests don’t violate the treaty;

–Obama, and now Trump, pledged over one trillion dollars for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories in Oak Ridge and Kansas City, as well as new submarines, missiles, airplanes, and warheads!

What has Russia had to say about these US affronts to international security and negotiated treaties? Putin at his State of the Nation address in March 2018 said:

 I will speak about the newest systems of Russian strategic weapons that we are creating in response to the unilateral withdrawal of the United States of America from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and  the practical deployment of their missile defence systems both in the US and beyond their national borders.

I would like to make a short journey into the recent past. Back in 2000, the US announced its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically against this. We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of the international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had the right to deploy ballistic missile defence systems only in one of its regions. Russia deployed these systems around Moscow, and the US around its Grand Forks land-based ICBM base. Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the ABM treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind, because the limited number of ballistic missile defence systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.

We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty.

All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would have to improve our modern strike systems to protect our security. 

Despite promises made in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the five nuclear weapons states–US, UK, Russia, France, China–would eliminate their nuclear weapons while all the other nations of the world promised not to get them (except for India, Pakistan, and Israel, which also acquired nuclear weapons), there are still nearly 14,000 nuclear bombs on the planet. All but 1,000 of them are in the US and Russia, while the seven other countries, including North Korea, have about 1000 bombs between them.  If the US and Russia can’t settle their differences and honor their promise in the NPT to eliminate their nuclear weapons, the whole world will continue to live under what President Kennedy described as a nuclear Sword of Damocles, threatened with unimaginable catastrophic humanitarian suffering and destruction.

To prevent a nuclear catastrophe, in 2017, 122 nations adopted a new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It calls for a ban on nuclear weapons just as the world had banned chemical and biological weapons.  The ban treaty provides a pathway for nuclear weapons states to join and dismantle their arsenals under strict and effective verification. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, is working for the treaty to enter into force by enrolling 50 nations to ratify the treaty.  As of today, 70 nations have signed the treaty and 24 have ratified it, although none of them are nuclear weapons states or the US alliance states under the nuclear umbrella.

With this new opportunity to finally ban the bomb and end the nuclear terror,  let us tell the truth about what happened between the US and Russia that brought us to this perilous moment and put the responsibility where it belongs to open up a path for true peace and reconciliation so that never again will anyone on our  planet ever be threatened with the terrible consequences of nuclear war.

China’s Social Credit Check System: A move towards Orwellian Dystopia

Saswat Mandal

“ Keeping trust is glorious, and breaking trust is disgraceful..”

In a move straight out of George Orwell’s famous 1984, China is in the process of implementing a nationwide “Social Credit Check System.” It is a national reputation system aimed towards standardizing China’s citizens’ and businesses’ reputation or ‘Social Credit”. This system will be implemented by gathering information through mass surveillance using cameras, online activity, past paper records, etc. and using data analytics on this data to give a unified score to everybody.

According to the government, the system has been put in place to create a feeling of trust between people. Every citizen is assigned a score based on their conduct and actions. People with higher scores are trustworthy and receive rewards. People who have committed improper acts aren’t trustworthy and therefore receive penalties and punishments. For example, you can be put on a travel blacklist if you were caught carrying illegal substances during travel. By the end of 2018, 5.5 million high-speed rail trips and 17.5 million flight trips were denied to people on the travel blacklist.

Even though the above example might seem to be “just desserts,” the real horror of the system shows up when considering its other characteristics. This system not only affects the person in question but also the people around them. For example, children of parents with low credit scores can be denied entry into China’s top schools. A simple act of misfortune can blow up into some very dire consequences for entire families.

It’s quite clear that through this system, the government is trying to control the actions and thought processes of their citizens. For example, if someone is caught using too much social media or playing videogames for too long, their internet speeds get throttled. Anything the government feels is undesirable in the population is getting punished.

Public embarrassment also seems to be one of the weapons through which China is spreading discord among people. A list of people who are on the blacklist is being shared in public places such as town centers. This kind of shaming leads to people ostracizing the blacklisted people causing rifts in the community.

The government is also actively using the credit system to further their agenda. People are rewarded with good ratings for giving information about people who are not following government directives or acting against the government’s wishes. The system has a clear potential for causing a divide in the people. It is very simple to fall into a negative spiral and become separate from normal society. In the future, resentment between the “blacklisters” and the “trustworthy” might become a conscientious issue for society as a whole.

Despite the visible and potential horrors that this system creates, Chinese citizens have started implementing the use of these rating systems in their daily lives. People on “Baihe,” China’s biggest dating site, have begun using their good scores as a way of attracting potential partners. People with good ratings are also receiving better interest rates from banks, discounts on bills, etc. Though they might have been uncomfortable at first, Chinese people are quickly warming up to this system. Many have reported that people have started behaving better due to fear of the system.

Citizens of democracies such as ours might believe that this phenomenon will remain isolated to our “democratic” neighbour only. But one should realize that China isn’t where such as trust-based system was formulated or implemented first. Similar systems are already in place worldwide. The credit check that a bank does before approving loans is the same thing. In countries such as the UK and Germany, similar kinds of data are being collected to determine access to credit or health insurance. The trust-based systems can also be found in day to day apps that we use such as Uber where both the driver and passenger rate each other.

We are sleepwalking towards a kind of system which the Chinese government is actively pushing its citizens. Though people cry out “Big Brother” towards the Chinese government, we might not be too far away from a society similar to that. Through the use of technology, central authorities have unprecedented reach over its citizens. It’s up to the discretion of the government to decide what to do with this power, and up to the citizens to allow for such systems to take root. But if one thing is clear, it’s that once the system is in place, it will be very difficult to remove it.

TB is preventable & curable: Zero new infection & zero deaths must become a reality

Bobby Ramakant

TB is preventable, treatable and curable. Science shows how can we effectively prevent, accurately diagnose, treat with effective regimen, and eventually cure TB. But are not we failing to translate scientific wisdom in public health gains? How can we explain over 10 million new cases of TB and 1.6 million TB deaths (including 300,000 TB deaths among people living with HIV) in 2017 (source: WHO Global TB Report 2018)?

Recognizing the compelling urgency to prevent avoidable burden of disease as well as avert premature deaths, a Call To Action was launched at TB HIV Symposium around the 10th IAS Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2019) in Mexico, which underlines: “TB is not only treatable and curable but also preventable.”

Noted human rights activist and South Africa based HIV advocate from Global Network of People Living with HIV, Wim Vandevelde, shared this Call To Action, for a coordinated HIV and TB response to reach 6 million people living with HIV with tuberculosis preventive treatment. But there are 36.9 million people living with HIV globally so should not we be aspiring to deliver TB preventive therapy to every person living with HIV?

“I think I have had a mixed reaction to the targets (30 million people to get TB preventive treatment (TPT) by 2022, among which would be 6 million people living with HIV). I think this is a good place to start as this calls for a lot of government and donor commitment along with lot of civil society engagement too to ensure that those who are hard to reach are reached with services. This could be a huge target if we aim to reach those who are hard to reach, but it could also be an easy target for programmes that are well designed to leave no one behind. So, I think it is up to us to ensure that we are all playing our roles to achieving these targets. But we hope that we will increase it even further and ensure that everyone is able to prevent TB” said Maurine Murenga, whose seminal contribution to bringing community voices centre-stage in TB, HIV and malaria responses is widely recognized.

She spoke with CNS (Citizen News Service) on the sidelines of TB HIV Symposium in Mexico. She has been living with HIV openly since the early 2000s and leads Lean on Me Foundation in Kenya. She is a board member representing Communities on the Board of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (The Global Fund), and is the Communities Representative at the TB Alliance Stakeholders Association.

Why were people with TB missing in the first place?

“Just recently we have been doing an exercise called finding missing TB cases. I think one question we need to ask ourselves is, why are these people with TB even missing in the first place? These are the questions that if we honestly answer, then we are going to begin the journey of ending TB” said Maurine Murenga.

“Civil society is known for pushing governments to meet their commitments, so that TB services are actually available, and they are provided in a way that promotes and respects human rights. We need to move beyond laboratories and hospitals to the community to be able to understand the community, create awareness, support access, adherence and retention and address all the barriers that come with it” added Maurine Murenga.

First scientific evidence how TB impacts people living with HIV came in early 1980s – soon after first HIV case got diagnosed in the world. But even today we are grappling with the sad reality that TB, being preventable, treatable and curable, is still the lead cause of death for people living with HIV. “We have been trying over the years to integrate TB and HIV but we have not got it right yet. When we have targets for HIV then we have targets for TB too – we have a clear direction where we are going around the two epidemics. I think it is time to start having honest conversations on how best to integrate them at country level” reflected Maurine Murenga, who was in conversation with CNS Health Editor Bobby Ramakant.

People living with HIV have heightened vulnerability to TB so TB preventive therapy as well as TB diagnostics, treatment and care services must reach them all. Other key populations who are at elevated risk of TB should also get full spectrum of TB services including TB preventive therapy.

“We need to identify people-centred interventions. We have to understand the people, their needs, complexities with which they live, and understand what works best for them” rightly emphasized Maurine Murenga.

Accountability begins from home

Multi-sectoral accountability framework is indeed key to monitor progress of governments, as well as all other stakeholders including civil society. “Communities also need to be working together, as I feel that we are together as community but back to back. There is no time to lose as we have to unite to deliver on the promise to end TB and AIDS. We already have the knowledge that treatment is prevention, especially in context of rolling out treatment for latent TB infection. Now we really need to step up and work together in order to ensure all evidence-based approaches and tools to prevent, diagnose, and treat TB, and latent TB, are maximally leveraged to end TB and end AIDS” rightly said Alberto Colorado, a noted TB and human rights advocate from TB Coalition of Americas.

Zero new infections and zero deaths of TB

Dr Suvanand Sahu, Deputy Executive Director of Stop TB Partnership, underlined the urgency warranted in efforts to end TB. By adopting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 193 countries have promised to end TB by 2030 (137 months left to achieve this target of TB elimination). India, with highest burden of TB globally, has ambitiously set the deadline to end TB nationally by 2025 (77 months to go). Urgency to cut the chain of transmission of TB infection was never so acute. We have to ensure that TB bacteria does not get transmitted from any patient to an uninfected individual. To achieve this zero transmission, we will have to provide accurate diagnosis and proper effective regimen that works for an individual, with full care and support without delay. We also have to ensure that no person with latent TB goes without being offered TB preventive therapy with dignity and respect to human rights. Ending TB is not just about meeting a deadline but is essentially a human rights imperative now.

Children Should Work On Dreams And Not On Fields

 Prem Auti

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

-Nelson Mandela

On 12th June 2019, ILO celebrated 100 years of promoting help and social justice to labor and their family. On this day, ILO defined one of their sustainable development goals as global commitment to eradicate child labor aligning with the United Nation Organization vision of declaring 2021 as the year where world will witness elimination of child labor.

Not only in India, globally, it has been observed that children have always been a topic of limited discussion. Children are considered as the backbone of any society, and the progress of any society is dependent on how society takes care of both physical and mental growth of children. But under certain circumstances, it becomes inevitable and children have to suffer through a lot of physical and mental trauma. This situation usually arrives when parents or the caretaker of children are not in a position to financially support their basic needs. In such cases a child sacrifices his childhood for the mere survival. Most of the child labor representation globally comes from the economically weaker section of the society.

Before we dive into the subject of child labor, it is important to understand the what exactly child labor means. There are many formal definitions of child labor. ILO defines child labor as a work which deprives children from their dignity, primary necessities and forces them to work in hazardous condition which is extremely dangerous for their health. Few organizations, including UNICEF puts the age criteria to child labor. Any child who is between the age of 5 and 11, and who puts 28 hours of economic activity including the domestic work in a week will be considered as child labor. Just to understand the gravity of the situation, in 2017 if we take any calendar day, we will find around 152 million children involved in child labor.

1. Source: ILO Report on child labor 2017

Global Characteristics of Child labor

Below are some disturbing facts related to child workers globally:

• The agriculture sector has witnessed the maximum number of child workers. Around 71% of the total child workers are involved in the livestock herding and commercial farming.
• Around 30% of child labor is in family-owned small business. These children are forced by their parents to work in their family business. Addressing this issue is a significant challenge for both the ILO and the state.
• Forced labor is the most dangerous form of child labor. Special attention needs to be paid by the agencies to curb this inhuman form of employment. Around 3 to 4 million of child labor around the globe are working as child labor. They not only have to work in the most hazardous condition but also have to suffer from lack of freedom and menacing of penalty in the workplace.
• The common notion of associating child labor with the economically weaker country is not at all true. Roughly around 56% of the entire child labor comes from developing and underdeveloped countries. Rest 44% is concentrated in the developed countries.

Dual Challenge

The problem is not restricted to the eradication of child labor. A parallelly running problem is the employment of youth along with ensuring a decent workplace for them. The dual challenge is making the world free from child labor and at the same time ensuring the availability of jobs to youths.

To deal with this dual challenge, there is an urgent need of coherent policy which circumscribes the critical issue of child labor, education, and employment opportunities for the youth. It is vital that child enter adolescence with certain kind of essential skills and knowledge so that he or she inculcates threshold competencies required for the any job. These policies will also help in the smooth shifting from the educational institute to the workplace. The policy should also ensure that the philosophy of decent work is not violated by any means. End result of creating decent work place for these youth will eventually have a positive effect on the parents who will start discovering the incentives of investing in their child’s education.

2. Coherent policy response to decent youth work and child labor

Following steps are crucial in dealing with this dual challenge:

• Transferring a child into school from labor: As mentioned earlier this step is crucial from the point of view that certain basic knowledge is must when a child enters into the adolescence. The other advantage of intervening early in the life is obliviating the possibility of high cost in the latter stage.
• Smooth Transition from school to work place: State should ensure that there are enough job opportunities available in the market to ensure every student shifting from school to work place gets a job according to his or her skillset. There is no one fit for all strategy to deal with this however it depends on many geo-political factors.
• Eliminating child labor in the age group of 15-17: Around 25% of the total child workers in the world are in the age group of 15-17. Nearly half of them works in a extremely dangerous work environment. Primary task will be on devising a well though risk mitigation plan for these workers and second chance of working in decent workplace.

3 Source: ILO Annual report on child labor 2017

• Paying attention to female children: There are very few opportunities for the female workers in the labor market as well as they face great difficulties in shifting to decent work. It is the responsibility of state to ensure equal opportunities to both male and female. Apart from these macro issues there are several micro issues which need to be addressed like sexual assault at work place, threat of penalty, rape etc.
• Bridging the Knowledge gap related to Child labor and Youth employment:

Various gaps identified are following:

1. Impact of child labor in the future outcomes of the labor market
2. Understanding and identifying the key factors in a hazardous work environment from the scope of improvement.
3. Awareness about the return on education for child labors.

• Genuine efforts towards creating an enabler environment: State framework for combating child labor should be aligned with the international standards set by ILO or UN to ensure effective implementation of policy, awareness programs, etc.
• Awareness among consumers: NGOs and other non-profit organization can play a crucial role in making today’s consumer aware about the malpractices which have been used during the manufacturing. Boycott from consumer can in a way will help to curb child labor.

Accelerated Action Plan to achieve Mission 2021:

There are more than 152 million child workers still suffering from the wrath of hazardous work environment. Following are the primary levers which will accelerate our journey towards a world without child labor.

• Identifying the root causes for the Child Labor: Here are several reasons for the child labor. Social inequality, income disparity, social exclusion, denying the basic rights at work place, poverty is few of the major reason for child labor. Key stakeholders which can play crucial role in this process are legal authority for framing framework, agencies working towards social protection and labor market itself.

• Adoption, Application and Enforcement: It is of prime importance for federal government to formulate a right strategy for the strict enforcement of the labor laws. They should also try to cover the areas which has not been covered under the current framework.

• Key Strategy- Right to education: Education will play a major role in eradicating the child labor. Efforts should me made in the direction of spreading the awareness about the importance of schooling in shaping the future trajectory of career. State should not only also ensure equal opportunity for both girls and boys but also strict enforcement of minimum age of employment.

• Social Protection: Government should ensure that families are not forcing children to meet their basic need under any kind of economic shock. Thus, social protection is very important in order to tackle child labor.

A decent and sustainable income for everyone can be achieved in the near future by eliminating child labor. 1919 was the year when ILO took it as a challenge but since then the mission is yet to be accomplished. Abolition of child labor requires a careful and an urgent attention from different section of society to ensure the success of mission 2021 –”World without child labor”

But for that:    “WE MUST ACT NOW”

India’s Solid Waste Management System

Arun Chaurasia

The city of Ahmedabad has grown to become one of the finest in country. The economic progress of the state has often been publicized across the country as something that other states should strive for. And it often feels so. The state has a remarkable growth strategy to boast of. It ranks high in terms of economy size (rank: 3), infrastructure (rank: 2), education (rank: 10), health (rank: 2) among the various states (India Today, 2018). One can look at these ranking and numerous other statistics to only conclude that it’s a place to be. As one comes out of the airport, one sees the posters of city boasting itself to be one of the “Heritage city of India” and feels graciously welcomed.

We witnessed something rather different when we had a chance to visit one of not so well known parts of the city. We visited, what is infamously, the Pirana landfill site of Ahmedabad. The landfill site has already been ordered for shifting and its proper management till the shifting is completed in entirety. However, on seeing the mountains of garbage stretching, one can only think the time it has been there and the sufferings that it must have caused to people around. The air stinks and people who have no choice but to stay around are prone to respiratory, skin and kidney related diseases. The landfill site has also left the underground water unfit for drinking and the societies around have to rely on daily water tanks supply.

Waste Generation in India

The situation mentioned above is not particular to Ahmedabad only. Cities across India have a problem of waste management, in particular Solid waste management, in some way or another. From open defecation to these mountains of garbage, the things changes in terms of the volume and not so much in processes. Indian cities make the major chunk of the most polluted cities in the world. While I agree that polluted is not the right measure of the waste generated and processed in a city, however, the Indian cities don’t fare very well in this measure as well.

The country’s solid waste management practices have not been able to keep pace with the country’s economic development. Although the administration has tried to keep up with the burgeoning cities, either the poor design of the policies of their ineffective implementation has led to ineffective results. The same can be understood from the emphasis of that the current government has put on campaigns like “Swatchh Bharat Abhiyaan (Clean India Mission)”.

To put the issue in perspective, India generated 62 million tonnes annually in 2016, of which 5.6 million tonnes is plastic waste, 0.17 million tonnes biomedical waste, 7.9 million tonnes is hazardous waste and 1.5 million tonnes is e-waste. The waste generation per head in Indian cities can range from 200-600 grams per day. Looking at the processing side of it, 43 million tonnes of waste is collected, 11.9 million is treated and 31 million tonnes is dumped in landfill site. Pirana is one of those. And the waste generated seems to only grow in the future. (PIB 2016)

These waste can be further classified into three major categories of organic (biodegradable waste), dry (or recyclable waste) and biomedical (or sanitary and hazardous waste). Nearly 50% of all the waste generated is organic with the other two categories growing with the urbanization.

Waste Management

The process can be seen to be constituting of the following steps.

The process starts with the municipal trucks performing door to door waste collection services. These waste should ideally be treated during the disposal with each type of waste requiring different handling of the same. More than three fourth of the waste management budget is allocated to the collection and transportation, leaving very little room for disposal or recovery of resources. (DownToEarth, 2019)

The Way Forward

While various methods and policies have been tried, we make some recommendations for handling the waste that India is generating:

1. Introduction of a volume based fee system: The focus here it to control the waste generated and also to generate additional resource to finance waste management.
2. Construction of Waste to Energy plant: The methane and other gases, and burning of the waste provides a huge potential to capture energy to be put to appropriate form that can also provide energy solutions to these areas which are usually some of the most backward regions of the cities. Various international organizations and countries like South Korea, have shown interest towards help in the installation for such facilities. Installation of waste-to-compost and bio-methanation plants would reduce the load of landfill sites.
3. Separation of the waste at the point of origin: This fells upon the individual waste producers, or the people of the country. It is important because more than 60% of the waste is organic, and there is a significant chunk of recyclable waste. Separation of such wastes at the point of origin can lead to significant reduction in the effort for waste separation and disposal. Various cities have adopted the blue and green dustbins to allow for the segregation of the waste into biodegradable waste and the others. Encouraging such practice is important, as many municipalities complain that the waste is so mixed up at the dumping site that it is nearly impossible to segregate otherwise.
4. Decentralized Dumping: The process of waste processing and disposal should be decentralized. Only two cities in India, Pune and Bengaluru, have implemented a process similar to this. The rest of the country has stayed on the course of an earmarked landfill site. The process is rather costly, with high transportation costs and massive pollution. Also, such processes often lead to corrupt practices.
5. Incentivizing the Market for by-products: The composting of the biodegradable waste, and the production of energy from waste is not a very economic friendly market acting as a deterrent for many to invest in the technologies or to make an economic logic out of it. The focus should be on incentivizing development of indigenous technologies by the government, and also providing subsidies and tax benefits for the companies who wish to foray into this domain. Also, a lot more needs to be done especially for creating a market for compost and also encouraging farmers to adopt these organic ways of farming.

Conclusion

Cleanliness is a basic necessity of the people and the responsibility of ours should not end as soon as the waste goes out of our houses. While we do have a moral inclination for taking the effort of segregation, it is in larger interest, the work of the municipal bodies that needs to be seen at. Countries in east and west both have set clear benchmarks that India needs to adopt. Building appropriate policies and infrastructure can help facilitate the appropriate changes.

Security architecture in the Gulf: Troubled prospects

James M. Dorsey

Russia, backed by China, hoping to exploit mounting doubts in the Gulf about the reliability of the United States as the region’s sole security guarantor, is proposing a radical overhaul of the security architecture in an area that is home to massive oil and gas reserves and some of the world’s most strategic waterways.

Chinese backing for Russia’s proposed collective security concept that would replace the Gulf’s US defense umbrella and position Russia as a power broker alongside the United States comes amid heightened tension as a result of-tit for-tat tanker seizures and a beefed up US and British military presence in Gulf waters.

Iranian revolutionary guards this weekend seized an alleged Iraqi tanker in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Iran said the vessel was smuggling oil to an unidentified Arab country. The taking of the Iraqi ship followed last month’s Iranian seizure of the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero.

The seizure was in response to the impounding off Gibraltar of an Iranian tanker suspected of breaching EU sanctions against Syria.

The Russian proposal entails creation of a “counter-terrorism coalition (of) all stakeholders” that would be the motor for resolution of conflicts across the region and promote mutual security guarantees. It would involve the removal of the “permanent deployment of troops of extra-regional states in the territories of states of the Gulf,” a reference to US, British and French forces and bases.

The proposal called for a “universal and comprehensive” security system that would take into account “the interests of all regional and other parties involved, in all spheres of security, including its military, economic and energy dimensions.”

The coalition, to include the Gulf states, Russia, China, the US, the European Union and India as well as other stakeholders, a likely reference to Iran, would be launched at an international conference on security and cooperation in the Gulf.

It was not clear how feuding Gulf states like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arb Emirates and Iran would be persuaded to sit at one table. The proposal suggested that Russia’s advantage was that it maintained good relations with all parties.

Chinese backing of the Russian proposal takes on added significance with some analysts suggesting that the United States, no longer dependent on Gulf oil imports, is gradually reducing its commitment despite a temporary spike in the number of US troops dispatched to the region as a result of the tension with Iran.

They suggest that the US response to Iranian racking up of tension has been primarily theatrics and hand wringing despite the Trump administration’s bellicose rhetoric. Warnings of “severe consequences” have proven to be little more than verbal threats.

“The United States is leaving the Persian Gulf. Not this year or next, but there is no doubt that the United States is on its way out… Leaders in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and Muscat understand what is happening…and have been hedging against an American departure in a variety of ways, including by making overtures to China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey,” said Steven A. Cooke, a scholar at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Recent tanker statistics suggest that Saudi Arabia is sending an ever-larger portion of its crude to China. On a visit to Beijing last month, UAE crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed and Chinese president Xi Jinping elevated their two countries’ relationship to that of a strategic partnership.

Perceptions of a reduced US commitment may make the Russian proposal of a multilateral approach more attractive in the short term. However, longer term banking on a continued Russian Chinese alliance could be tricky. The alliance could prove to be opportunistic rather than strategic.

That could force Gulf states to accelerate taking charge of their own security. So far, greater Gulf assertiveness has proven to be a mixed bag.

Fuelled by uncertainty about US reliability, perceived regional Iranian expansionism, and persistent popular discontent across the Middle East and North Africa, produced the debilitating Saudi-UAE intervention in Yemen, a failed Saudi effort to force Lebanon’s prime minister to accept the kingdom’s dictate, and Saudi and UAE projection of military force and commercial clout in the Horn of Africa.

A recent meeting between UAE and Emirati maritime security officials, the first in six years, as well as a partial UAE withdrawal from Yemen could, however, signal an emerging, more constructive approach.

If adopted, the Russian proposal could, however, suck China and Russia, despite having been able so far to maintain close ties to all sides of regional divides, into the Middle East’s multiple conflicts, particularly the Saudi Iranian rivalry. A multilateral approach could also bring latent Chinese Russian differences to the fore.

Dubbing the Russian Chinese alliance ‘Dragonbear,’ geo-strategist Velina Tchakarova cautions that it is s “neither an alliance nor a marriage of convenience, but rather a temporary asymmetric relationship, in which China is predominantly the agenda-maker, while Russia is mostly the agenda-taker.”

The Russian Chinese rapprochement operates in Ms. Tchakarova’s words on “the maxim ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ A status quo relationship would remain acceptable and be further developed so long as China’s rise is not a direct threat to Russia’s strategic interests of self-determination and security along its peripheries,” including the Middle East.

The question is less whether and more when Russia starts perceiving Chinese interests as a threat to its own. One divergence could be energy given that Russia is one of the world’s major oil suppliers while China is its top importer.

By the same token, China may longer term not want to be dependent on Russia for both its imports and the arrangements that would secure them.

Said Russia and Eurasia scholar Paul Stronski referring to the sustainability of the Russian Chinese alliance: “With China now recognising it may need to strengthen its security posture…, it is unclear how long that stability will last.”

India’s Tryst with Destiny: Freedom Struggle from Exploitation and Degradation Is Global

Colin Todhunter

Today, we are in the grip of a globalised system of capitalism which drives narcissism, domination, ego, anthropocentrism, speciesism and plunder. A system that is using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have poisoned the rivers and oceans, destroyed natural habitats, driven wildlife species to (the edge of) extinction and have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere with seemingly devastating effects.

With its never-ending quest for profit, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. It strides the world hand in glove with militarism, with the outcome being endless destabilisations, conflicts and wars over finite resources and the capture of new markets.

This is sold to the masses as part of an ongoing quest to achieve human well-being, measured in terms of endless GDP growth, itself based on an ideology that associates such growth with corporate profit, boosted by stock buy-backs, financial speculation, massive arms deals, colonialism masquerading as philanthropy, manipulated and rigged markets, corrupt and secretive trade deals, outsourced jobs and a resource-grabbing militarism.

That such a parasitical system could ever bring about a ‘happy’ human condition for the majority is unfathomable.

Over the last 70 years, material living standards in the West have improved, but how that wealth was obtained and how it is then distributed is what really matters. Take the case of the UK.

While much of manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labour economies, welfare, unions and livelihoods have been attacked. Massive levels of tax evasion/avoidance persist and neoliberal policies have resulted in privatisation, deregulation and the spiraling of national and personal debt. Moreover, the cost of living has increased as public assets have been sold off to profiteering cartels and taxpayers’ money has been turned into corporate welfare for a corrupt banking cartel.

Meanwhile, the richest 1,000 families in the UK saw their net worth more than double shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression, while the rest of the population is confronted with ‘austerity’, poverty, cutbacks, reliance on food banks and job insecurity.

But let’s not forget where much of the UK’s wealth came from in the first place: some $45 trillion was sucked from India alone according to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik.  Britain developed by underdeveloping India. And now the West and its (modern-day East India) corporations are in the process of ‘developing’ India by again helping themselves to the country’s public wealth and natural assets (outlined further on).

Under this system, it is clear whose happiness and well-being matters most and whose does not matter at all. According to researcher and analyst Andrew Gavin Marshall, it is the major international banking houses which control the global central banking system:

“From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements.”

Additional insight is set out by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book ‘Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making‘:

“The superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid … They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military… and other shadow elites.”

These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. They decide which wars are to be fought and why and formulate global economic policy.

Tryst with destiny

In 1947, on the steps of the Red Fort in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke optimistically about India’s tryst with destiny. Free from the shackles of British colonialism, for many the future seemed bright.

But some 72 years on, we now see a headlong rush to urbanise (under World Bank directives – India is the biggest debtor nation in the history of that institution) and India’s cities are increasingly defined by their traffic-jammed flyovers cutting through fume choked neighbourhoods that are denied access to drinking water and a decent infrastructure. Privatisation and crony capitalism are the order of the day.

Away from the cities, the influence of transnational agricapital and state-corporate grabs for land are leading to violent upheaval, conflict and ecological destruction. The links between the Monsanto-Syngenta-Walmart-backed Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the associated US sanctioning and backing of the opening up of India’s nuclear sector to foreign interests show who really benefits from this.

Under the guise of ‘globalisation’, Western powers are on an unrelenting drive to plunder what they regard as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas of the globe. Foreign agricapital has been moving in on Indian food and agriculture for some time. But it first needs to eradicate the peasantry and displace the current model of production before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control.

Other sectors have not been immune to this bogus notion of development. Millions of people have been displaced to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other large-scale projects. And the full military backing of the state has been on hand to forcibly evict people.

To help open the nation to foreign capital, proponents of economic neoliberalism are fond of stating that ‘regulatory blockages’ must be removed. If particular ‘blockages’ stemming from legitimate protest, rights to land and dissent cannot be dealt with by peaceful means, other methods are used. And when increasing mass surveillance or widespread ideological attempts to discredit and smear does not secure compliance or dilute the power of protest, brute force is on hand.

The country’s spurt of high GDP growth was partly fueled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population has widened enormously to the point where rural India consumes less calories per head of population than it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, unlike farmers, corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans but have failed to spur job creation.

Millions of small-scale and marginal farmers are suffering economic distress as the sector is deliberately made financially non-viable for them. Veteran rural reporter P Sainath says what this has resulted in is not so much an agrarian crisis but a crisis of civilisation proportions, given that the bulk of the population still lives in the countryside and relies on agriculture or related activities for an income.

Independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land is to be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and remaining farmers will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

US agribusiness corporations are spearheading this process, the very companies that fuel and thrive on a five-year US taxpayer-funded farm bill subsidy of around $500 billion. Their industrial model in the US is based on the overproduction of certain commodities often sold at prices below the cost of production and dumped on the rest of the world, thereby undermining farmers’ livelihoods and agriculture in other countries, not least India.

It is a model that can only survive thanks to taxpayer handouts and only function by externalising its massive health, environmental and social costs. And it’s a model that only leads to the destruction of rural communities and jobs, degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water, water shortages and spiraling rates of ill health.

We hear certain politicians celebrate the fact India has jumped so many places in the ‘ease of doing business’ table. This term along with ‘foreign direct investment’, making India ‘business friendly’ and ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ embody little more than the tenets of US neoliberal fundamentalism wrapped in benign-sounding words.

Of Course, as Gavin Andrew Marshall notes, US foundations have played a major part in shaping policies and co-opting civil society and major social-political movements across the world, including in India. As Chester Bowles, former US ambassador to India, says:

“Someday someone must give the American people a full report of the Ford Foundation in India. The several million dollars in total Ford expenditures in the country do not tell 1/10 of the story.”

Taking inflation into account, that figure would now be much greater. Maybe people residing in India should be given a full report of Ford’s activities too as well as the overall extent of US ‘intervention’ in the country.

A couple of years ago, economist Norbert Haring (in his piece A well-kept open secret: Washington is behind India’s brutal experiment of abolishing most cash) outlined the influence of USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in furthering the incorporation of India into the US’s financial (and intelligence) architecture. But this is the type of thing just the tip of a very large iceberg that’s been going on for many decades.

After the recent general election, India seems destined to continue to capitulate to a programme that suits the needs of foreign capital for another five years. However, the focus is often on what India should or should not do. It’s not as if alternatives to current policies do not exist, but as Jason Hickel wrote in The Guardian back in 2017, it really is time that the richer countries led the way by ‘de-developing’ and reorienting their societies to become less consumption based. A laudable aim given the overexploitation of the planets resources, the foreign policy implications (conflict and war) and the path to environmental suicide we are on. However, we must first push back against those forces which resist this.

On 15 August, India commemorates independence from British rule. Many individuals and groups are involved in an ongoing struggle in India to achieve genuine independence from exploitation and human and environmental degradation. It’s a struggle for freedom and a tryst with destiny that’s being fought throughout the world by many, from farmers and indigenous peoples to city dwellers, against the same system and the same forces of brutality and deceit.

Caste bias in institutions of Excellence

Sheshu Babu

Flaws in Indian education system have been discussed at length by various analysts and root causes have also been pointed out. Still, the situation has not improved. Marginalised sections find difficult to pursue higher study even though some of them successfully clear entrance exam and enter reputed institutes like IITs and IIMs.

Drop- outs

The surge in enrollment of dalits and adivasi students is remarkable, between 2001 and 2011 , the share of dalits attending college zoomed by a staggering 187% and adivasis by 164%. The comparable share of all other castes put together is 119%. (Enrol and drop out, education is a one-way street for dalits, by Subodh Verma, updated Jan 24, 2016, timesofindia.indiatimes.com). But among dalits, the share in school children drops from 81% for 6-14 years age group to 60% in 15-19 age group. It plummets to 11% in 20-24 age group in higher education. So, the enrollment of all castes is roughly the same , drop out of dalits and adivasis is more as the level of education advances. According to the data provided by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), of the 2,461 drop outs 1,171 (which is 47.5%) are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes in the last two years. (Over the past two years 2,500 students dropout of IITs , written by Siddhant Pandey, dated 2 Aug 2019, newsbytesapp.com). The HRD Minister pointed out that out of 99 dropouts of Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), 14 were from SC, 21 from ST category and 27 from OBC category.

Causes

The number of dropouts is a cause of grave concern specially for marginalised sections because of their entry into institutions despite poor background. Most dalits and adivasis have little income to spend on education and if they dropout, their efforts to achieve good career goes waste causing economic hardship.

These sections face stark discrimination right from their joining higher learning institutes. The teaching staff, mostly upper castes, do not support dalits , adivasis or OBCs or PH candidates both educationally and economically. They set high parameters for awarding grades which marginalised section find hard to match. The faculty should keep in mind that these students rarely have the resources to study like upper castes. Hence, they come to the institutions with lack of knowledge as that of higher caste students. Unless the institute provides supplementary coaching facilities and takes follow- up measures, the marginalised section cannot catchup with other ‘educated’ well- off students.

Language is also one of the problem for the dropouts. Many lower caste students are not good at English because of their schooling in government schools in rural areas. They find grasping lectures in English difficult. Hence, they should be given extra coaching so that they get used to the language.

But a major cause is discrimination and stark alienation by the general category students. They are frequently harassed citing their enrollment in colleges under quotas. This also influences dropout in the middle of the course. Many students have committed suicide on grounds of harassment and abuse by upper castes.

Assertive policy needed

Since very few of the lower strata of society enter prestigious institutes, they should be handled carefully. Proper psychological and educational counseling programs should be given to every student. Faculty should keep in view their socio- economic background in view while evaluating and awarding grades and marks.

Even in placements, the companies prefer only upper caste background people to SCs, STs, OBCs and physically disabled. They cite ‘ merit’ as their ground for recruitment. This is a myth as many students of marginalised sections are proving by acquiring knowledge and expertise.

Drastic steps should be taken to reduce the number of dropouts by assertive policy measures along with positive outlook of faculty members towards disadvantaged sections of society.

Reservations are a means of uplifting the downtrodden and the government must see that dalits or adivasis or other backward classes are not denied the right of education in institutions of excellence.